{"id":232525,"date":"2024-06-14T21:55:34","date_gmt":"2024-06-14T21:55:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/2024\/06\/14\/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-says-path-to-success-was-filled-with-dispair-and-torture\/"},"modified":"2025-06-25T17:17:02","modified_gmt":"2025-06-25T17:17:02","slug":"nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-says-path-to-success-was-filled-with-dispair-and-torture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/2024\/06\/14\/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-says-path-to-success-was-filled-with-dispair-and-torture\/","title":{"rendered":"Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says path to success was filled with ‘dispair’ and ‘torture’"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Nvidia<\/a> has been holding a clinic in shattering expectations. The company\u2019s market cap has increased 160% in the past six months, up to $3.10 trillion<\/a>, as the rush to cash in on A.I. has launched the chip maker into position as the third most valuable company in the world, trailing only Apple<\/a> ($3.30 trillion) and Microsoft<\/a> ($3.25 trillion).\u00a0<\/p>\n

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For Nvidia\u2019s CEO, Jensen Huang, it\u2019s been an equally meteoric come up. Huang\u2019s wealth surged more than $62 billion this year, up to $106.1 billion<\/a>, and he leapfrogged fellow tech star Michael Dell<\/a> to become the 13th-richest person on the planet.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But the man at the helm of Nvidia\u2019s historic rise hasn\u2019t sugarcoated how difficult the road to success was, either for himself, or the company he founded more than 30 years ago.\u00a0<\/p>\n

When Nvidia started in 1993, Huang, along with co-founders Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, began with an idea of creating chips that would enable realistic 3D graphics on personal computers<\/a>\u2014or graphic processing units, specifically for video games.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But speaking at the Fortune<\/em> Brainstorm Tech conference in 2018<\/a>, Huang told audience members that he always believed GPUs could have broader applications in society, otherwise there would have been \u201cno point in starting a company.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s incredibly hard to start a company; it\u2019s incredibly hard to start a business,\u201d Huang said at the conference.<\/a> \u201cThe depth of despair, the suffering, the torture\u2014balanced by the great joy of doing something the world has never done before\u2014is beyond words can describe. So unless you believe you\u2019re going to make a real contribution to society it\u2019s going to be incredibly hard to start that journey.\u201d<\/p>\n

The reason Nvidia got its start in gaming, Haung said, was that video games were the only area in technology where the computational potential was incredibly advanced, but there was also an enormous demand among consumers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Once they realized the potential scale of GPU servers, Huang said they were able to move into workstations, supercomputers, self-driving cars, and ultimately A.I. But all of that was only possible because of PC gaming.<\/p>\n

\u201c3D graphics and video games are the engine of innovation in our company, the engine of [research and development] scale,\u201d he said at the conference.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Huang has made other, more recent comments that paint a picture of entrepreneurship that is far from idyllic.\u00a0<\/p>\n

During an interview on a podcast in the fall of 2023<\/a>, Huang was asked what kind of company he would think about starting if he could turn back the clock 30 years, and the engineer-turned-executive had a somewhat surprising response.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI wouldn\u2019t do it,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we realized the pain and suffering [involved] and just how vulnerable you\u2019re going to feel, the challenges that you\u2019re going to endure, the embarrassment and the shame, and the list of all the things that go wrong\u2014I don\u2019t think anybody would start a company. Nobody in their right mind would do it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n