Above a table in San Jose, Calif., Denny's hangs a sign that reads: “The booth that launched a $1 trillion company.” The breakfast area is where, in 1993, engineers Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem founded the technology company Nvidia (NVDA). As evidenced by the plaque celebrating the chain, Nvidia passed the $1 trillion mark last year. Today, the company's dominance in the AI revolution has boosted its market cap to nearly $3.6 trillion, making it the world's most valuable publicly traded company.
Despite its seemingly rapid rise, Nvidia's trajectory has been in the making for a long time. When the company started with the idea of reimagining realistic 3D graphics with chips known as graphics processing units (GPUs), it faced several pitfalls along the way—including a graphics format crisis in 1996 that forced Huang, the company's CEO, to quit. more than half of its employees
Three years later, Nvidia introduced the industry's first GPU, the GeForce 256, and became a leading player in computer graphics and gaming. Although successful in that field, Huang decided to turn to AI more than a decade ago in the hope that the emerging technology would take off. His bet has paid off, with Big Tech players like Microsoft ( MSFT ), Meta ( META ), Google ( GOOGL ) and Amazon ( AMZN ) now spending billions of dollars on Nvidia chips used to power their generative AI models.
Besides his penchant for leather jackets, Huang is known for his unique leadership style—his executive team consists of more than 60 people, all of whom report directly to the CEO. “It's not the norm, but I'm sure it's the best way,” Huang told Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe, of the draft earlier this year. In addition to Nvidia's innovations in AI, data centers and gaming, the company is also strong in visualization and automotive technology.
Here's a look at some of the top leaders helping Nvidia ride the AI wave to unprecedented heights:
Jensen Huang, CEO
Huang has served as CEO and president of Nvidia since its founding. He owns about 3 percent of the company and has seen his personal fortune rise to $128 billion over the years, placing Huang among the ten richest people in the world.
Huang, who received a Bachelor of Science from Oregon State University and a master's in electrical engineering from Stanford, previously worked at companies such as LSI Logic and Advanced Micro Devices. But his first job was as a dishwasher at Denny's—the very restaurant that would serve as the birthplace of Nvidia. “I used to clean toilets, and now I'm the CEO of a company… There are many things in life that I believe you can learn,” Huang told Collison when asked why he rarely fires workers. “People know that I prefer to torture them and make them do big things. “
Chris Malachowsky, Nvidia partner
Co-founder Huang Malachowsky has held several different positions at Nvidia, where he oversaw areas such as IT, operations and product engineering. The executive, who previously held engineering and technology leadership roles at HP and Sun Microsystems, is currently focused on growing the company's core technology as an “Nvidia partner” and chief technology officer.
Malachowsky is also an expert in integrated circuit design and holds 35 patents. In addition to his work at Silicon Valley-based Nvidia, he serves as an advisor to the Wertheim College of Engineering at the University of Florida.
Colette Kress, chief financial officer
Kress, another member of Nvidia's executive board, was hired by Huang in 2013. His time at the company included Nvidia's entry into the $1 trillion club, then the $3 trillion club, with Kress helping to guide Nvidia's growing growth across its data center business. .
His leadership “has been instrumental in Nvidia's success with Wall Street and is key to Jensen's vision,” Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, told Fortune in June. Prior to joining Nvidia, Kress was chief financial officer of Cisco's technology and operations finance division and spent more than a dozen years at Microsoft, where his roles included chief financial officer of the server and equipment division.
Jay Puri, senior vice president of global field operations
As head of global field operations, Puri oversees all aspects of Nvidia's global business. The executive's responsibilities include areas such as sales, collaboration, program management and support services planning.
Prior to joining Nvidia in 2005, Puri spent more than two decades in sales, marketing and management at Sun Microsystems, where his positions included the position of senior vice president of the Asia-Pacific Group. Prior to that, Puri worked in roles at Hewlett-Packard, Booz Allen and Texas Instruments.
Debora Shoquist, senior vice president of operations
After more than 20 years spent managing operations at companies such as Quantum and Coherent, Shoquist joined Nvidia in 2007. As head of operations, he oversees Nvidia's supply chain operations, logistics and quality management systems.
Shoquist's role involves working closely with the company's global suppliers, most notably Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). In what is shaping up to be a very profitable partnership in AI, Nvidia relies on TSCMC to make chips like those that are part of the next-generation Blackwell platform.
Dwight Diercks, senior vice president of software engineering
As one of Nvidia's longest-serving employees, Diercks has been with the technology company since becoming its 22nd employee in 1994. Initially joining as a senior software engineer, he has served as senior vice president of software engineering since 2008 and leads the team that builds the software that supports its AI accelerators, autonomous vehicle technology and gaming products.
Diercks, who previously worked as a software engineer at Pellucid, Inc. and Compaq Computer Group, has also shown interest in AI applications outside of work. Earlier this year, he donated $20 million to fund programs at the Mayo Clinic that will use new technologies to quickly diagnose and treat cancer.
Jeff Fisher, executive vice president of GeForce
Like Diercks, Fisher joined Nvidia three decades ago. In the early days of the company, its first office was so small that Nvidia employees shared an office bathroom with another company and ate their meals around a ping pong table, he recalled in 2017.
Starting as the company's first salesman, Fisher worked his way up to head the GeForce business unit, which produces the company's line of gaming GPUs and 3D rendering. Prior to joining Nvidia, he previously worked in sales at Adaptec and Weitek Corporation.
Jonah Alben, senior vice president of GPU engineering
Alben, since 2008, has led GPU engineering at Nvidia, where his team focuses on developing the capabilities of next-generation chips. Before joining the company in 1997, he worked briefly at Silicon Graphics.
“We had the idea that when we put GPUs in the world … that somewhere in the world you're going to find these GPUs and use them for a new problem that we didn't even know about,” Alben said in 2020. podcast interview.
Ian Buck, vice president and general manager of accelerated computing
Ian Buck oversees Nvidia's large data center business. Buck has worked with Huang's company for 20 years and started as a software engineer and director. In charge of hardware and software for data centers and AI applications, Buck has testified about AI before the US Congress and urged federal agencies to invest in and adopt new technologies to improve the economy.
While completing a Ph.D. at Stanford in the early 2000s, Buck helped develop the Brook programming language. At Nvidia, his team helped develop CUDA, a parallel computing platform and programming model introduced in 2006 that builds on Buck's Stanford research and helps developers accelerate applications with GPUs.
Rev. Lebaredian, Omniverse vice president and simulation technology
Before beginning a 22-year career at Nvidia, Lebaredian focused on visual graphics at Warner Brothers Digital and Disney Dream Quest Images until he launched his own company, Steamboat Software, in 1999. Lebaredian joined Nvidia in 2002, where he now leads the company's Omniverse program and simulation technology.
Bringing together artificial intelligence with rendering and physics simulation, Nvidia's Omniverse allows the creation of so-called “digital twins,” which reproduce space and processes to help companies solve problems in areas such as factory scale, robotics development or climate research.
Danny Shapiro, vice president of automotive
Shapiro has been with Nvidia since 2009 and currently leads its automotive division. In addition to working on automotive development and design, Shapiro's team is focused on enabling AI for self-driving through the company's Nvidia Drive platforms.
It should come as no surprise that Shapiro drives an electric car powered by a California home solar system. Prior to joining Nvidia, the executive held marketing, engineering and business development positions at Advanced Micro Devices, Silicon Graphics and Digital Services.
Mohammed Siddeek, corporate vice president and head of NVentures
Siddeek and Nvidia go way back. In the 1990s, he helped the company go public while working at Morgan Stanley ( MS ) and then joined Nvidia as an investor relations manager in the 2000s before leaving to work at SoftBank ( SFTBF )'s Vision Fund.
The executive returned to Nvidia three years ago to lead NVentres, its venture capital. In contrast to the large investments made by Nvidia's business development division, NVentures focuses on early-stage startups using AI to improve healthcare and productivity. The main criterion for investment is “fitness,” Siddeek told the Financial Times in 2023, describing “companies that use our technology, that depend on our technology, that build their businesses on our technology” as the main targets.
