Biographer: I interviewed Nvidia's CEO for 6 hours—here's the most surprising thing I learned: ‘This is his fuel'

CNBC

4 days ago

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang runs one of the world's largest and most successful companies, valued at nearly $3.4 trillion. Yet, he's expressed that he still worries the company he co-founded in 1993 could implode at any minute.
Huang's fear of failure is one of his biggest motivators, pushing him to become one of the world's most successful CEOs, says biographer Stephen Witt. "This is his fuel. This is his gasoline, [and it's] what makes him go is this anxiety," says Witt, who spent six hours interviewing Huang, and spoke to his colleagues and employees, for the book "The Thinking Machine," which published in January.
Huang has discussed his drive for work before: When asked about work-life balance, he remarked, "I work as much as I can," in an April 2024 fireside chat with Stripe CEO Patrick Collison. Still, Witt was caught off-guard by how much of Huang's motivation seems to stem from anxiety, fear and guilt, he says."I think the most surprising thing about Jensen is that he's almost totally driven by negative emotions," says Witt. "He's really motivated by fear and guilt to a significant extent: fear of failure, paranoia about competition, and guilt about letting people down."
An Nvidia spokeswoman declined to comment when reached by CNBC Make It.
Other CEOs Witt has met and interviewed over his career are "more kind of type-A people" who fit the mold of upbeat, optimistic "go-getters," he says.
"Jensen, of course, is an obvious, huge go-getter, but it's all coming from this place of almost beating himself up for not working hard enough all the time," Witt adds. "I didn't expect to see that ... In fact, he becomes very uncomfortable and nervous when things are going well."
Huang has said he's a "demanding" boss who isn't easy to work for, and that stress is the best motivator he knows. "It should be like that. If you want to do extraordinary things, it shouldn't be easy," he told CBS' "60 Minutes" in December 2024.
His own success is a reflection of his resilience, overcoming setbacks like Nvidia's near collapse just three years after it first launched, he told students at Stanford University in March 2024. That resilience is partially due to having "low expectations," always preparing for potential failure and strategizing how best to avoid an implosion, he said.
You just can't let your anxiety prevent you from taking calculated risks, said Huang.
"Unless you have a tolerance for failure, you will never experiment, and if you don't ever experiment, you will never innovate," he said. "If you don't innovate, you don't succeed."
The ability to tolerate and learn from failures is a common trait among successful people, psychologists say: It's a marker of the mental strength and confidence you need to overcome challenges and bounce back from failure.
While excessive anxiety can be tough on your mental health and decision-making abilities, it can motivate people to succeed when harnessed in healthy ways, psychologist Lisa Damour told CNBC Make It in June 2024. Productive anxiety can spur you to be more productive and it can also be a signal that there could be a problem lurking that needs to be solved to avoid failure, research shows.
"The way psychologists see anxiety is as a protective emotion," Damour said. "It's there to keep us on our toes and help us course correct."
Huang, for his part, is most comfortable when he's "reminding himself it's like that first day, that they need to have a startup's energy, and that they're on the brink of failure at all times," Witt says. "This is the narrative he generates around himself — that he could fail at any time and be disgraced. And this is what motivates him."