- For decades, Nvidia employees have been sending Jensen Huang emails dubbed “Top-5 Things,“ and they are one of the ways the CEO keeps the chip giant’s hierarchy flat. “I’m looking to detect the weak signals.”
While his company is on the cutting edge of the AI revolution, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang still relies heavily on a more old-school technology to help him manage the chip giant: email.
That’s right, even in the age of Slack and instant messaging across enterprises, not to mention ubiquitous forms of collaboration like Zoom meetings and Google docs, the humble email remains an invaluable tool for the rockstar CEO.
In fact, Nvidia’s employees have been sending Huang emails dubbed “Top-5 Things,” or T5Ts, for decades, according to the Wall Street Journal.
And he reads them everyday, including on Sunday evenings, because those emails help him keep Nvidia’s hierarchy flat, enabling him to pick up on any trends as soon as possible.
Huang distrusts formal reports as too watered down and instead asks Nvidia’s 30,000 employees to send emails to their teams and executives that he can also access, the Journal said.
Nvidia declined to comment.
Citing the new book The Nvidia Way by Barron’s senior writer Tae Kim, the report described the T5T emails as typically short with a few bullet points, which give Huang a snapshot of what’s going on in the company.
“I’m looking to detect the weak signals,” Huang told Kim. “It’s easy to pick up the strong signals, but I want to intercept them when they are weak.”
According to the Journal, reading T5T emails helped Huang decide years ago that Nvidia needed to boost workloads on its graphics-processing units, which are now essential tools in the AI boom.
But Huang avoids sending his own T5T emails, fearing that everyone else’s would start to mimic his, rendering them less helpful.
“I have my own Top-5 Things that I keep to myself,” Jensen said, according to the Journal.