Nvidia held a clinic that shattered expectations. The company’s market capitalization has surged 160% over the past six months to $3.10 trillion as the quest to capitalize on artificial intelligence has propelled the chipmaker to become the world’s third most valuable company, behind only Apple ($3.30 trillion). ) and Microsoft ($3.25 trillion).
For Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, the event was just as fast-paced. Huang’s net worth has increased by more than $62 billion this year to $106.1 billion, moving him ahead of fellow tech star Michael Dell to become the 13th richest person on the planet.
But the man at the helm of Nvidia’s historic rise didn’t sugarcoat how difficult the road to success has been for him or the company he founded more than 30 years ago.
When Nvidia started in 1993, Huang, along with co-founders Chris Malachowski and Curtis Priem, started with the idea of creating chips that would enable realistic 3D graphics on personal computers or GPUs, specifically for video games.
But speaking at Luck Brainstorm Tech conference in 2018Huang told the audience that he always believed that GPUs could have wider applications in society, otherwise “there would be no point in starting a company.”
“It’s incredibly difficult to start a company; It’s incredibly difficult to start a business.” Juan said at the conference. “The depth of despair, suffering, torture – balanced by the great joy of doing something the world has never done before – cannot be described in words. So if you don’t believe you can make a real contribution to society, starting down this path will be incredibly difficult.”
According to Haung, the reason Nvidia got into gaming was because video games were the only area of technology where computing power was incredibly advanced, but there was also a huge demand among consumers.
Once they realized the potential scale of GPU-powered servers, they were able to move into workstations, supercomputers, self-driving cars and eventually artificial intelligence, Huang said. But all this became possible only thanks to computer games.
“3D graphics and video games are the engine of innovation in our company, the engine [research and development] scale,” he said at the conference.
Juan made other, more recent comments that paint a less than idyllic picture of entrepreneurship.
During a podcast interview in the fall of 2023, Juan was asked what company he would consider starting if he could turn back time 30 years, and the engineer-turned-executive gave a somewhat surprising answer.
“I wouldn’t do that,” he said.
“If we realized the pain and suffering [involved] and how vulnerable you will feel, the difficulties you will have to endure, the embarrassment and shame, and the list of all the things that will go wrong – I don’t think anyone would start a company. Nobody in their right mind would do this.”
Amendment June 14, 2024: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated Nvidia’s market capitalization in the headline.