I quit Nvidia before my stock blew up, but Jensen Huang taught me career lessons I still follow today

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Sid Pardeshi, 32, the co-founder and CTO of a generative AI software platform. He is from India and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I thought I’d stay at Nvidia forever.

The pay, learning opportunities, and benefits made it a delight to work there. I had no reason to leave.

But Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, inspired me, and I realized I wanted to be a founder, too.

In 2022, I made the extremely hard decision to leave Nvidia and pursue my entrepreneurial dreams. I resigned months before ChatGPT was released, and I believe that choice cost me double-digit millions worth of unvested company stock.

I co-founded the AI company Blitzy in 2023, which has raised $4.4 million. Working under Huang for over six years taught me valuable lessons that have been instrumental to my success.

Getting a job at Nvidia was a dream come true

I got an internship with Nvidia in India through my university, where I studied electrical and electronics engineering.

When I started in January 2016, Nvidia wasn’t a FAANG company, the acronym for the most prestigious Big Tech firms of the time: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google. But as a gamer, I was familiar with the company’s graphics chips, so I…