The most valuable chipmaker on the planet almost died twice, and its founder just said he would pass on the whole thing if he could rewind to day one.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sat down with Guy Raz on the "How I Built This" podcast, in an episode released Monday. Knowing how hard the road was, Huang said, he wouldn't start Nvidia again.
In 1996, Nvidia was 30 days from running out of cash after its first chip, the NV1, bet on the wrong rendering approach for Sega, which forced layoffs and missed bills. Then in 2008, the financial crisis dropped Nvidia stock roughly 85% from its late-2007 high while the company kept pouring money into a graphics business Wall Street didn't believe in.
"It was embarrassing. It was humiliating," Huang said. "You're the only face that everybody hates."
The twist is that the AI boom which turned Nvidia into a trillion-dollar story was built on those same unloved chips, used in ways nobody had priced in. The investors who held through the bottom in 2008 made the move of the decade, but only because Huang refused to fold.
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Huang's coping rule came from sports, which is to forget the last play. "I spent all my time forgetting yesterday," he said, adding that he missed a lot of his kids' karate competitions and credited his wife for "taking care of everything" at home.
He didn't dress any of that up. The personal cost of building Nvidia, in his words, is the part most founders never want to talk about because it makes the company story less inspirational.
He also pushed back on the idea that the pain was worth it just because the stock won. The point he kept circling, in plainer terms: founders don't build companies because the math works, they build them because they can't help it.
Most investors meet Nvidia at the AI rocket starting in 2023, not at the chapter where it almost went broke twice, while Huang's whole message was that everything before the rocket nearly killed the company and the only way through was endurance.
The takeaway for investors holding any long-term position is the same line he kept repeating - the names that became huge looked dead at some point, and most of the people who saw the bottom in real time didn't have the stomach to hold.
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