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JH Jordi Hays Jordi Hays Co-founder and host of TBPN, a daily technology talk show covering startup news, funding rounds and the businesses behind Silicon Valley.

“It's felt for the last year that if you were an AI company, Jensen was past the point of, let's say, north of $1 billion, you're too big to fail in sort of like Jensen's worldview. It seemed like he wasn't going to let a company that had any relevancy fail. And I think that without him in that seat, I think that changes a lot.”

TBPN · Startups & Venture · November 2026

“It's felt for the last year that if you were an AI company, Jensen was past the point of, let's say, north of $1 billion, you're too big to fail in sort of like Jensen's worldview. It seemed like he wasn't going to let a company that had any relevancy fail. And I think that without him in that seat, I think that changes a lot.” — Jordi Hays, TBPN

Context

Discussing whether Jensen Huang can stay as Nvidia CEO after admitting an affair with an alleged Chinese spy, Jordi Hays considers what happens to AI startup funding if Nvidia stops acting as a backstop for companies it has invested in.

Transcript

TBPN Around 21:36 into the episode
Jordi Hays

Yeah, you don't.

John Coogan

I don't assume that role.

Jordi Hays

I just think if it's not your company and you don't like, like, Jensen is incredible in so many ways. And I don't think that this story needs to take away from that. Somebody can be very bad on some dimensions, right? Like, he's bad on not having affairs with alleged spies. And he's very good at being the face of compute, right? He's very good at playing that game. And I think the sort of scary scenario, at least if you're a venture capitalist, is like, well, what happens? As of right now, unless the story gets way, way, way worse, which it seems like it's possible, I see Jensen staying in this role. But I think a lot of people are thinking, what happens if you don't have this sort of like founder-led company that's willing to throw $10 billion here, $20 billion here, or do creative deals by companies that aren't really working. It's felt for the last year that if you were an AI company, Jensen was past the point of, let's say, north of $1 billion, you're too big to fail in sort of like Jensen's worldview. It seemed like he wouldn't. It seemed like he wasn't going to let a company that had any relevancy fail.…

John Coogan

kind of loses some of the soft power, which he was thinking about. Totally.

Jordi Hays

And now it's like he can go and do what he's always done very well. But it's like he's giving a talk with an insane black eye. And it's just going to be this elephant, constant elephant in the room. And again, I'm still shocked that we're even having this conversation.

John Coogan

Yeah. What did Dylan Patel have to say over at semi-analysis? He says, nothing will happen to Jensen over the next six months. Is there a prediction market for CEO? Yeah,

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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