Starting Nvidia all over again? Jensen Huang says no chance.
In an interview on the “How I Built This” podcast with Guy Raz released on Monday, Huang reflected on the years of pressure, humiliation, near-bankruptcy scares, and personal sacrifice that came with turning Nvidia into the world’s most valuable semiconductor company with a market cap of $5.3 trillion, and the dominant force behind the AI boom. Nvidia was founded in 1993 and went public in 1999.
“Suppose I knew everything then that I now know — how hard it is and all of the pain and suffering and all the embarrassment and humiliation and all the setbacks,” Huang said, asking himself if he would start again? “The answer, absolutely not.”
The cost of success
The billionaire CEO said many founders understate the emotional toll of building a company because people only focus on the final outcome.
“If your question is knowing how Nvidia turned out, knowing the contribution we’ve made to the world, knowing the consequence of the company today, how it impacts so many different industries, all of the benefits that we have accrued as a result of our success, do I love those things? The answer is yes,” Huang said. “But that wasn’t the question.”
Huang described periods in the mid-2010s when Nvidia’s stock price collapsed while the company continued pouring money into CUDA, the software platform that later became foundational to modern AI systems.
During the 2008 financial crisis, Nvidia shares dropped by about 85% from their late-2007 highs. At the time, many investors doubted the strategy.
“It was embarrassing. It was humiliating,” Huang said. “You’re the only face that everybody hates. Your employees are probably embarrassed for you.”
Nvidia also survived multiple existential crises during its early years, including failed chips, layoffs, and moments when Huang believed the company was only weeks away from running out of money.
In 1996, Nvidia almost went out of business after failing to deliver a graphics chip for Sega. Sega provided Nvidia with a $5 million investment that kept the company afloat.
“You’ll be going out of business. You’ll have to lay people off,” Huang said, describing the reality of startup life.
Forgetting the pain
Huang said the only way he endured was by training himself not to dwell on setbacks.
“I spent all my time forgetting yesterday,” he said. “What do they teach athletes? Forget the last point.”
The CEO also reflected on the personal cost of Nvidia’s rise. Huang said he missed many of his children’s karate tournaments while balancing nonstop work and graduate school at Stanford.
“I missed a lot,” he said, praising his wife for “taking care of everything.”
Still, Huang said Nvidia’s success came from staying committed to ideas others dismissed, especially the belief that graphics chips could someday power a new era of computing beyond video games.
“I think a lot of people forget that the pain and suffering necessary, the endurance necessary to do something great,” Huang said. “It is because you’re always looking forward and forgetting the past.”
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