검색결과 총 12건
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Lessons in Leadership from the Classics | Chapter 4: Nvidia
The Patience and the Ascent of Jensen Huang How the Alleyways of Korea and the Floors of Semiconductor Factories Forged the Aesthetics of 古枯孤高 [Economy Daily] At the beating heart of the civilizational upheaval we call artificial intelligence stands one company and one man: Nvidia and Jensen Huang. The world measures them in market capitalization and market share. But the deeper truth of great leadership outlasts any number. It is the power of time, long and unhurried. It is the discipline of subtraction. It is the courage of solitude. And it is, finally, the dignity that comes only from having endured. In the vocabulary of East Asian philosophy, these four qualities compress into a single phrase: 古枯孤高 — ancient (古), austere (枯), solitary (孤), elevated (高). Nvidia's rise is not the story of a stock that spiked overnight. It is the story of these four characters slowly calcifying into the bones of one man and the culture of one company, across thirty years of painstaking accumulation. 古 — The Ancient: Time as the First Discipline Every great enterprise, if it is truly great, eventually earns its face — but only through time. Jensen Huang had been walking this earth as a businessman long before the world knew his name. His relationship with Korea begins here, and it begins on foot. According to domestic industry accounts from that era, Huang made repeated visits to Yongsan Electronics Market in Seoul in the late 1990s and early 2000s — when Nvidia was still an obscure startup struggling to be taken seriously. He came not as a visiting dignitary but as a salesman: explaining graphics cards to shop owners, persuading assemblers, winning trust one transaction at a time. Huang himself has said his connection to Korea dates to 1996. He has spoken of how South Korea's explosion of high-speed internet, its PC-bang culture, and the nationwide fever for StarCraft formed a critical foundation for Nvidia's early growth. Korea, in those years, was the world's most electrified laboratory for digital culture — and the heat of its gaming rooms, the sharpness of its consumers, the velocity with which it embraced new technology, all of it nourished a company that had not yet found its footing. This detail matters enormously. The histories of great corporations are often rewritten to begin in gleaming boardrooms or on famous stages. But Jensen Huang's formation happened in narrow storefronts, surrounded by towers of component boxes, in a market where customers were price-sensitive and performance-obsessed and utterly unimpressed by brand mythology. In Yongsan, he did not sell a brand. He sold credibility. He sold product knowledge. He sold the felt experience of superior performance. The I Ching offers an image for this season of a man's life: 潛龍勿用 — "the hidden dragon does not yet act." The dragon submerged beneath the water has not yet ascended to the sky, but it is already gathering strength, already orienting itself toward its direction. Korea was that submerged time for Jensen Huang. It was where the dragon went quiet and grew. 枯 — The Austere: The Discipline of Withholding Austerity is not poverty. It is restraint. And few companies in the history of Silicon Valley have practiced restraint as rigorously or as consequentially as Nvidia. While its competitors raced to win the surface war — chasing specification numbers, upgrading the cosmetics of their products, playing to the gallery of consumer benchmarks — Huang kept his organization's attention trained on something less visible and far more consequential: the underlying architecture of computation, the logic of parallel processing, the infrastructure that would eventually become the indispensable engine of artificial intelligence. This is the aesthetic the Chinese literati call 枯淡 — a beauty that comes not from ornament but from essence. The Diamond Sutra puts it this way: 凡所有相 皆是虛妄 — "all that has form is ultimately illusion." In business terms: what catches the eye rarely determines a company's fate. What determines fate is the capability that cannot be seen. Nvidia understood this early. That is why the Nvidia of today rests not on the appearance of its products but on the depth of its software ecosystem, its developer base, and the intellectual architecture that competitors cannot easily replicate. This philosophy of austerity extends to Huang's understanding of human character. Speaking at Stanford, he told students that the most important trait for success is not intelligence but resilience — and went further, saying, "I hope you will have the experience of suffering and hardship." It is a startling thing to say, and deliberately so. His point is unambiguous: greatness is not the product of cleverness alone. Character is forged not in comfort but in friction. Huang speaks from experience. He has publicly described being bullied in an American boarding school as a boy, washing dishes and cleaning bathrooms at minimum wage. His philosophy of hardship is not rhetoric. It is autobiography. Most organizations today speak to their people endlessly about well-being and are afraid to speak about tempering. But Jensen Huang did not flinch from the uncomfortable truth: growth always requires some degree of resistance and endurance. He knows this in his body. 孤 — The Solitary: The Courage of the Unfashionable Conviction Solitude, properly understood, is not the condition of being alone. It is the willingness to choose a road that others have not taken — and to walk it long enough to find out whether you were right. Nvidia was, for a very long time, a company that received no particular applause. It was known as a graphics chip company, and in that category, it was formidable. But inside that public identity, Huang carried a private and lonely conviction: that the dominant paradigm of computing would shift — that the age of the general-purpose CPU would eventually yield to an age of accelerated computing. Markets demand the present moment. Leaders sometimes have to absorb today's contempt in exchange for tomorrow's vindication. Only those who sustain that solitude earn the right to the rewards of early arrival. The Analects of Confucius puts it plainly: 德不孤 必有隣 — "virtue is never truly alone; it will always find its neighbors." What appears solitary and eccentric at the beginning eventually draws its community. And in the story of Nvidia and Korea, this movement from isolation to alliance is almost perfectly illustrated. The partnership between Huang and South Korea has long since outgrown its origins in retail sales. SK Hynix began collaborating with Nvidia on High Bandwidth Memory in the uncertain early days of that technology — a bet made before the outcome was clear. That relationship has since deepened into something that resembles co-development more than supply chain. Nvidia has been advancing large-scale AI chip supply and infrastructure cooperation with the Korean government, Samsung, the SK Group, Hyundai Motor Group, and Naver. The lonely salesman who once walked the aisles of Yongsan is now at the table with the leaders of Korean industry and government, shaping the architecture of the nation's AI future. The solitary vigil became a strategic alliance. What was once walked alone is now walked together. 高 — The Elevated: Altitude as Accountability Elevation is not merely position. It is character — the capacity to see farther and to hold responsibility longer than others can or will. The Doctrine of the Mean speaks of 至誠無息 — "true sincerity never rests." This is, unexpectedly, one of the most precise descriptions of how Jensen Huang has run his company. He did not build Nvidia on a passing fashion. He crossed product failures, market cynicism, supply chain crises, and geopolitical headwinds, and climbed — slowly, deliberately, one foothold at a time — to the position the company occupies today. This is not a mountain ascended in a season. This is a summit reached in decades. Here, again, Korea re-enters the story. However regal the title "emperor of the AI era" may sound, the circuitry running through that crown is substantially Korean. Korea began as the consumption frontier — the PC-bang, the gaming market, the early adopter culture that gave Nvidia its first mass foothold. It has since become the strategic frontier: the partner in HBM and advanced memory, the co-architect of AI factories and digital transformation. Between the image of Jensen Huang persuading shop owners in Yongsan and the image of Jensen Huang discussing AI infrastructure with the heads of Korea's largest conglomerates, there runs a very long river. But the river is unbroken. What he first saw in Korea was not merely a sales opportunity. He saw a society with an extraordinary capacity for fast technical comprehension, for organizing technology into industry, for connecting the work of the mind to the work of the factory floor. That insight lives inside every partnership he has built here since. A Reckoning for Korean Business What, then, should Korean business leaders take from this? The lesson is not complicated, though it is demanding. Innovation does not arise from eloquent mission statements. It arises from time endured, from the discipline to discard the inessential, from the independence to pursue an unpopular answer, and from the accountability that eventually transforms all of it into something worthy of the word dignity. Jensen Huang's career is not a story of a man who happened to catch the AI wave at the right moment. It is a story of sediment — of years and decades of experience, discipline, and conviction accumulating until they were precisely aligned with the door that history opened. Which asks certain questions of Korean business. Do we still carry the original instinct of those years when we wrestled with the market on the ground floor — when we had no reputation to trade on, only our knowledge and our reliability? Do we have the austere courage to strip away what is not essential? Do we have the nerve to choose the lonely right answer over the popular wrong one? Management, at its best, is completed in the love of people, in the respect for the work done in the field, and in the refusal to defy the logic of time and nature. The tree that grows too fast is hollow at its core. The success that comes too easily has shallow roots. Nvidia — Jensen Huang's Nvidia — took the opposite path. It stood like an ancient tree, silent and unhurried, enduring the winds and the droughts, growing upward alone toward the high place it had decided, long ago, to reach. His success, for that reason, is not a flash of light. It is light that stays. That is the lesson of 古枯孤高. Only those who have endured long enough ascend high enough. Only those who have passed through austerity reach genuine depth. Only those who have borne solitude long enough find themselves, one day, at the center of their age. Jensen Huang's Korean story is one essential thread in that larger narrative. Today's glory is conceived in yesterday's alleyways. Even the history of the world's most powerful technology company is completed, in the end, only on the accumulated sweat and trust of human beings. He is demonstrating that, quietly, every day. The author is a contributing columnist covering business philosophy, technology, and economic history.
2026-04-22 11:57:23
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코스피·코스닥, 동반 하락 출발…매도 사이드카 발동까지
[경제일보] 중동 사태 여파로 코스피와 코스닥이 5% 이상 하락 출발했고, 장 초반 매도 사이드카(프로그램 매도호가 일시효력정지)가 발동됐다. 9일 한국거래소는 이날 오전 9시 6분 코스피 시장에 매도 사이드카를 발동했다고 공시했다. 발동 시점 당시 코스피200 선물지수는 전 거래일 종가 대비 53.75p(6.49%) 내린 773.90p였다. 코스피 200선물이 5% 이상 하락한 상태가 1분간 지속되면 매도 사이드카가 발동된다. 이날 코스피는 전 거래일 대비 319.50p(5.72%) 내린 5265.37로 출발했다. 시가총액 상위 종목인 삼성전자와 SK하이닉스 모두 9% 이상 급락했고 현대차, 기아, NAVER, 삼성SDI 등도 약세를 띄었다. 반면 한화에어로스페이스와 한화시스템 등 방산주는 전쟁 장기화 가능성이 부각되면서 강세를 보이고 있다. HD현대중공업과 삼성중공업도 상승세를 보이며 조선주 역시 견조한 흐름을 보였다. 코스닥은 58.19p(5.04%) 내린 1096.48, 원·달러환율은 17.4원 오른 1492.0원에 개장했다. 중동 전쟁 확산과 국제유가 급등, 고용 지표 부진 등이 겹치며 간밤 미국 증시는 하락 마감했다. 다우지수는 0.95%, S&P500은 1.33%, 나스닥은 1.59% 내렸고 러셀2000은 2.33% 급락했다. 국제유가는 공급망 위축 우려로 급등했다. 서부텍사스산원유(WTI)는 12.21% 상승한 90.9 달러에, 브렌트유는 8.5% 오르면서 92.69 달러에 거래를 마감했다. 호르무즈 해협 봉쇄 우려와 산유국 감산 가능성이 요인으로 풀이된다.
2026-03-09 10:11:42
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검색창 넘어 '생활 플랫폼'으로…네이버가 '실시간 정보'에 집착하는 이유
[이코노믹데일리] 네이버(대표 최수연)가 2026년 설 연휴를 맞아 단순 검색 기능을 넘어선 '실시간 생활 밀착형 정보' 서비스로 트래픽 방어에 나섰다. 귀성길 교통 상황부터 공항 출국장 대기 시간, 연휴 기간 운영 병원 정보까지 총망라하며 포털의 본질인 '정보의 관문' 역할을 강화한다는 전략이다. 13일 네이버에 따르면 이번 설 연휴 기간 검색창에 '설날'을 입력하면 차례 지내는 법, 새해 인사말 등 기본 정보부터 교통, 의료 등 필수 생활 정보까지 원스톱으로 확인할 수 있다. 특히 주목할 점은 데이터의 '실시간성'과 '커버리지 확대'다. 가장 눈에 띄는 변화는 공항 관련 정보의 고도화다. 네이버는 이번 연휴부터 인천국제공항 제2여객터미널까지 실시간 대기 정보 서비스를 확대했다. 검색창에 '인천공항 출국장 대기시간'이나 '김포공항 탑승 소요시간'을 입력하면, 출국장별 현재 대기 인원과 예상 소요 시간을 초 단위에 가깝게 확인할 수 있다. 이 서비스는 김포, 김해, 제주공항 등 주요 국내선 공항의 체크인부터 탑승까지 소요 시간 정보도 포함한다. 공항 주차장 실시간 현황과 면세점 영업시간, 운항 정보까지 결합해 여행객들의 '불확실성'을 제거하는 데 주력했다. 이는 엔데믹 이후 폭발적으로 증가한 해외여행 수요를 플랫폼 내에 묶어두려는(Lock-in) 의도로 풀이된다. ◆ 의료·정책 정보 통합…'검색의 AI화' 전 단계 네이버는 연휴 기간 문을 여는 병원과 약국 정보를 공식 홈페이지 링크와 연동해 제공한다. 응급 상황 시 포털 검색 의존도가 높은 국내 이용자들의 패턴을 고려한 조치다. 또한 TV 특선 영화와 축제, 공연 정보 등 엔터테인먼트 정보도 일목요연하게 정리했다. '2026년'을 검색하면 올해 달라지는 주요 제도 정보도 제공한다. 2026년 최저시급, 국민연금 보험료율 변화, 청년미래적금 개시 등 실생활에 직결되는 경제 정책 정보를 카드 뉴스 형태로 가공해 정보 접근성을 높였다. 업계에서는 네이버의 이러한 행보를 생성형 AI(인공지능) 시대에 대응하는 '데이터 요새화' 전략으로 분석한다. 챗GPT나 퍼플렉시티 같은 AI 검색 서비스가 부상하고 있지만, 한국의 명절 교통 상황이나 동네 병원 운영 시간 같은 '하이퍼 로컬(Hyper-local)' 실시간 데이터는 여전히 네이버가 독보적인 경쟁력을 갖고 있기 때문이다. 글로벌 빅테크가 범용적인 지식 정보에 강하다면, 네이버는 한국인의 생활 맥락(Context)에 최적화된 시의성 있는 데이터로 차별화를 꾀하고 있다. 단순한 링크 나열이 아니라 사용자가 원하는 답을 즉시 보여주는 '정답형 검색'으로 진화하고 있는 것이다. ◆ '큐:(CUE:)'와 결합된 개인화 비서로 진화 향후 네이버의 명절 서비스는 자사의 AI 검색 서비스 '큐:(CUE:)' 및 '하이퍼클로바X'와 결합해 더욱 고도화될 전망이다. 현재는 "인천공항 대기시간"을 검색해 정보를 확인하는 수준이지만, 머지않아 "지금 출발하면 인천공항 T2까지 얼마나 걸리고 주차는 어디가 편해?"라고 물으면 AI가 교통 상황과 주차장 혼잡도를 분석해 최적의 경로를 브리핑하는 '비서형 서비스'로 진화할 것이다. 네이버 관계자는 "이용자들이 연휴 기간 겪는 불편함을 최소화하기 위해 공항, 교통, 의료 등 공공 데이터와의 연동을 대폭 강화했다"며 "앞으로도 AI 기술을 접목해 검색 의도를 파악한 맞춤형 정보를 선제적으로 제공할 것"이라고 밝혔다.
2026-02-13 10:41:18
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