- Starting a company is difficult, and Jensen Huang says he wouldn’t do it again if he had to go back.
- The Nvidia CEO said on the “Acquired” podcast it was “a million times harder than I expected.”
- “To this day, I trick my brain into thinking, ‘How hard can it be?’ Because you have to,” he said.
Jensen Huang built Nvidia into a trillion-dollar company, but if he had to do it over, he wouldn’t start a company again.
Founding the AI chip manufacturer was “a million times harder than I expected it to be,” the Nvidia CEO said on an episode of the tech podcast “Acquired” released this week.
“At that time, if we realized the pain and suffering and just how vulnerable you’re going to feel, and the challenges that you’re going to endure, the embarrassment and the shame, the list of all the things that go wrong, I don’t think anybody would start a company,” he said. “Nobody in their right mind would do it.”
Huang went on to say it’s actually helpful for entrepreneurs to underestimate how challenging it can be to start a business.
“That’s kind of the superpower of an entrepreneur. They don’t know how hard it is, and they only ask themselves ‘How hard can it be?’ And to this day, I trick my brain into thinking, ‘How hard can it be?’ Because you have to,” he said. “You have to get yourself to believe that it’s not that hard because it’s way harder than you think. And so if I go taking all of my knowledge now and I go back, and I said I’m going to endure that whole journey again, I think it’s too much. It is just too much.”
Though the journey was rocky, things worked out pretty well for Huang. Business is booming for Nvidia, thanks to the generative AI arms race. The fight over the chips that provide the computing power necessary for AI’s large language models ushered Nvidia into the exclusive club of companies with trillion-dollar market caps this year, joining heavyweights like Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple.
Huang’s wallet has grown accordingly. In Forbes’ annual list of the 400 richest Americans, Huang saw the biggest gain in net worth percentage-wise and cracked the top 20 for the first time. He has an estimated net worth of $37.3 billion, according to Forbes.
Huang has even become something of a fashion icon for his signature black leather jackets. Some online resellers have gone so far as to sell copycat jackets using his name. or even image in their marketing.
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