Sixty Direct Reports, No One-on-Ones

At Stripe Sessions in 2024, Huang told Patrick Collison: “NVIDIA’s leadership team is 60 people.” On meeting them one at a time he was equally direct: “I really discourage one-on-ones.” (Reports of the figure vary by year: the Stanford GSB interviewer put it at 50, and CNBC reported about 50 in 2023.)

The logic. At Stanford GSB he said: “CEOs should have the most of the reports by definition,” and that “the people that reports to the CEO requires the least amount of management.” Tae Kim, on the Upstream podcast, said Huang “samples a hundred of these top five emails every day.”

Doesn’t transfer to most teams. Sixty reports works because they are senior specialists who, in his words, need “the least amount of management,” and because a CEO with three decades of tenure and deep technical command can absorb that load. Anyone who needs coaching or career development loses out, and a first-time manager copying it is just absent.