NVDIA CEO Jensen Huang explains why your startup doesn't need a traditional business plan

Jensen famously didn’t know how to write a business plan when he first started NVIDIA. However, as he explains, business plans can be useful for teasing out important ideas before making the leap to start your company:

“I think that the art of writing a business plan ought to be much, much shorter. It should force you to concisely answer: What is the problem you’re trying to solve? What is the unmet need you believe will emerge? And what is it that you’re going to do that is sufficiently hard that when everybody else finds out it’s a good idea, they’re not going to swarm it and make you obsolete?”

Marc Andreessen echoes similar points in a separate interview:

“The process of planning is very valuable for forcing you to think hard about what you’re doing, but the actual plan that results from it is probably useless. In particular, now that we’re VCs, we’re evaluating pitches and when people come in, we want to hear their plan and we want to hear it in some detail because we want to see that they can think about the entire thing end-to-end. And if their initial plan doesn’t make sense, then obviously there’s an issue because they’re not quite capable of fully thinking this through. But when you get somebody who comes in and they present you the perfect plan and everything is fully integrated and makes sense, all you know from that is that they can come up with a good plan—which is good! But the odds that will be the plan they succeed on is still very small.”

Full video: Acquired “NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang” (Oct 2023)

P.S. We’ve put together a YouTube playlist with every Jensen Huang insight we’ve ever shared. You can watch it here: "Best startup advice from Jensen Huang"