The Daily Founder: Working at the Speed of Light

Since NVIDIA’s founding, Jensen Huang has insisted that all employees work at the “Speed of Light.” To Jensen, long hours are a necessary prerequisite for excellence, and the phrase itself is a sort of dare: the theoretical maximum that is impossible for competitors to exceed.

At NVIDIA, this wasn’t just talk. Jensen routinely worked from 9:00am to midnight, and his employees often felt obligated to keep similar hours. Saturdays weren’t special—they were workdays. Co-founder Chris Malachowsky would head home to have dinner with his family, then regularly come back to the office to wrestle hard technical problems well past midnight.

Sometimes employees complained about the long work hours, but Jensen’s response was direct: “People who train for the Olympics grumble about training early in the morning, too.”

Paul Graham wrote, “it may not be possible to prove that you have to work hard to do great things, but the empirical evidence is on the scale of the evidence of mortality.” Jensen would probably agree.