Charlie Rose’s interviews are low key, insightful, deep and lengthy; not your usual Hollywood elite trying to pitch their latest movie in five minutes or less (although I do enjoy that as well.) This past week, Rose interviewed Taiwanese American Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO and co-founder of Nvidia. Depending on what you do for a living, you may not have heard of Nvidia – they’re a Silicon Valley-based company that develops computer graphics chips.
I had the chance to hear Huang speak at Stanford a few years back; he’s down-to-earth and approachable. I asked Huang about the perceived glass ceiling in corporate America for Asian Americans and what we could do to break the ceiling. His advice: to be authentic, be true to yourself and be yourself. I wasn’t too sure if I was totally convinced at what he said, but his advice was emphasized by a column by former GE CEO Jack Welch, emphasizing that “the critical component of success is authenticity.”
You can see Huang being authentic and true to himself and true to the mission he sees Nvidia’s role in the future of computing in this video. Last fall, The New York Times also did a great profile on Huang as well as Nvidia, their new efforts around Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA), and the coming war for the soul of the computer with Intel.
