In 1993, Jensen Huang co-founded Nvidia with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem from a Denny’s booth. Today, Nvidia is a $2.2 trillion tech giant, but Huang admits that he had no idea how he started the company. “Frankly, I had no idea how to do it, nor did they. None of us knew how to do anything,” he said. At the time, Huang was just 30 years old and had never run a business before. Despite their lack of experience, they believed they could build a graphics processing unit (GPU) that would transform video games and computer graphics. Huang said that if he could go back to 1993 and do it all again, he probably wouldn’t do it at all. “At Nvidia, I [have] experienced failures. Great big ones — all humiliating and embarrassing,” he said. “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.” Despite the challenges, Huang believes that the superpower of an entrepreneur lies in their ability to underestimate the challenges they face. “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.”
Jensen Huang on Nvidia’s Origins: ‘I Had No Idea How to Do It’
