Humor, Philosophy, and Innovation: Unpacking Jensen Huang's Fireside Chat with Patrick Collison
Front Row Seat at Stripe Sessions 2024
One of my early products that I worked as a developer (apart from my personal projects) is to build a payment gateway using Stripe’s API.
It was right after completing my bachelors (Computer Science) and when I was given with this task, Stripe’s documentation is clear as crystal and within an hour I am able to create a POC.
The best part is they even have test cards to experience the payments.
1 in 10 people across the world transact with Stripe (as a customer or business) — David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) shared in Lenny’s Podcast
and I learnt last week how Stripe is able to scale to that level.
Last year, Stripe processed more than $1 trillion in payments for millions of users and that’s truly growing the GDP of internet (Stripe’s mission).
I attended Stripe Sessions last week in-person at San Francisco’s Moscone West. The venue is packed with founders, leaders and all Stripes.
Top 2 reasons why I admire Stripe is:
Developer-friendly — they listen to what developers want and make it easier.
Stripe is built for all kinds of businesses
Enterprise
Solopreneurs
SMBs (Small and Medium sized Businesses)
I attended this conference as a fan of Stripe and returned as a fan of
Jensen Huang (Founder & CEO of NVIDIA)
Because of Fireside chat with Jensen Huang where Patrick Collison (Stripe’s Founder & CEO) asking amazing questions and some burning topics of AI — this whole conversation became the best chat so far in 2024.
Here are some of the leadership lessons I learnt from Jensen Huang’s answers.
5️⃣ Jensen Huang's Personality and Humor
Sense of Humor
I am completely surprised by Jensen’s humor in first 5 minutes and I already knew this is going to be great chat.
When Patrick asked edge questions, Jensen’s calm look at him and responded with “I am a public company, you are a private company” — these answers filled the whole crowd with laughs.
4️⃣ Depth of Knowledge and Philosophical Insight
Broad Knowledge
I have never seen a CEO with such a spectrum of knowledge, he spoke about the electrons, atoms, and the water reaction at data centers and then suddenly he also spoke about the frequency of sound waves can also be fed into LLM models.
Philosophical Insights
Because of his beliefs as a kid, helping his parents from an early age and on top of that being an immigrant is not easy — all of his life experiences turned into a ton of insights and I’m surprised by how he haven’t forgot where he started.
“Love and Care” is often used by him during his internal leadership meetings and what does it mean for him and for company and for the product they are building.
That’s where Patrick shared “Craft and Beauty” that he uses with Stripes frequently because every product they are investing into has to be a work of craft and users have to find it beautiful (even though they didn’t ask for beauty explicitly).
3️⃣ Resilience and Background
At age 15 Jensen worked as a dishwasher at a Denny's restaurant and he continued to do every summer for 3 years
And he has done many jobs at each stage of his life
He still believes and shares that he is happy that he did all these jobs because he learned so much from these and even today he suggests the best first job is to start at a restaurant business.
2️⃣ Perspective on Pain and Greatness
In one of his recent talks he mentioned he wish today’s generation has more “Pain and Suffering” — and when Patrick brought up this and requested to elaborate:
Jensen smiled and replied: “Enduring pain and suffering is misunderstood, what I mean is those are the real pathways to achieve Greatness”
This reminds me to constantly come out of my comfort zone, it can be either learning new tech, going a step beyond than my actual job etc..,
One of my favorite reminders is Growth begins when your comfort zone ends!
1️⃣ Reasoning and Decision-Making
If there is one takeaway from this fireside chat, this is it!
Of course every decision we make is driven by data, customer stories, and sometime our guts in the world of products.
But the most effective skill in problem-solving is “Reasoning”
If you were asked a question, begin with reasoning .
Why do you think it is? What made you feel it? Why not this?
For example, when Patrick asked Jensen about when can we expect AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) in the world?
Does it take next 5 years?
10 years?
Jensen mentioned — “no one knows the right answer but I can give you the reasoning”
He started with — What is the fundamental definition of AGI?
It varies from people to people and companies to companies, because cracking math tests is evidence of AGI? or telling a good bed time story is AGI?
so we need to form our definitions on these and AGI could be here in next 5 years with different definitions because now every 6 months the factor of accuracy and convincing nature of LLM responses is being improved.
Conclusion
You might have heared and read it multiple times, but the legend himself shared that now is the time to use AI every day as we are in eye of the storm.
Every problem you solve, start with reasoning (data, anecdotes comes along)
If you are in pain, sufferring, you are on a path to greatness
If you are not already, start coming out of your comfort zone and that will be a great first step to your achievement.
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