Eric Schmidt, whose net worth is hovering around $45 billion, knows what it takes to climb the corporate ladder in Silicon Valley, having spent a decade as CEO of Google. Yet the secret to his success is not racking up endless hours in the office.
Instead, Schmidt credits a deceptively simple habit, one he calls a game-changer for anyone seeking meaningful productivity gains: Set aside a few undisturbed hours each weekend for reflection, and grab a pen and paper. No screens allowed.
This approach, which Schmidt revealed during a recent interview on The Gstaad Guy Podcast hosted by Gustaf Lundberg Toresson, traces back to his mentorship by the late great Bill Campbell, legendary coach to tech’s most influential leaders.
“You work really hard during the week, as hard as you can—you know, 12 hours, 14 hour days, whatever—and on the weekends, when you’re at home or with your family or whatever, carve out a few hours to think,” Schmidt said on the podcast. “Turn off the phone. You’re not texting. You’re not looking at Instagram and so forth. And think and write down your assessment of what you did last week, and then what you need to do next week to address the things you forgot to do last week.”
He insists this simple practice can be transformative because it helps you practice focusing on accountability. “It’s a good trick because it forces you to take charge of your next week. Like, ‘Oh, I forgot that I have a sales problem over there,’ or ‘I forgot I was supposed to call this person,’ ‘Oh, I didn’t have this proposal and I had this idea but I didn’t get to it.’ And that usually works pretty well,” he said.
This practice isn’t about squeezing more tasks into the weekend. It’s about using downtime to recalibrate. Schmidt said he eventually found his optimal workweek to be about 63 hours—not the 80-plus-hour marathons of his younger years—which just goes to show that more time at the desk doesn’t always lead to better outcomes. “You hit declining marginal productivity,” he said on the podcast, adding that too much “slaving away” can actually erode results.
He also makes clear that reflection is not just for CEOs or entrepreneurs. Anyone, from engineers to junior staff, can benefit, especially in a world saturated with digital noise and the ever-present risk of distraction. In an era where “attention has become a form of currency,” he said, the need to carve out thoughtful time while unplugged from our cavalcade of electronic distractions has never been greater.
According to Schmidt, adopting this weekend habit can help you catch small problems before they grow into big ones, and let you stay focused on important matters. As Schmidt notes, “writing things down equals clarity”—and that clarity is what keeps the world’s most powerful leaders not just busy, but effective.
Jensen Huang prepares to throw out the ceremonial first pitch before the game between the San Francisco Giants and the Arizona Diamondbacks at Oracle Park on Sept. 03, 2024 in San Francisco. Lachlan Cunningham/Getty Images
There’s no question that Nvidia (NVDA) is one of the biggest winners of the A.I. boom so far. Funneled by an insatiable demand for its graphics processing units (GPUs), the chipmaker’s stock has skyrocketed by more than 450 percent since early 2023. As Nvidia’s market cap and revenue soar, so does the pace of its investing in A.I. startups. More than half of the company’s startup investments since 2005 took place in the past two years.
The value of the company’s startup investments reportedly totaled more than $1.5 billion at the beginning of 2024, a significant jump from the $300 million a year prior. The chipmaker has participated in more than ten $100 million-plus funding rounds for A.I. startups in 2024 alone, according to data from Crunchbase, and has backed more than 50 startups since 2023. That’s not to mention a flurry of activity from the company’s venture capital arm NVentures, which separately made 26 investments in 2023 and 2024.
Nvidia’s seemingly unflappable upward trajectory took a hit yesterday (Sept. 3) after reports surfaced that it had received a subpoena from the U.S. Department of Justice as part of an antitrust probe. The company’s stock dropped nearly 10 percent, shaving $279 billion off its market cap, which currently stands at $2.6 trillion.
But its falling stock price doesn’t mean the company is slowing down in its startup department. In addition to eyeing an investment in an upcoming funding round in ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, Nvidia yesterday unveiled its participation in a more than $100 million funding round for the Tokyo-based Sakana AI, a company that specializes in accessible A.I. models trained on small datasets.
“We invest in these companies because they’re incredible at what they do,” Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang told Wired earlier this year. “These are some of the best minds in the world.”
From companies specializing in humanoid robots to autonomous vehicles, here’s a look at some of Nvidia’s most significant startup investments:
Perplexity AI
Huang hasn’t been shy about his love for Perplexity AI, the A.I.-powered search engine positioned as a competitor to the likes of Google. The Nvidia CEO uses the startup’s tool nearly every day for research, according to Huang’s interview with Wired.
He has also put his money where his mouth is, with Nvidia partaking in a $62.7 million funding round for Perplexity AI in April that valued the startup at $1 billion. Led by investor Daniel Gross, the round included participants like Amazon (AMZN)’s Jeff Bezos. It wasn’t the first time Nvidia has backed the company—the chipmaker also invested in Perplexity AI during another funding round in January that valued the startup at $73.6 million.
Hugging Face
Hugging Face, a startup providing open-source A.I. developer platforms, has long had close ties to Nvidia. The chipmaker participated in a $235 million funding round in Hugging Face in August 2023 that valued the company at $4.5 billion. Other corporate investors participating in the round included Google, Amazon, Intel, AMD and Salesforce.
Hugging Face has previously included Nvidia hardware among its shared resources. In May, it launched a new program that donated $10 million worth of free, shared Nvidia GPUs to be used by A.I. developers.
Adept AI
Unlike more well-known A.I. assistants from companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic, Adept AI’s primary product doesn’t center around text or image generation. Instead, the startup is focused on building an assistant that can complete tasks on a computer, such as generating a report or navigating the web, and is able to use software tools. Nvidia is on board, having participated in a $350 million funding round in March 2023.
Databricks
After receiving a giant valuation of $43 billion last fall, Databricks became one of the world’s most valuable A.I. companies. The data analytics software provider unsurprisingly uses Nvidia’s GPUs and has been backed by the chipmaker alongside other investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Capital One Ventures, all of whom participated in a $500 million funding round in September 2023. “Databricks is doing incredible work with Nvidia technology to accelerate data processing and generative A.I. models,” said Huang in a statement at the time.
Cohere
A formidable opponent to OpenAI and Anthropic, the Canadian startup Cohere specializes in A.I. models for enterprises. The company’s growth over the past five years has attracted backers such as Nvidia, Salesforce and Cisco, which funded Cohere during a round held in July. Nvidia also took part in a May 2023 funding round that brought in some $270 million for the startup.
Mistral AI
Mistral AI is a French startup focusing on developing open-source A.I. models. It was founded by former Google DeepMind and Meta employees in April 2023. Nvidia has participated in two of the startup’s fundraising rounds, a $518 million round in June and a $426 million round in December 2023. The collaboration between the two companies doesn’t end there—in July, Nvidia and Mistral AI jointly released a small and accessible language model for developers.
Figure
Huang has long reiterated his belief that A.I.-powered robots able to work among humans will constitute the next wave of technology. It is, therefore, no surprise that Nvidia is a backer of Figure, a startup developing humanoid robots for use in warehouses, transportation and retail. Nvidia reportedly funneled $50 million towards the company during a February funding round that raised a total of $675 million and included participants like Bezos and Microsoft.
Scale AI
To properly train A.I. tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, tech companies need vast amounts of data. This is where A.I. startups like Scale AI, which provides troves of accurately labeled data and is headed by billionaire Alexandr Wang, come in. Nvidia participated in a $1 billion funding round for the company in May alongside Big Tech players like Amazon and Meta.
Wayve
Autonomous driving is another area of interest for A.I. leaders across the tech world. Huang himself said that “every single car, someday, will have to have autonomous capability” in a recent interview with Yahoo Finance. One of the startups at the forefront of this wave is the U.K.-based Wayve. Nvidia participated in a $1 billion funding round in the startup in May.
Inflection AI
Out of the 92 startups Nvidia has backed throughout the decades, Huang’s company has only been a lead investor in 20 rounds. One of these occurred in June 2023, when Nvidia led a staggering $1.3 billion round for Inflection AI. The chipmaker co-led the round alongside Microsoft, Bill Gates and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
The A.I. startup, which was co-founded by LinkedIn (LNKD) co-founder Reid Hoffman and Google DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman and most recently valued at $4 billion, produces a chatbot known as Pi. Much of the round’s funding went towards bolstering Inflection A.I.’s computing cluster of 22,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs.
Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt has a complaint about his old stomping ground—and it’s one that workers have heard on repeat for the past two years: They aren’t working in the office enough.
Schmidt, who left Google for good in 2020, blasted the company’s working-from-home policy during a recent talk at Stanford University, while claiming it’s the reason why the search engine giant is lagging behind in the AI race.
“Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning,” Schmidt told Stanford students.
“And the reason startups work is because the people work like hell.”
“I’m sorry to be so blunt,” Schmidt continued in the video posted on Stanford’s YouTube channel on Tuesday. “But the fact of the matter is, if you all leave the university and go found a company, you’re not gonna let people work from home and only come in one day a week if you want to compete against the other startups.”
Schmidt made the remarks in response to a question from professor Erik Brynjolfsson about how Google have lost the lead in AI to startups like OpenAI and Anthropic.
“I asked [Google CEO] Sundar [Pichai] this, he didn’t really give me a very sharp answer. Maybe you have a sharper or a more objective explanation for what’s going on there,” Brynjolfsson posed to the former Google boss.
Fortune has contacted Schmidt and Google for comment.
WFH became the norm at Google after Schmidt left
Schmidt, who led Google from 2001 to 2011, before handing the reins back to the search giant’s co-founder Larry Page, stayed on as Google’s executive chairman and technical advisor until 2020.
Since then, the world of work has undergone a significant transformation. Despite the dangers of the pandemic being long behind us, companies are largely still operating remotely—at least for part of the week.
In fact, a study from KPMG recently revealed that CEOs who believe office workers will be back at their desks five days a week in the near future are now in the small minority.
It’s worth highlighting that Schmidt’s one-day-a-week remark is an exaggeration: Like most firms, Google has asked workers to come into offices around three days a week, per the company’s 2022 Diversity Annual Report.
More recently, Google has even begun formally tracking office badge swipes and using it as a metric in performance reviews.
However, Schmidt should note that employee backlash from rigid return-to-office mandates could actually wipe out any productivity gains in Google’s AI department.
WFH, RTO and productivity
Schmidt’s not the first leader to complain that working from home kills innovation.
However, CEOs who order their staff to work from an office five days à la pre-pandemic risk having fewer staff around to innovate.
Reams of research suggest that workers would quit their jobs if forced to return to their company’s vertical towers.
Meanwhile, leaders who have already enforced an RTO mandate have admitted they experienced more attrition than they anticipated and are struggling with recruitment.
Elon Musk, for one, has been an outspoken advocate for in-office work—he quickly found out that employees will call their bosses ultimatum to commute to work or find another job.
Twitter’s (now X) operations were put at risk soon after he took over when more workers than expected chose to quit rather than answer Musk’s call to go “hardcore”.
Plus, even if employees don’t quit in anger, they’ll likely have less zing for their jobs: A staggering 99% of companies with RTO mandates have seen a drop in engagement.
Either way, Google’s lack of innovation in the AI department can’t be down to staff working from home more than those at OpenAI—they have the same 3-day in-office policy.
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Just a couple of years ago, it seemed that space mining was inevitable. Analysts, tech visionaries and even renowned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson predicted that space mining was going to be big business.
Space mining companies like Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, backed by the likes of Google‘s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, cropped up to take advantage of the predicted payoff.
Fast forward to 2022, and both Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries have been acquired by companies that have nothing to do with space mining. Humanity has yet to commerciallymine even a single asteroid. So what’s taking so long?
Space mining is a long-term undertaking and one that investors do not necessarily have the patience to support.
“If we had to develop a full-scale asteroid mining vehicle today, we would need a few hundred million dollars to do that using commercial processes. It would be difficult to convince the investment community that that’s the right thing to do,” says Joel Sercel, president and CEO of TransAstra Corporation.
“In today’s economics and in the economics of the near future, the next few years, it makes no sense to go after precious metals in asteroids. And the reason is the cost of getting to and from the asteroids is so high that it vastly outstrips the value of anything that you’d harness from the asteroids,” Sercel says.
This has not dissuaded Sercel from trying to mine the cosmos. TransAstra will initially focus on mining asteroids for water to make rocket propellant, but would like to eventually mine “everything on the periodic table.” But Sercel says such a mission is still a ways off.
“In terms of the timeline for mining asteroids, for us, the biggest issue is funding. So it depends on how fast we can scale the business into these other ventures and then get practical engineering experience operating systems that have all the components of an asteroid mining system. But we could be launching an asteroid mission in the 5 to 7-year time frame.”
Sercel hopes these other ventures keep it afloat until it develops its asteroid mining business. The idea is to use the tech that will eventually be incorporated into TransAstra’s astroid mining missions to satisfy already existing market needs, such as using space tugs to deliver satellites to their exact orbits and using satellites to aid in traffic management as space gets increasingly more crowded.
AstroForge is another company that believes space mining will become a reality. Founded in 2022 by a former SpaceX engineer and a former Virgin Galactic engineer, AstroForge still believes there is money to be made in mining asteroids for precious metals.
“On Earth we have a limited amount of rare earth elements, specifically the platinum group metals. These are industrial metals that are used in everyday things your cell phone, cancer, drugs, catalytic converters, and we’re running out of them. And the only way to access more of these is to go off world,” says AstroForge Co-Founder and CEO Matt Gialich.
AstroForge plans to mine and refine these metals in space and then bring them back to earth to sell. To keep costs down, AstroForge will attach its refining payload to off-the shelf satellites and launch those satellites on SpaceX rockets.
“There’s quite a few companies that make what is referred to as a satellite bus. This is what you would typically think of as a satellite, the kind of box with solar panels on it, a propulsion system being connected to it. So for us, we didn’t want to reinvent the wheel there,” Gialich says. “The previous people before us, Planetary Resources and DSI [Deep Space Industries], they had to buy entire vehicles. They had to build much, much larger and much more expensive satellites, which required a huge injection of capital. And I think that was the ultimate downfall of both of those companies.”
The biggest challenge, AstroForge says, is deciding which asteroids to target for mining. Prior to conducting their own missions, all early-stage mining companies have to go on is existing observation data from researchers and a hope that the asteroids they have selected contain the minerals they seek.
“The technology piece you can control, the operations pieces you can control, but you can’t control what the asteroid is until you get there,” says Jose Acain, AstroForge Co-Founder and CTO.
To find out more about the challenges facing space mining companies and their plans to make space mining a real business watch the video.
