A towering valuation hasn't softened the fears of a CEO who says the company still feels close to collapse. That outlook never changed, Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang said recently. 

Huang told "The Joe Rogan Experience" podcast that the pressure begins at 4 a.m. every day, when he starts checking emails and added that he works seven days a week, including holidays. He said Nvidia's scale has not altered how he prepares for sudden shifts in the industry.

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Fear That Never Goes Away

"You know the phrase ‘30 days from going out of business,' I've used for 33 years," he told host Joe Rogan. "It is exhausting. Always in a state of anxiety," he said while discussing the demands of leading a company central to the artificial intelligence hardware boom. He said that pace shapes how Nvidia advances its processors and responds to fast-moving computing needs.

Huang also talked about the moment that signaled AI's acceleration. He said the breakthrough 2012 AlexNet model, trained on Nvidia graphics cards, showed how quickly deep learning was improving and why the company needed to scale its technology faster to stay competitive.

Meanwhile, Nvidia became the first public firm to cross a $5 trillion market value in October as demand for its AI chips surged. 

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A Crisis That Shaped His Outlook

Huang then described a turning point from Nvidia's early history. He told Rogan the company discovered flaws in its first graphics chip in the mid-1990s while developing technology for Sega's next game console. 

With money running out, he flew to Japan to inform Sega that the chip would not work and that the contract should end. He told Sega that Nvidia still needed the final $5 million payment to survive.

According to Huang, Sega converted the remaining amount into an investment, giving Nvidia enough funding to continue operating. He said the experience shaped how he evaluates risk and long-term decisions. 

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"For all of you Stanford students, I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering," Huang said at a Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research summit in March 2024, adding that people with very high expectations have very low resilience.

Family That Works The Same Way

Beyond the company, Huang told Rogan the pace extends to his family. His children, Madison Huang and Spencer Huang, joined Nvidia as interns in 2020 and 2022 and now work there full time. He said both work every day, a rhythm he has kept since founding the company. 

Before joining Nvidia, Madison studied at the Culinary Institute of America, while Spencer studied marketing in Chicago, moved to Taiwan to learn Mandarin, and opened a cocktail bar in Taipei.

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