“Frankly, I didn’t know how to do it and neither did they. None of us knew how to do anything,” Huang recently told “60 Minutes” about the company’s origins.
Huang has now been Nvidia’s CEO for more than 30 years, building the company through ups and downs into a $2.2 trillion tech giant and helping drive the artificial intelligence boom.
But he was only 30 years old when Nvidia was launched. Although the co-founders had never run a business before, Huang, a microprocessor designer, believed they could build a graphics processing unit (GPU) that would revolutionize video games and computer graphics. said.
The 61-year-old billionaire now believes that his lack of experience may have kept him from giving up on the company before it became successful — because growing the company was too slow. That’s because I didn’t know how difficult it was. If Huang could go back to 1993 and start over, he probably would bail out Nvidia, he said on the Acquired podcast in October 2023.
“At NVIDIA, I [have] I experienced failure. It’s a very big deal – the whole thing is humiliating and embarrassing,” Huang told graduates in his speech at National Taiwan University’s May 2023 commencement ceremony.
Those experiences started early. The company’s first GPU was a huge failure, and his Nvidia nearly went out of business in 1996. Even though Nvidia provided “technically inferior” chips, Mr. Huang cut more than half of the company’s workforce and begged his partners at video game company Sega to pay him the deal. He said.
With the money from the Sega contract acquisition, Nvidia doubled down on its new chip, the RIVA 128. This became his first blockbuster product for Nvidia, and in 1997 he sold over 1 million units in four months. That success turned around his Nvidia fortunes and installed it. The path to a multi-trillion dollar business.
But Huang still says the stress and pain of navigating his business through such difficult circumstances might not have been worth it had he known everything was coming.
“At that time, if we understood the pain and suffering and how vulnerable you felt and the list of hardships, embarrassments and embarrassments and things that could go wrong that you would endure, “I don’t think anyone would start a company if they did,” he said on the podcast “Acquired.” “No sane person would do that.”
In other words, for entrepreneurs, ignorance is not only blissful, but necessary.
“I think that’s the superpower of an entrepreneur,” Huang said. “They don’t know how hard it is, they just ask themselves, ‘How hard can it be?'”
When absolutely necessary, Hwang continues to use the same tricks — accessing the same buoyant optimism he had in 1993 — “Even now, I trick my brain into thinking, ‘How much is that? It’s hard, isn’t it? Because we have to do it,” he said. ”
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