He Joined Nvidia’s Board in 1993, the Year It Was Founded. Today Harvey Jones Became Its First-Ever Chair. He Handed a Company to a Founder Once Before
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In 1993, three engineers started a graphics chip company in California, and a semiconductor software executive named Harvey C. Jones joined its board. Thirty-three years later, on Thursday morning, Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) named Jones the first chair in its history, in the same announcement in which Jensen Huang resigned as president, CEO and a member of the board, effective immediately.
Chief financial officer Colette Kress is interim CEO, as we profiled earlier, while the board, now chaired by Jones, searches inside and outside the company for a permanent one. We covered what history says about companies left without a permanent CEO here.
Nvidia opened at $151.01, fell as low as $148.80, about $2.18 trillion below its October 6 record value, and was at $164.56 at 10:46 AM ET, 10.6% above that low and down 5.3% from Wednesday’s close.
Who Harvey Jones is
Jones has spent more than 30 years as an entrepreneur, technology executive and venture investor, according to his Nvidia biography. In 1981 he co-founded Daisy Systems, a computer-aided engineering company, and served as its president and CEO until 1987. From 1987 to 1998 he led Synopsys, one of the companies whose software is used to design chips, first as CEO for seven years and then as executive chairman. In 1997 he co-founded Tensilica, which licensed processor designs, and chaired it until Cadence Design Systems bought it in 2013. Since 2004 he has run Square Wave Ventures, a private investment firm. He holds a math and computer science degree from Georgetown and a management degree from MIT.
On Nvidia’s board he sits on the audit committee and the nominating and corporate governance committee, the group that oversees board membership and, typically, leadership succession.
He has handed a company to a founder before
The detail investors may find most relevant is from Synopsys. Jones ran it as CEO for seven years from 1987. In 1994, the job went to Aart de Geus, one of the company’s founders, while Jones stayed on as executive chairman. De Geus went on to run Synopsys for about 30 years. Jones has lived through a CEO handoff from the chairman’s seat, at a chip-design company, with a founder involved. This time the handoff runs the other way: the founder is leaving.
What he said
“Colette has helped lead NVIDIA through a period of extraordinary growth and has a deep understanding of our business, customers, operations and financial position,” Jones said in Thursday’s announcement, adding that she is supported by an experienced leadership team.
That is the whole of his public statement so far. The company called him the board’s first-ever chair, so the role is new at Nvidia. The board’s own investigation, led by the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz with former acting U.S. Attorney Joon Kim, into Huang’s relationship with Alice Huang, a former executive at Singapore’s Megaspeed whom U.S. officials suspect of spying for China, is still open. China calls that claim groundless, and Huang has not been accused of a crime.
What it means for shareholders
Nvidia is worth about $3.97 trillion and has never chosen a CEO. The board’s new chair has sat on it since the year the company was founded and has seen a chip-design company go through a leadership change before. What shareholders do not have yet is a timeline, a shortlist or a permanent CEO. Analysts have named Kress and Ian Buck, who runs Nvidia’s hyperscale business, as internal candidates, and Bloomberg reported that the board had been working with an outside firm to identify candidates.
For investors, the decision that matters today is the size of the position. Nvidia is about 6% of the S&P 500 and more of the Nasdaq-100, so most retirement accounts own it whether or not they hold the stock directly. If your total is more than about 10% of your portfolio, trimming inside an IRA costs nothing in taxes.
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I've been writing about stocks and personal finance for 20+ years. I believe all great companies are tech companies in the long run, and I invest accordingly.
