NVIDIA: Jensen Huang. From near collapse to becoming the world’s biggest company

25:50And then we're going to fabrication. I mean, did anybody say this is not a good idea? It was the only idea we had. And I got to tell you, I didn't remember anybody objecting to it. But I also didn't remember asking too many people whether they objected to it. You know, I think smart engineers reason about things. I guess we always knew it was existential. We always knew we were going out of business. But I just remember us being super calm, super focused. and we just step by step by step reasoned that it was the only chance for us to be. That had to work. It had to be. This is, I don't know if it's apocryphal, but I think it's true.

26:31You are known to say at that time, our company is 30 days away from going out of business. And it kind of became a meme and a mantra for a while, but it was true. I mean, you were, so this had to work. This thing had to work. And we, I'm not revealing any secrets. It did work. It did actually work. But enough to save the company. Yeah, good enough to save the company. When we come back in just a moment, Jensen identifies a whole new market for NVIDIA, a market that does not yet exist. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This.

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30:31Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's the late 1990s and NVIDIA has escaped extinction by using an unproven machine to test its latest chip. And as it turns out, that new chip, the Reva 128, is a hit, which means the company can now write its next chapter. We're 100 % focused on the gaming industry. We were the first computer graphics company ever created to focus on one application industry fully, which was video games. Yeah. So the way we saw the world, that the chip is important, but ultimately what makes people happy and what really creates industries, is the applications that were on top of the chips that make new things possible, recognizing the importance of application developers or game developers so that we can help them realize the full potential of our chip while we make their application as wonderful as possible.

31:32I want to just pivot for a second because here you are, you're still a young guy, in your late 30s, mid-late 30s, running a company. It's the first time you are the CEO of a company. It's not like you have any management training or you need to go to business school, which is very normal, right? And you kind of had to teach yourself because you have and had a reputation for being like a hard-ass, yelling at people, demanding excellence, and really just tearing into people when you feel like they didn't do great work. But I read that you stumbled upon this book by Christian Claytonson. Clayton Christensen, forgive me, he's no longer alive, Harvard School of Business, called The Innovator's Silema.

32:11Very important book. And it had a huge impact on you. Like, you read this book, because he has this example of like Honda, they were making motor scooters for kids, and no one was paying attention to them. And so when they started making cars, they had this advantage, because they could really scale quickly and get out there. And you read this book, and you were inspired by it. What do you remember about that book that you thought, that's it. This is the thing that I need to think about. The single most important thing about technology is the moment it becomes good enough, when you over-serve the market, you're ready for disruption.

32:47In fact, at the NVIDIA journey, every single step of the way, we were always the disruptor. So I think the large lesson of Clay Christensen is really about disruption and how technology emerges out of thin air that apparently looks like toys but went off to disrupt large markets. If you looked at NVIDIA's Reaver 128, the quality of it was okay, but it was good enough that it disrupted an entire market. If you looked at NVIDIA's first GPU that was designed for high-performance computing, it was not perfect, but it was good enough. And so example after example after example, the way that we went off to revolutionize large industries Initially, it looks a little toyish, but the outcome has always been the same.

33:38All right. So I want to jump ahead a little because in the late 90s, NVIDIA developed a new technology called parallel computing. And this basically gave your chips the ability to perform multiple calculations at the same time, multiple tasks, right? But this was another gamble because I think a lot of other companies had tried and failed to produce parallel computing chips, right? During that time, there were all kinds of different processors being created. And people were trying to come up with new ways of doing computation. And then we realized that computer graphics, if it was just beautiful, but the world was static, it was hard to create beautiful and immersive worlds.

34:22And so you really need to find a way to bring physics into that virtual world so that, you know, waters would flow and, you know, leaves would blow in the wind and explosions would look like explosions. And so we would try to use the processor, which was incredibly parallel, to express, you know, the types of algorithms that represent real-time physics today. And so that was really the beginning of our journey down that world of general purpose programmability. Meanwhile, scientists around the world noticed that NVIDIA's processors were super powerful. Lots and lots. You could do multiple things.

35:00Lots, yeah. Because you were thinking, okay, this could be used by game designers, maybe in the film industry, which it eventually would be. But still, it was like you were thinking beyond people playing video games on their consoles or on their PCs. We would use it for fluid dynamics and image processing and particle physics. And one of the areas that really caught my eye was the whole field of inverse physics or imaging. And two doctors at Mass General were using our graphics chips to do CT reconstruction. And it was during that time other types of techniques for general purpose computing was coming along, which ultimately led to what we now call CUDA.

35:41All right, so let's jump into this because you launched this project called CUDA or C-U-D-A in roughly 2006. And to put this in very basic terms, CUDA is this platform that makes your graphics chips a lot more versatile. And originally, you thought this would be great for scientists and researchers who had to process tons of data. But meantime, your customers were gamers. And so they were getting these really sophisticated chips that they didn't really need or use, right? Yeah. And so you just go back to the inspiration that we had at the time that it could be used for a whole bunch of other types of general purpose computation, parallel computing nature computation.

36:25And image processing could be one of them. You know, there's a whole bunch of them in early experimentation. But none of that paid the bills. Most of those applications were in universities, and the researchers didn't buy too many of them to justify it. And so the only thing that really paid the bills was video games. You understood that the GPU could do something, lots of things, but that we just had not imagined those things yet. Yeah, we knew of some things. And during that time, I was constantly looking for algorithms that required parallel computing. I was always looking for algorithms that somehow only ran on supercomputers.

37:05But if we could just figure out a way to bring it into a personal computer, its exposure or its ability to reach more people could be incredible. Constantly looking for things like that. I'm trying to understand, because basically from 2006 to 2012, your stock price was just either collapsing at times or wasn't moving. You had to refund hundreds of millions of dollars to people who didn't like the processors. And still there was this conviction in continuing down this path, this CUDA path, because you and the people around you believed that there was something there that you couldn't really know exactly what it was.

37:48But it was going to be something, so let's keep investing in this. And I'm trying to get into just this space of how you were dealing with, you know, you're a publicly traded company. Your stock price was terrible. You probably had a lot of pressure from investors. What made you and the people that you worked with say, we're going to keep our heads down and keep going? Because it was a long time. We're talking six, seven, eight years on this thing that nobody understood and had zero, not zero, but very little commercial success. Well, that's when CEOs had to be CEOs. We believed our first principles.

38:26This should be quite useful. And I had to believe that it's quite useful. Now the question is, what's the strategy for creating this new architecture for computing that everybody would be able to enjoy? And the problem with computer architectures is this chicken or the egg problem. Let's say you created a brand new architecture. It's incredible. It's the most amazing thing in the world. but computers are built to run software. And if your install base is not large enough, it doesn't attract software developers because developers want to program on large install-based computers like iPhone and PC.

39:04And so the problem is, even though we believed that this architecture was going to be incredible, that CUDA was going to be everywhere or could be everywhere, how do you get it everywhere? And if you don't get it everywhere, how do you attract the developer? And if you had no developers, who would write the killer app. And if there was no killer app, then why would people buy it? And so the answer was very simple. It was literally sitting in front of us. And it just required enormous sacrifice. The answer was, let's use GeForce, which is the GPU that is now everywhere in the world used for playing video games.

39:39And let's have GeForce carry on its back Cuda to every single computer in the world. Now, of course, by doing so, our gross margins would go from bad to horrible. Okay, well, let's get past that. Let's not worry about the fact that our - It's going to be years. I know. Well, you never think that it's, nobody ever thinks it's that long. And I thought it was going to be next year, it's going to be okay. And the next year is going to be okay. And next year is going to be okay. But nonetheless, the cost was incredible in carrying CUDA and we couldn't charge anybody for it. And so we gave it away. Meanwhile, we started up programs to reach out to every single university.

40:19We evangelized CUDA. We flew everywhere around the world to pitch CUDA whenever you can. Meanwhile, G-Forces were taking CUDA out to the world. And so the hope was that someday some software company or some researcher or hopefully a lot of them eventually would know how to use CUDA. And they would take advantage of it because it's sitting right there on G-Force. Was there ever any thought in your mind that maybe we're too early? We might be the ones who actually make this revolutionary technology, but we might not be the ones to bring it to the promised land. Yeah, all the time. But that's, you know, then there was 900 other smart strategies and, you know, the list of new ideas that we came up with to keep the company alive and, you know, successful for just another few more days.

41:11and it was countless. And so you're solving the problem both in making sure that you stay alive long enough to proliferate this technology everywhere, looking for every possible way. You're making it easier and easier for people to use this technology. You're teaching people to do it. You're talking to software developers and you're saying, hey, you know that imaging software that you had? Maybe Photoshop, for example, or some video imaging system for broadcast. Can we modify that so that it runs on CUDA? And we're live, I mean, but were enough people adopting it to make it seem viable? GeForce kept the lights on and just didn't do it very well.

41:51You know, we were always under pressure because unlike our competitors, they didn't have to carry CUDA on its back. GeForce carried CUDA on its back for literally 25 years now. And people were using this product and not even knowing what it could do. Not one day. Yeah. It was just all sitting there except for the scientists, except for researchers and universities that heard about CUDA and said, oh, all you have to do is go buy GeForce? But then at this point, I mean, everything was about to change for NVIDIA because in the early 2010s, a group of researchers in Toronto bought two NVIDIA gaming GPUs or G-forces.

42:31They plugged them into a computer in a bedroom and then they trained a neural network to recognize images way better than any computer had ever done before. And this was essentially the beginning of the AI boom, right? So when you found out about that, what do you remember? I mean, do you remember thinking, this is what we've been waiting for for 15 years? Well, at that time, several different groups reached out to us to ask us for help on using CUDA to accelerate deep learning. And the reason for that was because there was a contest coming up for computer vision called ImageNet. And they were all developing similar techniques that wanted to use CUDA.

43:14Instead of using CPUs, which would have taken thousands of CPUs. CPU is one task at a time. One task at a time. And they could use our GPUs, just a few GPUs, maybe a couple of them, running simultaneously on CUDA. Maybe they could train these deep learning models a lot faster and a lot more cost effectively. And so they reached out all at the same time. And the leap over previous generation algorithms were so significant, it really caught my eye. And so we asked ourselves, you know, what is this thing about? and where can it go from here? What is the implication to our chips? What's the implication to computers?

43:51And so, like we do with everything, you know, reason about the so what's, which led to a lot of other good decisions. It was a weekend, I guess, in 2013, where you sent a note out and essentially said, we're now an AI company. Like, Friday, you were focused on the gaming. I mean, because the majority of your business was still gaming, maybe people who are doing 3D animation and doing graphics for films. That was a pretty significant source of your customer base. But now you are saying, well, we are becoming a different company. Yeah, and the process kind of goes like what I was explaining earlier.

44:31As I do with everything, I break things down to first principles. And you ask yourself, what did I learn? Why is it impactful? What are the foundations of this technology that made it effective? Can it do more than this? How far can this algorithm go? What is the implication to our computer industry? So you just got to go through all of that. You know, it's no different than somebody writing a business plan about something, except, you know, this is kind of how my brain's wired for almost everything. I'm good at connecting dots, good at system thinking. and I came to the conclusion that this could be a really significant future direction for the company.

45:11And long before I would send out an email that declares something, I had already, through tens of engagements with different groups, each one of the groups have already been brought along. So by the time that I sent an email to the company integrating everything, everybody's already been brought along. And so it just kind of tends to be my management style. But at some point, I will, you know, set a direction for the company. I'm curious, again, about stress management and conviction. Like, I wonder how you personally dealt with that. I mean, there were periods of time where you and obviously other people believe in the potential of this thing.

45:56Like the capacity is going to be enormous, but we just have to stay the course and nothing is really moving for a while. I mean, it's going to take a long time, but you don't know that. You don't have a crystal ball. I mean, are you just comfortable with that level of stress? Or, I mean, do you feel – because you don't strike me as somebody who was saying, we're going to be the biggest company. We're going to be the masters of – Not going out of business is always high on my list. Yeah. Yeah. Showing up in life matters a lot. Showing up every single day matters a lot. Guy, I guess to me it's not that complicated.

46:36There's a lot of unknowns. And being a CEO, you're dealing with mostly unknowns. And I'm very comfortable with unknowns. But the first thing you have to do is, to the best of your ability, reason about what it is that we're doing and what do we believe in. I deeply believed. And because I deeply believe it, I help everybody else believe it. And I really believe they believed it. And then, of course, we don't want to dedicate our lives to go work on something that the world already have. I don't want our company working on things to capture share from somebody. They built a market. We want to take their share.

47:10And so let's go and fight to the bitter end. And when your share point goes up by a point, you celebrate with joy. I mean, I just don't find any joy in any of that. That wasn't interesting. It was about going in a completely different direction. Creating something that's really, really hard. And I believe if it works, it would make such an extraordinary impact. It was not hard to stay the course. It would have been harder to give up. You know, I think that because you believe so deeply in something, it's already manifested fully in my head. I imagine everybody using it. G-Forces carried it to everybody's computer.

47:45Everybody has CUDA inside their PC. And so the question is not to me whether we would succeed. The only question is when and who is going to be their first application. When we come back in just a moment, NVIDIA becomes a major player on the world stage. And Jensen reflects on the future of AI and on his own reluctance to reflect on himself. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This.

48:34Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2013, and NVIDIA is now pivoting away from making chips for gaming to making chips for AI. And as the technology takes off, NVIDIA starts to soar right along with it. And I'm going to jump ahead to the part of the story that's familiar to all of us because we've all lived it. By 2022, ChatGPT and Claude start to transform the workplace in our daily lives. Massive data centers go up around the world, and most of them are full of NVIDIA chips. NVIDIA becomes the biggest company in the world and has as much influence on world affairs as some countries, maybe most countries.

49:17But just to state the obvious here, a lot of that can feel kind of disconcerting. You know, you're well aware of lots of people who have a lot of worry about this. I mean, Jeffrey Hinton, one of the earliest users of your chief use to train these networks. They've signed letters saying, you know, there's a famous letter came out May of 2023 saying, look, to quote, of mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war, signed by Bill Gates and Sam Alpin and Dario Amadei and many, many others. You didn't sign this letter and you have been really clear that you are not worried about it.

49:58You think a lot of this is alarmism, a lot of the conversation around AI and how it's going to take over our jobs and can manipulate all kinds of things. why do you think the people who are making those warnings wrong yeah i think the first thing that everybody should do is to take the science fiction and the hollywood versions of artificial intelligence and set that aside and come back to a sensible understanding of what a computer is it's computers it's software it is not conscious having said all that i think we all everybody Everybody wants the same thing, that the technology evolves in a safe way.

50:44I am worried about it. And so the question is, how do you channel your worry? What are you worried about? Well, we have to build the technology safely. And so could you imagine if the auto industry every single day told you that the car is going to kill lots and lots of people? It's their job to make the car safer. Yeah. Channel their worry towards making the car safer. I don't think it's helpful. for the airline industry to tell you that every single day if the plane fails, it would crash out of the sky. I think all of those narratives are not helpful. But they're coming from the people who are making some of this technology.

51:22I guess I've got a different perspective on why it is that they're doing that. Maybe it's because they want the world to realize the technology they invented was so powerful. It's a celebration of their own achievements. Maybe they are genuinely scared themselves and that they believe that only they can create a technology and keep it safe, ignoring the fact that there are millions of innovators around the world who are thinking about AI safety, AI security, and building technology for AI safety and AI security. There were even attitudes that we had to slow down AI innovation, which I believe is exactly the opposite.

52:04We had to speed up AI innovation because through innovation, we can make the technology safer, more secure. And obviously, it's proven to be true. The fact of the matter is the AI technology of today is more grounded on truth. It hallucinates less. It lies less. And all of that technology needed to be invented. And so my single greatest worry is that the United States doesn't take advantage of the technology because we scared everybody. What do you mean? Right now, the sentiment for AI in the United States is lower than most countries. Because the message is it's going to take your job. It's going to take your job.

52:43It's going to be existential threat. It's going to go into a singularity and it'll be the end of the world. And you think that conversation is only happening here or in the West? Oh, by far. By far. I travel the world by far. In the West, it's really out of control. And I think we're doing ourselves a disservice. Let me give you an example. So a decade ago, somebody said, listen, the first profession that's going to be wiped out is radiology. Yeah. And the reason for that is because the first model that was invented was used for computer vision. Computer vision is used, would be trained to read radiology scans better than any human scan.

53:18And therefore, no radiologist would be necessary. Well, it turns out they were absolutely right, 100 % right. AI has now completely revolutionized radiology. Every single radiologist uses AI to study the scans. It does it incredibly fast, incredibly accurately, better than a human can. However, radiologists' demand has gone up. The number of patients that we're able to take care of, the number of scans has now grown. Because it's cheaper. Because it's cheaper and faster, and therefore you want to do more scans so that you can do a better job diagnosing disease. What is fundamentally missed is that a job has a purpose and a task.

53:57The task is to study the radiology, the scans. But the purpose is to diagnose disease. Turns out hospitals are now seeing more patients, generating more revenues, which enables them to support more patients and they need to hire more radiologists. Now, where's the harm? The harm could be that by well-known experts declaring the end of an entire profession, who's going to go into radiology? So young people who wanted to be in radiology decided that this profession is completely obsolete and therefore don't come in. What happens? The world doesn't have enough radiologists. As a result, we've brought harm.

54:38So you're saying the conversation we're having here is very binary in the United States. It's like we're saying it's going to be this or this. And so the argument you're making is that there's a lack of imagination. So, for example, you know, I've got a son who's going to go to college next year, right? And so a lot of the conversation is what are these kids going to do in five years? What are the jobs going to be? I mean if law firms are using AI for discovery, if consulting firms are using AI for, you know, what an entry-level job would be if finance firms, et cetera, et cetera. Would you argue that that's a lack of imagination, that we actually are reaching those conclusions because we can't think beyond that scenario?

55:16Partly. I believe the opportunities, the potential for a new college grad in computer science or computer engineering or software engineering or chip design today is far, far greater than the opportunities and potential when I came out of school. The tools they have to work with is a billion times more capable. It's super highly automated already today. And yet they're busier than ever. And the reason for that is because we have ideas of the things that we want to build that we didn't conceive of at the time without the tools that we have. AI is going to help this next generation of new college grads achieve greater things, build greater things, not take their jobs.

55:57For us to scare them into not even want to go to college, not even want to be a computer scientist, is a disservice to society. You're not saving anybody. You're talking a whole bunch of people out of professions that we need in the future. And that conversation is not happening in China? They're not buying it. They're just not buying it. For me, the most harmful thing we could do to our society, our closest families, is to scare everybody so that we don't benefit in the next several decades the other countries will. We can't allow that to happen. Do you think that there is a possibility that in 10 years from now, NVIDIA will have an order of magnitude more employees?

56:43Before AI or after AI, I don't think it would make any difference. The difference is that with AI, along with my employees, we're going to have hundreds, thousands of AI assistants helping them doing amazing things. And so our expectations of our company will be different. Things that take 10 years, I think it'll take one year. And so is that good or bad? It's thrilling. It's exhilarating, I think. Yeah. You know, there's just so much of the universe that we don't understand. For the first time in history, we have the technology to do so. We will do in the next several decades what it took humanity several hundred years to achieve.

57:24Well, as a dad of two boys, I hope you're right. Yeah, I expect to be. I know that you don't like to talk about speculation. But I read an excerpt from a new book that's coming out. It's called Defending Taiwan by a writer named Ake Freeman. And he paints a scenario of a possible conflict, hot conflict, where, you know, all of a sudden Taiwan is somehow invaded or occupied, whatever you want to call it, right? And we've seen what, you know, we've got some challenges geopolitically, right? I mean, what part of that, let's just say that scenario is not realistic. that it would be destructive for China as well because their economy really depends on the US market.

58:11Does any part of the fact that such a high percentage of advanced chips, not just NVIDIA, but advanced chips are produced in Taiwan, is any part of that, should people be concerned about that at all? We should always have a resilient supply chain. That's part of building a strong company. And a resilient supply chain has diversity and redundancy, but sometimes you don't have the benefit of diversity and redundancy, so you make the best you can. I think there are a lot of conflated questions that are put into that concern. If you ask me, am I concerned about a hot conflict? I'm less concerned than most.

58:56But depending on the actions of the leaders, we may cause the hot conflict. And so I am of the opinion that we all must be more long-term minded if we can. We ought to have a more balanced and nuanced set of policies, not all or nothing. Don't push your adversaries and don't push your competitors to the wall where they have no choice or where there's no cost. to a strategic alternative. And so I think that, you know, in your question, do I believe it? The answer is I don't. Because I believe, can it happen? Of course it can happen everywhere, obviously. However, I believe in the wisdom of the people involved.

59:43What have you had to unlearn as a leader? The bigger this company has gotten and the more experience you've gotten. I mean, you are, you know, known for being hard demanding, hard charging. You demand the best out of people. You have yelled at people, all those things. Would you say those things are still how you manage or have you unlearned some of those things or have you changed some of those things in your style? I don't think people care about style. I think people care about your values and what you care about. So long as you're tough on the same things every time it comes up, so long as the moment that it's over, it's over, and they know that they're safe, you love them, you want them to succeed, this is their life's work, and you want it to be as good as it can be.

1:00:35Everybody knows that I have enough of everything. Whatever it is that anybody thinks they need more of, I've got plenty of it. And yet I work harder than ever. And the reason for that is because I want everything that I have, they have. I want them to see, to realize their dreams. So long as you're pure and high integrity and completely there for them, you could be quite challenging to people. And they know that you're on their side. You have been on the record as basically saying, you've been asked, would you do this again? Would you do this all over again? And I'm sort of paraphrasing, but you said a version of no.

1:01:15That wouldn't do it again. Yeah, no way. Yeah. So can you explain that? I mean, we've sort of have the outlines of all of the troughs, and there were a lot of troughs. Yeah. And I'm trying to even imagine like quarterly. Ends rough. I'm trying to imagine quarterly earning calls in 2007 when your stock price is in the toilet and you're putting all this money. And God, I tell you, it's embarrassing. I'm trying to figure out how you can do that as a publicly traded company, withstand the pressure and, as you say, the embarrassment. It was embarrassing. It was humiliating. You're the only face that everybody hates.

1:01:48Your employees are probably embarrassed for you. Your question about doing it again. You know, most people, I just think they're being dishonest. So let me just tell you why. When somebody asked me, would I do this again? If your question is, knowing how NVIDIA turned out, knowing the contribution we've made to the world, knowing the consequence of the company today, how it impacts so many different industries, all of the benefits that we have accrued as a result of our success. Do I love those things? The answer is yes. But that wasn't the question. You know? The question is, suppose I knew everything then that I now know how hard it is.

1:02:37And all of the pain and suffering and all the embarrassment and humiliation and all the setbacks, and you compress all of that. And you just told that 30-year-old kid, listen, this is going to take a lot longer than you think. However fast you thought your company was going to be successful, it's not going to be anything like that. and you're going to be the person who delivers most of the most horrific financial return news that anybody's ever explained, you know, so on and so forth. You'll be going out of business. You'll be, you know, you have to lay people off. Would you start again? The answer, absolutely not.

1:03:13And so I think a lot of people forget that the pain and suffering necessary, the endurance necessary to do something great is because you're always looking forward and forgetting the past. Yeah. I spend all my time forgetting yesterday. Yeah. In fact, you know, right now as we're talking, it is really quite hard for me to resurface those memories and resurface those feelings. And the reason for that is I spend all of my time, all of my life trying to forget yesterday. Right. So that you can get back on that horse. that's in fact what do they teach athletes forget the last point yeah it's about forgetting yeah i understand i mean the sacrifice right i mean you've got a family like you probably missed a lot of things you probably did 12 hour days seven days a week four years and after you sort of really began to focus on ai it doubled again i mean it was it was all those things all true All true.

1:04:16And during the time when the kids were still young, I was finishing my master's at Stanford. And so I was busy on multiple levels. And yeah, I missed all their karate tournaments. I missed a lot. I missed a lot. I don't know that I've ever asked them what it was like on the receiving side of it. But if you're going to build a company, you need somebody strong and you need somebody amazing like my wife. And she took care of everything. Lori took care of everything. And I don't remember complaining even one time, one nanosecond or even one instance. That's the gift that she gave me. And both kids love NVIDIA to their core.

1:05:01And both work here. Both work here. They both went off in their own careers for a while. And we were lucky to attract them back. And both kids have read every shareholder letter, gone to every shareholder meeting, been to every single conference that I've ever done. I've missed most of theirs. They've been to all of mine. And Spencer's 35, Madison's 34, and the company's 33 years old. And that kind of puts it in perspective. I mean, they've had, you know, NVIDIA in their lives the whole time. And despite the fact that it was gone a lot, you know, they found a way to always love the company. And I'm really lucky.

1:05:42Your story to me is just, it's a story of pressure, right? And now it's like, you know, you did not intend or anticipate that this was going to be the company it is. Its importance is global. And that's a lot of responsibility. yeah and humility is helpful yeah being grounded is helpful not doing this job from a yacht is helpful yeah and the fact that the company was built stone by stone you know with the people that are here everybody's still grounded i think it's helpful you also have to realize that the company also evolved over 30 years you know it recently but this is one of the oldest technology companies in the world.

1:06:36I know that we have talked a lot about you and your life, but the guy who wrote a biography of you and NVIDIA, Stephen Witt, said you were one of the most challenging people to report on because you generally don't like to talk about yourself. Great reservation in doing so, yes. And I wonder, is that because you just find it to be self-aggrandizing or, I don't know, just you find it to be, you know, being self-reflective. I mean, going back to what you said about forgetting everything that happened and just moving forward. Is that part of it? Is it that you don't, I noticed that when you talk about your kids or even your parents and the struggle, sacrifice they make, you do, you know, get a little bit emotional.

1:07:17And I wonder whether part of not liking to talk about yourself is maybe some of that. Yeah, even that, that's a hard question. Why don't I like talking about myself? I didn't do anything by myself. I was fortunate to have two amazing, amazing friends, Chris and Curtis. I'm surrounded by amazing computer scientists here. I made a lot of good decisions. I've made a large number of lesser good decisions. I just don't find any of that to be very special or that interesting. It's just not the way I'm built, you know? The way I'm built is you put me in crisis, all right? The perfect day is we are in trouble, and you just create the worst possible condition.

1:08:04And Jensen, we need you to come and help us think through this. That's my perfect. That's my vibe. Battlefield. I'm a battlefield CEO. And so I think I'm just uncomfortable talking about it, maybe. I don't know why, Guy. I don't know why. Maybe I need therapy, you know, to help me figure it out. Have you had it before? No. No, it was as close as I thought. You don't strike me as, I mean, you talked about your dad. It was as close as it comes. Your dad's 88, right? And he's retired. Yeah. And so you strike me as, you know, that it's sort of moved forward. And maybe your dad also, like, you know, isn't sort of looking back on his life wistfully.

1:08:44He's, I'm sure, proud of you. And maybe some of that comes from there. Would you say that all of those things you mentioned, the people you met and the decisions that were made, the good decisions and the bad ones and the grind and the result now, the most – I mean, you hear it a million times and it's probably still crazy to hear it, the most valuable company in the world, right? I mean, the value of this company is bigger than most countries by far. Do you think that that happened because of all of those elements, all of the people, the hard work, the grind? Or do you think that luck played a bigger role?

1:09:29Several hundred forks in the road in a lifetime, I've largely taken the right one. A combination of good judgment, good values, good friends, informed decisions, critical thinking, and some dose of luck led me to choosing the best of several options. and when I didn't, when the company didn't choose the best options, we created a system that allowed it to self-reflect, to not be so hard on ourselves for making a bad decision that we can quickly adjust and not let the bad decision be fatal. But I think that in the end, the secret to it all, You know, the only thing I've really learned about it all is that the next fork in the road is about to come.

1:10:24And the people that are going to help me make the best decisions likely will be different than the ones that helped me make the last decisions. And I've always felt safe making strategic decisions. I've always felt safe taking risks. Maybe it's because I know that when I get home, Lori's still there. You know? Maybe it's because when I get home, I know the kids are there. Maybe I know that all of our employees are going to be here. Maybe that's as complicated as it is. I wish I could be more technical in explaining how companies are built and run. But I built this one from the first day. And it's much more personal, I frankly believe.

1:11:12You know, because people say it's not business, it's personal. It's always personal. That's Jensen Wong, co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA. And yes, during our interview, he was wearing his signature black leather jacket, black T-shirt, black jeans, black belt, and black shoes. It's what he wears daily. He says it makes his life simpler. It's one less decision he has to think about each day. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And if you're interested in insights, ideas, and lessons from some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, please do sign up for my newsletter at GuyRoz.com or on Substack.

1:11:58This episode was researched and produced by Alex Chung with music composed by Ramtin Arablui. It was edited by Neva Grant. Our engineers were Patrick Murray and Robert Rodriguez. Our production staff also includes Casey Herman, Chris Messini, JC Howard, Catherine Seifer, Kerry Thompson, Carla Estevez, Sam Paulson, John Isabella, and Elaine Coates. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.