Jensen Huang’s 22-year-old video captures Nvidia’s success story: ‘I don’t need to change the world overnight’
Nvidia wasn’t an overnight success. And Jensen Huang knew this from the very beginning.
An old video of Nvidia CEO from 2003 surfaced on social media; Here Jensen Huang is heard saying that he doesn’t want to change the world “overnight”.
Speaking at the Stanford Technology Ventures Program “The Importance of Execution” in January 2003, Huang said, “I don’t need to change the world overnight.”
“I’m going to change the world in the next 50 years. I don’t need to create a great product overnight. I just need to create a winning product,” he said.
foosball analogy
Jensen Huang used a comparison to a pinball game to describe a successful business; this analogy has since become popular among fans.
“And the point of winning is so you can play again. It’s just like pinball, okay? If you can play well enough to get another game, you can be there for a long time,” he said.
Nvidia CEO, who is now among the richest people in the world, said the key to sustaining a long-term business is to deliver a successful product.
“Most companies actually need to understand that it’s a long road and you’re not going to be able to produce the perfect product. So once you do that, you limit the scope of the project.”
Huang suggested the perfect way to achieve success.
“You keep the project simple now. You have a long-term vision, but your product definition is pretty simple. You execute it flawlessly because your employees can now execute a simple plan flawlessly and you come back and do it again,” he said.
Nvidia’s rise to power
Nvidia’s meteoric rise over the past few years is the story of decades of strategic foresight, from gaming graphics card developer to supplier of the most crucial components in the AI revolution.
Founded during a meal at Denny’s in 1993, Nvidia was a mediocre chip maker in an industry once dominated by companies like Intel and Dell.
While Nvidia started to gain popularity thanks to its ability to produce custom GPU chips, Intel dominated the chip market.
But the pandemic changed everything in 2020, when things went remote and companies led by ChatGPT maker OpenAI realized how big AI could be in the future.
And these companies leveraged Nvidia to support their technology, fueling its meteoric rise.
Since then, Nvidia has made history. Months after surpassing $4 trillion, it became the first company in history to reach a market capitalization of $5 trillion, as in October.
