This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Sid Pardeshi, 32, the co-founder and CTO of a generative AI software platform. He is from India and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
I thought I’d stay at Nvidia forever.
The pay, learning opportunities, and benefits made it a delight to work there. I had no reason to leave.
But Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, inspired me, and I realized I wanted to be a founder, too.
In 2022, I made the extremely hard decision to leave Nvidia and pursue my entrepreneurial dreams. I resigned months before ChatGPT was released, and I believe that choice cost me double-digit millions worth of unvested company stock.
I co-founded the AI company Blitzy in 2023, which has raised $4.4 million. Working under Huang for over six years taught me valuable lessons that have been instrumental to my success.
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Getting a job at Nvidia was a dream come true
I got an internship with Nvidia in India through my university, where I studied electrical and electronics engineering.
When I started in January 2016, Nvidia wasn’t a FAANG company, the acronym for the most prestigious Big Tech firms of the time: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google. But as a gamer, I was familiar with the company’s graphics chips, so I was deeply passionate about working there.
At the end of my six-month internship, I started a full-time position as a junior engineer at Nvidia in Pune. By 2018, I was a senior system software engineer.
I didn’t interact with Jensen much, but he would lead quarterly all-hands meetings, which I would attend remotely from India. He spoke about things where he was ahead of his time, like AI and virtual worlds. I was fascinated by him because I shared his love of technology.
Once, when Jensen visited staff in India, I asked him after an all-hands meeting what to focus on if I wanted to make a meaningful contribution to Nvidia and the tech space at large.
He suggested choosing one area of expertise and committing to it deeply, rather than spreading myself out across many interests. I took his guidance to heart and went deep into AI as it related to gaming.
Jensen inspired me to become an entrepreneur
As time passed, my ambitions evolved. I saw a lot of opportunities emerging in AI, and I wanted to become a founder like Jensen.
In 2022, at age 28, I quit my job and moved to Massachusetts with my wife and children to join an MSc and MBA program at Harvard.
While studying, I worked for Nvidia as an intern from May 2023 to April 2024. They offered me a job that could start after I completed my master’s, but starting a business was my primary goal.
In 2023, a classmate at Harvard and I founded Blitzy, which I work on full-time as the CTO. We’re working on using AI to significantly automate software development work for enterprises.
Jensen showed me the importance of valuing all employees and following my convictions
At Nvidia, I noticed that Jensen nurtured and valued talent. When I was an intern in the US, he made time to meet with us. His assistant kept telling him that a very important client was calling him during the meeting. “Let them wait,” Jensen said. “I’m talking to the future of Nvidia.”
Like Jensen, I want to keep the spark alive among employees, regardless of their rank. Every day, I allocate two hours to listening to team members and helping them solve problems.
Jensen would also follow his convictions. For example, he bet on the accelerated computing platform CUDA in the 2000s, when no one saw its true potential. Now, it’s the backbone of AI training processes.
Similarly, when we first pitched to investors that we intended to use AI to build software autonomously, many didn’t believe AI was advanced enough yet. But because I’ve been reading papers in the AI space every week for years, I trusted my convictions and that we could automate coding at Blitzy.
Another page I’m taking from his book is never ruling out the prospect of going out of business. Jensen was always concerned about the survival of Nvidia, despite it being a trillion-dollar company. I remember once a fellow intern in the US asked Jensen whether he watched movies. He said that even in the theater, he’s thinking about Nvidia.
As Blitzy’s CTO, I want to anticipate every challenge ahead of time. I focus on solving important technical problems and delegate everything else. I want to let people with more knowledge about other aspects of the company handle issues in their space.
Similarly, it’s thought that Jensen’s signature outfit, the black pants, shirt, and leather jacket, helps him minimize decision fatigue. I do wear different outfits every day, but my wife, who loves fashion, picks them out for me.
If I hadn’t followed my dreams when I did, it would be too late now
At one point, I wondered if I was being selfish by leaving Nvidia. I had a family, and needed to make the right choice, both for my career and for them.
I moved to the US on a student visa, which meant my wife was my dependent and not allowed to work. She put her career on the line.
Yet, my wife, and my mom, encouraged me to pursue my dreams, and it would be too late now if I hadn’t done it then. Once ChatGPT came out, everyone was thinking about bringing AI solutions to the market. I’m glad I already had deep knowledge and experience with AI and was ready to take advantage of the moment.
Financially, quitting Nvidia wasn’t a smart decision because, based on my calculations around my compensation package, my unvested stock would be worth double-digit millions because of how the company’s value has grown.
I knew AI technology would progress significantly over the next few years, although I couldn’t have anticipated ChatGPT coming out so fast in November 2022 — just months after I resigned. I was leaving right on the cusp of a big moment in the industry, before I was able to harvest the returns.
But I’m glad I quit when I did. If my family has what they need, working on cutting-edge stuff is more important to me than money.
I got to watch as Nvidia grew from a relatively insignificant company to a trillion-dollar business, and I’m applying everything I learned to Blitzy. My mission is for Blitzy to be on the same trajectory as Nvidia, one day becoming a trillion-dollar company.
A spokesperson for Nvidia declined to comment.
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