🎧 01:28 - 02:28 (01:00)

The tremendous value of whiteboarding.

Whiteboarding forces every single person to think from first principles. It is extremely hard to fake deep thinking at the whiteboard.

🎧 02:47 - 08:30 (05:42)

Success breeds complacency.

Complacency breeds failure.

Only the paranoid survive.

David Senra: So this deep belief in constant reinvention as mandatory, as not optional, something I think that Jensen has in common with Michael Dell. One of my favorite things that Michael Dell ever said was this. He said, I stood up and told the company that five years from now, we will have a new competitor. And that new competitor is going to be in every business that we are in, except they're going to be faster, more efficient, and more capable. And they're going to put us out of business. And the only way that we're going to prevent that is if we become that company. It is gut-wrenching stuff to reinvent and reimagine your business. But if you don't do it, you'll go out of business, which leads to idea number three, which is complacency kills. Jensen repeats this belief over and over again throughout the book. Complacency kills. I would say that Jensen has this combination of extreme self-confidence and charisma matched with this inner voice that says that he sucks, inner voice that says nothing he ever does is good enough. And I truly believe for a lot of history's greatest founders, that inner voice is impossible to satisfy. And there's a great line in the book on how this manifests. It says at Jensen's company, innovation is a necessity, not an option. I don't know what Jensen's answer would be if you ask him, like, what is his biggest fear? I would highly suspect that complacency taking root inside of his company is going to be towards the top of that list. And so throughout the entire book, he's just constantly hounding on this. Here's one example. Jensen resists overly positive accounts of NVIDIA's startup period and his own missteps. When we were younger, we sucked at a lot of things. NVIDIA wasn't a great company on day one. We made it great over 31 years. And so in addition to rereading this book for the second time, I also watched Jensen's commencement speech that he gave at Caltech. And as with any commencement speech, they're going to give you a nice introduction. They're going to give you like a short biography. And after the nice introduction, he begins his speech by saying, thanks for the kind introduction. It really makes me cringe listening to all of that. I hate hearing about myself. In the book, he summarizes his first 15 years as CEO. This is what it says. He slipped into the third person. If Jensen wasn't even involved in the first 15 years of our company, I would really like that. He wasn't proud of how the company was managed then or his own naivete and lack of strategic thinking. not the competition, but itself. The worst enemy is the complacency that grips any successful company. That is yet another thing that Jensen has in common with a lot of history's greatest founders. They all believe that complacency kills. In fact, Andy Grove, he had a mantra. His mantra was success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive. This idea of complacency killing your company just reappears over the again. Here's another example. Herb Kelleher, founder of Southwest Airlines, he has a great way to describe this. A company is never more vulnerable to complacency than when it's at the height of its success. We must not let success breed complacency, cockiness, greediness, laziness, indifference, preoccupation with bureaucracy, hierarchy, or obliviousness to threats posed by the outside world. I read this great profile on the founder of LVMH, Bernard Arnol. It says he abhors complacency so much. Warren Buffett would repeat this over and over again in his shareholder letters. He says you need the ability to fight off the ABCs of business decay, arrogance, bureaucracy and complacency. When these corporate cancers metastasize, even the strongest of companies falter. And so there's so many examples in the book of Jensen fighting back against complacency. One example earlier in their history says that each monthly company meeting, Jensen would say, we're 30 days from going out of business. All the way back in 97, he talks about making sure that we're acting with a sense of urgency because one of the biggest companies in the world is trying to kill us. He says, we need to kill Intel. Make no mistake. Remember saying this in 97. Make no mistake. Intel is out to get us and put us out of business. They have told their employees and they have internalized this. They are going to put us out of business. Our job is to go kill them before they put us out of business. We need to kill Intel. I also wanted to include this in here because obviously he's an extremely unusual person. And he's at the top right now, but he was like this for decades. At the time he just said this, he's telling his company, we're going to go kill Intel. At time, Intel was 860 times larger than NVIDIA in terms of revenue. Jensen abhors complacency. Only the paranoid survive. Again, that's a quote from Andy Grove. What's interesting about that is Andy Grove mentored Steve Jobs. And Steve Jobs had a very clear philosophy about what to do after achieving something great. And it's a way to, again, avoid complacency taking root in your company. This is what Steve said. I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should just go do something else wonderful and not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what's next. That is a mentality that history's greatest founders have. This is the way I summarize it. No rearview mirror, no resting on laurels or sleeping on winds. Make something great, then do it again. And one of the things I admire most about Jensen is this relentless dedication to improving his craft. In fact, craft the word that he uses in that commencement address that he gave at Caltech.

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