The Secrets Of The Man Who Made Nvidia The World's Most Valuable Company

They're called T5T emails. They're essential to Jensen Huang's success.

- Ben Cohen

Every morning, the man who built one of the world's most valuable companies scrolls through his inbox and looks at 100 of the most important emails that he'll see all day. And on Sunday nights, he pours himself a glass of his favorite Scotch and reads even more of them.

For decades, Nvidia employees have been sending notes known as T5Ts, or Top-5 Things—things they're working on, things they're thinking about, things they're noticing in their corners of the business. And for decades, Jensen Huang has been reading them. All of them.

"If you send it," he says, "I'll read it."

The founder and chief executive of Nvidia reads them to keep the pulse of the company and make absolutely sure that he's getting the sort of insights that might never reach him otherwise.

He's been doing this since before his startup became a trillion-dollar company by selling the chips powering the AI revolution, long before he was Silicon Valley's reigning philosopher-king and even before he had an entire wardrobe of black leather jackets. Over the years, Top-5 Things emails have become his preferred method of flattening hierarchy and something of an organizing principle for the whole company.

It's a clever and incredibly effective management strategy—and one I'll explain in more detail later in this column. As it turns out, it's also classic Jensen Huang.

"Jensen's management style is unlike anything else in corporate America," Tae Kim writes in The Nvidia Way, his illuminating new book about the company.

The book offers a peek behind the curtain at one of the most important and idiosyncratic companies in the world today. Founded in a Denny's booth more than three decades ago, Nvidia is now worth as much as Apple and Microsoft, and it's the single-best performing stock in the S&P 500 over the past decade.