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Jensen Huang explains his decision to start NVIDIA as a parent with young children

December 17, 2024

Jensen was 30 years old when he quit his job at LSI Logic to co-found NVIDIA in 1993. Asked how he made this decision as a young parent at the time, he responds:

“I believed in [my co-founders], and I believed in myself… Even though we had a family and our kids were young — they were just one and two — and that could cause us to be quite risk averse, I was never concerned about being able to do something else if it didn’t work out. And so I felt like I wasn’t risking anything. Maybe that’s too careless by some other standards, but I really believed it. I believed that we weren’t putting our family in harm’s way. And if things didn’t work out, there’ll be an even better job for me somewhere, someday… Lori and I were young and it wasn’t a decision that was difficult per se. It was probably even less than a dinner conversation. Maybe even less than that.”

Jensen offers the following advice to the Berkeley students in the audience:

“All of you are young and bright, and there’s so much opportunity out there. I genuinely don’t believe that when you make a decision to start a company or join a startup that it’s a horribly difficult life decision. The only thing that really matters, in my estimation, is are you going to love the people that you work with? Are you going to love the work that you’re going to do? Are you going to love it so much that all the pain and suffering that’s going to come your way — which I promise you will be lots: setbacks, disappointments, the list of bad days — you’ll be able to keep carrying on. So long as you love the work that you do, you’ll be able to keep carrying on. That’s really it. That’s 100% of the wisdom.”