Nvidia founder tells Stanford students their high expectations is a hindrance
fortune.com
fortune.com
> You guys have it real easy. I never had it like this where I grew up. But I send my kids here because the fact is you go to one of the best schools in the country: Rushmore. Now, for some of you it doesn't matter. You were born rich and you're going to stay rich. But here's my advice to the rest of you: Take dead aim on the rich boys. Get them in the crosshairs and take them down. Just remember, they can buy anything but they can't buy backbone. Don't let them forget it. Thank you.
In all seriousness, I took that speech on as my own personal motto for the rest of my life. Take dead aim at those rich kids, indeed!
Going back to the topic I think Jensen is right 99.9999 % of the time. An exception could be Bill Gates and I don't think that is because him was born in a priviledged family but because he has an unique drive [2].
I think that is the best.
I wish he had remade it like a decade ago, after honing his style and technical talents, and with a right-sized budget. I'd still go see it if he did a remake now, but I doubt it would maintain enough of its spark at this point :)
Royal Tenanbaums is really polished and well done.
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.
I almost didn't graduate high school and made a mess of my time at university, dropping out entirely my senior year (drugs and alcohol fueled by deep self-loathing made this an easy choice at the time).
Like you, I wish my dad had realized what he was doing in raising his children the way he did. His circumstances were deeply cruel. My relationship with him now continues to be marred by my understanding that he doled out the same punishment to his children and justified it by telling himself he was making us tougher.
In the end, it also took me nearly a decade to reach some level of parity with my peers. If that resilience is what got me here, then fair enough. But the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.
I was gobsmacked today by Rod Nordland's revelations on Amanpour that were a degree more intense but strikingly similar to my own childhood, and how I somehow also share gravitation to extreme sports and dangerous situations.
Severe disappointment, frustration, and discomfort as the result of their own decisions? Sure.
Actual abuse? Not so much.
This is important. We are limitless potential. To embody that, is to understand that life is uncertain. It's great to set goals. But don't take them too seriously. Or you will get lost in the concept.
Personally, I struggle to actually achieve serenity and positivity from this in practice, though I do find it compelling in theory.
It's true that being able to cope instead of fall apart is a useful power for you.
It's also true that anyone with any form of authority over you would love nothing better than for you to never demand anything.
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.).
I suspect that in practice, relatively little feedback is being shared either up or down within such a structure, as people are busy working and never hit their set time reminding them to think through what feedback they have.
In fact I see this with my coworkers, especially PMs, who have their schedules full of 1-1s daily. No doubt there's useful work that gets done in them _sometimes_, but I have doubts its efficiency over the long term with cross functionals. But even just focusing on 1-1s between managers/reports, I'd prefer nixing them in favor of a flatter structure, and using office hours/one-offs when needed.
Now, maybe this is fine for someone who manages other executives, where the primary touch points can be, like quarterly budget and strategy reports or something (I honestly have no idea what people like this do day to day, so I'm totally guessing on this...).
But out near the "leaves" of an org, managers exist to support their reports who are doing work day to day, and they can't do that if they have too many reports to spare any time for 1:1s with them.
I think PMs having a bunch of 1:1s, likely comprised mostly of status updates that could be done asynchronously, is a different problem, that we likely agree about.
But managers should have few enough reports that they're able to support them. If their reports want to cancel their 1:1s because they don't have anything to discuss, that's fine, but being unable to get on the schedule regularly is a problem, IMO.
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.
Engineering culture dictates much more strongly regarding unit and other tests than constant human feedback. It's also easy to add automated lint coverage tests to your PRs, and creating a documented process to check whether smoke-tests, etc.
I think we need to do better at offering youth (during adolescence) what could functionally be 'adulthood with training wheels'
Few people born with a silver spoon in their mouth become great examples of motivation, drive.
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.
Working hard on itself does not bring rewards. Asking for what you want and negotiating brings rewards.
I was raised to believe that asking for anything more is a sign of pride and vainness.
If my work won't be recognized, than all it means that it wasn't good or useful, and asking for anything more is pride.
If your work isn't be recognized does not mean it's not good or useful. It just means it's not recognized.
The only variable I can change is myself, and thus I recognise that every single mistake or failure is mine and mine only. I believe that's the healthiest outlook on life that one can have.
Also, I think too I don't have any right to say what I'm worth - my worth is determined by how much my labor creates value for others. If I'm paid peanuts, that speaks badly of me.
This is just an extremely tone deaf article from a billionaire.
This is a really terrible message to put out, especially where once upon a time America truly tried to make a "great society" through new deal programs and civil rights advancement; but nowadays the political climate is trash, largely thanks to the elite class rat fucking it into submission.
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.
I can't tell if that'd be correct or not, though
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 resilient from suffering and others become unable to succeed in life. Maybe suffering just reveals the types of people that are already resilient?
My hypothesis is there's some baseline and people have different predispositions based on their personality, but that resilience can also be improved by learning how to handle difficult situations better (and what kinds of thought patterns you allow yourself to have) - a kind of emotional observation/regulation/understanding. The opposite of what current identity politics/seeing yourself as a perpetual victim of 'trauma' plays into (imo this makes people a lot less resilient).
It's possible that's something you can only really develop through suffering (maybe this is Jensen's point), but it might also be able to be something that can be learned even without suffering - though people may have less reason to truly internalize it until it's tested.
edit: not sure why downvoted, here's a source if you don't believe me: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3968319/
But as you say, people who experience extreme suffering are much more likely to experience a lifetime of profound difficulty than to become a great auteur, entrepreneur, or leader.
Like you said there is probably some sweet spot that we should try to hit. I suppose the hard part is there’s no good way to know how much suffering society should allow or encourage, and probably more importantly no good mechanism by which we can turn off suffering once you’ve “had enough”
A less resilient person may have a perfectly happy and content life doing things that aren’t as hard, that’s true of most people.
But someone who has something extreme happen to them will have a way higher fucking bar for bad. If you lost your family in war the stress of a startup is nothing to you.
But respectfully this isn’t really how PTSD works. It seems intuitive to say this, but in reality, stressful situations will often trigger an exaggerated flight or fight response than is warranted due to changes in the brain’s structure, especially the hippocampus. Repeated, prolonged trauma makes the person even less resilient, not more so.
While it sounds like this would describe Huang's experience, I don't think that's what he intended to convey.
As others have said, it seems to be about resiliency. You don't develop that unless you have a reason to do so - "pain and suffering", to me, sounds like a synonym for "struggle".
My childhood was pretty much uniformly excellent. I saw my parents struggle a bit, but I was too young for it to really mean much to me at the time, and it didn't directly impact me. My personal struggle didn't really begin until after high school; I ran head-first into undiagnosed ADHD and chronic depression.
Recognizing those issues and overcoming them was the process that defined who I am as an adult. I fully believe it has made me a better and more resilient person. It wasn't until then that I was able to look back and really understand what my parents went through.
It has also informed the way I parent my children. I make it a point to be transparent about what I'm thinking, the struggles I'm facing now, and the ways I'm dealing with them. That's tempered by constantly reinforcing that those things are my stresses, not my kids'... because my kids aren't my therapist :P.
My hope is that by being transparent, my kids don't enter the adult world expecting everything to go according to plan. I'm trying to model not only "correct" behaviors, but how to emotionally deal with and overcome hardship.
So, I am skeptical.
I understand the idea behind it, but it's survivorship bias in a pedestal. What about all the other kids that suffered the same or even more, but weren't lucky enough to become billionaires?
These wannabe inspirational quotes from lucky individuals don't make sense to me.
(Just don't be a risky, low margin, labor intensive, short lifecycle, unscalable business like a restaurant unless you're really, really, ..., really good in some niche like a place that has people line up around the block at 8:30 am for BBQ several days a week.)
We’re now much closer to the end of this cycle than to its beginning.
x=https://fortune.com/2024/03/13/nvidia-founder-ceo-jensen_huang-stanford-students-genz-grads-low-expectations-successful/amp/
busybox wget -U "" -qO/dev/stdout $x \
|{ echo "<meta charset=utf-8 />";grep -o "<p.\*</p>";} > 1.htm
firefox ./1.htmMichael Easter's The Comfort Crisis https://www.amazon.com/Comfort-Crisis-Embrace-Discomfort-Rec...
A Boy Named Sue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOHPuY88Ry4
"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 to buy a big mortagage. You are going to become a prisoner of that lifestyle. When I made the decision I was going to go into business, I had everything to gain, not much to lose."
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.
This is also why 99% of CEO written self-help books are worker drone manuals --- insisting "you could be like me if you worked real hard too!" helps their bottom-line much more than it helps the person who reads those books.
That is the least interesting reason to start saving early. In fact it’s such a bad reason it probably puts people off the concept. Few enough people actually listen to it that it makes you wonder.
Every dollar you don’t spend at 25 is a dollar off of your expectation of standard of living. Which is a dollar you don’t need at retirement. And saving early means stock market usage early, and stock market losses early. The sooner you learn not to lose your shirt on the stock market the better. And that’s when you have a few thousand to lose on the market instead of later, when it’s tens of thousands.
Those are the reasons you start early, and start small.
> [Stanford] is one of the most selective in the United States [...] and the few students who get picked to study there are charged $62,484 in tuition fees for the premium, compared to the average $26,027 per annum cost. But, unfortunately for those saddled with student debt, [...]
Stanford students, and students of elite institutions more generally, are simply not taking on more debt than "typical" college students (for various values of "typical", from large state schools down to community colleges). Most debt loads are regulated and capped, it's extremely hard to get a personal loan beyond that. And to the extent that's not true, it's actually the wealthier students, and ones attending smaller niche schools outside the normal finanancial aid world, that bear the highest loads.
A quick google turned up this list, which roughly matches my understanding:
https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/average-student...
Sort by highest debt load per student, and note (1) how many of the schools at the top of the list are ones you've never heard of, (2) that literally none of the top-10/elite/whatever schools appear on the first page of the list, and (3) how heavily modal the graph is anyway: basically graduating students take on about $38-40k of debt in the US, no matter where they go.
Please be very suspicious of this kind of class warfare screed. It's just wrong, and it finds its way into the public conciousness by throwaway lines like the one I quoted.
Note that's not true of post-graduate schools. In particular banks are willing to tolerate a much higher debt load for med school students. But the discussion here is about "Does Stanford require more debt than other schools". And it does not.
A friend who supported himself through college on construction jobs, then went through a major surgery (think brain/heart/cancer) left his FAANG job for the startup.
His cofounders? A married couple with prime Bay Area real estate purchased by their family abroad, constantly bragged about Stanford (masters, mind you)and CCP connections.
Long story short, apparently the cofounder couple lied about their visa situation, both to the investors and to their cofounder. (They had a green card when they said otherwise). This was so they could lie about quitting their job at Google, which they never did.
My friend left when he found out, as he was the technical one anyway, and last I heard bootstrapped something with decent revenue.
In any case, the situation reminds me how important it is to fully vet your cofounders. Also, crazy that people can be effectively rewarded for being so scummy.
Hardship is feedback to address these fundamental primitives to create integrity with the big picture. If someone builds a foundation on froth, don't be surprised when the foundation collapses. Entitlement does not provide value.
> “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.)
When I see someone extolling the virtues of adversity, I guess I'm wondering: Just how much adversity are we talking about here? I wouldn't wish too much of it upon anyone.
Less flippantly, there is no way that someone who is a billionaire has low standards. If they did, wouldn’t they have stopped working at 1 million, 10 million, or perhaps 100 million dollars?
Or 'Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them' -- Shakespeare
There are many paths to greatness. The article mentions a lot of hurdles and racism that he had to overcome. But those are specific to him. I'm sure there are plenty 'great' people who haven't suffered.
> One of my great advantages is that I have very low expectations.
I don't think people with low expectations start companies. Certainly those with low expectations don't rise and achieve greatness.
In essence, he is saying people should be resilient and try to persevere through hard times. The rest are just fluff to fill time.
But even with resilience and perseverance, you aren't guaranteed success. It also takes a bit of luck. Being at the right place at the right time. There isn't a magic formula to be successful. And there are only X number of billionaires the economy can suppport...
I think this is a common misinterpretation of "expectations", to the point that it honestly just isn't a very clear way to make the point he's making. Here's a restatement of your quote that I would agree with:
> I don't think people with limited aspirations start companies. Certainly those with limited aspirations don't rise and achieve greatness.
But aspiration is not the same as expectation. It is perfectly plausible - and indeed, I agree with Huang, increases the likelihood of success - to shoot for the stars while expecting to miss.
The mans completely detached. Nothing, none of what anyone experiences in the real world impacts him in the least. The man wouldnt be able to empathize with the sufferings of predatory college lending if he tried. his stratospheric wealth makes him practically undefinable in the context of actual hard work or labor.
Everything hes made in life came from the hard work and excess capital of people like Stanford students.
I don't mind dunking on the disconnected rich who luck their way into fortune, but this doesn't seem like one of those cases.
I mean, i used to believe self-made man stories until I found out who Bill Gates' mother is. Now I'd rather see some research.
It's funny that all the comments pointing this out are getting heavily downvoted here. I thought we were all (or mostly) into Bayesian reasoning here. Perhaps not, or perhaps many of us are really bad at it.
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.
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?
> 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.
"Luck" is often a reason given by losers. It's the argument that shifts blame away from their own poor, often stupid decisions. It's used by losers when it comes to starting and running businesses, just like it's used by losers who failed to buy-in on cryptos or stocks when they were low.
"Oh, your business actually took off? You got lucky!"
"Oh so btc hit 69k? You got lucky."
They talk as if they had any clue whatsoever (because to make the assessment you need to understand the matter at hand), but if that was the case, they'd be amongst the actually objectively successfull people.
So ... yeah, right. I didn't make the right decisions at the right time to make sure [project] works out, after doing lots of research. No, I just got lucky. I didn't put hard work into [my project], I just got lucky.
Fuck. You.
It's not luck. No. It's simply not being a clueless loser. It's "putting hard work into reaching your goal". It's "not giving up". It's "standing your ground against the losers who want you to fail".
If these people you're mentioning, were so smart, they'd be rich.
Now take a good fucking guess why they're not.
How many people working 3 jobs you know are billionaires? Even millionaires? Are those not hard working people?
Yeah, citing crypto, which is literally gambling, tells me the kind of argument you have.
Not sure why the personal attacks are necessary.
Can folks who downvote please explain why?
Because survivorship is a real thing and becoming a billionaire isn’t just down to hard work or resilience.
The fact is: people want to believe hard work leads to success. It's a nice thought.
Many people center their entire lives around this concept. If someone challenges it, it can make them very angry.
> isn’t just down to hard work or resilience.
I'd argue it's never down to either of those. These are way too common to be relevant in the equation. Imagine if I told you all hard working resilient people were billionaires. I'd be factually incorrect and be rightfully called crazy.
But when folks don't say it out loud and instead only imply, it's suddenly accurate. Makes no sense.
The point is: he's no more qualified than anyone else. Whatever he's saying is simply not reproducible and most certainly not what made him a billionaire. Otherwise we could all just replicate whatever any billionaire does and inevitably become one. That's not how it works though, is it?
It's easy to say it was hard work that got you there after you're the 1e-20% that made it.
On the other hand to what you're saying
He had to make fuckton of decisions over his whole time as a CEO and that's where it brought him, so he definitely had at least some idea, vision, direction supported by some traits.
Once you're a CEO with hundreds of thousands of very smart people under you, making the wrong decision is much, much harder. There's some skill to it, but so few people get into that position that simply not making completely dumb decisions can already lead to success. A good company has self-sufficient people that don't need to be micro-managed.
I've said it many times before: give someone billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of talented individuals and I'm pretty sure they'll manage just fine. But we can't know for sure, so... maybe you're right in that sense.
Going back to the original point though, had he pointed out his decisions and vision, that'd be completely different compared to attributing it to "suffering and pain". That's plain silly.
If you get billions of smart hard working people, you still only get a few hundred billionaires. The only differentiator is luck.
You're one of the lucky that could migrate, went to the right schools, met the right set of people, were born in the right year and so on.
It's purely the logical conclusion. Some people get inspired through quotes like that, and it's probably good to lie to yourself that your hard work will inevitably pay off. But we should all know that it's ultimately a lie.
There are no billion equal people.
There are other differentiators than just opportunity: environment, background, culture, childhood, experience, vision and maybe traits.
>It's purely the logical conclusion. Some people get inspired through quotes like that, and it's probably good to lie to yourself that your hard work will inevitably pay off. But we should all know that it's ultimately a lie.
That's not a lie, it just doesn't guarantee success. But it increases probability (when you talk in general, not some specific person).
That's what I mean when I say luck. It's a combination of millions of variables that eventually lead to the successful outcome. The vast majority of those we have no control over.
So I stand by it. Ultimately the difference is luck. You can't pinpoint one of those millions of events and say: this was it. It's always a combination of them all.
>That's not a lie, it just doesn't guarantee success. But it increases probability (when you talk in general, not some specific person).
If inspirational quotes were phrased like that, I agree, that's not a lie. But at least in my bubble I only see folks with fanatical belief that if you work hard you are guaranteed success. I even got personal attacks for my comment from one of those fanatics.
Or even more commonly, like in this case, already successful people attributing their success to "hard work", which is extremely misleading.
The Tyranny of Merit[1] talks about this in a lot more depth.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Tyranny-Merit-Whats-Become-Common/dp/...
You dont have to go to a top tier school, or even college at all to be a working (and decent) engineer.
Going to Stanford and taking on gobs of debt is absolutely a choice you make, I agree with you about discharging college debt, and whatnot, but some of this is based on choices individuals make.
And no I'm not saying rich people are too dumb to understand it, I'm saying that they're trying to rationalize survivorship bias, which pretty much everyone on planet earth does, knowingly, or unknowingly.
I'd highly recommend Fooled by Randomness for more on the topic:
>He came from poor to the top and wasn’t passed a silver spoon, so he has enough qualifications to lecture.
The fact is it's a lot harder to create a company or build something new, than to be an employee and "work hard" all your life. There's nothing wrong with that, but to pretend that everyone rich (especially this guy!) is just luck is ludicrous.
I think a reason we find this so disagreeable to think about is that it removes much of the incentive to work hard. If you are not wealthy and you don't work hard, you have a basically 0% chance of achieving wealth. If you do work hard, you have a 5% chance (for example). So, sure, if you want fiscal security then you have to work very hard, but even with hard work success is unlikely, with the factors other than "work hard" largely out of your control.
Then, of course, if you do achieve success it's easy to attribute it solely to your hard work (after all, again, if you hadn't done that, you wouldn't have been successful) - which is supremely annoying to everyone else as it very obviously isn't the case.
Is it really important if they understand it? Isn't enough for everybody else to know that?
You’re more likely to succeed in life if you have a “low resilience pampered degree” than not. I haven’t seen evidence that all the “resilient hard workers” out there automatically turn billionaires given enough time, huffing and puffing.
The cycle continues, on the family level as well as the society level.