Nvidia CEO’s Story: From Cleaning Toilets to Building a $3 Trillion Company

A good leader can’t be afraid to get his hands dirty, according to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

Long before he co-founded the computer chip giant, now worth more than $3.1 trillion, Huang was a teenage worker at a Denny’s.

Years later, he and his co-founders came up with the idea to start Nvidia at a booth in the same Denny’s where he cleaned tables, washed dishes and even cleaned toilets.

A Successful Business Leader

Despite his estimated net worth of $108 billion, Huang said those humble beginnings still shape the kind of business leader he is today.

“For me, there’s no job I’m above, because I was a dishwasher, I was a toilet cleaner,” Huang said in an interview at Stanford Graduate School of Business in March.

“I mean, I’ve cleaned a lot of toilets,” he told a roomful of students, according to CNBC.

Of course, there’s a big difference between being a small-batch restaurant employee and running a multi-trillion-dollar company. But Huang says he still approaches his job today with the same willingness to do anything he thinks can help his employees improve the company, regardless of whether that task can be delegated to someone else.

Working with employees

“If you send me something and you want me to contribute to it and I can be there for you — review it, or even share how I think about it — I’m not going to hesitate to contribute,” Huang said.

Huang has a reputation as a hands-on manager, with some employees describing him as “demanding” and a “perfectionist.” He asks employees across the company to email him every week with the top five things they’re working on, and Huang occasionally walks into employees’ offices to ask how projects are going and weigh in on suggestions, according to a New Yorker profile. Whenever possible, the longtime CEO likes to show his employees the rationale behind a proposal or solution. Doing so helps the company in the long run, and Huang finds it personally rewarding and an opportunity to learn new things himself, he told the Stanford audience. “I show people how to think about things all the time: strategic things, how to predict something, how to solve a problem,” he said. “You empower people everywhere.”

The ideal structure for the company

He tries to get his most complex work done early in the day, so if someone needs something from him the rest of the day, he can “always say, ‘I have plenty of time, I’m doing this,’” Huang said in a commencement speech at Caltech last month.

While many CEOs try to limit the number of people who report directly to them to a handful of employees to free up their administrative schedule, Huang actually prefers to have “around 50 direct reports,” he told CNBC in November. This structure improves Nvidia’s performance by allowing information and strategy to flow more directly between Huang and other Nvidia leaders, Huang said.

“The more direct reports a CEO has, the fewer layers there are in the company,” he said. “It allows us to keep the information flowing.”

Huang said at Stanford that it’s all about putting his employees in the best position to succeed and contribute to Nvidia’s overall success. He added that the job of a good CEO is to “lead others to greatness, inspire others, empower others, and support others.” “This is why the management team exists: to serve all the other people who work in the company.”