We South Africans are parochial at the best of times, but right now our politics feels dangerously claustrophobic. In fact, it’s telling how little coverage the story of how a man born in Taiwan, who worked as a dishwasher at Denny’s, almost broke the internet because he autographed a woman’s chest last week after the company he helped build became third to exceed the $3-trillion market cap mark.
There are important lessons for us in Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang’s meteoric rise to the top table of tech that legislators in the seventh administration would do well to heed.
Some call it Jensanity: Huang founded Nvidia in 1993 and it took only 31 years to top the $3-trillion milestone.
Apple took 48 years to become the first US firm to exceed a market capitalisation of $3-trillion, in January 2022. Microsoft reached the $3-trillion landmark in January 2024 after 49 years.
Since its founding, Nvidia has pioneered accelerated computing. The company’s invention of the graphics processing unit (GPU) in 1999 sparked the growth of the PC gaming market, redefined computer graphics, and ignited the era of modern artificial intelligence (AI).
Basically, Nvidia creates sophisticated semiconductors, or “the brain of computers, robots, and self-driving cars,” according to its website. These semiconductors need sophisticated lithography, etching, doping and deposition to build complicated nanometre-scale transistor architectures. How many people really know what all of that means? Very few.
Each of these steps requires extreme precision and control at the nanometre scale (one nanometre is one-billionth of a metre). To put this into perspective, a sheet of paper is about 100,000 nanometres thick. The power of entrepreneurship and innovation is writ large over the world.
Huang’s observation has since become known as his eponymous law in computer science and engineering that advances in GPUs are occurring at a significantly quicker rate than traditional central processing units.
Huang’s journey highlights his incredible tenacity and the formative experiences that shaped his path to becoming a leader in the tech industry
This finding contradicts Moore’s rule, which projected that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit would double every two years. Huang’s law predicts that GPU performance would more than double every two years.
Huang was born in Taiwan to a chemical engineer father and a primary schoolteacher mother. His early years were marked by constant movement. At the age of five, his family relocated to Thailand, but due to the Vietnam War’s instability, they decided not to settle there permanently. Huang’s father, impressed by his experience in a US training programme with air conditioner manufacturer Carrier, envisioned a future in the US. To prepare for this move, Huang’s mother diligently taught him and his brother 10 random English words daily.
At nine, Huang and his brother were sent to live with an uncle in Tacoma, Washington, while their parents remained in Thailand. Their uncle, believing he was enrolling them in a prestigious boarding school, sent them to the Oneida Baptist Institute in Kentucky. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a reform school for troubled children. Here, Huang endured daily hardships, from cleaning toilets to facing severe bullying and racial slurs. His brother’s experience was equally challenging, working on a tobacco farm. Despite these tough circumstances, Huang’s journey highlights his incredible tenacity and the formative experiences that shaped his path to becoming a leader in the tech industry.
Addressing a group of undergraduates at the prestigious Stanford University recently, Huang offered a glimpse of insight that, if unleashed, could slingshot the SA economy out if its 15-year funk.
Emphasising the value of low expectations and the significance of pain and suffering in building character, Huang stated, “One of my great advantages is that I have very low expectations. Most of the Stanford graduates have very high expectations. And you deserve to have high expectations because you came from a great school. People with very high expectations have very low resilience. And unfortunately, resilience matters in success.”
Huang elaborated on the importance of resilience and how it is cultivated through adversity. “I don’t know how to teach it to you except for I hope suffering happens to you. I was fortunate that I grew up with my parents providing a condition for us to be successful on the one hand, but there were plenty of opportunities for setbacks and suffering,” he said.
“To this day, I use the phrase ‘pain and suffering’ inside our company with great glee. You wanna train, you wanna refine the character of your team because greatness is not intelligence. Greatness comes from character, and character is formed out of smart people who suffered.”
SA entrepreneurs have all experienced Huang’s “ample doses of pain and suffering”. No matter how pop-psych the quote may sound, it’s important to understand the mindset of one of the world’s great entrepreneurs. It’s the same mindset that I encounter in the entrepreneurs I speak to week in and week out.
It’s a superpower that if truly unshackled from red tape, bureaucracy, exchange controls, restrictive labour laws, could spark a growth-led revolution in SA. If our politicians, whomever is chosen to lead in the seventh administration, could just lift their gaze from their own inflated navels for a second.
• Avery, a financial journalist and broadcaster, produces BDTV’s ‘Business Watch’. Contact him at Badger@businesslive.co.za.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.