Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, is the character of the moment in the world of technology. Known for his entrepreneurial spirit and ability to innovate, Huang was named by the prestigious Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of 2024, after having received the same recognition already in 2021. From his arrival in the United States to becoming a globally recognized leader, Huang has traveled a path marked by challenges and successes.
Nvidia, founded by Huang in 1993, quickly became a leading force in the technology industry, with a valuation reaching $2 trillion. Nvidia’s innovations and technological advancements in computer chips fueled what we know today as the artificial intelligence revolutionpushing this technology well beyond the frontier of progress.
Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Meta and friend of Huang, traced his profile in Time. “I have always admired leaders who have the grit and determination to stay true to their vision for long periods of time. Jensen Huang is the clear tech industry leader in this regard. He began by believing in creating a powerful, parallelizable computing system to deliver exceptional, inspiring graphics and gaming experiences. While most of the industry was focused on making mobile devices, he recognized that providing the most powerful chips would unlock the next wave of innovation. Today, most artificial intelligence models, from LLMs (Large Language Models like ChatGpt’s, for example) to autonomous driving systems and applications in the fields of science and healthcare, are based on Nvidia hardware. It’s an amazing testament to Jensen’s ability to evolve. But not only that, Jensen also took the time to help me and other founders when we faced challenges. I deeply appreciate everything he has done for our industry“.
Despite the successes, Jensen Huang is managed to maintain a critical vision of his own path which gradually transformed him, interview after interview, even into a formidable communicator and showman.
The most curious thing to hear is that Jensen Huang he wouldn’t follow the same path if he could go back 30 years. In an interview with Acquired it is the entrepreneur himself who says that he would not make the same choices again. “Building Nvidia turned out to be a million times harder than I expected,” the Nvidia CEO told interviewers. Huang suggests that there is something inside him (and other entrepreneurs), a kind of “superpower” that allows you to tackle enormous tasks that others consider impossible with enormous sacrifices.
“To all of you Stanford students, I wish abundant doses of pain and suffering“, this is one of the fundamental messages that Jensen Huang sent to the students of Stanford University, the university where he himself trained. “Greatness comes not from intelligence but from character. And character is formed in people who have suffered. Among these “sufferings” there is above all failure. One of my big advantages is that I have very low expectations,” concluded Huang during the event.