I think you must spend a lot of time reading or whatever, but you're always so incredibly thoughtful and well-read in every single detail of what's going on in the industry.

How to stay so on top of things while running one of the world's largest companies.

Wow.

Let's see, what's the answer to that?

Well, first, I'm surrounded by amazing people.

When I went to visit you, you were surrounded by amazing people.

And they're generous to teach me.

And so you have to make the effort to learn.

People love teaching people who are great students.

And so I dedicate myself a lot to being a good student.

And of course, we're in a whole lot of domains from self-driving cars to climate research to digital biology.

And so the vastness, the breadth of impact that we can have in the world is great.

But we also have to learn.

And so you're in a very tech-driven industry, solving and creating solutions for companies.

I'm in a very tech-driven industry.

And so for both of us, it's essential we understand the underpinnings of the technology.

So you have an intuition for how the industry is going to change.

You have an intuition for which one of the technologies is a little bit of a left turn and which one is fundamental.

To realize that maybe the early works that we did with generative adversarial models to variational autoencoders to diffusion models, that they were somewhat cousins of each other.

And that realizing the impact of one could lead to a breakthrough in another which opens up the horizon for now diffusion models that are utterly incredible.

And so I think having an intuition for technology allows you to better extrapolate.

And our ability to extrapolate and see down the road is really vital because, gosh, technology is changing fast, but it still takes us several years to build a great solution.

And so how do you, on the one hand, dedicate yourself to build something that's going to take years to do, building it on top of technology that's utterly changing by a factor of a thousand every few years.

How do you do that unless you have an intuition for it?

And so I think that the fact that you're so deeply gifted in technology and so you understand it and you have great interest and curiosity in technology is essential to running a technology driven company.

So I think it's, I love that part of my job and I'm surrounded by people who are generous to teach me and I've got to just dedicate myself to be a good student.

So one area I'm very intrigued by as well is how you run the company.

I've understood you don't have one-on-ones, you know, can you talk me through some of the sort of classic management playbook that you've challenged and evolved?

Well, first, with respect to building a company, the first thing that you have to go, as with all problems, and Joe, you do this very naturally, you start from first principles.

What is this machine that we're trying to create?

And what is its output?

What is its input?

What is its output?

What are the conditions that it's in?

What is the industry like?

Is it a fast-moving industry?

Is it a bureaucratic industry?

Is it a highly regulated industry?

You know, what kind of industry is it?

And what are you trying to build?

And so I think you think about it from that perspective.

There are several things that I wanted to do with the company.

I wanted to create something, a company that naturally attracts amazing people.

And the reason for that is because we're solving problems.

Our company's mission is to solve computing problems that are barely possible.

And if a problem could be solved by normal computers, we don't do it.

And so we have to go find problems that are impossible for normal computers to solve or barely possible.

And so you want to attract amazing people who want to invent this new form of computing and apply it to solving some really difficult problems.

And so I wanted amazing people.

Second, I wanted a company that was smaller, not larger.

You want a company that's as small as possible, not as large as possible.

You know, it needs to be as large as necessary to do the job well, but to be as small as possible.

And so naturally, you want to empower people.

Well, if you want an organization that obeys command and control, then you make it a pyramid, just like the old military, all the way back to the Roman Empire.

But if you want to empower people, then you want to make it as flat as possible so that information travels quickly.

And so in order to make something as flat as possible, the first layer has to be well-considered.

Well, the first layer happens to be the most senior people, and you would think that they need the least amount of management.

Nobody's coming to me, none of my management team is coming to me for career advice.

They made it and they're doing great.

And so I have a whole lot of people reporting to me because I don't need to do one-on-ones.

I don't have to do career coaching.

They're all fabulously happy and they know what they're doing.

They're experts in their field.

And so those one-on-ones are really not necessary.

And if there's a strategic direction, why do you tell one person?

You tell everybody.

And so after we're swimming in the soup of strategizing and how to formulate the path to the future, when the time comes, I just send it out to everybody at the same time or I'll tell everybody at the same time.

And people will give me feedback and we'll refine it.

And because the company is so flat and you've empowered the organization so much with knowledge of the company and their access to information, the company is also agile.

And so it turns out that by having a lot of direct reports, not having one-on-ones made the company flat, information travels quickly, employees empowered, which made it possible for me not to do one-on-ones.

That algorithm was well-conceived and the architecture is well-implemented.

We also don't have business units.

We don't have divisions.

Everybody works as one and the company is shaped in a way that allows us to build accelerated computing best.

If you asked me to go do fried chicken, we'd have a hard time doing fried chicken.

Swedish meatballs, no chance.

But accelerated computing, very well.

I think you have 40 direct reports, right?

Something like that.

The challenge is getting everybody together.

When I want to get everybody together, but either somebody's out or somebody's on vacation or somebody's doing something.

The odds of everybody sitting at the office is approximately 0%.

How did your leadership style change over time?

You've been going on for decades now.

How did that evolve as you learned?

Well, I don't really have a style.

It's just me.

There are a lot of things that I want to do better.

If something's happening at work and I don't like its direction, I'll just say it.

I don't take anybody aside, do one-on-one coaching.

If something's not right, I'll just say it.

If I have a different opinion, I'll just say it.

It could be a little too direct, but if people just realize that I'm not trying to do anything except be direct, then I spend a lot of time reasoning through my decisions, which empowers employees because they learn how leaders think through problems.

Just by every meeting I'm in, I'm explaining how do I think through this?

Let me reason through this.

Let me explain why I did that.

How do we compare and contrast these ideas?

That process of management, I think, is really empowering.

We also don't do just vice president meetings or just director and board meetings.

The meetings I have, there's new college grads in there.

There are people from every different organization, and we're just all sitting in there.

They're kind of like your office.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, everybody's just kind of sitting in there.

Exactly.

That's actually one thing that I found very intriguing because that's one of the playbooks.

You have a very clear leadership team, and you have leadership team in meetings and so on.

That's something I've always struggled with because you'll have a lot of the best individual contributors, and of course, they should be in that meeting.

It shouldn't be just like vice presidents not knowing the craft, so it's fascinating that you can- That's exactly it.

You got it.

You want the person who is most informed or best skilled or just had the most experience.

They actually made the mess, or they actually confronted the situation.

You want ground truth.

You want ground truth and experts the best you can.

You have some model for folks to communicate their top priorities.

I've heard something about sending an email.

What's that all about?

We don't do status reports, and so I don't read any status reports.

The reason why I don't is because status reports are meta information by the time you get it, and so they're barely informative, and so I'm distilled and refined, and bias has been inserted, and perspective has already been added.

You're not looking at ground truth anymore, and so I tend to appreciate information that anybody presents, and so you're allowed it.

If you send out email, and it's called Top Five Things, and just whatever happens to be your top five things, whatever you observed or whatever you did or whatever you learned or things, they're just things.

Oh, really?

Yeah, top five things, whatever it is.

You just went to a great restaurant.

Who doesn't want to hear that?

That's important information.

Just had a baby.

That's important information.

So whatever these things are, top five things, if you send it out, I'll read it.

And so I read every single morning, probably a hundred or so, and I do it every day.

And it's one giant thread that everyone in the company sends to you, right?

No, just everybody has their own version of top five things, and they just send it out.

If you send it, I'll read it.

What's your top five things?

Top five things are not meant to be from the center out.

They're meant to be from the outside.

That's right.

Yeah.

Think of it as IoT.

Yeah.

If I take my top five things and I sent it out, then I contaminated the system, in fact.

That's the reason why I don't do it.

But I have my own top five things that I keep to myself.

And how do you balance that with planning?

So sort of bottoms up ideas, having the best engineers on your team decide what to work on combined with, you know, sometimes you also have to execute on a plan.

How do you balance those two things?

First of all, strategy is not words.

Strategy is action.

And so if the company has a set of strategies, but the people's actions, their top five things are not that, then they're obviously not executing the strategy.

And so the strategy turns out isn't what I say, it's what they do.

And so it's really important that I understand what everybody's doing.

And you do that by just getting a feel for everybody's top five things.

And you don't have to read all of them.

You don't have to read them all every week.

You don't, you just kind of, you know, it's sporadic and, you know, stochastically sampling the system.

And you have a feeling for whether the company is going in the direction that you want it to go.

Yeah.

That we all agree we go.

And so that's one.

Second, planning, we don't do a periodic planning system.

And the reason for that is because the world is a living, breathing thing.

And so we just plan continuously.

There's no five year plan.

There's no one year plan.

There's no plan.

There's just what we're doing.

That's really exciting to hear.

I think one thing as you're executing on first principles and you come to some ideas, it can also be hard to trust your intuition if you're doing something that's, you know, contrarian to what the playbook is.

What do you think made you trust your intuition on some of these things?

Well, you know, most everything that you dedicate the company to go after should be reasoned through first principles.

Yeah.

You know, there's a foundation of what are the assumptions, the important assumptions that led to you believing that the computer has to change or the chip architecture has to change or the way that software is developed or how a data center has transformed.

You know, a data center used to be a place where we store all of our files and we would go retrieve it.

But every company in the future will have two more data centers.

But one of the data centers will not be a center for data.

But it's a factory.

Exactly.

It's a factory for producing intelligence.

And data comes in.

It's refined through the computer.

And what comes out is this invisible thing, which is the most valuable thing in the world called intelligence.

And this building is going to be, you know, driving this thing continuously, right?

And so you and I, we're all going to have factories.

And how would you reason through that?

And you kind of back your way out, you know.

And before you know it, you formulate a view of the world based on first principle thinking.