Since the beginning of this year, taking advantage of the east wind of artificial intelligence, NVIDIA has created a business miracle. On November 21, Nvidia released its financial results for the third quarter of fiscal year 2024 ended October 29, with revenue of 181 during the periodUS$200 million, a year-on-year increase of **206%, much higher than the market expectation of US$16.2 billion. Nvidia revealed in its earnings report that 80% of its revenue comes from data centers, a division responsible for the burgeoning business — the chips that power the next generation of artificial intelligence technology.
Despite the success of Nvidia, which Huang founded, he recently said, nothing is a more effective motivator than the fear of company failure.
He made the remarks at the 2023 DealBook Summit on November 29. He said he would still wake up every morning "in a state of worry."
Consider that Nvidia is a company that has undergone a big transformation. For example, in recent years, it has successfully transformed from a graphics company to more like an artificial intelligence company. Mr. Huang's worrisome concern came as a surprise to some other business owners.
In a recent bio in The New Yorker, Huang said that in the late '90s, he experienced his first serious failure in designing graphics chips for gaming PCs. At the time, Microsoft announced that it would no longer support the graphics format that Nvidia had chosen to use.
To survive the crisis, Huang fired half of his team members and told the other half that they would switch to Microsoft's preferred graphics format, with the goal of beating other competitors in the market.
By the time the new chip was released, Nvidia only had the funds left to support the lights for a month. Fortunately, the chip was a huge hit, with more than 1 million units sold in just four months.
This experience motivates Huang to always motivate employees to act as if the fate of the company depends entirely on them. "Our company is 30 days away from closure" remains Nvidia's unofficial motto.
Look at how much a big entrepreneur like Jensen Huang takes crisis and risk seriously. On the one hand, this emphasis will prompt them to relentlessly develop new technologies and products, so as not to be eliminated by the sudden wave of technological updates. Many well-known companies have closed down and are complacent with the status quo. On the other hand, it will also make them pay attention to and try to avoid financial risks in business operations.
Another similar example is the world ranking in terms of total assets.
7. Jamie Dimon, president of JPMorgan Chase Bank, the No. 1 bank in the United States, once revealed that his bank does 100 stress tests every month to prepare for a possible financial crisis.
Their awareness of risk is particularly worthy of learning from Chinese entrepreneurs, Xi them.