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Jensen Huang resigned Thursday as CEO of Nvidia, the chipmaking company he co-founded in 1993, following public revelations of his extramarital affairs. Colette Kress, Nvidia's chief financial officer, will serve as the company's interim CEO.
Huang's visionary leadership style and his central role in driving the company's strategy, combined with the company's unusually flat management structure, will make him especially difficult to replace, experts say.
Huang notably had more direct reports than the typical CEO, with a "direct staff" of approximately 60 employees, he said in a March 2026 interview with podcaster Lex Fridman.
"The more direct reports a CEO has, the less layers are in the company. It allows us to keep information fluid," Huang told CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin in 2023.
Having minimal hierarchy has worked for Nvidia so far "because [Huang] has been a strong leader with a strong vision," says Jo-Ellen Pozner, associate professor of management at Santa Clara University's Leavey School of Business.
But that structure could make the company's leadership shake-up even more difficult to navigate, she says.
At companies with flat management structures, the CEO often has even more influence than they would in a traditional hierarchy, according to Joseph Fuller, professor of management practice at Harvard Business School.
Nvidia's structure was "designed to adapt well in a world of change, either caused by us or affecting us," Huang said in a March 2025 conversation with Arthur Mensch, cofounder and CEO of Mistral.
Since he directly managed the company's top executives, Huang held "a tremendous amount of power" at Nvidia, Fuller says. "He's the orchestrator," he continues. "He's the coordinator. He's resolving the disputes. He's allocating the resources."
Now, the company has lost its top decision-maker, Fuller says.
Without Huang, "there is likely nobody who is able to coordinate among those various people with their different expertise and domains," Pozner says, which could lead to a slowdown in technical work.
There are some advantages to Nvidia's flat structure, says Denise Rousseau, professor of organizational behavior and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University. Having fewer management layers can strengthen "local leaders" in each area of the company, she says, which can help stabilize Nvidia through its leadership transition.
But "nobody else has the big picture view" that Huang did, Pozner says, which makes finding a permanent successor within the company especially difficult. Moreover, with dozens of direct reports, it's unlikely that Huang had the time to groom one of his subordinates to take over one day, she says.
Pozner predicts that Nvidia's next leader will steer the company toward a more traditional management structure. "I understand that a lot of people, especially in Silicon Valley, are averse to rigid hierarchies and the kind of structure that we expect from a legacy organization," she says. "But it's functional for a reason."
Ultimately, Nvidia's current system is "not an organizational structure that's built to last," Pozner says.
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