Who would have ever thought that Nvidia, a company that makes primarily graphics processing units or GPUs, would ever get so big? For the longest time, this hardware was just another computer component that helped people render high-quality video games and visual editing.
However, today, with the AI boom, GPUs, and consequently, companies like Nvidia, have enjoyed success like no other company has before. In fact, Forbes highlights something astounding. Today, Nvidia is worth more than most countries’ GDPs (97% of all countries to be precise). Only the U.S., China, Germany, and India had larger GDPs.
How does that happen? How does a single business become worth more than entire countries? More importantly, what lessons can you learn from the visionary behind this trillion-dollar company? Let’s find out.
Start Thinking on a Civilization Scale
Just like the founders of SpaceX or Amazon, Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, has a keen awareness of the grander role his company can play. If Huang were an average entrepreneur, he might have simply focused on the kind of angles that wouldn’t have led to his current success.
He might have chased short-term competition and spent all his energy trying to stomp out rivals like ATI (now AMD). He might have avoided investing heavily in CUDA (a parallel computing model) when there was no evidence that it would eventually become so important. He might have simply been satisfied with being a supplier without a stake in advancing the world.
As an entrepreneur yourself, how are you thinking about your products and services? Are you taking risks? They don’t have to be massive ones in the beginning. You can start small to get used to the discomfort of doing things unconventionally. Say, you’re about to build a website for your business. Rather than hire a web developer and do things traditionally, consider using an AI website builder.
As Hocoos notes, these platforms allow you to create entire websites just from scratch by simply answering a few questions. The point here is that thinking on a civilization scale won’t happen overnight. You’ll need to push and expand the mindset that tends to limit you, and this is just one step you can take.
Lean into Your Predictive Intuition
One downside that comes with being too professional is an overreliance on doing things by the book. The truth is that many successful companies got where they are through an intuitive spark from their leaders. On the contrary, if you were to strictly follow the advice of consultation firms, without any personal intuition and will, success would just be a coin flip.
Huang has been shown to think and predict the future of his industry, which is something many entrepreneurs fail to do. In one podcast, Huang laid out his vision for what the next decade might look like. He pointed out that the previous ten years focused on the science of AI, but the next ten years would be about application.
Do you feel confident and qualified in your industry to make predictions like this? If not, what’s holding you back? Is it a skill issue? Where is the hesitation coming from? You need to find the root cause, because as an entrepreneur, this ability to have strong, intuitive convictions about the future is critical.
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Don’t Think Too Much
This is one of the biggest lessons you can learn from Huang from his overall experience in building Nvidia. The number of challenges that he faced would make most entrepreneurs who analyze every single detail balk. It’s a core limiter.
According to Huang, building a company is ‘insanely hard’. He explains that the number of things you need to know and the networking to make things work is vast and complex. However, he also points out that a certain level of ignorance can be a superpower because many entrepreneurs would never try if they realized the effort needed.
In other words, just like learning to swim, the most effective way is to just throw yourself into the deep end and pray you survive. After all, you can’t fail if the only path is forward.
All things considered, Jensen Huang didn’t get Nvidia to a $4 trillion market value by luck. Is it likely that every entrepreneur can create a company this big? Of course not. However, if you can aim and reach for 1% of what Huang has achieved, you’d still be looking at a $40 billion company.
