How Hard Can It Be?
This week, my friend Andrew shared a fascinating interview with me.
It’s a dialogue with the CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang and the Acquired.fm show hosts. Nvidia is currently the third biggest company on the planet with a valuation of around $3 trillion. It makes the chips that are powering much of the AI revolution.
Nvidia’s revenue for 2024 is estimated to be $100 billion. To put that in perspective, it’s about one-quarter of South Africa’s projected gross domestic product.
One would be excused for expecting the CEO to be a little cocky after achieving such stellar results. After all, the little startup that Huang conceived in an American diner in 1993 has made him one of the top twenty richest people in the world.
Except, Jensen Huang is not cocky at all. His self-awareness in the interview is remarkable.
At one point, the show hosts ask how Huang would approach things if he could go back in time to the beginning.
This is how he responds:
I wouldn’t do it. The reason for that is really quite simple. It’s so hard. Building a company and 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 realised 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. I think that that’s the superpower of an entrepreneur. They don’t know how hard it is, and they only ask themselves how hard can it be? To this day, I trick my brain into thinking, how hard can it be?
Crazy, hey?
This is the journey we have chosen, as entrepreneurs.
In just a few words, the founder of Nvidia is underpinning exactly why it’s so important for us to become increasingly resilient, robust and antifragile.
Most of us have embarked on this brutal path either because we are unemployed or unemployable **.
Most of us are responding to a calling or reacting to a crisis. A mundane job prospect will usually not stand in our way.
Our doodles turn into side hustles. Soon, our side hustles turn into main hustles.
It’s inevitable. It’s daring. It’s beautiful.
It’s also terrifying.
Consider that Nvidia nearly went bankrupt three times between 1993 and 1997.
Their first chip, the NV1, developed in 1995, failed.
They scrapped plans for their second chip, the NV2, midway through development.
So, how did Huang and his co-founders survive those dark days?
In the Acquired podcast, Huang talks openly about the difficult discussions he had with his board in the mid-nineties. Around that time Huang famously informed his board, “We’re only 30 days from going out of business.”
Somehow, Huang made a series of crucial decisions. Together with his team, he scrapped, hustled, cajoled and connived his way out of bankruptcy to being (for a brief time earlier in 2024) the most valuable company in the world.
The mindset required by entrepreneurs is what Stanford Business School Professor Jim Collins, calls the Stockdale Paradox.
Collins writes about our ability to confront the brutal facts, but never give up hope.
We need to be both realistic and idealistic at the same time.
This entrepreneurial mindset is what we’re talking about at our October event, Antifragile, with Dr Marc Rogatschnig and Sarah Rice.
Clearly, the topic is hitting a nerve.
One question that is asked often in our events and programme cohorts: “Is it worth it?”
Is it worth risking everything for the entrepreneurial calling?
Sometimes, the answer is no.
We have seen some lives too many lives torn apart by the relentless grind of starting, scaling and (perhaps) selling their businesses. We cannot pretend that this journey is something that everyone should embark upon.
At other times, it is most definitely worth it.
For example, Andrew (who sent me the podcast link) started his company in his friend Shane’s garage in 2004.
Sixteen years later, they sold it for an estimated R460m million.
And Nvidia?
Consider the case of Chris Malachowsky, one of Nvidia’s co-founders, who met with Huang at that diner back in 1993. He invested $40,000 of his own money to help get Nvidia off the ground.
As of recent reports, Malachowsky's net worth is estimated to be in the range of $1-2 billion. This makes his initial $40,000 investment one of the most successful in tech history.
Malachowski left Nvidia after only serving a decade in the business. Unlike Huang, he chose a somewhat less turbulent life.
Except in Malachowski’s case, he has a few billion dollars to smooth out any bumps.
How hard can it be?
