This is why smart people rarely build businesses
Jensen Huang stood in front of a room of Stanford graduates and told them he hopes they suffer.
He wasn't being cruel. He was being precise.
His argument: people with very high expectations have very low resilience. And resilience, not intelligence, is what decides who actually makes it. A Stanford grad has spent their whole life as the smartest person in the room. They've rarely been tested by real failure. So when something finally breaks, they break with it.
Then he said the line every founder should sit with: "Greatness is not intelligence. Greatness comes from character. And character isn't formed out of smart people, it's formed out of people who suffered."
He would know. At nine, Huang was scrubbing toilets at a Kentucky boarding school his family hadn't realized was a reform school. As a teenager he bussed tables at Denny's. In 1993 he started NVIDIA in a Denny's booth, and nearly lost it more than once in the years that followed. The character was built decades before the valuation showed up.
This is why he uses the words "pain and suffering" inside NVIDIA with what he calls great glee. He isn't trying to shield his best people from the hard part. He's trying to give it to them on purpose.
Talent gets you into the room. The people who stay are the ones who were broken once and learned they could rebuild.
Perhaps you should help revolutionize the electric car industry, help invent reusable rockets that land themselves, launch the first high speed satellite internet, develop a way for people who are paralyzed to interact with computers with their mind, and provide a platform for free speech….
You know so little! The value of stock isn’t fixed. If SpaceX doesn’t deliver, the value of those million dollar shares drops to $O. And believe me; a panel of homeless would kill SpaceX within a few months and there would be no one to buy those shares. I hope you’re joking and not serious.
Elon Musk in this 2012 interview:
" My proceeds from PayPal after tax were about $180M, $100M of that went into SpaceX, $70M into Tesla, and $10M into SolarCity and I literally had to borrow money for rent."
$SPCX $TSLA
@bourscheid You don’t get it and that’s why you aren’t worth a trillion. You have to provide value to bring people out of poverty…you cant simply hand them paper bills.