NVIDIA is currently the most valuable company in the world, and its founder Jensen Huang has given some insight into the amount of effort it’s taken to get it there.
NVIDIA co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang says he works on his company all the time he’s awake. “I work from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to bed. I work seven days a week,” he said in an interview. “When I’m not working, I’m thinking about working, and when I’m working, I’m working,” he added.
Huang says he works so hard that also he’s thinking about work when he’s doing non-work things. “And so I sit through movies, but I don’t remember (the plot) because I’m thinking about work. But my work is not (just solving problems). You’re thinking about what the company can be, and are there things that we could do even better. Or sometimes it’s just trying to solve a problem, but sometimes you’re imagining the future and (thinking) if we did this and that, and it’s working. You’re fantasizing, you’re dreaming — it’s incredible,” he added.
Huang’s comments seem to echo those made by Narayan Murthy in India, when he’d exhorted young professional to work 70 hours a week. Murthy’s comments had drawn sharp criticism on social media, with many people saying that working 70 hours a week would make it impossible for employees to maintain work-life balance. But Huang doesn’t seem to be particularly worried about work life balance, and says that he’s thinking about work when he’s trying to watch movies. But instead of being frustrated, Huang seems to be energized by this, and says that he finds the situation “incredible”. But perhaps it takes this kind of obsession to build massively successful companies — NVIDIA is the most valuable company in the world, and Huang is personally worth $121 billion. And maybe that’s the trade-off that people have to make — either you can crib about work-life balance, or you can be obsessed about your business and build incredible amounts of wealth for yourself and your shareholders.