NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang shares his fish pond metaphor for thinking about market size

Jensen explains that the single purpose of NVIDIA is to build an AI platform that can be used anywhere, and he draws the distinction between “market makers” and “share takers”:

“Not one day does this company talk about market share. All we’re talking about is: How do we create the next thing? How do we take that flywheel that used to take a year and crank it down to a month?”

He continues:

“The only question is whether that mission is necessary. All great companies ought to have that at their core - it’s about what you are doing. Is it necessary? Is it valuable? Is it impactful? Does it help people? If you have a sole purpose and your purpose is meaningful and your mission is dear to you and dear to everybody else, then you can be transparent.”

Jensen cites NVIDIA sharing its roadmap with hyperscalers like Azure and AWS who are building their own ASIC chips. He doesn’t worry about market share. His only goal is to invent new markets, which he compares to fish ponds:

“Companies are limited by the size of the fish pond. A goldfish can only be so big. So the question is, what is our fish pond? And that requires a lot of imagination. It’s hard to figure that out looking backwards and trying to take share - ‘share takers’ can only be so big. But market makers can be quite large.”

This has been NVIDIA’s goal from the very beginning of the company when they created the 3D gaming PC market. And it’s rational - inventing new “fish ponds” is likely the only way for them to 10x their $3 trillion market cap.

Full video: Bg2 Pod “Ep17. Welcome Jensen Huang | BG2 w/ Bill Gurley & Brad Gerstner“ (Oct 2024)

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"