Welcome, everyone. Jonathan Kirschner here along
with my sidekick Joynesson. And we're here on a podcast
about leadership. And on this podcast, we talk
about all things leadership. And we're delighted today to
have Gideon Rosenberg on the call today from Tel Aviv.
And Gideon works for a little small company called NVIDIA.
If anybody's heard of NVIDIA, it's this small little $4.5
trillion in growing organization that is ushering in heralding,
accelerating the future through AI and, and, and many other
things. So Gideon is just fantastic to
have you here. Welcome on the show.
Thanks for having me. All right.
So, so Gideon, I mean the first question you know, we we have
burning curiosity about is, is really just you and maybe you
could share a little bit about yourself and your journey that
brought you up to up to where you are right now.
And then we have about a billion more questions. 4.5 trillion
more questions. Yeah.
So I, I won't go through all my career, but about 15 years ago,
a little over 15 years ago, I joined a small company called
Mellanox Technologies here in Israel.
And at the time we had about four hundred 450 employees and
worldwide and we were valued at around $700 million on the stock
market on NASDAQ. And, and you know, we, we went
through this amazing trajectory from the time I joined, you
know, shortly afterwards, we, we acquired, we started acquiring
companies and you know, growth started to happen.
We hit a few speed bumps along the way.
But then in 2019 we were acquired by, by NVIDIA that the
closing happened in 2020. And ever since, you know, we
joined forces and, and things have gone, you know, really,
really well, obviously. And I joined originally as as
deputy general counsel and got a legal background.
That's what I do let M&AS and, and the sort of things that you
would expect. And then about four years ago, I
also became head of HR here in Israel.
Just just help us understand like what's it like inside
NVIDIA and and and and how is it as as a, an employee, as a
leader and and what is your sense of what makes it
distinctive? Yeah, it's a good question.
I think overall, look, it's it's been a very good experience,
right? It's it's we've joined exactly,
you know, an opportune moment in time in the last five years.
It's been amazing. But I think what's, you know,
you mentioned Jensen, Jensen's leadership style is different
than what I'm, I've seen in the past with other CE OS, not
because, and, and for me, it's mostly on the side of he's a
very empathetic person, all right.
He really genuinely cares about his employees.
And that's not to knock my previous CE OS I work with who
also cared about their employees.
But Jensen's taken it to this new level for me personally.
And I, I see it in the actions that he takes and the way he,
you know, he cares about each and every one of his employees.
And so that I think trickles down obviously within the
organization. And we, we focus on, on that.
So Jensen likes to say, hey, you come to NVIDIA to do your life's
work, right? And that could sound a bit
pretentious because what does that mean, right?
You know, is NVIDIA the only company where you could do your
life's work? No, that's not what you really
means, but it means you should be doing something work that you
think is meaningful, right? Not that just we at NVIDIA think
is meaningful, but you individually.
And So what that leads to is people that are doing hopefully
jobs that they're interested in. And if they're not satisfied,
they should look to find another job within the organization
because there are other opportunities.
And I'm a great example, All right, Suddenly, you know, from
legal, I've moved to also doing HR, which I never thought I
would do in my life, right? I don't think anybody around me
thought I would do ever in my life.
And and that was a big, you know, bit of a leap of faith on
behalf of leadership, including Jensen, to give me that role.
And you know, and it's, it's paid off for me, hopefully also
for the company, but that's sort of a vision here, right?
You can do different things. And I think that's sort of a
core part of our how we do business certainly.
I love that. I think we also read that the
Jensen's a big proponent of learning from mistakes in a
public way. And I imagine that connects to
this. You know, if something's not
working in your role or even professionally for you, there's
opportunity to learn from that and and find something that's a
better fit. So I'm curious, Gideon, you
know, with with your HR hat on and with NVIDIA being at this
pivotal moment, really building the foundational technology for
the future, how does that forward-looking mission
translate into like how the company actually thinks about
developing its own people, like the HR people strategy?
Is there like an NVIDIA way to managing talent?
How do you how do you own that hat?
Because that's a big, big hat. First and foremost, obviously
we're, we're looking for the best talent out there, all
right, we're looking always to find and then that's across all
disciplines. It doesn't, you know, it's not
just a tech people, right? And it's, it's our operations
team, it's our finance team, it's our legal team, it's the
marketing team, everybody we're looking for the top talent.
And, and we mentioned Jensen before and I think one of the
key attributes for him when he's looking and know what he's
looking for, his executives, he's looking to, to hire the
best humans, right? So it's not just about your
skill set in, in your technical capability, but it's also how
you are as a human being. And I think that's, that's an
important, you know, distinction, especially for a
company that's leading the AI revolution.
And so we want to make sure that the, you know, the human element
is is maintained. And so we're we're really
focused on that and, and trying to ensure that our employees are
always challenged. We give them, you know, full
authority to do things on their own, right.
Everybody can be what we call a pick right in person pilot in
command of the mission, the specific mission that they're
given, right? And it doesn't it could be a
junior employee who owns that mission that can tell, you know,
a senior leader, hey, this is what we're doing type thing.
And and and that conversation is is acceptable right to to within
our. So you can just blast through
hierarchy with with that clarity of role.
Like if I if I am pick right then then I can.
Doesn't matter where I sit on the totem pole.
Yeah, I mean, obviously with with some things, but yeah,
yeah, I mean, that's the idea. We're empowering our employees
to do their their job and to to drive missions to drive our
success. And you know, that's that's key.
So we want to, and I and I mentioned this before, we want
to make sure that our managers are, are thinking about this
concept, right? That every morning, All right,
you need to, to remember that your employees make a decision
to come work, right? They wake up in the morning,
they open their eyes and they go, Yep, do I get work today?
And that happens every day, right?
It's not a one off decision, right?
They made a decision to join NVIDIA, which is great.
And then every day they need to make that decision.
So that's a mindset that we're trying to, that we've instilled
in our, our, our managers that you need to be focused on, on
the employee success and their desire to continue to work for,
for the company. And that's that's not always the
way people think. That's such a beautiful thing.
I, you know, coming into this, call it, you know, I'm just a,
I'm just a, a consumer of the Wall Street Journal at
MarketWatch and barons and, and various publications.
And, you know, I see Jen sang and his, his black leather coat.
He's always smiling. He's holding up like a GPU or
posing next to a robot. The first thing that comes to
mind is, is, is visionary innovation just just leading the
future? And then you, when you, when you
take that into the broader context of what you're seeing in
tech, right, whether it's it's Meta, Google, Microsoft, and,
and you look at the, the, you know, continuous stream of cuts
and riffs and it's just, it's your, your where your mind
would, you know, ultimately the conclusion it would arrive at is
that this is a cutthroat tech first, human second environment.
And what I'm hearing from you is that that actually it's, it's
human 1st. And I didn't know that that that
everybody views Jensen is as this incredibly empathic human
first leader. That's that's really amazing to
hear. Yeah.
Again, I don't know how it is in
other companies and I, I so I don't really reference them, but
I say, you know, in general we are a small company relatively
speaking in terms of the size of our employee basin.
So which is why we're, we're growing at a fast-paced and,
and, you know, we're, we're playing catch up with some of
the, the other large tech companies.
But yeah, we've, we've always put our people in, in, in front.
And, you know, Jensen is is is right there with, you know,
that's his one of his key mantras.
That's amazing. I mean, so, so Joy and our our
podcasters a a new role we've taken on recently, but we're
also leadership experts and leaders ourselves.
So I'm the CEO of Air enjoys our SVP of leadership solutions.
You're obviously leader. I think we can all sort of level
set that like one of the hardest things in leadership is managing
the polarities, right? The, the sort of the opposites
and the tension that's created between these opposite.
So on the one hand, you've got like people leadership and, and
human first leadership and the empathy that we all have and,
and, and compassion. And then on the other pole is
like the like cold hard business results and performance.
So driving performance and driving, you know, human
engagement and human motivation through the relationship and
through empathy. And sometimes these can come
into tension with each other. I find that personally to be the
hardest challenge being a leader, period.
The best leaders I know have figured out how to sort of
negotiate between these two competing tensions.
I'm just curious. I mean, it's, it's sort of an
abstract, you know, kind of concept that the notion of this
polarity. But you know, Gideon, like any,
any any thoughts on that, any observations or anecdotes of how
you've seen that manifest within NVIDIA?
Yeah, look, at the end of the day, it's not easy working in
NVIDIA, right? It's not, You know, I don't want
to paint a picture that says it's all great and everybody's
happy all day long. Right, no stress.
It's a it's a difficult world that we work in.
It's very competitive. We want to make sure that we're
running faster than our competitors.
And Jensen is a very demanding leader and rightfully so.
That's why he's successful, right?
The fact that he can balance both driving the business to the
cutting edge of technology that we're at.
And that's cutting edge across all organizations, right?
Not just the the GPU's and not just the software, but also
operations and others were, you know, we're, we're trying to,
you know, create things that weren't created in the past,
right, With technology that doesn't necessarily exist.
You're creating the future, right?
Right, right. You're making sci-fi real.
Challenging and you can balance that with with with the fact
that he's just very empathetic, but at the same time, he's very
demanding. And when he's not happy, he's
not, you're aware that he's not happy.
And that's I think that's fair, right.
At the end of the day, he expects us to deliver and he has
high expectations from us and we need to meet them.
And sometimes, you know, that happens that easier and
sometimes it it doesn't. And you know, we have to strike
that core, the right, the right balance.
But overall, you know, it's it's and it's very difficult, right?
So. And is it like, how does it all
work? Meaning it like you could see
this being like a disaster, like from a culture standpoint, and
yet it works so beautifully. My, my, my hypothesis would be
that, you know, clear is kind and the, and the more clear you
are about your expectations and the norms, you know, whether
we're going to be a hardcore working culture or it's just
this is going to be like, you know, a big party, it almost
doesn't matter. It's how clear you are about
what the expectations are. I mean, would you say that that
that is is part of it? I think it's, it's all right at
the end of the day, when there's a very clear mission message
from your leadership as to what it is that's expected and how
it's expected to happen, then, you know, everybody can work
towards the same mission. And I think we have, you know,
this ability, obviously success has, has helped, right.
So when you're successful and the company's doing so well,
everybody's, you know, on board, it's much easier to get
everybody on board on the mission and work harder and,
and, and enjoy the work itself, even though we have people that
work really, really hard and it's, and that's not easy over
the course of time, but people have been with us also for, for
many, many years. And so they, they, they enjoy
the environment it and, and understand it most of the time,
right. It's not always perfect, but
it's most of the time people are very clear.
And the fact that Jensen's such a visionary, it's just very, you
know, obviously helpful. We all understand visual, but
he's very adept telling us the vision in in ways that are very
clear to us, very simple, right? And it's not, you don't have to
be a tech person to understand the vision.
You ought to just need to listen.
And he's making it very, very clear.
And so that just drives everybody to see the success
that we've we've achieved. No, that's it.
That's a. In addition to all the visionary
leadership skills and and innovation that that clear
communication is itself I, you know, I think of a pretty big
superpower. It's rare to have leaders.
That are able to be so big picture and also so detail
oriented. No, it's usually a.
Trade off like you're saying, you know, one over index that
the expense of the other to be able to have both is is is
pretty unique. So so Joy and I and we talk a
lot about leadership and air. The way we define leadership,
obviously, is that we're actualizing a clear and
compelling vision through others, right?
So if you're doing it through yourself, you're that's you
might be a great contributor, you might be building something
incredible. You can still be a pioneer, an
innovator, but you're not a leader, right?
The leadership it the the the requirement is that it's through
others now others for the vast history of the world, all the
history of the world is been people.
But you know, we're now approaching a point where others
at where we have to take into account AI as part of that
others and especially that sounds really abstract.
And it's hard to really like, you know, to think of that as
true when AI, when we associate AI to a sort of chatshu BT or or
Gemini terminal that you're chatting with.
But when we have robots sitting next to us, you know, at at the
boardroom table or in our office.
Which Gideon? Might already have and just
can't say. I think it's going to start to
come very real. So you know, I, I guess you
know, Gideon, like what what are your thoughts on how AI is going
to impact leadership and teams? And when I say AI, not just AI
as we know it right now now, but you know where the puck is going
and as far as embody the AI and robots like that human.
Robot interaction. If you will.
Yeah. So, so I, you know, obviously
I'd love to be able to tell you that I know what's going to
happen. But but because we're we're
living through this revolution together, think I'm going to
take my cue all from from the visionary himself, and that's
Jensen and make it clear. I don't think that yeah, we're
we're heading towards where a world where nobody's working,
right. I think we shouldn't fear AI in
that respect, because we're not going to lose our jobs to AI
necessary. We're going to lose our jobs to
the people that know how to use AI better than us.
All right. So that's, you know, that's the
key issue here. And I think we all need to
harness the power that is AI, right?
And it's just an infancy, right? But we need to harness that
power and understand it. And each of us, whether in our
professional world or our personal world and you know,
we'll, we'll see where there's going to be AAI agents, multiple
ones that will help you do your job better, right?
And they won't replace you. They'll help you, right, to do
things more efficiently. You'll be able, I think to focus
on bigger picture matters rather than the the mundane work that
we all have to do as part of our regular jobs, right?
And so I think that's the world And, and obviously some, some
jobs are going to be omitted and but new jobs will be created.
Things that we don't know yet what they will be will happen,
right. If you look back, this always
happened during revolutions of technology, right?
We, we used to have folks that I'm not old enough to remember,
but I've seen them in movies that operated elevator.
Yeah, the manual. Elevator.
Yeah. Well, that that.
Used to be and and it's no longer right right and there's
millions of examples of similar city you know jobs that they
were that have changed over the course of mankind right and so
we'll we'll get there there'll be newer jobs than we just right
a few years ago nobody knew what a influencer was better times.
Right. No, there were.
Influences, they just weren't all that right.
And I think there's there's this whole world that we just don't
understand yet, but we know it's going to happen.
And that's why we, you know, obviously video we're we're
investing in that. We're investing a lot of time
and effort in getting the right tools and, and making sure
people are educated about AI and understand where it's going and
where we also want to bring it to so and, and make sure that
they can thrive in that environment of AI.
And I think that'll be a game changer for where people want to
work. It will be based on all right,
what's, you know, it's not just beauty salary.
It's not going to be just, you know, what do we do?
We have a nice cafeteria. It's it's what's my working
environment from an AI perspective, you know, not just
my desk and my chair. Is it a comfortable chair or
not? Right.
There's obviously going to be obvious stuff.
It's going to be basics of what AI tools we have and whoever has
the better AI tools, you know, might attract better child.
I love that. Example of the the elevator
operator. Because, you know, his job did
go away, but he didn't necessarily need to go away and
become obsolete. Like he probably learned some
different skills and is working in a different position
somewhere. Or not if he chose not to learn
different skills. So it's not as simplistic as
some of these, like very sort of negative dystopian, you know,
pictures were like 90% of the jobs will be done and like we're
just going to be like laying back on a beach chair with a
large Diet Coke or something with Ubi and just.
Collecting money from machines that do our work.
I mean it. Sounds like your position is, is
more of that that yes, jobs are going to change and, and
probably pretty significantly, but our ability to adapt and
learn AI skills is going to be, you know, really essential for
for anybody who wishes to have a, a successful career in the
future. Yeah, and and.
Gideon, we don't typically get HR and legal experts the two in
one. So I'm, I'm curious what your,
what, what is your perspective of like what are some of the
ethical and legal questions that we as leaders that organizations
should be thinking about asking themselves as we go into this
kind of unchartered era of disruption?
Sure, there's, I think there's going to be so many of those.
And I'm, I'm not necessarily an expert at in, in, in this.
And so I'm, I'm going to say, look, there's at, at some point
we need to figure out people working on this is how do we
avoid bias and privacy issues that are arising from, from AI,
right, from, you know, and that's going to be a key item,
right? GDPR compliance or, or, or
privacy compliance rules that happen.
And another key area will be it's already is right,
copyrights, IP rights in general, who's going to own the
IP? And, and there's already case
law that's starting to, to materialize there, but, but I'm
not sure that it's, you know, it's, it's it, it's still at the
nascent part. Does, does the AI own it?
Does the company that that created it?
Who? But we haven't gotten to the
point where employees are going to say, well, wait, this is
mine, this is yours. And, and things of, of that
nature, you know, that'll work itself.
Job displacement concerns, obviously, you know, and how we
support on the reskilling or, and their, their skill sets.
And from an HR perspective, I think there's going to be how
are we going to keep the level playing field, right?
How are we going to make it fair in terms of hiring people,
right? Because there's going to be AI
tools screening resumes not already existed, you know, and
things of that nature, right? And, and it's not just going to
be that, right, It's going to be the next level will be all
right. There's going to be an AI tool
that will do your focal review for you, right?
I'll write the focal review for the manager, it'll write the
self-assessment for the for the employee.
How do we make sure that that we keep that while the tools going
to be very useful? How do we make sure that the
managers are still focused on the performance and not just
relying on the AI to tell them their performance?
All right, we're going to have the same things in schools,
right, kids, parent teacher conferences are become really
interesting. And so, you know, this is all
applicable to to to the real world outside of work.
I know we're focused on work, but yeah, and I think obviously
cybersecurity issues are going to pop up with the use of AI and
how are we going to protect the company and employees and and
organizational data and all that from sophisticated AI
cybersecurity attacks, right? That's, you know, we've all
seen, you know, things happening already, right, with generative
AI videos and things, deep fakes.
Yeah, makes exactly. And all that stuff.
So it's going to be it's not going to be boring.
And you see the point is we were making earlier, lawyers aren't
going to be replaced, right? Some work that lawyers do will
be replaced, but it's going to be a long time before we have AI
figure out ethical AI. All right, so.
Yeah, I'm just picturing like chat bots suing each other now,
so. It's not a little bit all away
from. Us.
We'll get there my. Agent is suing your agent,
right? Right.
And I've created an agent to represent my agent.
Oh my gosh. So legal, ethical, maybe just
for a moment to, to just touch on philosophical implications.
When we are starting to, as AI becomes a more accurate and
increasingly more accurate prediction machine and, and
people continue to delegate their human thinking to AI.
Do you have any fears or concerns that like we're just
going to kind of degrade our our human intelligence and and just
become kind of like, again, I that I that picture of the, the
person sitting back. Oh, in Wally chair.
Yeah, in Wally, you know, and electric chair like that, that
takes you through the the cafeteria.
Yeah, I don't share those concerns per SE because you
know, all technology throughout history, everybody said, well,
technology is going to make you duller for like a better word,
right? I guess like the.
Calculator people thought right so.
I remember when I used the W yeah, when I used the
calculator, when I, I moved to the states at the at the young
age and everybody in the classroom turned around and
said, what are you doing? And I was like, I don't know,
just using a calculator, What's the big deal?
Why couldn't I use the technology?
But apparently it was frowned upon it so great.
And I did not know that. And so, you know, I think did
the calculator make, no, it made my life easier.
Not sure that I needed to know, you know, how to do long
division in my head. Turns out I do know how to do
it, but it's only to a certain degree of numbers, right?
But you know, technology is going to make our lives better.
People that will want to continue to educate themselves
will continue to educate themselves.
People that want to just coast through life will coast through
life irrespective of the technology.
We have search engines galore today, right?
We could find everything there, you know already.
And so it's just a question of how you use it and how you want
to, you know, Excel. I think it's actually the
reverse AI will be a more of a level of your leveler in in the
playing field, right, because it's available to everybody.
All right, you could everybody can use ChatGPT or or the likes
and it doesn't matter where you are in the world, you can use it
right. And that'll help, I think change
things around a bit and and make sure that people are across the
world are, are, are playing on this as an equal footing as as
possible, right. There's always going to be some
changes, but an advantages to people that have more money
because they'll be able to buy better solutions.
But it'll work itself out also. And I think, you know, people
need to learn how to use it and they won't be lazy.
Then they'll be lazy. Yeah, it's great.
I love that you brought it back into like the context of, of
the, the, the larger trajectory of history, because this isn't
the first time that there's been like a radical innovation.
And and you're right, like at each point, if you think about
the computer, the Internet, you know, the mobile phone, probably
even, I don't know, the typewriter of, you know, there's
that and that gut reflexive like, oh, this is going to make
us, you know, Dumber when in fact it can, it can make us like
leapfrog where we were joy. And I talk to a lot of CHROS and
heads of talent, talent management, talent development,
leadership and organizational development, organizational
effectiveness. They're all a little on edge as
far as like, you know what, what do they need?
What should be their priority right now when they think about
preparing their organizations for the future?
In some ways, like you could argue that the, the CHRO role in
particular is going to be increasingly like one of the
most important roles in an, in an organization.
That's, that's my perspective because I don't know who, who,
who's going to be the determiner of, of, you know, our mix
between robots and humans and the implications that might have
to culture and to workforce planning and all these things.
Like so much is going to be rolled up into HR that may have
previously been relegated to other functions within tech
divisions or. Yeah, like IT.
Or so I'm just curious, like what advice, you know, Gideon,
would you have for CHROS and and people leader professionals
right now, you know, in terms of thinking about and planning for
the future? Well, I don't want to be
presumptuous to say that I can give advice to all CHROS, but in
if I'm looking at it from my personal perspective and saying,
OK, well, what what should we do is it's quite simple, right?
You got to embrace AI. The change is coming, right?
There's no point in fighting it. It's going to happen, right?
And I think going back to what we said earlier, right, it's not
the question of replacing people.
The job is understanding. Now, how do we adapt our people,
how do we grow their skill set into using AI in a more
efficient way to make our company more efficient, right to
do to get better results because we're not going to replace all
roles, right? They will be.
So you can identify certain roles where you go, OK, there's
no real added value in a human spending time on doing this
task, right? I can automate it, but guess
what I was automating cast well, way before AI, right?
It all goes back. There's there's nothing new
here. There's just new technology,
right. So we've automated, you know,
worlds before or automated the way we create automobiles,
right. So, you know, that was a
breakthrough. And so we're always going to
want to drive automation in our, in our organizations and AI will
help us in that. And we will lift our employees
and help them become, you know, you've said it before,
superpowers, right? So they'll have superpowers.
AI will give them superpowers that they had before.
We just need to understand and explain to them bridge that
concern that they have. Am I going to be replaced by AI
or by this machine or whatever? And no, you're going to be
working with it. You're going to use it, and
you're going to become a better employee and enjoy your world,
your work more because of it. Yeah.
No, I love that. And we've been doing a lot of AI
accelerators. So we'll work with leaders, with
organizations to help with really the mindset shift and the
cultural shift around what does it mean to embrace this
technology in a way that doesn't diminish from your culture, from
your goals, from the human centered nature of the work that
we all value. And I'd love to hear from you.
Gideon, you know, you shared at the top of of this interview
that you've had an extensive background in M&A integration
and so much of that is that blending of company cultures.
And I almost think of AI as kind of the.
The, I don't know, cultural. Integration that our entire
planet is going through together.
So I'd, I'd love to hear, you know, what are, what are some of
the leadership challenges and maybe successes that you can
draw upon from your M and a experience that would maybe be
helpful as we navigate our global MNA with AI.
Yeah, I don't. Again, AI is a tool and we need
to use the tool. We shouldn't rely on the tool,
right? Just rely on the tool.
We need to, to, to use our, our abilities as, as humans to think
and, and, and and develop and create the new environment that
we want to work in it from an MNA perspective, obviously
trying to blanked cultures together and different companies
and, and the way they work is, is always the most difficult
part of the acquisition, right. So doing acquisitions is I say
fairly easy form is form and we, we do due diligence and we do
everything and then most acquisitions will fail on the
post merger integration part. I've been very lucky throughout
my career. I've done many, many M&A
transactions both being and including two where I was
acquired previous company before Honey Dialogue was also
acquired. And I think overall right you,
you, you got it right to have the like fit and that's very,
very difficult. It also depends on the, the size
of the company being acquired in the sort.
But if, if you're looking at a fairly large acquisition
compared to your own size, then you know, there's going to be a
lot of time and effort spent on trying to understand how do we
mesh the teams together. And, and that's a work that, you
know, the entire leadership has to work at and, and, and do and,
you know, obviously I've learned through many of these
experiences that that you got it, you got to work at it a lot.
And, and, and nobody's going to do the job for you.
And that's all leadership. It starts with the CEO and, and
trickles down to, to others, But it's not just obviously the
acquirer's side, it's, it's the acquired side as well.
They need to, to understand the new universe that they're in and
they have to buy into the store. You have to understand that
it's, it's in their interest as well to to be part of this
larger organization and they need to buy into the vision and
all and and that sort. So we can go into examples for
my past if you want, I would be curious.
Because it sounds like the biggest risk.
I love how you'd said basically that M&A is easy until the post
merger integration. Yeah, the paperwork.
'S easy, you know. Assuming you have the expertise,
yeah, I guess it could all make sense on the Excel file and the
analyst reports, you know, but then you know, the rubber meets
the road, you know, you know, on day 2 and and it sounds like
culture from what I hear from you, Gideon is is the number
one. You know, it it it success
factor or, you know, blocker to an M and a going going well.
So yeah, I mean, it it to the extent you have an anecdote or,
or could double click on you know what you've seen, you know,
work really well from a culture standpoint or conversely, like,
you know what didn't work well, Yeah, so.
I think, I think I'll actually, what works really well is when
the CEO of the acquiring company has a good relationship with,
with the folks being acquired, right?
And that always helps because they, they already understand
each other, right? They respect each other.
And, and that's worked really well at NVIDIA with, with
Jensen, Everybody, you know, really respects him and he, he
respects them. And, and that can work really,
really well on, on the flip side, right when it, you know, I
can give you 1 anecdote from, from the acquisition we did
many, many years ago at Mellanox.
It was our first acquisition. We require a company called
fault there. And there was animosity between
the, the, the, the companies for, for, I'm not even sure I
wasn't part of the, the animosity because I, I just
joined Mellanox a bit before. But there was some animosity
between between the companies, I think over competitiveness and
and and we're both trying to get into similar spaces and going on
and you know, once we acquired. You.
Start, you know, so you've done the due diligence.
We've done everything we thought we had.
We understood everything, right? That, that was the key issue.
We thought we knew and we created these new form
agreements for them, employment agreements.
And we said we know what we're doing here, right.
We've got these new agreements, we're going to get them on our
paper because we wanted consistency across the company
and we had looked through their documents and ours in the
comparison and we felt very comfortable with what we
provided. And we missed something.
We missed the term that was we didn't think was critical
because it was part of the way we did business, all right.
So we had just a culture of of that that dealt with that issue
without having it written in our employment agreements.
But for them when we delivered the document, it became a
critical issue. And no matter how many times I
spent telling people don't worry about it, this is the way
either. This has been our practice.
We've been doing this. Since we've we've been founded,
they just were not happy with just taking our word for it and
we had to amend the contract and and wow.
And this was a like a cultural artifact from the legacy from it
was. Yeah.
And they had it written in. The difference was they had it
written in their contracts and we didn't, but we practice the
same. So it was there was no issue.
There was no discrepancy in culture.
It was just the, the way it was formulated in a document or not
in the document and it for them it was, yeah, we didn't think
much of it. But for them it was critical
existential. And because of the lack of the
some animosity that was pre-existing, it became a bigger
issue, right. And so there was a lot of trust
issues around. So we missed that and we learned
from that obviously for future situations.
And we ensured that we, you know, we took a much more
careful look at things and employment agreements and the
way we did business afterwards in our future acquisitions.
So you got to learn from, from your mistakes, obviously.
And, and, and I was pretty glad that we did, but that was a
painful mistake. And especially obviously for,
for me, because I was legal. And I said, oh, you know, I'm
sure I was there saying it's not a big deal, you know, don't
worry about it. And then I have to, right?
Worry about it. Well, when you were just.
It's fine. I paid the price obviously for
my own mistakes. Yeah.
But that that's you got to be really careful with with that
situations. You know how how you bring
people on board, how you you make it feel comfortable, how
you buy it and trust and it's all that trusted at that.
At the core, it's. Trust, right?
And that and that's trust safety.
Yeah, you won't be creative or innovative if you don't feel
safe so, but even like for. For creating that right culture,
you could argue, I mean, that that there's so much involved
in, in culture being the manifestation of our values and
behaviors. But at the very, very core of it
all is, is trust. Like you could have the most,
you know, eloquent, you know, culture posters and cards and
behavioral values, but it none of it matters if you don't have
that sort of foundational trust in place.
Gideon, I I want to you know, this is a podcast on leadership
and. I want to.
Hear a little bit about how you as a leader manage within one of
the most amazing but also demanding organizations in the
world. You know, how do you stay
grounded? How do you stay focused?
I've been so impressed throughout this podcast by the
way of your ability to just kind of like reduce the noise and
just be really clear and simple, like, hey, it's just a tool.
It doesn't feel that way, you know, when you're trying to like
chase it and understand it and you know, reading newsletters,
like it can just become so overwhelming.
And before you know it, you're like, this thing's like taking
over the world. But but it's it's great to hear
from you about like, hey, it's just a tool.
Like you can use it to do some extraordinary things, but it's a
tool. And don't don't lose sight of
that. Curious if you could maybe do
that for us, you know, in in this important domain of
leadership, you know, how how are you staying grounded?
How are you leading today? So if I'm being really honest
here, which I tend to to do anyway, I don't take myself
overly seriously. I understand that I have a big
title, and it may seem important to fit people that, you know,
like, oh, I'm AVP and people will look at me and go, oh,
you're AVP, you must be, you know, very important.
But that must. Be very important and, and I and
I it's not true right I mean I have a lot of responsibility
because of my title, right because of my jobs, but that
doesn't mean that that's everything and and you know and
and anything to me it's it's my job and I need to take it
seriously but I don't need to take myself too seriously not
let it go to my head that, you know I'm working you know I I
didn't I wasn't born AVPI wasn't born AVP at NVIDIA and that you
know I'm just that's thankfully my life trajectory has has led
me to here, but there was a lot of hard work that that that got
me and and a lot of luck right it's all about luck.
So I think if I if I just whittle down to that it's don't
I don't take myself too seriously I know my strengths
and my weaknesses. I, I like to delegate, I like
to, I don't micromanage. I'm, I, I'm very good
relationship with my team. I trust them completely and I
made sure that, you know, I know they know how to do their roles
and remember, I'm not an HR professional, right?
I didn't learn this, learning it over the course of, you know,
life, but also especially in the last four years.
So I have people that work for me or report into me or part of
my organization that are much more experienced and have the
expertise and our subject matter experts that I will never have,
right. And so I, I trust in them and
they can, you know, they teach me and they lead from, from the
front and, and they can do their jobs.
I don't need to do their jobs for them.
And I think that's sort of, you know, key.
I let them focus on theirs. I focus on mine.
They know when to come to me. I know where to go to them.
I love that. I you know, this idea of don't
take yourself too seriously. It's like simple advice, but it
but you know, I think underlying that.
Is essentially. Humility, right?
It, it's, it's knowing that you might be wrong, that things
might change and that we have to put our best foot forward and,
and, and bring it. But at the same time know that
like things might change, right? And humility seems to be one of
these like, I mean, it's, it's a timeless attributes, but but
particularly important these days, right now.
Yeah, yeah. Any other like skills or
behaviors? Or yeah.
Leadership attributes that like you think are going to be really
important, you know, if you had to give advice to future leaders
tomorrow. You know to be.
Successful in 20-30? I really need to know, right?
Or develop like yeah. Yeah, I, I think it goes back to
what we were just talking about before, and that's AI, right?
I think in order to be successful, you're going to have
to embrace AI, right? That tool that you mentioned,
that's the key to to anybody being successful.
We mentioned it earlier, whoever knows how to use AI better will
lead the charge, right? And whoever you know will
benefit from it more than others.
And I think that's, you know, the, the key understanding that
I have don't be afraid of new technology.
I'm not an early adopter by any means, right?
I was also a little hesitant about this AI thing, right?
And I didn't really understand it.
And I just recommend, don't read the the white papers, don't read
those newsletters you mentioned earlier.
Just don't read them all. Unsubscribe.
It's going to be a lot. Unsubscribing for me but but.
Don't. No, you can read them as long as
you also try it out right? So I'll let your pens dirty a
bit and and work with with the various tools that are out
there. Don't use it just as a search
function. Great function, but don't just
use it for that. Use it for the other things that
it's there for, right, to make your life better.
And once you start working with it, then you'll see how great it
is, right? So children can use it for
education, right? They can.
It can teach them how to do solve Mac problems.
Doesn't need to give them. It won't give them if you decide
it right, tell them to behave in a certain way.
It won't give them the answer. It'll show them the way, right?
Educate them. And so we need to educate
ourselves as leaders. And if you want to be a leader,
you're going to have to figure out how that balance between
technology and and the human side of things works.
And I would just focus on on that as well, right.
And you know, and you said humility and be humble.
Yeah. You need to understand you don't
know everything. That's difficult.
And it's OK to say that even to your direct reports or to your
team and say, look, I don't have all the answers.
And sometimes they have answers that you won't have.
That humility, you know, especially in, in the face of AI
becoming increasingly more and more and more powerful the, the,
the, the expert, right, the expert position or engineer as
AI begins to meet that expertise and exceeded like that, that is
existential in terms of your own identity, right?
If I, if I, if my self esteem and my sense of self is, is sort
of associated with the body of knowledge that I worked my tail
off acquiring over for 810 years of education and years of, of,
of career growth. And all of a sudden this thing
can do it better. Do it better.
In, in, in, you know, 15 seconds.
That's a, that's a big moment, right?
So humility, yeah, seems to be like a prerequisite in order to
be able to use that and your human intelligence to actually
like do as we've been talking about, like leapfrog into the
future and actually become more advanced as opposed to that
inert human on, on a, on a beach chair while I'm on the beach.
Large soda. So, Gideon, this has been
fantastic. We've learned so much from this.
Is there anything that you'd like to impart upon our
listeners before we conclude this this wonderful session?
I think, again, going back to the first principles of just
remember, we're all humans. We're all going to, Yeah, this
isn't the first revolution of technology that happens in the
world. It's not going to be the last
one either, right? It's just that the Mason heart
of AI it's, you know, and we should enjoy the ride.
This is unlike any other revolution that's happened.
The difference is we all understood on the same day that
the world is changing, right? Every other revolution that's
happened from a tech perspective throughout the course of
history, it's taken years or decades for people to
understand, right? Even including the Internet or
the Internet existed in the 60s and 70s until it became popular
in decades past, right? And even when it became popular
right at the beginning, still took years until, you know, it
became really popular and we all understood the power.
But we all know the day that we all heard about ChatGPT, right?
And that moment in time, we all understood.
Well, that's it, world's changed and everybody understands it.
And so we're just at that beginning stage and we, you
know, embrace it, you know, enjoy the ride.
It's going to be an amazing ride, I think for for all of us.
And as nobody knows what the future holds, just to try to
enjoy that ride and and embrace it and learn from it and don't
be afraid of it and don't be afraid of it.
Things will be wise words. Don't be afraid, Don't be
afraid. Of it that's I'm not saying it's
going to. Be perfect.
I'm not saying the AI won't be used for bad things.
It will. All technologies always begin
bad things as well. But the benefits will outgrow
the the negative parts of things and our lives will be
dramatically better over the course of our lifetime by this
technology. So Gideon.
Thank you so much. You you've heard it from Gideon
Rosenberg, right, the deputy General counsel and Head of
Human resources for NVIDIA Israel, NVIDIA, the global
powerhouse in AI, artificial intelligence.
And Gideon's parting message is? We're human.
Stay human. Stay human.
Love it and and and really love the don't be scared, right
Embrace, don't be scared. Gideon, thank you so much for
spending the time with us and and helping us learn, grow and
stretch and all of our viewers, and it's just been a pleasure.
Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.
OK.