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Nvidia<\/a> VP Simona Jankowski has just bid the $3.1 trillion tech giant farewell\u2014and paid homage to her boss and CEO Jensen Huang on her way out.<\/p>\n \u201cWorking with Jensen has been the experience of a lifetime,\u201d she concluded of her time reporting into the billionaire from humble beginnings.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n After nearly seven years of running investor relations and strategic finance at the chipmaker, she gushed on LinkedIn<\/a> that Huang is \u201cin a class of his own\u201d before sharing the three leadership lessons he taught her: \u201cFirst principles thinking, zero-billion dollar markets, speed-of-light execution and so much more.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHe inspired me to reach to the limits, made me laugh to tears, and taught me the harmony of work and family,\u201d Jankowski added.<\/p>\n After an initial foray into developing graphics processors for computer games, the company invented one of the first AI-friendly GPUs and now it\u2019s dominating the market, selling over 70% of all AI chips<\/a>.<\/p>\n Last week, Nvidia briefly topped Microsoft<\/a> to become the world\u2019s most valuable company with a market capitalization of $3.34 trillion.<\/p>\n Since Jankowski joined Nvidia in 2017, she boasted that she\u2019s watched its revenue grow tenfold and its earnings and market cap have jumped by more than 20 times.<\/p>\n \u201cPerhaps even more impressively, the AI compute performance delivered by NVIDIA\u2019s flagship GPU is up over 1,000X, while the size of frontier AI models has grown by over 20,000X,\u201d she added. \u201cLiving through exponentials like these is rare and thrilling, and keeps the learning curve steep and exciting.\u201d<\/p>\n But Nvidia\u2019s GPU success was no accident\u2014it clearly demonstrates Huang\u2019s habit of applying first principles thinking (that is, questioning every assumption to get to the basic element of a problem) to find innovative solutions instead of mimicking existing models, and forging a business in a zero-billion dollar market (that is, a nascent but potentially giant market).<\/p>\n Previously, CPUs\u2014the most common computer chips, which date back to the 1950s\u2014were great for executing complex calculations one at a time, but they didn\u2019t quite fit the needs of data scientists <\/a>when deep learning and AI research intensified in the 2010s.\u00a0<\/p>\n But GPUs can perform many simple calculations at once\u2014and as it turned out, Nvidia\u2019s GPUs were a perfect fit<\/a> for the type of computing systems AI developers needed to build and train large language models.<\/p>\n \u201cJensen is a visionary and saw the trends of GPU adoption in data centers early on and aligned the company\u2019s strategy to that vision,\u201d a semiconductors senior research analyst, Tristan Gerra, told Fortune<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n One of its prescient moves included creating CUDA, a high-level programming tool the company built in 2007 to help unlock the full capability of its GPUs in a straightforward way.\u00a0<\/p>\n CUDA is now so widely used that it\u2019s difficult for companies building large language models like OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT to imagine themselves using other tech.<\/p>\n As Huang himself previously pointed out, that\u2019s precisely what it means to operate in a zero-billion-dollar market:\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cAlmost all of our purposes should be to go and do something that hasn\u2019t been done before, that is insanely hard to do, that if you achieve it could make a real contribution,\u201d he told Stripe\u2019s CEO Patrick Collison on stage last month.<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cThat market is probably zero billion dollars in size because it\u2019s never been done before\u2014I\u2019d rather be a market maker than a market taker.\u201d<\/p>\n\nThe world\u2019s most valuable company\u2014thanks to Huang\u2019s first principles thinking and zero-billion dollar market concepts<\/h2>\n
Who is Simona Jankowski?<\/h2>\n