Jensen Huang didn’t build Nvidia into a $2 trillion company without setting high standards for his employees—and while they say that makes him difficult to work with, Huang welcomes the label of “perfectionist.”
The Taiwanese-born entrepreneur owns about a 3.5% stake in the Santa Clara chipmaker, giving him a net worth of $77.3 billion. according to Bloomberg.
Huang’s rise to fame in Silicon Valley has earned him recognition from the likes of Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, who has called Huang the “Taylor Swift of technology.”
But Juan also deserved a couple more titles from his team, as he was told in a recent interview with 60 minutes. These include: “demanding,” “perfectionist,” and “not easy to work with.”
Juan said those descriptions fit him “perfectly,” explaining, “That’s the way it should be. If you want to do extraordinary things, it shouldn’t be easy.”
Nvidia has truly delivered outstanding results in a less-than-stable economic environment. The company’s share price is up 203% over the past year and 1,818% over the past five years.
During it last earnings report in FebruaryThe company reported revenue for the quarter of $22 billion, up 22% from the previous quarter and 265% year-over-year.
Billionaire Waiter
This level of success is a surprise even to Juan himself. The 61-year-old said: “It’s the most extraordinary thing that an ordinary waiter operating a dishwasher could grow up like this.”
The father of two started working at Denny’s at age 15, and the restaurant provided him and two friends with the opportunity to come up with the idea that would later make him a billionaire.
According to Nvidia Blog Post 2023 Huang, along with Chris Malachowski and Curtis Priem (both of whom worked at Sun Microsystems), met at one of Denny’s “most popular” locations in Northern California to discuss “creating a chip that would enable realistic 3D graphics on personal computers.” Thus the idea of Nvidia was born.
But in an interview this week, Huang made it clear that it took a lot more than just a good idea to build Nvidia into the brand it is today: “There’s no magic, it’s just 61 years of hard work every single day.
“I don’t think there’s anything more.”
Fans of Huang, whose giant business is now part of the Magnificent 7 group of shares, will not be surprised by his mentality.
Earlier this year, Huang told students at his alma mater, Stanford, that they should lower their expectations. “People with very high expectations have very low resilience—and unfortunately, resilience matters for success,” Huang explained. “One of my big advantages is that I have very low expectations.”
He added: “To all of you Stanford students, I wish you ample doses of pain and suffering. Greatness comes from character, and character is not made from smart people, but from people who have suffered.”
Hoping for a surprise
While some experts fear the unknown consequences of AI, Nvidia’s president hopes to be surprised.
IN February the company published footage his supercomputer Eos, a subsidiary of his AI platform of the same name. The model equipped with H100 systems is a data center-scale supercomputer “designed to power the next frontier of innovation in artificial intelligence.”
The Eos supercomputer can perform “quadrillions of calculations per second,” Huang said.
But despite how advanced this high-profile technology is, Huang isn’t worried about it working in unexpected ways. “We hope he does something that surprises us,” he said. “That’s the whole point.”
Huang, who joined the government’s advisory council on the safety of artificial intelligence, continued: “In some areas, such as drug discovery, developing better and lighter materials, we need artificial intelligence to help us explore the universe in places that we can imagine.” allow. we could never do it ourselves.”