In San Francisco, Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, has stated that throughout the majority of the company’s 33-year history his approach has been to operate on the basis that it is only “30 days away from going out of business”. However, at a recent startup event the billionaire executive made it clear that his well-known paranoia doesn’t prevent him from appreciating the next generation of entrepreneurs.
At the Startup School 2026 event held at Y Combinator, when speaking to Garry Tan, the CEO of YC, the 63-year-old man stated that now is the best era in history to launch a company and admitted that he feels jealous of the young founders present in the room.
What Huang was getting at was not the matter of spectacular funding rounds or the most recent AI tools, but rather the discrepancy between how difficult a business appears from the outside and how difficult it actually becomes when you begin to build it.
Huang’s advice: do not scare yourself before you begin
The message that he gave to entrepreneurs was straightforward: don’t go over the issue of failure before you have actually begun.
Instead of trying to anticipate every possible difficulty in advance, Huang advised entrepreneurs to put forward a more direct question: “How hard can it be?” In his opinion, overconsidering the magnitude of a challenge generally leads to anxiety, and that anxiety may well be the reason why one decides not to start at all.
That doesn’t make the job easy; Huang stated that he still works seven days a week and has always kept in mind the possibility that Nvidia could fail if it stops adapting.
He has had that mindset since 1993, the year he and Chris Malachowsky as well as Curtis Priem founded Nvidia in a booth at Denny’s.
Learning, not pretending to know everything
Huang also stated that Nvidia’s success was not due to always being correct but rather to its willingness to learn quickly when it made mistakes.
He indicated an instance in which the company had chosen the incorrect graphics method and didn’t know how to correct it; his reply was unorthodox but memorable in that he went to Fry’s, bought some technology textbooks, and gave them to his engineers.
According to Huang, the early Nvidia was basically a company that raised funds and purchased textbooks. His main point is that the choice of technology is important, but the ability to face up to reality and learn quickly is even more important.
A booming startup scene, but survival is still tough
At a time when business creation in the United States is at a peak, Americans submitted 3.23 million business applications in the first six months of 2026, a record figure as reported by Inc., representing an increase of 12.1% compared with the corresponding period the previous year.
The surge is taking place even though the wider economy is still sluggish, which is the reason why some entrepreneurs believe that difficult times can be a good opportunity to start a new business since a weak market can cause founders to make early adjustments while there is still less at stake.
Yet the road lying ahead is by no means easy. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the five-year failure rate for new businesses is almost half.
Jeff Bezos has for a long time maintained that people who want to start companies should take the time to learn how a successful company carries out hiring, interviewing, and running operations before launching their own, whereas Huang’s view was that although the fear might never completely go away it should not prevent people from building.
Even though Nvidia has achieved enormous success, Huang still appears to adhere to the same belief which shaped the company from the beginning—namely, to remain alert, stay humble and act as though the finish line is always just in sight.
