What does Jensen Huang tell founders who quit Nvidia?

David Hoeller and Nikita Rudin were leaving Nvidia to start a robotics company, and they wanted their CEO's blessing before they went. What they got instead was a name change.

The two had spent years building simulation tools at Nvidia, including work behind a widely watched demo where Jensen Huang shared a stage with a lineup of humanoid robots. Dialling in from a conference in Munich in 2024, they told Huang they were leaving to found their own startup, one they planned to call Checkpoint.

Huang raised no objection to them leaving Nvidia. The startup's name was a different story. "He told us that the name was bad and that we had to change it," Rudin recalled, adding that others had separately told them Checkpoint sounded like it belonged in a different industry entirely.

The founders took the note. Checkpoint became Flexion Robotics, now a Zurich-based company that has raised more than $57 million and recently opened a San Francisco office to expand into the US. Nvidia later became an investor in the company Huang had once talked out of its own name.

Bing Xu’s departure came from a totally different playbook. He had initially come aboard Nvidia through a business deal in 2024 and resigned this year to start INT21, a firm dealing with chip software based on artificial intelligence, taking with him Nvidia stock which would have made his life very lucrative.

Before his departure, Huang spent two hours with Xu and other executives trying to persuade him to remain at the firm, giving him the most candid feedback he has ever gotten in ten years. Huang told him that his greatest weakness is communication since he assumes people know the background information.

Xu was also dealing with high blood pressure at the time, and Huang told him to take time off and rest rather than push straight into a new venture.