27 June 2024

“I owe my success to the dreams and aspirations of my parents,” says Jensen Huang, founder of Nvidia.

His father was a chemical engineer, and his mother was a grade school teacher. In the 1960s, Huang’s father arrived in the U.S. for the first time through an employee training program with the air conditioning company Carrier. This experience ultimately enabled him to send his sons to study in the United States.

“Every day, my mother would pick ten words out of a dictionary at random and make my older brother and me learn them,” Huang reminisces.

“My father’s dream and my mother’s aspiration ultimately sent my brother and me to America… I owe everything to them.”

On May 30th, Nvidia’s market value exceeded a trillion U.S. dollars, marking the first time a semiconductor company has reached this milestone. Jensen Huang’s net worth was estimated at over $32 billion.

A Stint in a Reform School

Huang didn’t move to the United States until he was nine years old. Before that, his family had settled in Thailand due to his father’s work. However, the political unrest there led his parents to send him and his brother to live with their uncle in the U.S. in 1973.

At that time, Huang’s uncle had recently immigrated himself and mistakenly enrolled the boys in a reform school instead of a preparatory school.

The institution was the Oneida Baptist Institute, located in the remote mountains of Kentucky. Bud Underwood, who later became Dean at the Institute, shared on an NPR program that the school was established in the 1890s to accommodate students rejected by other schools. “In the 1970s, many viewed Oneida as a reformatory, but that’s not who we are anymore,” he explained.

Eventually, the Huang family reunited in Oregon. There, Huang met his future wife, Lori Mills, at Oregon State University. They married five years later and had a son and daughter. In 1990, Huang earned his Master’s in electrical engineering from Stanford.

Nvidia’s Origins: A Denny’s Restaurant

After graduating, Huang worked for AMD and LSI Logic. On his 30th birthday, he co-founded Nvidia at a Denny’s restaurant with friends and fellow engineers Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem. They recognized a growing need for more powerful hardware to render computer graphics, which was lacking at the time.

Interestingly, Denny’s was also where Huang worked as a waiter during his studies. “I was a good student, focused and driven, but I was very introverted and incredibly shy,” Huang told The New York Times. Working as a waiter helped him come out of his shell, teaching him to interact with customers and navigate challenging situations. He learned to handle mistakes, whether they were his own, his colleagues’, or the customers’.

Their gamble paid off tremendously. As the video game industry flourished, Nvidia’s graphics cards provided the parallel computing power that brought games to life. Later, the cryptocurrency boom further elevated Nvidia’s prominence. Today, the surge in generative AI heavily relies on Nvidia’s GPUs, which are central to machine learning models.

Now 60, Huang is recognized for his signature all-black leather jacket and the Nvidia tattoo on his arm. A car enthusiast, he owns two Ferraris, a Koenigsegg, and a Mercedes. He got the tattoo as a memento the first time Nvidia’s share price surpassed $100.

Huang embodies the hardworking spirit of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, starting his day at four in the morning and often working for 14 hours after a morning workout. His management style is often described as an “iron fist in a velvet glove.”

He once tore into a project team that constantly made mistakes during a meeting. He asked the silent team members, “Did you screw up?”

“If you screwed up, wake up and tell everyone you screwed up.” The point Huang wanted to get across was clear. “If you need help, ask.”

Huang says that the core value he treasures most is “the tolerance to take risks and the ability to learn from failure.” He’s worked hard to make it the core value of Nvidia.

The second core value is intellectual honesty, which involves openly acknowledging failures and making necessary adjustments rather than hiding mistakes and misdirecting efforts to address problems.

When Nvidia was founded, there was nothing comparable on the market. The technology wasn’t fully developed, and the company was on the brink of bankruptcy.

Huang reflects on that period: “I learned that it was acceptable for CEOs to admit that the strategy didn’t work, that the technology was flawed, that the product didn’t succeed, but we’re still going to thrive, and here’s why.”

Today, Nvidia’s corporate ethos can be summed up like this: If you believe in a worthwhile idea that hasn’t been tried before, it’s perfectly fine to take a risk. It’s okay to experiment, and if things don’t pan out, learn from the experience, adapt, and continue moving forward. Embracing the idea of “failing forward” is key to being a truly great company.

As CEO, Huang doesn’t provide all the answers; instead, he prefers to ask questions. He understands that a CEO can’t know everything, but they often have a better ability to anticipate challenges and a sharper intuition than most, allowing them to offer valuable insights.

While Bill Gates stepped away from day-to-day operations at 52 and Jeff Bezos did so at 57, Huang, at 60, is the longest-serving CEO in the tech industry—and he feels as though he’s just getting started. During the annual Nvidia GTC conference earlier this year, he joked to reporters that he doesn’t know how much longer he will be C.E.O., “But maybe in 30 years, I will become a robot so that I can work another 30 years.”