Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is one of the most successful entrepreneurs of all time. Nvidia is among the handful of companies that have touched $1 trillion in market cap, and Huang himself is one of the richest men in the world with a net worth of $37.5 billion. But he has an unusual take on his experience of being an entrepreneur.
Nvidia CEO says he wouldn’t start a company again if given the choice. “I wouldn’t do it. And it goes back to that building a company is so hard. And building Nvidia turned out to have been a million times harder than I expected it to be, any of us expected it to be,” he said on a podcast responding to a question on what sort of company he would build if he were again 30 years old and wanted to start up.
“If we realize the pain and suffering and 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,” he added.
But Huang says that being able to push through these difficulties is what sets entrepreneurs apart. “That is kind of the superpower of an entrepreneur. They don’t know how hard it is. And they only ask themselves, how hard can it be? And to this day, I trick my brain into thinking, how hard can it be? Because you have to still you wake up in the morning. Yeah, how hard can it be?” he said.
But enduring thorough all these difficulties does pay off once in a while — and if it does, it can pay off in a big way. Huang had founded Nvidia all the way back in 1993 with less than $1000; the company is now one of the biggest tech companies in the world, and worth over $1 trillion. And while he’s now fabulously wealthy, and has been going through the grind for 30 years, he has no plans of stopping. “The trick is still working,” he laughs. “The trick is still working. I’m still enjoying myself immensely and I’m adding a little bit of value,” he says.