Story + PD: The Story of the Company | Nvidia

Part of a series at the intersection of Storytelling and Product Development.

Some stories are told because they are meant to inspire and direct our action. They are meant to shape our future, not just feel good. We tell these stories so that our audience (and/or ourselves) with the hope that they can live that story. Then maybe someday it will become a real success story.  (We certainly did that at Jump, from our early founders’ meetings on to every company team retreat and every onboarding. )

We can all play a role in creating and telling these stories of who and what our company is meant to be. But the CEO as Chief Storyteller (h/t Marsha Prospere) is so important, whether it’s a highly visible consumer brand or a piece of technology that’s buried under a mess of wires. Maybe it’s even more important for the latter category.

Jensen Huang of Nvidia

Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/nvidia-taiwan/27097146880

The tidal wave of developments in AI frequently brings Nvidia into the news in a way that I wasn’t seeing five years ago. As new profiles of the company’s success and importance in the tech world are written, CEO and cofounder Jensen Huang’s role as a storyteller is rising to the surface. Right away, in an interview with Lauren Goode of WIRED, he brings up storytelling.  (“The Nerd King Vibes of Jensen Huang” June/May 2024)  

Huang: “Someone I really admire… is Shantanu Narayen, the CEO of Adobe. He said he always wanted to be a journalist because he loved telling stories. 

Goode: “It seems like storytelling is an important part of building a business, being able to tell its story effectively.”  

Huang: Yes. Strategy is storytelling. Culture building is storytelling.  

Goode: “You’ve said many times you didn’t sell the idea of Nvidia based on a pitch deck.”

Huang:  “That’s right. It was really about telling the story.” 

When their companies abandoned their work, Huang and two colleagues sat at Denny’s for hours and figured out their gameplan for a chip company They landed on making chips for “3D graphics cards” for PCs to be used by teenagers to play games that haven’t been created, two years ahead of any real traction in the home PC market.  It was a “zero billion dollar market” as the founding team likes to say.

Huang “did a horrible job with the pitch” in 1993, but he had already proven himself as an engineer to the friend of an investor at Sequoia. They gave him the money anyway, despite the risk.  It wasn’t the pitch deck. He painted a compelling picture of a possible future to get someone to buy into it. He would have to do it again as the new company struggled. 

To stay ahead in a market they created, the founders had to find the threads of a new story for the future, and enroll people in a vision again and again. Once the company realized their programmable accelerators were being used in universities doing scientific research. It changed everything. Nvidia wasn’t about just games. They enabled people to create supercomputers. 

And when they learned those supercomputers were being used in neural network research, laying the foundations of modern AI, Huang reoriented the company toward that strategic vision, which was again a “zero billion dollar market” around 2010. Huang: 

As a CEO or anybody who is trying to steer the ship in a new direction, you have to have some intermittent, some near-term positive reinforcements. And so you have to keep promoting the idea. Whenever something good happens, that reinforces the direction you’re going you have to, you know, put into perspective: What is this? Why is this important? How does this help us get to the next level?

When we pivoted the ship in that direction, we sought out every single AI researcher on the planet. … They were all helpful in providing the early indications of future success along the way for me and, you gotta make a big deal out of those small wins.

In another interview, this time a podcast by one of Nvidia’s earliest funders, Sequoia, I found a little more context. Huang has become expert at telling the company’s story to the press and investors, but also partners and regulators. The Nvidia story now is about being a platform company that enables AI products and services, and he is precise in how he speaks of this framing for the business. But it's clear to me that he’s also become an expert at the internal storytelling to align people around strategy, and to support a culture that can overcome adversity to do such big things. 

Takeaways: 

• Find the story that animates you by immersing in the data that is your lived experience and the signals of the people around you, including the people you serve. Find little wins. 

• Write the story with people you trust to call you on your assumptions and see your potential. 

• Tell the story of the direction you’re going and the small wins that reinforce it. 

• Live that story in the decisions you make, like where and with whom you immerse yourself.
  
  

Maybe storytelling is my hammer of the moment, so I see nails everywhere… but listen. Every CEO needs to be a storyteller. Every leader needs to be a storyteller. Why? Leaders inspire and guide people to do hard things. . 

For anyone to do their best work for someone else, on something hard, for a long time, they  need a story that moves them. 

They don’t need us to be Aaron Sorkin or Mark Twain or AA Milne or Ernest Hemingway. 

They don’t need the same kind of story arc, complexity, or beautiful turn of phrase. 

They don’t need a screenplay or a lengthy composition. 

They need a narrative that serves to make sense of what they’re doing and helps them feel right about it. 

If you can do that with a metaphor, a framing phrase, or evoking another narrative…

If you can provide an image that enables them to place themselves in relation to a worthy goal of a worthy hero. 

Maybe they are the hero. 

Maybe they are the mentor who provides the hero with a useful gift. 

Maybe they are blocking the antagonist from the hero’s path.  

A leader uses narrative to shift a motivation away from their own power and to the agency of the worker, or better yet, for something larger than either of them.

Jensen Huang and his team are on that kind of a journey.