Author|Jia Guipeng
With the advent of the wave of artificial intelligence, NVIDIA's position has also risen, and it once sat on the position of the world's most valuable company, although it was surpassed by Microsoft and Apple again in a short period of time, but its market position is still unshakable.
However, at the recent 2024 Download Day, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang admitted in an interview that if it doesn't go all out, Nvidia may also go bankrupt within 30 days.
Emphasizing that self-confidence is what drives the company forward, but that self-confidence does not equate to complacency, Huang shared his management philosophy of always seeing problems and challenges as the key to driving progress, rather than ignoring them.
So is this behemoth really like Huang said, if you don't work hard, it will go bankrupt in 30 days? Maybe it's possible.
Nvidia was once on the verge of bankruptcy
If it is a bit of a joke that Nvidia may go bankrupt in 30 days, then they have also faced huge challenges in the past, and they were almost on the verge of bankruptcy at one point.
In the 90s of the 20th century, Nvidia founder Jensen Huang founded the company in Silicon Valley. However, due to the failure of the first chip project, the company almost ran out of funds and faced the crisis of bankruptcy.
At this existential juncture, Huang turned to then-Sega executive Shoichiro Zori for help, but he didn't have much hope, after all, Shoichiro Irori was not obligated to provide such a large amount of financial support to an unfamiliar company.
Surprisingly, however, Shoichiro Irito decided to invest in Nvidia, and after painstaking negotiations, Shoichiro Irito succeeded in securing the much-needed additional $5 million for Nvidia.
The funding helped Nvidia maintain operations for six months, during which time it developed new chips that successfully turned the tide.
We can see that Huang chose a very radical development path in the early days of establishing NVIDIA, and although there were some adventures, with the help of noble people, he still achieved very much so far. After the accumulation of the game era, in the AI era, Nvidia has been leading the entire industry, but we have found that after they have laid a solid foundation, the company's internal problems have gradually become prominent.
Trouble continues within Nvidia
Just after Nvidia sprung up, it also ran into internal trouble, and some senior employees who owned a large number of company shares began to "lie flat" and no longer do their part.
The problem was serious enough that Huang took it seriously and made him feel compelled to address it himself. At the company's internal all-hands meeting, Mr. Huang singled out a bunch of questions submitted by employees in advance: What to do with older employees who appear to be "semi-retired," people familiar with the matter said.
Huang replied that working at Nvidia is like a "voluntary sport," so every employee should be the "CEO" who manages their time. He admitted that some employees had been with Nvidia for a long time and jokingly named some people. He added that the intensity of work is a judgment to be made by adults. Huang's overall message is that each person should determine how hard they work, but do so responsibly, people familiar with the matter said.
Nvidia employees are steadfast in their support for Huang's role as CEO, who founded the company in 1993. Even so, they criticized Huang for creating an overly employee-centric culture and a relatively hands-off management style. Coupled with Nvidia's recent near-dominance in the cutting-edge AI chip market, employees have relaxed their demands on themselves. Some of the new millionaires who own a lot of Nvidia stock are also not working as hard as they used to.
As Nvidia faces increasing regulatory pressure and competition from chip design companies AMD, Intel, and other big tech companies like Amazon and Microsoft, the "employee feud" that is simmering within the company could one day become a more serious risk.
In response to the company's situation, Huang emphasized that every day counts, that every decision and effort can determine the company's future, and that sense of urgency and desire to succeed is key to driving the company forward.
Huang said the statement may shock and unsettle new hires, but he won't hesitate to tell them, "Every decision you make, every effort, every hire, every accomplishment you make, and the culture you create will determine the fate of the company — whether it's vibrant, sustained success, or going bankrupt — in the next 30 days." ”
In response to this, at other recent all-hands meetings, he told employees that the stock market is very unforgiving. As a company with a market capitalization of more than $2 trillion, Nvidia is expected to continue to deliver strong results.
Technology Vortex believes that after achieving results, it is normal for people to slack off, but if this is in a company determined to change the world, then the situation is a little different, they must have a more tenacious character than ordinary people, in order to continue to forge ahead, create a new world, and Huang Jenxun's "30 days" fate at this time, whether it can make employees "calm down", is the key point of Nvidia's future development.
Write at the end
Despite Nvidia's current success, Huang also seems to be the most anxious about the future. He once bluntly said that he wanted to be vigilant because the company could go bankrupt one day.
At present, Nvidia is indeed the world's leading in terms of technology, and its chip sales are also the highest. But in three years, there may be new competitors at home and abroad, such as big technology companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. are eyeing each other, and will Nvidia continue to soar in the future, or will technology companies succeed in encirclement? Let's wait and see.