Nvidia's Jensen Huang on his role as CEO and what he finds exhausting at work

Jensen Huang said that his major role at Nvidia is to explain the logic while solving problems that come.

Nvidia founder Jensen Huang said that as the CEO his role is to make an environment where employees can work without any difficulties or interference. At Stanford Graduate School of Business, in a session titled ‘View From The Top’, Jensen Huang said that no task should be beneath anyone in a company's culture as “to me, no task is beneath me. Because remember I used to wash dishes, and I mean I used to clean toilets. I cleaned a lot of toilets. I've cleaned more toilets than all of you combined and some of them...just can't unsee. I don't know what to tell you. That's life.”

Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia talked about being a CEO and what it means for him.

He said that his major role at Nvidia is to explain the logic while solving problems that come. He said, "I show people how to reason through things all the time - strategy things, how to forecast something, how to break a problem down. You're just empowering people all over the place and so that's how I see it. If you send me something you want me to help review it, I'll do my best and I'll show you how I would do it. In the process of doing that, of course, I learned a lot from you. You gave me a seat of a lot of information. I learned a lot. So, I feel rewarded by the process.”

Although the process can be sometimes exhausting, he said, adding, "It does take a lot of energy sometimes because in order to add value to somebody, and they're incredibly smart as a starting point, and I'm surrounded by incredibly smart people, you have to at least get to their plane. You have to get into their head space and that's really hard. That takes just an enormous amount of emotional and intellectual energy and so I feel exhausted after I work on things like that."

Talking about his role, he further said, “A CEO should have the most direct reports by definition because the people that reports to the CEO requires the least amount of management. It makes no sense to me that CEOs have so few people reporting to them, except for one fact that I know to be true. The knowledge the information of a CEO is supposedly so valuable, so secretive you can only share with two other people or three. And their information is so invaluable, so incredibly secretive that they can only share with a couple more.”