I recently finished reading The Thinking Machine about Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the development of AI. It reminded me of the biographies of two other hyper-wealthy capitalists: Chernow’s Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., and Nasaw’s Andrew Carnegie.
I was mulling over the similarities between these industry titans and realized that their stories illustrate exactly what steps you can take to become wildly successful in business. For those familiar with D&D character building: the key is to become a glass cannon. For those not quite so nerdy, it’s Mark Twain’s famous quote: “put all your eggs in one basket, and then guard that basket.”
The catch however, is that while it’s straightforward to actually take these steps, they don’t guarantee success. Like a surfer who paddles to a part of the ocean where good waves normally form, there’s no guarantee that you’ll catch an amazing wave. Conversely, of course, the surfer who stays on the shore has no chance at all.
So here’s the formula in a nutshell. I’ll break it down in greater detail below using examples from the lives of Jensen Huang, John Rockefeller Sr, and Andrew Carnegie:
Find a business activity that you intrinsically enjoy doing.
Do that thing to the exclusion of almost everything else in your life.
When opportunities present themselves to diversify your time, energy, or money, ignore them and double down on your thing.
Get lucky.
Do Something You Enjoy
It’s pretty hard to imagine anyone pulling 90-100 hour weeks month after month, year after year if you don’t intrinsically enjoy doing the work. Some people have insane self-discipline, but in the contest between people of approximately equal skill, one of whom just can’t get enough of doing something, and one that has to force themselves to do it, it’s pretty obvious who will win out over the long-term.
Jensen Huang gravitated towards electrical engineering from a very early age. People that knew him during his brief time at AMD and then LSI recounted stories of his single-minded focus on becoming one of the best chip designers not just at his company, but the industry. His work ethic was a force of nature.
Similar accounts are told of both John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. And it’s worth noting that during the decades they grew up, a “standard” work week was 60-70 hours. Contemporaries describe them as out-working the most diligent employees, staying later, waking earlier, and just generally out-grinding them.
John D. Rockefeller learned the ropes at the trading house of Hewitt & Tuttle where he developed a passion for accounting and negotiation. He was later able to leverage those talents when he started Clark, Gardner & Company where he first started trading and refining oil.
Carnegie started his career as a telegraph operator before moving on to the Pennsylvania Railroad company. When he wasn’t working, he was reading and learning. First about telegraphs, then railroads, and later about steel manufacturing. Carnegie’s great business passion was learning and improving.
So, paradoxically, to become wildly successful in business, you first need to identify a business activity you love doing. And then you need to do it for almost every waking second of your life for many years.
You could insert a glib quote here about hitting 10,000 hours of experience, but I don’t think there’s anything that predictable. Anyways, if you’re doing this right, you won’t care whether it takes 10,000, 15,000, or 30,000 hours to become an expert, you’ll be having fun the entire time.
For Jensen, it was designing circuits, for Rockefeller, it was accounting and negotiation, and for Carnegie it was the thrill of learning something new. Each spent years in their early careers doing almost nothing else but learning their craft.
Do That Thing to The Exclusion of Everything Else
To become wildly successful at anything of importance, you need to put in the hours. But human lifetimes are pretty short, so if you want to achieve domain expertise while you are still young and healthy enough to leverage it to achieve great things, you can’t afford the luxury of diversification.
Jensen Huang worked subscribed to the 996 lifestyle (9AM to 9PM 6 days per week) while at LSI. He was responsible for designing novel chip architectures and delivering them to vendors. By the time he joined the founders of Nvidia, his life had consisted mainly of designing computer chips and running teams of technologists.
Rockefeller learned his craft at a trading house in early career, but then struck out on his own. He quickly became the expert among the 3 founding partners and maneuvered them out of the business so that he could move things more quickly. His days consisted of nothing but learning markets and negotiating with vendors and transport companies.
Andrew Carnegie taught himself to interpret morse code just by spending time among telegraph operators. At the Pennsylvania Railroad company, he taught himself the then-legal skill of insider trading and when he founded the Keystone Bridge Works company, he taught himself how to optimize the Bessemer Process to improve the efficiency of producing low-carbon steel. He only married at the age of 51. When he wasn’t working, he was reading books and learning about new technologies and management practices.
While all three men did marry and have children (eventually), their focus on work was a meaningful tradeoff against other life paths. It’s not that you can’t have a healthy marriage or hobbies if you want to become wildly successful in business. For example, Rockefeller was an avid golfer later in life and Jensen apparently has a quirky interest in teppanyaki. But if you want to get good at a skill quickly, it will crowd out lots of other things you could have spent your time on.
Never Diversify, Always Double Down
If John D. Rockefeller Sr. had followed standard portfolio development advice and diversified his stock holdings outside of the Standard Oil Company, he never would have become so wealthy. Instead, it was well understood at the company during his tenure that if you wanted some liquidity, you could always sell your shares to John and he would buy them for the market rate. He did this for decades and without regard to the prevailing sentiment about the future of the company. His belief in himself and the value of the products the Standard Oil Company made was unwavering.
Carnegie leveraged his connections with magnates in the railroad industry to make a small amount of money early in his career that he then deployed to finance the Keystone Bridge Works which would eventually become US Steel. Instead of spending the profits from his earlier ventures, he ploughed those proceeds into acquisitions of competitors, starting with the Homestead Steel Works. The name “US Steel” was later chosen because he had acquired so many competitors he needed a generic name to encompass the resulting corporate entity.
Like Carnegie and Rockefeller, almost all of Huang’s wealth has been generated by a single company, in this case Nvidia. While we know less about Huang’s personal finances than we do about the late Rockefeller and Carnegie, he has been the chief executive officer of Nvidia for 32 years, making him one of the longest-serving CEOs in the technology industry by a wide margin. He has spent the literal majority of his life doing nothing but building and scaling Nvidia. The whole premise behind his push for CUDA and its associated software libraries was a massive doubling down on parallel computing that was viewed by many industry experts as foolhardy and misguided. But Jensen had a vision and he doubled down on it, even when that vision seemed likely to wreck his company and career.
For me, the crazy thing about these stories is the scale of these men’s focus.
Side quests get more and more appealing the more experienced and renowned you become. You might be lucky to scrape together an unpaid internship in your chosen activity when you’re in your early 20s. But when you are 45 and have developed a reputation as the best hardware entrepreneur in the industry, you probably get all-expenses-paid speaking gigs to the island of Fiji with $250,000 honorariums. And while this may seem like an obvious distraction from your laser-focused pursuit of your activity, others will be more subtle.
Standard Oil could have become a broader commodities broker, US Steel could have expanded to producing other metal alloys, and Nvidia could have branched out into services or chip fabrication. Instead, each business leader chose their niche and at every turn.
So to become wildly successful in business, you have to avoid the siren’s call of diversification at every turn. Even if that means you have to literally create new markets for your products.
Prior to Rockefeller’s refinery optimizations, most refiners treated gasoline as a waste product and dumped it into rivers and ponds just to get rid of it. One of his key insights was that refinery by-products could be sold for other uses.
By bringing down the cost of hardened, low-carbon steel, Carnegie wasn’t just able to build stronger and longer bridges for Keystone Bridge Works, he created entire military defense applications like metal battleships.
Huang’s expensive gamble on CUDA hardware and associated software libraries enabled advances in neural nets to produce the modern AI industry.
These entrepreneurs didn’t just double down: they literally created the reality their businesses needed to be successful.
Get Lucky
Finally, and most critically, you have to get really lucky. Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Huang all identified a business skill that they intrinsically enjoyed. They put in the time to become world class in those areas. They resisted the temptation to diversify, and instead spent decades doubling down on their previous wins.
But these investments are fundamentally fragile. Without a substantial amount of luck, the stories of these men’s lives would likely have been forgotten after they doubled down one too many times and lost everything in a bad turn of fate. That’s what happens to almost everyone throughout history. We only know Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Huang’s names because they did what is nearly impossible: they made huge sacrifices, put all their chips on black, won, put all their chips on red, won, and then did that another 20 times.
Rockefeller entered the oil market against the preferences of his then-business partners who didn’t understand it and felt it was too volatile and immature. But Rockefeller got extraordinarily lucky with his timing. After the Civil War, oil prices cratered as the northern industrial economy rapidly demobilized. The Pennsylvania oilfields around Titusville went from boom to bust and margins for refiners collapsed. Rockefeller’s first lucky break was in his competence negotiating (often brutally) for the absolute lowest rates for transporting crude and refined oil products. His years of honing his accounting and contract negotiation skills combined with a bust among pre-war drilling companies gave him unprecedented leverage to out-extract and out-transport his competitors.
Although the Bessemer Process predated Carnegie’s entrance into the world of steel manufacturing by more than 20 years, that interim time had allowed the technology to become more widely deployed and ripe for innovation. Carnegie streamlined and vertically integrated the manufacturing of steel at an unprecedented scale during a period of rapid economic growth following the American Civil War. His deep contacts in the railroad industry helped his company secure contracts even during the economic depression from 1873 - 1879 and his connections in Washington helped US Steel receive favorable tariff protection. If even one of these ingredients hadn’t been present, it’s feasible that US Steel would never have been created.
Like most startup companies, Nvidia nearly died several times in the early years due to bad product releases, economic conditions, and poorly-timed strategies. But Jensen got extremely lucky that his expensive investment in CUDA hardware and software was timed perfectly for use by cryptocurrency miners and neural net advances. Without those lucky breaks, the company may well have been relegated to the dustbin of history along with other contemporary graphics card companies like 3DFX.
To continue the surfing metaphor, you have to get exactly the timing and weather if you want to catch the perfect wave.
You Feelin’ Lucky Punk?
Most people who truly fathom the costs associated with this path eventually shy away and choose to compromise. That’s not a failure of personality, but a healthy understanding of their values.
But for those that want to become wildly successful in business, the steps are pretty easy to explain. The question that you have to ask yourself is whether you’re feelin’ lucky. If you are, go ahead: find a skill, focus on it, double down, and roll the dice.
