Nvidia VP Simona Jankowski has simply bid the $3.1 trillion tech big farewell—and paid homage to her boss and CEO Jensen Huang on her approach out.
“Working with Jensen has been the experience of a lifetime,” she concluded of her time reporting into the billionaire from humble beginnings.
After practically seven years of working investor relations and strategic finance on the chipmaker, she gushed on LinkedIn that Huang is “in a class of his own” earlier than sharing the three management classes he taught her: “First principles thinking, zero-billion dollar markets, speed-of-light execution and so much more.”
“He inspired me to reach to the limits, made me laugh to tears, and taught me the harmony of work and family,” Jankowski added.
The world’s most respected firm—because of Huang’s first ideas considering and zero-billion greenback market ideas
After an preliminary foray into growing graphics processors for pc video games, the corporate invented one of many first AI-friendly GPUs and now it’s dominating the market, promoting over 70% of all AI chips.
Final week, Nvidia briefly topped Microsoft to develop into the world’s most respected firm with a market capitalization of $3.34 trillion.
Since Jankowski joined Nvidia in 2017, she boasted that she’s watched its income develop tenfold and its earnings and market cap have jumped by greater than 20 occasions.
“Perhaps even more impressively, the AI compute performance delivered by NVIDIA’s flagship GPU is up over 1,000X, while the size of frontier AI models has grown by over 20,000X,” she added. “Living through exponentials like these is rare and thrilling, and keeps the learning curve steep and exciting.”
However Nvidia’s GPU success was no accident—it clearly demonstrates Huang’s behavior of making use of first ideas considering (that’s, questioning each assumption to get to the essential ingredient of an issue) to search out progressive options as a substitute of mimicking present fashions, and forging a enterprise in a zero-billion greenback market (that’s, a nascent however probably big market).
Beforehand, CPUs—the most typical pc chips, which date again to the Nineteen Fifties—have been nice for executing advanced calculations separately, however they didn’t fairly match the wants of information scientists when deep studying and AI analysis intensified within the 2010s.
However GPUs can carry out many easy calculations without delay—and because it turned out, Nvidia’s GPUs have been an ideal match for the kind of computing programs AI builders wanted to construct and practice giant language fashions.
“Jensen is a visionary and saw the trends of GPU adoption in data centers early on and aligned the company’s strategy to that vision,” a semiconductors senior analysis analyst, Tristan Gerra, advised Fortune.
Certainly one of its prescient strikes included creating CUDA, a high-level programming device the corporate inbuilt 2007 to assist unlock the complete functionality of its GPUs in a simple approach.
CUDA is now so broadly used that it’s tough for corporations constructing giant language fashions like OpenAI’s ChatGPT to think about themselves utilizing different tech.
As Huang himself beforehand identified, that’s exactly what it means to function in a zero-billion-dollar market:
“Almost all of our purposes should be to go and do something that hasn’t been done before, that is insanely hard to do, that if you achieve it could make a real contribution,” he advised Stripe’s CEO Patrick Collison on stage final month.
“That market is probably zero billion dollars in size because it’s never been done before—I’d rather be a market maker than a market taker.”
Who’s Simona Jankowski?
Jankowski, a Stanford College alum, labored at Goldman Sachs for her complete profession earlier than becoming a member of Nvidia.
However even then, Jankowski revealed that she had been working intently with the chipmaker for fairly a while.
“As a newly minted equity research analyst at Goldman Sachs in 2001, my first assignment was building the NVDA financial model, and I met Jensen Huang as part of our initiation of coverage,” she defined in her LinkedIn submit.
Following the corporate’s “cool product launches, rapid technology advances, supply chain trips to Taiwan” and “Q&As with Jensen”, she stated, helped her make her title as an analyst.
Jankowski labored her approach up the ranks, overlaying the semi-conductor business inside Goldman’s International Funding Analysis division for years earlier than being promoted to managing director.
Now, she’s off to hitch the world of startups as a chief monetary officer—however she’s not but revealed the enterprise in query.
Fortune has reached Jankowski for remark.
