Rev Lebaredyan talked about how he dreamed of opening an NVIDIA office in Armenia, what the company is doing today and what are the advantages of being a leader.
Rev Lebaredyan, city — New Orleans, Vice President of Omniverse & Simulation Technology at NVIDIA, Director of NVIDIA Office in Armenia, linkedin
About NVIDIA and development in Armenia
In the early 80s, when I was six years old, my father bought me my first computer. Then they did not meet often and were so weak that they could not be played. Just programming, which is what I learned. And years later I learned about computer graphics and devoted myself to writing programs that could create images.
When I was 15, I went to college. Around this time, the World Wide Web appeared. And in 1993 there was a sharp increase in the popularity of the Internet. The film Jurassic Park was released. It was a turning point for computer graphics. A new era has begun for the film industry.
Since I grew up in Los Angeles, I immediately got into this field and got a job at Warner Brothers. They needed people who knew at least a little about computer graphics. Then I came to Disney, where I wrote a system to make a fur for the movie Mighty Joe Young. We were even nominated for an Oscar.
After that, I created my own company, where I developed a new renderer. Licensed it to many companies, including Disney, Sony, Warner Brothers, Digital Domain.
In 2001, I was invited to NVIDIA. It was interesting for me to work in a place where most people are engineers like me. As a result, I have been working here for 20 years. My job at the company is to create Omniverse, a software platform for modeling complex virtual worlds.
NVIDIA is known as a developer of graphics processors and systems on a chip that are used in video games. But the company has gone beyond this direction. By combining its technologies with neural networks and artificial intelligence, the brand creates virtual worlds similar to real ones. Based on this, neural networks can be trained, for example, for unmanned vehicles.
I was born in the USA, but I am Armenian, I speak Armenian. My family and I often visited this country. My relatives live there. For many years I dreamed that NVIDIA would open an office there. But the country was not ready. All these years I have helped to open and expand NVIDIA offices in Russia, Switzerland, Canada, and US cities. A few years ago, everything changed. The IT sphere began to develop actively, many successful startups appeared. Recently, the first unicorn startup, Picsart, appeared in Armenia. And the sharp flow of IT specialists from different countries, which has happened over the past six months, has finally accelerated the process of opening an office in Yerevan.
Now I am the director of NVIDIA office in Armenia. We have dozens of employees. We establish contacts with other ecosystem participants, get acquainted and build relationships with leading market players, representatives of creative communities, researchers, artificial intelligence specialists. NVIDIA is interested in the market of Central Asia and the Caucasus, and we will actively develop here ourselves and help our partners grow. We are still at an early stage of development, but we are happy with the progress.
About corporate culture
NVIDIA is a unique company. I feel like a part of the family thanks to the principles that were formulated by CEO Jensen Huang. Everything we do is built around the company's mission.
When I came to NVIDIA, there were about 1000 people working there. Now there are more than 20,000 of us. But the company remains small and flexible because we don't have a strict hierarchy.
There are several hundred people in my team, and they are all distributed around the world. Only a small part works in offices. Working remotely is difficult. But we believe in what we are doing: creating virtual worlds in which people can also work.
What should a leader be like
Even when I had my own company, I wrote CTO on my business card, not CEO. I wanted to be an engineer, not a manager. I didn't like managing people, being responsible for them. I wanted to create technologies, solve problems with my own knowledge and be responsible only for myself.
This situation did not last long. When I moved to Moscow, I was promoted to manager. I had a large team of 40-50 people, but I still wrote most of the software myself. Spent a lot of time rewriting employee code. As a result, I almost didn't do management. It was necessary to make a choice. I would prefer to just code, but I realized that even if I spend 24 hours a day at my computer, I still don't have enough resources to create software of the scale I want. This requires a large team of people.
To create large projects, I followed the path of management
To create large projects, I followed the path of management. For the last 10-15 years, I have been focused on becoming a good leader. One of the things I learned during this time is that if I don't rewrite the engineers' code, they will eventually create a better solution than I could have created. The main thing is to give them the time and resources to do this.
The leader should be a gardener who creates a favorable environment and plants seeds, and they then bear fruit.
The leader must clearly understand the goals that he faces. See the way to achieve these objectives. And constantly update your strategy.
Also, the leader must correctly convey the goal and the chosen tactics to the team. All employees must agree with it in order to work as a single system.
About the advantages and difficulties
I can participate in creating things that are much bigger than me. It's inspiring. But to create a large-scale project, you need to gather a lot of smart people in one place and make them work together. And this is one of the main difficulties.
Another difficulty is learning how to manage time correctly. I always want to do more than I can fit into my schedule. Until recently, I managed my own time. But with the advent of new responsibilities, I needed help. Therefore, I rely on an assistant who helps to organize my time competently and acts as a buffer between me and people who ask for my attention.
About the plans
Today, the world is changing rapidly, and we are acting on the basis of current events. We plan to increase NVIDIA's office in Armenia and expand in the areas of interest to us.
I would like to see more computing infrastructure, centers with supercomputers built in Armenia to support companies, startups and universities. NVIDIA naturally integrates into such ecosystems and expands with them. Therefore, I am actively working with other representatives of the country's IT community. There are a lot of interesting things ahead.
