Nvidia’s rise from an idea hatched over a booth at Denny’s to the world’s most valuable company is one of the defining business stories of the AI boom. But according to CEO Jensen Huang, whose net worth now sits at $196 billion, there’s a less glamorous ingredient behind that success: suffering.
“Nobody suffers better than I can,” Huang said in conversation with the Korea Society late last month. “In order to do something incredible, you have to suffer. It’s not a walk in the park. If it’s a walk in the park, anybody could do it.”
For Huang, that suffering has taken different forms over Nvidia’s 33-year history. In the company’s early days, he said, it was largely the result of simply not knowing what he was doing.
“As the company endeavors, there are setbacks, or people didn’t believe in your future, or they didn’t believe in you,” Huang said. “Maybe the market didn’t believe in you, maybe the customers didn’t believe in you.”
But suffering alone isn’t enough, according to Huang. It takes resilience, stubbornness and determination to push through it.
“It takes resilience to continue to believe in yourself,” he added.
Huang’s fear of failure keeps him working 7 days a week
This is not the first time Huang has spoken about the suffering that comes with building a successful company. In a conversation with Stanford business school students in 2024, he encouraged young people to embrace friction in their careers.
“People with very high expectations have very low resilience—and unfortunately, resilience matters in success,” Huang said. “One of my great advantages is that I have very low expectations.”
“I don’t know how to teach it to you except for I hope suffering happens to you,” Huang added.
Some of that suffering appears to have manifested in his approach to work. Huang has said he works seven days a week, including holidays, driven in part by a persistent fear that Nvidia could fail.
“You know the phrase ’30 days from going out of business,’ I’ve used for 33 years,” Huang said on an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience last year. “But the feeling doesn’t change. The sense of vulnerability, the sense of uncertainty, the sense of insecurity—it doesn’t leave you.”
Nvidia declined Fortune’s request for comment.
Leaders like Ray Dalio agree: pain and suffering is a motivator for success
Huang’s view on suffering echoes a broader philosophy among business leaders: discomfort, failure, and setbacks can be useful if you’re willing to learn from them.
Ray Dalio, the billionaire founder of Bridgewater Associates, has boiled that idea down to a simple equation: “Pain + Reflection = Progress.”
“There is no avoiding pain, especially if you’re going after ambitious goals,” the hedge fund manager wrote in a blog post. “Believe it or not, you are lucky to feel that kind of pain if you approach it correctly, because it is a signal that you need to find solutions so you can progress.”
The key, Dalio argues, is not to avoid the pain but to examine it: “If you can develop a reflexive reaction to psychic pain that causes you to reflect on it rather than avoid it, it will lead to your rapid learning/evolving.”
Winston Weinberg, cofounder and CEO of $15.5 billion AI legal startup Harvey echoed that sentiment on an episode of Fortune’s Term Sheet podcast earlier this year.
“I think it’s really hard to figure this out without failing. You just have to fail a million times,” he said.
For Weinberg, learning from those failures requires putting ego aside and taking an honest look at what went wrong—and what worked.
“Most of that is destroying your ego 24/7,” he said. But, he added: “It’s a very good way to learn.”
