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Nvidia founder tells Stanford students their high expectations is a hindrance

fortune.com

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Re: Nvidia founder tells Stanford students their high expectations is a hindrance

#71

Post by treespace8 »

The quote: `I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering’ really hits on the nose for me.

My Dad had a successful business after a rough childhood, failing high school. He worked hard and built a successful business. He also really did wish ample doses of pain and suffering on me. And he got his wish.

He always thought it was good that I was bullied, that I also failed school, and that everything in life was generally hard for me. He told me this so much that I also believed it, well into my 20s. That is was good I was a failure and suffering.

It took a decade to build my life to a point similar to my classmates that did not suffer the way I did. And I'm not ahead of them even now.

I really wish my Dad would have gotten therapy instead of internalizing his anger, and believing that is what made him successful. It would have saved me a lot of time.

Re: Nvidia founder tells Stanford students their high expectations is a hindrance

#72

Post by sanderjd »

dont_dox_me_bro wrote: post #27
StefanBatory wrote: post #12

It's painful article but it's true. We have to remember that none of us deserves anything not that we have any right for anything; nothing is given and we have to work hard for that.

Do you think he would feel the same if the government split apart Nvidia and forced them to either sell the software (CUDA) or hardware as separate companies? After all, it's not like he has the right to run his company at the detriment of society. Opening up CUDA would be a massive net gain to humanity, or at least allowing more open source software to run on Nvidia hardware. This is just an extremely tone deaf arti…

I mean, I have no idea what he would say or how he would truly feel about that happening.

But the philosophy he is espousing here is not incompatible with that. If he truly and successfully adheres to it (a big if!), the right response would be to feel that he had no expectation that the government would never step in to split up his company, and instead feel only appreciation that he was able to build and run it in the form he wanted, and to enjoy its profits, for as long as he did.

It's a very hard philosophy to actually adhere to! It's pretty natural for humans to feel entitled to the good things they already have, even when they know they shouldn't.

Re: Nvidia founder tells Stanford students their high expectations is a hindrance

#73

Post by Pet_Ant »

donflamenco wrote: post #14

I would recommend the full video on Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEg8cOx7UZk Another fascinating bit is when he describes the flat management structure NVDA has. He, as CEO, has 58 direct reports and no scheduled one on ones. Feedback is given constantly (up and down.).

> Feedback is given constantly (up and down.).

If you don't make time for things they rarely happen unless the people are particularly fired up about them. I don't even know who my current manager is to even reach out to. My coworkers don't unit test until reminded on the PR. I honestly forget to smoke-test until called out on it. So unless your culture is about feedback and everyone truly embodies that and is on board, it's not gonna happen.

Re: Nvidia founder tells Stanford students their high expectations is a hindrance

#74

Post by neilv »

Thinking of this as startup founder...

> “People with very high expectations have very low resilience—and unfortunately, resilience matters in success,” Huang said during a recent interview with the Stanford Graduate School of Business. “One of my great advantages is that I have very low expectations.”

People with family money need much-much less resilience than those without family money.

Compare... serial founder who always has not only ready-made seed investment (plus all the connections that come from parents helping line up your ducks to go to a rich-kids school) to fail repeatedly with a safety net and do-over each time...

... with the scrappy kid who's barely clawed their way into those echelons, has put everything into their startup push, and if it fails, they might be out homeless on the street. (See the moral at end of "Gattaca".)

One of these things is not like the other, in terms of need for resilience.

(Granted, a rare person might get far enough that being a hardened fighter a la (to choose one kind) Sam Altman might be a quality that then makes stratospheric success possible. But AFAICT you haven't needed that to be successful enough with VC growth startups: you just need to have money flowing through you repeatedly until some desired condition is achieved, hopefully without all the stress costs of grueling, existential adversity.)

Re: Nvidia founder tells Stanford students their high expectations is a hindrance

#75

Post by brushfoot »

schnitzelstoat wrote: post #54
brushfoot wrote: post #10

Reminds me obliquely of what Jack Cowin told an MBA class, as quoted in Rafael Badziag's _The Billion Dollar Secret_: "You guys have a big disadvantage over what I had. When I finished university, I got a job offer of $6,000 a year, and you're going to get a job offer of $150,000. You're going to develop a lifestyle. You're going to join the golf club, you're going to have private school for your kids. You're going t…

This is just the myth they build for themselves though. In reality, you have far more to lose when you start out with nothing because if you fail Daddy's not going to pay for you to go back to school and do your plan B. You have no safety net. Empirically, this bears out as well. Successful entrepreneurs are overwhelmingly from the upper-middle/upper classes.

I like it because it was useful to me in quitting a well-paying job and venturing out on my own. Which was terrifying! Especially when, two weeks after I quit, a competitor announced they were giving away the feature I built my business around for free. It's been a wild ride.

Re: Nvidia founder tells Stanford students their high expectations is a hindrance

#76

Post by watwut »

StefanBatory wrote: post #12

It's painful article but it's true. We have to remember that none of us deserves anything not that we have any right for anything; nothing is given and we have to work hard for that.

The other reality is that if you expect nothing, you will get nothing. If you expect low salary, you will get low salary no matter how hard you work or what skills you have.

Working hard on itself does not bring rewards. Asking for what you want and negotiating brings rewards.

Re: Nvidia founder tells Stanford students their high expectations is a hindrance

#77

Post by shrimp_emoji »

treespace8 wrote: post #71

The quote: `I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering’ really hits on the nose for me. My Dad had a successful business after a rough childhood, failing high school. He worked hard and built a successful business. He also really did wish ample doses of pain and suffering on me. And he got his wish. He always thought it was good that I was bullied, that I also failed school, and that everything in life was gen…

Heh. I had some of that "character building", and I credit that I don't seem to have as fragile a temperament as some to it. It worked for the Germans and Huns and Mongols. Too bad we can't run the counterfactual and see if we would be the same across different timelines.

Re: Nvidia founder tells Stanford students their high expectations is a hindrance

#78

Post by watwut »

homefree wrote: post #6

It's more about resilience and what sets the stage for it. He argues resilience is created through suffering (which plays into the idea that if you want to know who will be a good founder, ask about their childhood). It makes me curious though about the direction of the causality - how much is resilience actually about temperament and genetics vs. the environmental experience of suffering. Why do some people become r…

If you are low key insulting your child regularly, they won't de better then kids of parents who treat them well. Kids who think low of themselves usually don't even try.

So, I am skeptical.

Re: Nvidia founder tells Stanford students their high expectations is a hindrance

#79

Post by detourdog »

wslh wrote: post #55
sanderjd wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, I dunno, I tend to agree that Rushmore is his best (at the least, it has had the most influence on me), but I think it's a very close thing between it and The Royal Tannenbaums. (But after that there is certainly a large gap to the next best.)

I agree that could be a stretch but Rushmore does not only depict a nerd but one that is creative and iconoclast. Many times we have a bond with a movie for personal reasons that are not shared with the rest. I shared my ranking where there are movies which are classical top and others personal takes. That is the reason to create these (non algorithmic/AI) lists: share and help others to move from the average^average…

No Bottle Rocket?

I think that is the best.

Re: Nvidia founder tells Stanford students their high expectations is a hindrance

#80

Post by Draiken »

bell-cot wrote: post #65
Draiken wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's somewhat irrelevant IMO. There are hundreds of thousands of hard workers (probably millions) that are smarter than him that will never become billionaires. The difference is: he got lucky. This is the nature of survivorship bias.

> The difference is: he got lucky So...back in 1993, when Jensen Huang was founding Nvidia, how many of those million-ish "smarter" people had any real interest in founding a graphics card company? Or any sort of company, period? Yes, luck favored him a number of times, to make it to $8e10 net worth. If he was only worth a measly $8e5, would you have some other reason(s) to sneer at him?

I don't understand why everyone assumes I'm talking down on him. I'm merely pointing out how irrelevant that quote is.

> how many of those million-ish "smarter" people had any real interest in founding a graphics card company? Or any sort of company, period?

That's not the right question. The right question is: how many of those even had the opportunity to do this? I'd doubt it's more than a single digit.

He made it. Congrats to him. But we don't know why he made it. No, it wasn't because he "suffered". It wasn't because he worked hard. We quite simply can't know.

If you can't attribute his success to what he is saying, it's not relevant. Now that he made it, he can proclaim it was any of his millions of choices, but by definition it cannot be a few generic choices, because many more made the same choices and never made it.

Luck is a stub for all of the infinite choices and events that conspired for him to be where he is today. It's nice to pretend it's hard work that leads to success (or in this case "pain and suffering"), but it's most definitely not true.

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