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Jensen Huang on how to maintain conviction in the early days of a startup

November 18, 2025

Nvidia almost failed several times in the company’s early history. Jensen is asked how he maintained conviction during the times when it looked like the company would fail, to which he responds:

“You have to reason all the way back to whatever first principles you can hang on to — as far back as you can. Now once you do that, and you’ve come to the conclusion that all of the information that you have causes you to believe what you believe, you have to decide: Am I going to be somebody who does something about it? Or do I just become one of those people who says something like, ‘Oh yeah, I knew that” but you did nothing about it?”

He continues:

“I tend to be somebody who would reason about these things and believe it so deeply that I could see it in my head. And once I could see it in my head, as far as I’m concerned, it might as well be real. Everything else is just details.”

Jensen offers founders the following advice:

“Manifest your belief as deeply as you can, and then after that, you’re hard to dissuade.”

But he makes an important caveat:

“Every single day, I gut-check all of the assumptions that I made and used to reason about the strategy. I’m constantly reevaluating if the assumptions or principles that I used were flawed. I’m constantly learning through failure, and I’m quick to adapt. And by adapting, you get to stay in the game . . . Oftentimes people have a hard time pivoting because they feel that their ego is somehow tied to the decision they made or something they said . . . You have to be intellectually honest.”