Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said he is reluctant to fire employees, opting instead to “torture them into greatness” — a strategy he claims has built the company into one of the world’s most valuable.
Huang — whose employees can work as much as seven days a week, sometimes as late as 2 a.m. but reportedly stick around because of the lavish compensation — said his approach to employees has been key to the success of Nvidia, the $3.1 trillion chipmaker whose semiconductors power artificial intelligence technology.
“When you fire somebody, you’re saying, a lot of people say: ‘it wasn’t your fault’, or ‘I made the wrong choice’, or ‘there are very few jobs’,” Huang said during an interview in June when asked why he doesn’t fire people.
Huang also recalled his previous job cleaning toilets as he explained his belief in giving workers opportunities to move up in the organization.
“Look, I used to clean bathrooms, and now I’m the CEO of a company. I think you can learn it. I’m pretty certain you can learn this,” Huang said.
“And there are a lot of things in life that I believe you can learn, and you just have to be given the opportunity to learn it.”
Huang, the 61-year-old whose net worth is valued by Bloomberg Billionaires Index at $111 billion, said that he is “learning constantly” from the 60 people that report directly to him.
“And so I don’t like giving up on people because I think they could improve,” the Nvidia boss added.
“And so it’s tongue in cheek, but people know that I rather torture them into greatness.”
Huang said he thinks that “coaches that that really believe in their team, torture them into greatness.”
“And oftentimes, they’re so close, don’t give up. They’re so close to greatness.”
A group of current and former Nvidia employees told Bloomberg News earlier this week that employees stay at the company despite the fact that its work environment is a pressure cooker which requires long, grueling hours and meetings that often descend into shouting matches and fights.
But the employees wind up staying at the company due to its generous stock compensation package.
The stock options that are awarded to employees can only be vested after four years — giving them strong incentive to stick around.
Since 2019, Nvidia’s stock price has surged by more than 3,700% — meaning that engineers who have worked at the firm since that time recently became newly minted multi-millionaires.
Last year, just 5.3% of Nvidia employees left the company, though the number fell by half after the firm’s market capitalization exceeded $1 trillion.
By comparison, the average turnover rate for the chip industry is 17.7%.
The Post has sought comment from Nvidia.
