Nvidia Lacks Clear Successor for Superstar CEO Who Built Company

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“Succession plans are rarely visible from the outside, and companies typically do not designate a successor well in advance for competitive and other reasons,” said Moon Surana, a portfolio manager at Harding Loevner. “That said, greater visibility into its senior leadership and management bench would be helpful for investors in assessing management depth and succession readiness.”

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A defining characteristic of Huang’s management style is impatience. He rushes to capitalize on opportunities and clear roadblocks, fearing that a lack of speed will doom the company. 

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Projects that don’t pan out disappear overnight. Individuals and whole teams — regardless of seniority or tenure — are reassigned without warning to work on what Huang thinks is Nvidia’s biggest need.

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He hates one-on-one meetings. Instead, Huang holds group gatherings that often hammer away at one problem until there’s a solution that everyone then works on. He seldom fires people but openly admits to torturing them so that they can become the most effective version of themselves.

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Presentations to large audiences by a group leader will be interrupted by Nvidia’s CEO, often brutally, if he feels like the speaker is missing a point. 

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Nvidia employees, even those who have moved on, remain in awe of him. They talk about having to submit emails listing their five main priorities and of getting feedback directly from him at all hours, usually in the form of terse one-liners.

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In the Spotlight

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For most of Huang’s tenure as CEO, Nvidia faced much less scrutiny. Started by Huang and his co-founders in 1993, the company was a niche maker of chips used in graphics cards for computer gamers. That changed after researchers found the technology useful for developing and running AI models — a computing-intensive task that involves bombarding them with data. 

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In the last five years, Nvidia has become central to a staggering build-out of AI data centers. That’s delivered unprecedented sales growth and financial strength, and put the company and its leader under a microscope.

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Nvidia was the first company to reach a $4 trillion valuation and even briefly topped $5 trillion. Revenue more than doubled in each of the past two fiscal years, and Wall Street expects sales to pass $500 billion annually before the end of the decade.

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It’s also astoundingly profitable: Nvidia is on track for net income of $113 billion in the fiscal year ending this month — far more than it used to make in annual revenue before the AI frenzy took hold.

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For shareholders, the hope is that Huang can stay in the CEO role for many more years.  

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“He’s built a $4 trillion company and has been the primary public face of it,” said Michael Kirkbride, a portfolio manager at Evercore Wealth Management. “Hopefully we won’t find out how it operates without him for a very long time.”

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Huang’s approach was shaped by brushes with disaster. In Nvidia’s early days, it was always threatened with extinction by Intel Corp. Nvidia evolved as a scrappy organization primed to react to crises. That’s paid off more than anyone could have imagined by creating a culture of continual evolution — one that could pivot from graphics chips to the processors used by the world’s most powerful computers.

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His speeches, which mix goofy humor with explorations of computer science, physics and mathematics, all have a purpose. He’s constantly anticipating the next problem or opportunity and trying to push toward a solution.