The Nvidia Way书摘
“When we were younger, Tae, we sucked at a lot of things. Nvidia wasn’t a great company on day one. We made it great over thirty-one years. It didn’t come out great,” he said. “You didn’t build NV1 because you were great. You didn’t build NV2 because you were great,” he said, referring to the company’s first two chip designs, both of which were flops that nearly killed Nvidia. “We survived ourselves. We were our own worst enemy.”
There were several more near-death experiences. But each time, amid the stress and the pressure, the company learned from its mistakes. It retained a core of die-hard employees, many of whom remain in the fold to this day.
2、NVIDIA成功的最关键要素——独特的组织架构设计和工作文化：Through these interviews, I began to understand what makes Nvidia special. Its defining characteristic is not its technological prowess, which is more a consequence than a root cause. It is not the financial resources and the new opportunities that come from a high market valuation. It is not a mystical ability to see the future. It is not luck. Rather, it is a unique organizational design and work culture that I have come to call “the Nvidia Way.” This culture combines unusual independence for each employee with the highest possible standards; it encourages maximum speed while demanding maximum quality; it allows Jensen to act as strategist and enforcer with a direct line of sight to everyone and everything at the company. Above all, it demands an almost superhuman level of effort and mental resilience from everyone. It’s not just that working at Nvidia is intense, though it certainly is; it’s that Jensen’s management style is unlike anything else in corporate America.
Jensen runs the company in the way he does because he believes that Nvidia’s worst enemy is not the competition, but itself—more specifically, the complacency that grips any successful company, particularly one with a long and impressive track record such as Nvidia
3、有助于员工成长的企业文化：His antidote to the backstabbing, to the gaming of metrics, and to political infighting is public accountability and, if needed, public embarrassment. “If we have leaders who are not fighting for other people to be successful and [who are] depriving opportunities to others, I’ll just say it out loud,” he said. “I’ve got no trouble calling people out. You do that once or twice, nobody’s going to go near that again.”
In a sense, that is the Nvidia Way in its purest form. It is the unwavering belief that there is tremendous reward in doing your job the best you can. It is the drive to persevere amid adversity. Or, as Jensen put it when looking directly into my eyes: the secret to his company’s success is nothing more than “sheer will.”
4、Jensen连洗盘子都要求严格：When Jensen was fifteen, his brother helped him get a job at a Denny’s in Portland. He would work at the twenty-four-hour diner for several summers in high school and college. Jensen started where he always had, doing the dirty work of washing dishes and cleaning bathrooms. “I did more bathrooms than any CEO in the history of CEOs,” he would recall...He believed that Denny’s equipped him with a number of significant life skills, including how to navigate chaos, work under time pressure, communicate with customers, and handle mistakes (in this case, from the kitchen). It also taught him to find satisfaction in the quality of his work, no matter how minor the task, and to fulfill each according to the highest possible standards.
5、Jensen初入职场也遭遇了拒绝：The precocious Jensen had skipped a grade at his elementary school in Thailand and again at Oneida Baptist Institute in Kentucky. He graduated from Aloha High School at the age of sixteen and decided to attend Oregon State University in Corvallis, both because of the low in-state tuition and because his best friend, Dean Verheiden, was going there too. Together, Jensen and Verheiden chose electrical engineering as their major and took many of the same classes. Hoping to gain relevant work experience, Jensen applied repeatedly for an internship at a local technology company called Techtronic Industries but was rejected every time.
6、用于跳出安全的舒适圈寻找基于：Although he was good at designing microchips for AMD, he found it tedious; at the time, it was still done manually, by hand. One of his office mates had left for LSI and wanted Jensen to come with him to the company. And Jensen, like most people in the chip-making industry, had heard that LSI was now pioneering new software tools that promised to make the process of chip design much faster and easier. The idea intrigued him. Although he knew it would mean taking a risk, he felt a need to work at a company that, to him, seemed to have a clear grasp on the future of the chip industry. It was an early sign of his restless, forward-thinking nature, which would lead him to pursue the cutting edge even if it meant leaving safety and security behind...Luck had clearly played a part in bringing Jensen to this new opportunity. So had his own talent and skills.
7、“伟大来源人格”：“People with very high expectations have very low resilience. Unfortunately, resilience matters in success,” he later said. “Greatness is not intelligence. Greatness comes from character.”
8、Malachowsky反思自己真正热爱的事物：He didn’t think too much of it until the lunch break between his MCAT medical school entrance exam sessions. While Malachowsky laid down on a picnic table and stared up at the Florida sun, he contemplated life as a doctor and following in his father’s footsteps. Is that what he wanted to do for the rest of his life? Be on call at all hours, working four-to-five-day stretches with little to no sleep? He wondered, “Do I really want to know what all the names on drug bottles mean?” “No,” he realized. “I like this engineering stuff. I’d rather be an engineer.”
9、当Jensen与合伙人发生争执时看到更多的是机遇而非危险：Jensen saw more promise than peril in these explosive fights, too. He called them examples of “honing the sword.” Just as a sword only becomes sharper when it meets grinding resistance, the best ideas always seemed to come from spirited debate and argument, even if the back-and-forth could get uncomfortable. Already, he was learning to embrace conflict rather than shy away from it—a lesson that would eventually come to define his philosophy at Nvidia
10、PCI总线和Window3.1的出现加速了图像芯片的设计开发：In 1992, two major developments—one in hardware, one in software—accelerated the demand for better graphics cards. The first was the computer industry’s adoption of the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) bus, a type of hardware connection that transferred data among the expansion cards (such as graphics accelerators), the motherboard, and the CPU at a much higher bandwidth than that available from the prior Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) bus. The process of designing higher-performance cards would be easier, and there would be a far larger market for the resulting products.
The second development was Microsoft’s release of Windows 3.1, which was intended to showcase the very latest in computer-graphics capabilities. It introduced TrueType fonts, which rendered pixel-perfect text across all Microsoft programs, and it supported high-quality video playback with its new Audio Video Interleave (AVI) video-encoding format.
11、英伟达这个名字的由来：Most of the other possibilities on Priem’s list incorporated “NV” as a reference to their first planned chip design. These names included iNVention, eNVironment, and iNVision...The last remaining option was “Invidia,” which Priem found by looking up the Latin word for envy—in a sense, another callback to their work on the GX, when he and Malachowsky believed that their rivals, both within and beyond Sun, had envied their success. “We dropped the ‘I’ and went with NVidia to honor the NV1 chip we were developing,” said Priem, “and secretly hoped that someday Nvidia would be something that would be envied.” On April 5, 1993, Nvidia was officially born. That same day, Priem drove to the Department of Motor Vehicles to order a vanity license plate: NVIDIA
12、在风投集资过中 Malachowsky 拒绝了风投公司 Kleiner Perkins 想要英伟达自己生成集成电路板的要求：The partner’s insistence made no sense to Malachowsky...Part of this was the typical, if not necessary, bravado of a start-up founder, but part of it was Malachowsky’s practical nature shining through once again. For all their ambition to take over the PC graphics market, Nvidia had to focus its resources on the single best opportunity rather than spread themselves thin chasing all possible ones.
13、当英伟达从 Sequoia Capital 和 Sutter Hill Ventures 那里获得了第一笔两百万美元的融资后，Jesen Huang的感想：Nvidia now had enough money to fund the development of its first chip and to start paying its employees. It was a humbling moment for Jensen, Priem, and Malachowsky: they had succeeded on the strength of their reputation, not their business plan or their demo. It was a lesson Jensen would never forget. “Your reputation will precede you even if your business plan writing skills are inadequate,” he said
14、射击游戏 DOOM 使用的是 2D Video Graphics Array（VGA）标准，但 NV1 却主要用于 3D 图像加速，这就导致 NV1 只能支持部分 VGA 功能，最终严重影响了 DOOM 玩家的游戏体验：It was a hard lesson in the value of backwards compatibility and the dangers of innovating for innovation’s sake. Nvidia’s new card, which was supposed to push the boundaries of the graphics industry, could not keep up with the world’s most popular game. It was sunk by a lack of truly compatible games and the ongoing support from most game makers for inferior, though widely adopted, technical standards. “We thought we had built great technology and a great product,” Malachowsky said. “It turns out we only built great technology. It wasn’t a great product.”...Jensen realized Nvidia had made several critical mistakes with the NV1, from positioning to product strategy. They had overdesigned the card, stuffing it with features no one cared about.
15、对于 NV1 的失败，Jenson 尝试从书中找到答案：In his search for answers to Jones’s question, he gravitated to the book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries and Jack Trout. In it, Ries and Trout argue that positioning is not about the product itself but rather about the mind of the customer, which is shaped by prior knowledge and experience. People tend to reject and filter out anything that doesn’t align with their existing worldview, which makes it hard to change their minds with reason and logic. But emotions can change quickly, and a skillful marketer can manipulate people to feel a certain way about a product, if a company uses the right message. According to the two authors, potential buyers didn’t want to be persuaded. They wanted to be seduced.
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