20VC: Arm CEO Rene Haas on How The Best Leaders Make Decisions and The Trade-Off Between Speed and Quality | Leadership Lessons from 7 Years at Nvidia | How Companies Can Retain Speed, Innovation and Agility at Scale

Rene Haas is the CEO @ Arm. The technologies that Arm creates are used in over 230+ Bn devices with everything from sensors to smartphones to servers. In 2016 Softbank made Arm it’s largest ever acquisition with a reported price of $32Bn. As for Rene, he was appointed CEO in February 2022 having spent the last 8 years in numerous different roles within the company. Before Arm, Rene was Vice President & General Manager of the Computing Products Business Unit at Nvidia where he enjoyed a very successful 7 years with the team there.

In Today’s Episode with Rene Haas We Discuss:

1.) Entry into Tech from Eastman Kodak:

• How did Rene make his way into the world of technology and innovation?

• What are 1-2 of the biggest takeaways from his 7 years at Nvidia?

• How did working with Jensen impact his leadership approach and philosophy?

2.) Decision-Making in Leadership:

• What is the single biggest mistake leaders make when making decisions today?

• How does Rene balance the trade-off between speed vs quality of decision?

• At what point does Rene believe leaders have enough data to make a decision?

• What does Rene know now that he wishes he had known when he started on decisions?

3.) Scaling the Org and Remaining Nimble:

• Agile: How does one retain the speed and agility of a startup when one is the size that Arm is today?

• Ambition: How does Rene as a leader inspire the same level of ambition and vision in his team when Arm is as large as it is?

• Risk: How does Rene encourage his teams to take large risks when they have so much more to lose?

• Breakage: What are the first things to break in scaling? What can leaders do to get ahead of them?

4.) Leadership 101:

• What really is strategy? What is it not? What mistakes do all leaders make when it comes to strategy?

• How does Rene define “high performance” in leadership? How has his style of leadership changed over time?

• How does Rene approach vulnerability in leadership? What are the pros and cons?