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Another lesson is to try to be incredibly lucky. I'm not suggesting this is all luck, Nvidia has executed very well and their early investments in programmable

Another lesson is to try to be incredibly lucky. I'm not suggesting this is all luck, Nvidia has executed very well and their early investments in programmable GPUs really paid off as a result, but a lot of their insane valuation now is due to crypto and then LLMs which are basically two back to back once in lifetime goldrushes where Nvidia happened to be the best positioned shovel seller. You can run a company well to prepare to ride such a wave should it appear, but you've also got to be born with horseshoes up your ass for this to work out as well as it has for Nvidia

hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
The other thing I find interesting is that Jensen Huang has said that he wouldn't do it all over again. That is, knowing how hard it is now to build a startup, he wouldn't do it again. I find this pretty crazy given that (at least for now) NVidia is the most successful startup of all time. Imagine the millions of other entrepreneurs, many of whom worked just as hard, who completely failed in the process.
- pllbnk 1y ago
  There's almost nothing interesting that any CEO says publicly, including this. They're celebrities; they'll say anything that helps them get higher in the celebrity popularity contest even if they're contradicting themselves during every other interview.
SeanAnderson 1y ago
One of my favorite quotes is, "Luck is when preparation meets opportunity" :)
- Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  Yes but opportunities are random. I recently read in the https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44495428 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44495428 (it is absolutely good article) and the first comment there which I wanted to paste here is:- It's so, so , so hard to walk the line between persistence (which leads to glory) and stubbornness (which leads to more time following already wasted time.) -Bruce_511 (HN) So sure preparation meets opportunity but don't be stubborn just cause you feel like you are prepared. Work hard but honestly, if you walk the line like bruce said (then persistence will result in you doing the hard work too tbh that's my philosophy right now) So Everybody just need to figure out this line b/w stubborness and persistance especially in the startup world. But I think we need a book written on this topic tbh, any suggestions anybody?
  - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
    >Yes but opportunities are random. Not random, but always in the places where the big and easy to get money is. You're not gonna get much VC funding in Botswana or Bangladesh no matter how good your idea is and how smart you are. That's why so many sacrifice everything to go live in the bay area even if it's an overpriced shithole full of homeless, drug addicts and feces.
- Mars008 1y ago
  AMD, Intel, IBM,.. were just as lucky, and what?
Nifty3929 1y ago
Satoshi =? Jensen
chubot 1y ago
I may concede it's "luck" to start a company in computing, rather than another industry. All the $1T+ companies seem to be in computing -- if you go into fossil fuels or real estate, you're not going to get to $1T apparently! BUT one thing I didn't know was that, from the very beginning, Nvidia was not a graphics or gaming company. In college, I thought of them as the company that made graphics cards. Rather, they were looking for applications of fundamental semiconductor technology, and gaming turned out to be the most promising one at the time. I learned that from one of the Acquired podcasts; it might have been this one: https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/nvidia-the-gpu-company-1993-2006 https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/nvidia-the-gpu-company-1993... I'd say it's analogous to Amazon -- Jeff Bezos was actually not interested in books, per se. He was interested in Internet retail, because he saw a rocket that was taking off. The "meta" was that he understood that an online bookstore could inherently have more selection than a physical bookstore. And that he could build this vertical slice business, and expand from there. This strategy succeeded wildly, and he was misunderstood for a long time. Jensen said something like "Intel and Nvidia are like Tom and Jerry -- whenever I see Intel in a market, I pick up my chips and run !!!" So crypto and AI were applications of semiconductors that Intel was not occupying. If you wanted to make money in semiconductors 2000-2015, you would probably go for desktops, servers, phones. But Jensen explicitly understood that his smaller company had to find other markets. So he made a bet, that turned out to be correct. From that perspective, I would not call it luck. All the big companies have been lucky, to some extent, but they haven't become as big as Nvidia.

hn_throwaway_99 1y ago

The other thing I find interesting is that Jensen Huang has said that he wouldn't do it all over again. That is, knowing how hard it is now to build a startup, he wouldn't do it again. I find this pretty crazy given that (at least for now) NVidia is the most successful startup of all time. Imagine the millions of other entrepreneurs, many of whom worked just as hard, who completely failed in the process.

pllbnk 1y ago
There's almost nothing interesting that any CEO says publicly, including this. They're celebrities; they'll say anything that helps them get higher in the celebrity popularity contest even if they're contradicting themselves during every other interview.

SeanAnderson 1y ago

One of my favorite quotes is, "Luck is when preparation meets opportunity" :)

Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
Yes but opportunities are random. I recently read in the https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44495428 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44495428 (it is absolutely good article) and the first comment there which I wanted to paste here is:- It's so, so , so hard to walk the line between persistence (which leads to glory) and stubbornness (which leads to more time following already wasted time.) -Bruce_511 (HN) So sure preparation meets opportunity but don't be stubborn just cause you feel like you are prepared. Work hard but honestly, if you walk the line like bruce said (then persistence will result in you doing the hard work too tbh that's my philosophy right now) So Everybody just need to figure out this line b/w stubborness and persistance especially in the startup world. But I think we need a book written on this topic tbh, any suggestions anybody?
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  >Yes but opportunities are random. Not random, but always in the places where the big and easy to get money is. You're not gonna get much VC funding in Botswana or Bangladesh no matter how good your idea is and how smart you are. That's why so many sacrifice everything to go live in the bay area even if it's an overpriced shithole full of homeless, drug addicts and feces.
Mars008 1y ago
AMD, Intel, IBM,.. were just as lucky, and what?

Nifty3929 1y ago

Satoshi =? Jensen

chubot 1y ago

I may concede it's "luck" to start a company in computing, rather than another industry. All the $1T+ companies seem to be in computing -- if you go into fossil fuels or real estate, you're not going to get to $1T apparently! BUT one thing I didn't know was that, from the very beginning, Nvidia was not a graphics or gaming company. In college, I thought of them as the company that made graphics cards. Rather, they were looking for applications of fundamental semiconductor technology, and gaming turned out to be the most promising one at the time. I learned that from one of the Acquired podcasts; it might have been this one: https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/nvidia-the-gpu-company-1993-2006 https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/nvidia-the-gpu-company-1993... I'd say it's analogous to Amazon -- Jeff Bezos was actually not interested in books, per se. He was interested in Internet retail, because he saw a rocket that was taking off. The "meta" was that he understood that an online bookstore could inherently have more selection than a physical bookstore. And that he could build this vertical slice business, and expand from there. This strategy succeeded wildly, and he was misunderstood for a long time. Jensen said something like "Intel and Nvidia are like Tom and Jerry -- whenever I see Intel in a market, I pick up my chips and run !!!" So crypto and AI were applications of semiconductors that Intel was not occupying. If you wanted to make money in semiconductors 2000-2015, you would probably go for desktops, servers, phones. But Jensen explicitly understood that his smaller company had to find other markets. So he made a bet, that turned out to be correct. From that perspective, I would not call it luck. All the big companies have been lucky, to some extent, but they haven't become as big as Nvidia.