Why Jensen Huang Has 60 Direct Reports and No One-on-Ones
The org chart isn't bureaucracy. It's architecture. And most companies get it wrong.
Jensen Huang has more than 60 direct reports. He doesn't do one-on-ones with any of them.
Most people hear this and assume it's chaos. It's the opposite. It's the most deliberate organizational decision he's made — and it follows directly from what Nvidia actually builds.
The Logic
Every company has an org chart. Most of them look identical — same hierarchy, same structure, whether you're making hamburgers, software, or cars. Huang thinks this is absurd.
His argument: the architecture of a company should reflect what it produces and the environment it operates in. The org chart is not an HR document. It's a system design. And if the system is wrong, the output is wrong.
Nvidia builds AI supercomputers. That means co-designing across the entire stack simultaneously — chips, networking, memory, power, cooling, software, algorithms. These aren't sequential problems. They're deeply interdependent. A decision about cooling affects networking. A decision about power delivery affects chip architecture. You can't optimize them in isolation.
So the organization mirrors the problem. Sixty specialists, all with a foot in engineering, all in the room when anything is being decided. Not because everyone needs to speak — but because anyone might need to.
No One-on-Ones
The reason Huang doesn't do one-on-ones is the same reason he has 60 reports: problems at Nvidia are never one person's problem.
When a question comes up about optical networking, the memory expert needs to hear it. When cooling is being redesigned, the power distribution team needs to know. The interdependencies are so tight that solving anything in isolation means solving the wrong version of it.
So they present problems to the group. Everyone attacks it. Whoever can contribute, contributes. Whoever has nothing to add, tunes out. And if someone who should have contributed didn't — Huang calls them out.
The structure forces the cross-pollination the work actually requires. It's not a management style. It's a consequence of building something where everything connects to everything else.
What This Means Beyond Nvidia
Most org charts are inherited, not designed. They reflect how companies were built decades ago — for information flows that no longer exist, for problems that no longer apply.
Huang's point is simpler and more radical: start with the output. What does this company need to produce? What environment does it operate in? The organization should follow from that — not from convention, not from what other companies do, not from what's comfortable.
The company is the machine. Design the machine for the job.