From washing dishes to founding Nvidia: the story of Taiwanese migrant Jansen Huang

In the name of Nvidiathe company founded by Jensen Huang in 1993, three revealing elements are mixed: NV, for next vision (the vision of what is coming); VID, a reference to video – since the company began by betting on the development of graphics cards for computers -; but also the word envywhich is used in Latin to refer to – you guessed it – envy.

And, judging by the amazing results that this technology company has had during the last year, it is likely that this is indeed the feeling that both the company and its founder have awakened in their competitors.

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Between March 2023 and March 2024, the value of Nvidia shares went from US$264 to US$886, taking its total valuation above US$2 trillion and making it the third most valuable publicly traded company in the world, surpassing Alphabet (Google), Amazon and Meta; and only behind Microsoft and Apple.

The rapid multiplication of Nvidia’s value is explained by the furor around artificial intelligence and the fact that this company is the supplier of more than 70% of the chips that make this technology possible.

Today, as the magazine recently said Wired, Huang is considered “the man of the hour, of the year and perhaps of the decade”; while Jim Cramer, investment analyst for the American network CNBC, has stated that the founder of Nvidia surpasses Elon Musk as a visionary.

Huang’s story, however, has not been without difficulties, risks and hard work, including many hours spent washing toilets and waiting tables as a waiter.

An immigrant child in a reformatory

Nvidia microchips are playing a leading role in the AI ​​revolution. (Getty/)

Born in Taipei in 1963, Huang spent part of his childhood in Taiwan and Thailand, until his parents decided to send him and his brother to the United States.

The boys – who did not speak English – were taken in by uncles, also recently immigrants, who sent them to study at the Oneida Baptist Institute in Kentucky, which by then was more similar to a reformatory than a regular school.

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According to a newsletter published by that school in 2016, both brothers were allowed to live, eat and work at that institution – which then only offered high school classes – while they attended classes at Oneida Elementary School.

Little Jensen’s assigned job was to wash the bathrooms..

“The guys were really tough. They all had pocket knives and when there were fights, it wasn’t a pretty thing. The kids were hurt,” the businessman commented in an interview with NPR in 2012.

Despite the difficulties, Huang has always maintained that it was a great experience and that he enjoyed his time there.

In fact, in 2016, he and his wife, Lori, donated US$2 million for the construction of a building with classrooms and dormitories for girls at that educational center.

Finding luck

A few years later, the boys moved to Oregon to join their parents when they emigrated to the United States.

Huang attended Oregon State University to study electrical engineering.

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He says that it was there where he opened his eyes to “the magic behind” computers and it was also there where “luck” led him to meet his wife, Lori, who was his laboratory practice partner.

She was one of three girls who belonged to a class with 80 students.

In a talk he gave to students at that university in 2013, Huang highlighted how he had also accidentally met the two co-founders of Nvidia, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem.

“To a large extent I am saying that chance is very important for success“, said.

The three co-founders of Nvidia came up with the idea of ​​creating the company during a breakfast at a Denny’s fast food chain in San Jose (California).

A plaque was placed there that commemorates that fact, after in 2023 that technology company managed to be listed for the first time for US$1 billion.

Huang has a long relationship with Denny’s, as it was at a store of that chain in Portland where he got his first job at the age of 15 washing dishes, cleaning tables and serving as a waiter.

“Excellent job choice. I highly recommend everyone start their first job in the restaurant business, it teaches you humility and hard work.”said Huang, who usually brags about how good he was at those tasks.

“My first job before becoming CEO was washing dishes and I did it very well,” he noted recently in a talk at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

The businessman has said that working at Denny’s helped him overcome his extreme shyness.

“I was terrified of having to talk to people,” he told The New York Times.

Betting on the unknown

Nvidia achieved its first successes in the market thanks to the development of graphics chips that revolutionized the world of video games. (Getty/)

Huang graduated as an engineer in 1984. “A perfect year to graduate,” as he said, because it was the same year in which the era of personal computers began with the release of the first Macs.

He then pursued a master’s degree in electrical engineering at Stanford University, which took him eight years to complete.

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In parallel, he was working in different roles in technology companies such as Advanced Micro Deviced (AMD) and LSI Logic, which he left shortly before founding Nvidia.

As he said in the talk he gave in 2013 at Oregon State University, before creating that company, the three founders asked themselves three questions: Is this work something that “we would really love” to do? Is this work worth doing? And is this work something “really difficult” to do?

“Today I ask myself those same three questions all the time. Because You shouldn’t do anything you don’t love. And you should only work on the things in your life that matter.”, he stated.

Part of their work philosophy is based on betting on doing these important things even when there is no clear established market.

“We find inspiration not in the size of the market, but in the importance of the work, because the importance of work is an early indicator of the future market”he said at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

There he also recommended constantly returning to basic principles because – he assured – that is something that creates many opportunities.

Applying ideas of this style, Huang has created a company with a fairly horizontal structure in which not only are there more than 40 people who report directly to him, but in which he also encourages transversal communication, as well as from the bottom up.

It is a way, as he explained, to facilitate the flow of ideas and information, but also to keep up to date with the best ideas of his team.

“Leading people to achieve great things, inspiring, empowering and supporting others, these are the reasons why a management team exists.to serve everyone else who works in the company,” he noted in his talk at Stanford.

And judging by Nvidia’s results, it’s a philosophy that works.

That, of course, has not prevented the company from going through tough times.

The first of them occurred very soon when, after having searched for technological solutions to overcome the high price of DRAM memory during its first two years, its price fell 90%.

This made the invested effort useless and opened the doors for dozens of other companies to compete in the race to develop the best graphics chips.

Nvidia managed to redirect its efforts and in 1999 launched the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), a type of microprocessor that redefined computer games.

From there, the company continued working on the development of GPU-accelerated computing, a computing model that makes use of the massive use of parallel graphics processors and that allows speeding up the work of programs that require great computing power, such as data analysis, simulations, visualizations and artificial intelligence.

The bet on the latter has skyrocketed the price of Nvidia shares and, with them, Huang’s personal fortune, which reaches US$79 billion, which – according to the magazine Forbes– makes him the 18th richest man in the world.

And it can go even further thanks to the quasi-monopoly position that Nvidia has with the production of these superchips, whose demand is expected to only grow in the near future.

As a Wall Street analyst cited by the magazine The New Yorker: “There is a war going on in the field of artificial intelligence and Nvidia is the only arms seller.”

Jensen Huang’s luck, it seems, may continue to improve.

Source: Elcomercio