Jensen Huang says he does not know how he started Nvidia: Wouldn’t do it again
When Nvidia was started, Jensen Huang was just 30 years old and the co-founders had never run a business before.
Jensen Huang co-founded Nvidia with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem from a Denny’s booth in 1993 but he said that he has no idea how he did it. Talking about the origins of the company which is a $2.2 trillion tech giant now, he said, “Frankly, I had no idea how to do it, nor did they. None of us knew how to do anything."
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At that time the company was started, Jensen Huang was just 30 years old and the co-founders had never run a business before. Jensen Huang said that he believed they could build a graphics processing unit (GPU) that would transform video games and computer graphics.
Although, the 61-year-old billionaire said that is he could go back to 1993 and do it all again, he’d probably not do it at all.
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“At Nvidia, I [have] experienced failures. Great big ones — all humiliating and embarrassing,” he said.
He added, “At that time, if we realized the pain and suffering, just how vulnerable you’re going to feel, and the challenges that you’re going to endure, the embarrassment and the shame, and the list of all the things that go wrong, I don’t think anybody would start a company. Nobody in their right mind would do it.”
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He talked about the superpower of being an entrepreneur and said, “I think that’s the superpower of an entrepreneur. They don’t know how hard it is, and they only ask themselves, ‘How hard can it be?’”
He said, “To this day, I trick my brain into thinking: How hard can it be? Because you have to.”