Nvidia has not been an overnight success. And Jensen Huang knew that from the very beginning.
An old video of the Nvidia CEO from 2003 has surfaced on social media, where Jensen Huang is heard saying that he did not want to change the world “overnight”.
“I don’t need to change the world overnight," Huang said, speaking at the Stanford Technology Ventures Program “The Importance of Execution" in January 2003.
“I’m going to change the world over the next 50 years. I don’t need to build a killer product overnight. I just need to build a winning product,” he said.
The pinball analogy
Jensen Huang drew comparison to a game of pinball to describe a successful business, an analogy that has since become popular among his fans.
“And the goal of winning is so that you can play again. It’s just like pinball, OK? If you could just play well enough to get another game, you could be there for a long time,” he said.
The Nvidia CEO, who is among the richest people in the world right now, said that the key to sustaining a long-running business is making a successful product.
“Most companies just need to realize that, in fact, this is a long road and that you can’t build that perfect product. So once you do that, then you keep the project’s scope confined.”
Huang suggested the perfect way to execute success.
“You keep the project now simple. You have a long-term vision, but your product definition is rather simple. You execute flawlessly on that because your people now can execute flawlessly on a simple plan, 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 a story of a decades-long strategic foresight, going from a developer of gaming graphics card to the supplier of the most important components in the AI revolution.
Founded in 1993, famously over a meal at Denny's, Nvidia used to be an average chipmaker in the industry that was dominated by the likes of Intel and Dell.
While Nvidia started to gain popularity, thanks to its ability to make specialised GPU chips, Intel dominated the chip market.
But then the pandemic changed everything in 2020, when work became remote and companies led by ChatGPT maker OpenAI realised how big AI can be in the future.
And these companies tapped into Nvidia to back their technology, triggering its meteoric rise.
Since then, Nvidia has created history. It became the first company in history to reach a market capitalisation of $5 trillion in October, months after it breached the $4 trillion mark.
