#403 How Jensen Works

Founders

David Senra

Steve Jobs, Founders, James Dyson, Company Builders, Technology, Henry Ford, Elon Musk, Business Professional Biography, How I Built This, The History Of Entrepreneurship, Jim Clark, Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurs, History, Founder, Business Autobiography, Jeff Bezos, Entrepreneur, Biography, Biographies Of Entrepreneurs, Biographies, Business, Business Biography

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 20 October 2025

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This episode covers the insanely valuable company-building principles of Jensen Huang—and nothing else. I spent over 40 hours reading (and rereading) this book on Jensen and Nvidia written by Tae Kim I then spent several days editing down 30 pages of notes from the book. I deleted everything that was not How Jensen Works. List of ideas: 1. Professor Jensen 2. The Whiteboard 3. Complacency Kills 4. Insist on a Flat Organization 5. Public Criticism 6. Tortured Into Greatness 7. Speed of Light 8. Extreme In All Things 9. Top 5 Emails 10. Direct Communication 11. LUA 12. The Mission is the Boss and Pilot-in-Command 13. Strategy is Action 14. Ship The Whole Cow 15. Go To School On Everybody 16. Create The Market 17. Choke You With Gold 18. Highest Priority First 19. Swarm Your Greatest Opportunity Episode sponsors: ⁠Ramp⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ gives you everything you need to control spend, watch your costs, and optimize your financial operations —all on a single platform. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud ⁠⁠⁠by going to Ramp and learning how they can help your business control your costs and save time and money.⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ramp.com⁠⁠⁠⁠ Automate compliance, security, and trust with Vanta.⁠ ⁠⁠⁠Vanta helps you win trust, close deals, and stay secure—faster and with less effort⁠⁠⁠⁠. ⁠⁠⁠Find out how increased security leads to more customers by going to Vanta⁠⁠⁠. Tell them David from Founders sent you and you'll get $1000 off. ⁠⁠⁠https://www.vanta.com/founders⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠ Collateral⁠⁠ transforms your complex ideas into compelling narratives. Collateral crafts institutional grade marketing collateral for private equity, private credit, real estate, venture capital, family offices, hedge funds, oil & gas companies, and all kinds of corporations. Storytelling is one of the highest forms of leverage and you should invest heavily in it. You can do that by going to ⁠⁠https://collateral.com

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	About a year ago, I read this book called The Nvidia Way by Tay Kim.
0:03.5	The book is a company history and a partial biography of Jensen.
0:07.0	The episode that I made on the book, the first time I read it, covered a lot of Jensen's life and then how he built NVIDIA.
0:13.2	That was episode 376.
0:15.0	For this episode, I reread the book and then I wanted to strip away everything that wasn't ideas for how Jensen
0:22.2	runs his company. So how Jensen works and nothing else. And so what I did is I made a list of
0:28.5	about 20 of Jensen's ideas that I want to run through with you. So starting with idea number one,
0:35.6	which I call Professor Jensen.
0:37.8	So a common trait of history's greatest founders, they spend a lot of their time teaching their organization.
0:44.9	The best description of this I ever heard actually comes from Jim Senegal, the founder of Costco.
0:49.1	He says if you're not spending 90% of your time teaching, you're not doing your job.
0:54.0	The very first sentence of this
0:56.2	book is, in another life, Jensen might have been a teacher. Colleagues call him Professor Jensen
1:03.1	for his ability to explain complicated concepts on the whiteboard in a way that just about anyone
1:08.5	can understand. There's another line in this book that comes
1:11.7	later on where the author take him says, I would become his student, much like his employees do.
1:18.0	Jensen's teaching is both persuasive and pervasive. They say that you can talk to two unrelated
1:24.7	Nvidia employees who don't know each other, and they still will say the same thing.
1:30.4	Jensen has this Vulcan mind meld with everybody inside of his company.
1:34.6	He spends a great deal of his time communicating with his employees and ensures that everyone at the company knows the overall strategy and vision, which leads us ties into idea number two, which I've
1:46.0	already mentioned, and that is whiteboard. Jensen wants the whiteboard to be used as the primary
1:50.8	form of communication in meetings. Why? Because it forces employees to demonstrate their thought
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from David Senra, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of David Senra and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.