Jensen Huang
Retreating with dignity
The second story in the Taipei address
Commencement address at National Taiwan University, 2023
One of the three stories he told the graduates is about giving up. Why he says retreat is hardest for the ablest.
What actually happened?
At the 2023 Taipei commencement he told the story of leaving mobile chips. Nvidia had entered mobile processors early, then saw giants ringing the category and the margin being squeezed out, and knew that dropping it meant dropping the biggest growth story it had. They dropped it, and moved the chips toward robotics and AI. Then he named the psychology out loud: retreat does not come easily to brilliant, successful people like you; but strategic retreat, sacrifice, deciding what to give up, is core to success. Hence the second half of the famous line: run, don't walk.
The abler you are, the dearer admitting defeat costs
A clever person's record holds no failures, and that is precisely the burden. Retreat is not a business adjustment for him, it is a threat to identity: the story I never give up is what stops him doing the right thing. Watch for star teams defending ground that should be given up.
The failing project hardest to kill is the one handed to the best team. Not because it deserves rescuing, but because nobody wants a loss on that record.
Retreat on the structure, not on this quarter's fighting
Mobile chips were still growing when they left. What they read was not the quarter but the structure: giants subsidising the modem, a visible ceiling on margin, their own comparative advantage sitting elsewhere. Retreat timed off the fighting always comes too late to bring the troops out whole.
It is still growing, so let us look again is reading the fighting. Growing does not change who upstream takes the margin is reading the structure.
A retreat has to become a redeployment the same day
The period that took them out of mobile put the engineers onto the robotics platform. The value of a retreat is not the loss it stops but the freed strength having somewhere to go immediately. Withdrawal without redeployment is bleeding; withdrawal into a new formation is manoeuvre.
The announcement that cuts a line has to name the new position and who goes there. Retreat first and think later cuts the team's belief in the next attack too.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: a business that is still growing, has no structural way out, and is the team's pride.
Ask first: is what stops us a structural judgement, or the story that we never give up? For the people and money coming out, have we named where they go?
Where it goes wrong: reading strategic retreat as a pass to withdraw whenever things get hard. Or retreating without redeploying, so the freed resources sit in the account going mouldy.
Lines to keep
Run, don't walk.
Same situation, other people are asking
I built this line and I can't be the one to end it.Pulling out would look like admitting I was wrong.I can't cut something I built · all 2 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.