Jensen Huang: evaluation

Transcript context

…I guess CUDA was a rebirth of UDA, but understanding this now, UDA going all the way back, it really is all the way back to all the chips you’ve ever made. Yeah. In fact, UDA goes all the way back to all of our chips today. For the record, I didn’t help any of the founding CEOs that are listening. I got to tell you while you were asking that question what lessons would I impart? I don’t know. The characteristics of successful companies and successful CEOs (I think) are fairly well-described. There are a whole bunch of them. I just think starting successful companies is insanely hard. It’s just insanely hard. When I see these amazing companies getting built I have nothing but admiration and respect because I just know that it’s insanely hard. I think that everybody did many similar things. There are some good, smart things that people do. There are some dumb things that you can do. But you could do all the right smart things and still fail. You could do a whole bunch of dumb things—I did many of them—and still succeed. Obviously, that’s not exactly right. I think skills are the things that you can learn along the way, but at important moments, certain circumstances have to come together. I do think that the market has to be one of the agents to help you succeed. It’s not enough, obviously, because a lot of people still fail. Do you remember any moments in Nvidia’s history where you’re like, oh, we made a bunch of wrong decisions, but somehow we got saved? Because it takes the sum of all the luck and all the skill in order to succeed.…

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