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Comment by trustingtrust | Hacker News Reader

You should see his interviews with Dr. Ian Cutress. The man basically knows everything in the industry in and out and knows how to create great teams. I want to interview for Tenstorrent at some point and would love to work for him. I feel being part of great teams is what he has been fortunate with. People very easily forget the rest of the team in chip design and make it about one person. I feel he's a true leader in chip design teams, but I also think he has worked with many great people to achieve that.

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People like this are extremely rare and talented, AND they are able to build amazing teams.

Other super talented people want to work with a Jim Keller. So a company hires a Jim Keller not just because you want his brain, but because you can then go to the next 20 amazing people in the industry and say "come work on Jim Keller's team" – now you have 20 min Jim Kellers on your team and that is enough to move mountains in an extremely specialized field such as chip design.

The cult of personality is always an enticing idea, it's pretty much certain that Jim Keller had a stellar team to work with in all of those places.

That being said, even a strong team is still usually only as good as its leadership. You can have all the great ideas in the world, but if the organisation does not allow you to pursue them (or on the other extreme, allows everyone to work on what they think is best) you will still fail to execute.

At the end of the day you need someone to make the correct decisions every step of the way.

One thing I gathered from interviews is that Jim Keller is good at identifying good people already on the teams and inspiring and working with them to set the priorities and goals to make a better product. The team that built Zen isn't that much different than the team that built Bulldozer, but Zen is a much better product. He's also pretty good at spreading the credit around.

Having a good grasp of everything in the whole stack is obviously helpful for setting priorities and goals, and there's a lot of leadership skills involved in getting people to work together and follow the organizational goals. Having a track record of success is obviously helpful, too.

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