Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says the company’s rise to becoming the world’s most valuable semiconductor giant came with years of humiliation, failed products, financial crises, and constant fear of collapse.
Speaking on the “How I Built This” podcast with Guy Raz, Huang admitted that if he had known in advance how painful the journey would become, he would never have started Nvidia in the first place.
Huang described decades of pressure behind building the company, including moments when Nvidia was only weeks away from running out of money. During the 2008 financial crisis, Nvidia’s stock lost around 85% of its value as investors questioned the company’s heavy spending on CUDA — the software platform that later became one of the foundations of the modern AI boom.
“It was embarrassing. It was humiliating,” Huang said while describing periods when the company struggled publicly and critics doubted Nvidia’s future.
Nvidia also faced major setbacks in its early years. In 1996, the company nearly went out of business after failing to deliver a graphics chip for Sega. A $5 million investment from Sega helped keep Nvidia alive during one of its most dangerous moments.
Huang said many founders underestimate the emotional cost of building a company because people only focus on the final success story instead of the years of setbacks, stress, layoffs, and uncertainty behind it.
Today, Nvidia sits at the center of the global AI race, powering everything from advanced AI models to data centers and robotics, with a market value of more than $5 trillion. But Huang said surviving those difficult years required constantly moving forward and “forgetting yesterday.”