I'm my opinion good CEOs know when to press that emergency button and to use it sparingly. Some CEOs like Musk manage exclusively by it and I don't know that it's the healthiest of long term strategy. He does get away with it for the most part it seems.
Feels pushy and disrespectful of his time to me. If everyone emailed the CEO when they have some problem the CEOs wouldn:t be able to get anything done.
The email also makes you feel like an asshole if you don't drop whatever you're doing to help him because supposedly it's your fault his company is failing.
In the Twitter thread the sender says they exhausted all the support channels. And note they were a corporate customer of an expensive product, not some random guy.
Would it have been more respectful of the CEO’s time to wait until your business falls because of an Nvidia driver issue and then write up a postmortem?
if you want to get anything done in the world you need to be a little bit pushy. If your company is at the risk of failing because of some critical bug sending someone an email isn't a big deal. Worst case he ignores it, it's not like you called the guy out of bed at 3 in the morning.
The biggest mistake people make is simply not asking for help as directly as possible. Especially if they're too intimidated by someone's status.
This is Hacker News, I'm pretty sure there's no need to rename him from Jensen to 'NVIDIA CEO'. There's only one Carmack, one Linus, one DJB, one Elon and one Jensen.
Jensen is NVIDIA. Left MSI, took on the #1 competitor in the space (3DFX) and dominated them, responsible for things like CUDA and DLSS, now supplies the hardware for most of high end gaming and ML, has a two year advantage over AMD, appeared in his kitchen for an announcement once then a few months later told everyone that the entire scene was done with high quality physics based rendering and nobody knew.
Nvidia wasn't founded as a $960b company with 27,000 employees; it was once "microscopic", and if you saw some of Jensen's early emails, you'd probably mock them too. I think Suhail was appealing to Jensen's sense of urgency and responsibility as someone that understands what it's like to grow a small company. The tweet says "30 years after its founding, this guy still acts like a hardcore founder. Jensen is the best tech CEO in the game rn." I read that as Suhail praising Jensen for being so responsive and helpful, not flexing or equating their work.
Suhail is also the founder of another "small" company called Mixpanel.
No, finding your lunch doesn't make you a founder. Building something and launching it makes you a founder. Ridiculing others who are trying makes you a...?
Does anyone get an unpleasant feeling from these typical "founder" types? Something always just feels deeply off about them. They all seem like carbon copies of each other too.
27 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 63.7 ms ] threadhttps://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-explain...
The email also makes you feel like an asshole if you don't drop whatever you're doing to help him because supposedly it's your fault his company is failing.
Would it have been more respectful of the CEO’s time to wait until your business falls because of an Nvidia driver issue and then write up a postmortem?
if you want to get anything done in the world you need to be a little bit pushy. If your company is at the risk of failing because of some critical bug sending someone an email isn't a big deal. Worst case he ignores it, it's not like you called the guy out of bed at 3 in the morning.
The biggest mistake people make is simply not asking for help as directly as possible. Especially if they're too intimidated by someone's status.
Feedback is a gift.
He is famous in crypto (as in cryptography) circles for:
- Ed25519 for fast + safe asymmetric crypto
- chacha/poly for fast symmetric crypto
He is also famous in Unix circles for:
- qmail
- djbdns
- his init system daemontools
and a bunch of other bits.
He also fought the US government for your right to use encryption when encryption was considered a munition.
More at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_J._Bernstein or https://cr.yp.to
Jensen is NVIDIA. Left MSI, took on the #1 competitor in the space (3DFX) and dominated them, responsible for things like CUDA and DLSS, now supplies the hardware for most of high end gaming and ML, has a two year advantage over AMD, appeared in his kitchen for an announcement once then a few months later told everyone that the entire scene was done with high quality physics based rendering and nobody knew.
You would expect that. Except HN isn't very good with Hardware. It might have work with Linus or Carmack. Not so much with Jensen.
"Me, founder of a microscopic SaaS image company trying to capitalize on the hype of AI"
"You, founder of $960b company with 27,000 employees and generations of market leading advanced technology"
Clearly they both speak a special language that only "founders" can understand!
/s
I "found" my lunch yesterday, does that make me a founder?
Suhail is also the founder of another "small" company called Mixpanel.
No, finding your lunch doesn't make you a founder. Building something and launching it makes you a founder. Ridiculing others who are trying makes you a...?
Nice response from Nvidia though.