Czech engineer Igor Staněk built his career next to Nvidia boss

Igor Staněk is the highest-ranking Czech at Nvidia, where he has worked for twenty years, watching the company grow into the undisputed leader of the tech world. He built that career almost without ever leaving his native Brno, and in the past he worked with Jensen Huang, Nvidia's co-founder and CEO and the eighth-richest person on the planet.

In an interview for the Forbes Next Big Thing tech festival, Staněk talked about what it was like to work alongside someone who can tear into an employee one minute and calmly raise a glass with them at the bar the next. In his view, it's precisely this mix of demanding standards and humanity that defines the leadership style of Nvidia's founder.

One item Staněk treasures in particular is a memo — a note Huang left him back in 2006, scribbling a few lines in a book on his way to the bathroom. That short, almost offhand gesture turned out to be remarkably prescient: at the time, no one could have predicted that a decade and a half later Nvidia would become one of the most valuable companies in the world thanks to the explosive growth of artificial intelligence.

Staněk also touched on a question that worries many people in the industry: what it's like to work on advancing AI technology while knowing it may eventually replace the very developers building it. His years of experience inside one of the key companies of the AI industry offer a rare inside view of how the balance of power in the tech world is shifting, and what role Czech specialists play in that shift.