Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says it’s ‘insanely hard’ to build a business — and ignorance is a ‘superpower’ for founders

• Nvidia’s Jensen Huang explained just how tough it was to build the chipmaker into a world-beater.
• The CEO ticked off the knowledge and people required, and the competition and challenges he faced.
• Startup founders don’t know what they’re signing up for — and that’s a good thing, Huang said.

Starting Nvidia from scratch and growing it into a $3 trillion company took three decades and stretched Jensen Huang to his absolute limit.

“Building a company is insanely hard,” the chipmaker’s cofounder said in a video shown at “Acquired Live” last month and posted online this week.

“The number of things that you have to know. The amazing people that you have to surround yourself with. The adversaries and all the smart things that they’re going to do. The adversities that you’re going to be confronted with over time.”

Huang added that if he were to “take all the challenges, and all the hardship, and all the pain and suffering of the last 32 years, and I would have compressed it into the brain of a 29-year-old, there is no way that that person would have started the company.”

He emphasized that if he knew what Nvidia would ultimately achieve, he would definitely have founded the company. Huang’s aim was to underscore just how tough it is to build a successful business, and highlight why ignorance is a “superpower” for entrepreneurs — they don’t know what they’re getting themselves into.

Growing pains

Nvidia remains the poster child for the artificial intelligence craze. Its stock price has skyrocketed eight-fold since the start of 2023, fueled by frenzied demand for its microchips to power all manner of AI technology.

The company generated about $30 billion of revenue and $17 billion of operating income in the three months to July 28, its latest earnings show. That comfortably exceeds the roughly $27 billion of revenue and $10 billion of net income it brought in during the entirety of its 2022 financial year.

Nvidia stock has surged by almost 180% over the past 12 months and the company is now worth $3 trillion.

Huang — the world’s 13th-richest person with a $107 billion net worth, per Bloomberg — spelled out how difficult it was to reach this point on the Acquired podcast last year.

He said that “building Nvidia turned out to have been a million times harder than I expected it to be, any of us expected it to be. 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.”

Huang added that with his current knowledge, he would balk at starting a company and enduring such hardship: “I think it’s too much — it is just too much.”