Day: October 1, 2025

• Arm CEO says working with Nvidia’s Jensen Huang taught him a key leadership lesson.
• Rene Haas recalled how Huang once scrapped a product line and reassigned 2,000 engineers overnight.
• “You have this amazing set of characteristics of vision, speed, fearlessness,” Haas said of Huang.

Arm CEO Rene Haas said at Nvidia, he saw up close how bold leadership decisions can change a company’s trajectory.

The CEO of the $150 billion chip design firm spoke about his seven years at Nvidia working on computing products at the All-In Summit 2025 in September, in a conversation posted Wednesday.

Haas said he saw how Jensen Huang built the company by taking bold risks and pivoting quickly.

Haas said Huang changed strategy at an off-site meeting meant to review business roadmaps. “We’re abolishing this product line. We’re going to move 2,000 engineers off of project X onto project Y,” said Haas, adding that the company had only about 6,000 people at the time.

That abrupt shift — away from making support chips for Intel’s processors — proved decisive. Instead of trying to keep up with Intel in PCs, Huang redirected thousands of engineers to focus on Arm-based designs and graphics chips. That move reshaped the company’s future, said Haas, who left Nvidia in 2013 to join Arm.

“You have this amazing set of characteristics of vision, speed, fearlessness, taking risk, and an ability to pivot very, very fast,” Haas said of Huang, adding that he has “learned so much” from working with him.

Nvidia is one of Arm’s flagship customers — its latest AI chips combine Arm-based CPUs with its own powerful GPUs.

In 2020, Nvidia tried to acquire Arm in a $40 billion deal that fell through because of regulatory hurdles. Haas told Business Insider in 2022 that Arm wasn’t dwelling on the failed sale and was instead focused on expanding in industries like cloud, networking, automotive, and the Internet of Things.

“I’m not going to say Jensen is my competitor today,” Haas said at the All-In Summit.

But when asked if Arm might eventually make its own chips and go head-to-head with Nvidia, he added: “I’m not going to say that today, but could we do that? I hinted in the last conference call that we’re looking at going a little bit further than we do today.”

Haas, Arm, and Nvidia did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• Pavel Durov is the cofounder and CEO of Telegram, a messaging service.
• Durov said he relies on coding contests instead of interviews to screen for potential hires.
• “It’s in line with my overall philosophy. I think competition leads to progress,” he said.

Fancy a job at the messaging service Telegram? You might want to look out for the next coding competition the company organizes to recruit engineers.

Pavel Durov, the cofounder and CEO of Telegram, said in an interview with podcaster Lex Fridman, which aired on Tuesday, that he prefers to assess candidates through a coding contest instead of the standard interview process.

“It’s in line with my overall philosophy. I think competition leads to progress,” Durov said.

“If you want to create an ideal process for selecting the most qualified people for certain specific tasks you have in mind, what can be better than a competition?” he added.

Durov said coding contests are the best platform for candidates to “demonstrate their skills,” which makes it easier for Telegram to “just select the best.”

“These competitions are the closest experience to what people will have when working at Telegram,” he added.

Durov told Fridman that another quality he looks for is whether a candidate has actually used Telegram themselves. This is something that he can select for by promoting his contests on Telegram, he said.

“What can be better than, for an employee of your company, somebody who has been a user? If this person has no prior experience of using Telegram, their understanding would be very limited,” Durov continued.

Durov has previously talked about holding coding competitions to hire staff.

Durov told Tucker Carlson, in an interview that aired in April 2024, that Telegram built its own platform to host competitions.

“We hold them every month or two months. After a series of these competitions, we select the best of the best of the best and they then maybe could join our team, which is just about 30 engineers,” he said.

“This is how we operate. We don’t need an HR department to find super-talented engineers,” he added.

In June, Durov said in an X post that he has been hiring software developers through coding competitions since 2007.

That was when Durov was still CEO of VK, the Russian social network he founded in 2006. He cofounded Telegram with his brother Nikolai in 2013 and left VK a year later.

Telegram’s careers page listed several openings as of press time. These included roles related to content moderation, translation, software engineering, site reliability, and accounting. The site did not specify how many vacancies were open.

The company told applicants interested in the “C/C++ Software Engineer” position that participating in a relevant coding competition would be the “fastest and easiest way of joining the team.”

Telegram’s most recent coding contest was held between June and July. Durov wrote in an X post promoting the competition that the winner would be hired as an Android developer and receive a salary of $1 million a year.

“The only way in is to win our coding contest that ends on July 11. The task? Implement the animation from this mockup in our open-source Android app,” Durov added.

Durov referenced the contest during his interview with Fridman, saying that it helped to accelerate Telegram’s software development process.

“The Android app. It’s an open-source app. Anybody can take its code and play with it,” Durov said.

“So as a result, we would not just select the best person and hire this person. We would also select the best solution to the problem because we would not suggest that the contestants solve trivial problems,” he added.