Jensen Huang says he wouldn't start Nvidia if he could go back in time: 'It's too gruelling'

Jensen Huang, 60, CEO and co-founder of Nvidia

Nvidia became one of the world’s most valuable companies this year thanks to its major stock rally but despite its success, the company's cofounder and CEO Jensen Huang has said that if he could go back in time, he wouldn’t start the business.

Speaking during a podcast recently, when asked what sort of company he would think about starting if he could go back to being 30 years old, the 60-year-old said, "I wouldn’t do it... It’s just too grueling."

Jensen Huang added that if people knew how hard it was to build a company from the ground up, "nobody in their right mind would do it".

“Building Nvidia turned out to have been a million times harder than I expected it to be -- than any of us expected it to be,” Yahoo quoted Huang as saying. “If we realised the pain and suffering [involved] and just how vulnerable you’re going to feel, the challenges that you’re going to endure, the embarrassment and the shame, and the list of all the things that go wrong--I don’t think anybody would start a company. Nobody in their right mind would do it.”

Although Nvidia crossed the $1 trillion market cap to become the world's most valuable listed semiconductor company this year, things have not always been smooth. In fact, in May, Huang recollected that the company was on the brink of shutting down three times in the last 30 years.

"At Nvidia, I experienced failures -- great big ones. All humiliating and embarrassing. Many nearly doomed us," Huang had said. “Confronting our mistake and, with humility, asking for help saved Nvidia.”

Read more: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang reveals 3 times the $1 trillion-market-cap company nearly died