The Nvidia company was founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang. Since the company started making graphics cards for computers, the company name has combined three elements.
Given the technology company’s impressive results over the past year, it’s likely that this is exactly the sentiment that both the company and its founders will evoke in their competitors.
Between March 2023 and March 2024, Nvidia’s share price increased from US$264 to US$886, making its total value over US$2 trillion.
And it has become the third largest public company in the world, surpassing Alphabet (Google), Amazon and Meta.
Now only Microsoft and Apple are ahead of it on the list.
Nvidia’s rapid rise in value is explained by artificial intelligence and the fact that it supplies more than 70 percent of the chips that make this technology possible.
But if it wasn’t for the vision of its founder, Jensen Huang, this technology wouldn’t have come to be.
They chose this market when it didn’t even exist and contributed to making it a reality.
As Wired magazine recently wrote, today Huang is considered ‘the man of the hour, the year and perhaps the decade’.
While Jim Cramer, an investment analyst for the American network CNBC, said that the founder of Nvidia has surpassed Elon Musk in terms of vision of the future.
Huang’s story was not without difficulties, dangers and hard work. The story also includes working long hours as a waiter and washing toilets.
An immigrant child in the reformatory was born in 1963 in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan.
Huang spent part of his childhood in Taiwan and Thailand before his parents decided to send him and his brother to the United States.
The two brothers did not know English and lived with their maternal uncles, who had also recently arrived in the country.
He was sent to study at the Oneida Baptist Institute in Kentucky, a place that was more like a reformatory than a school.
According to a newsletter published by the school in 2016, when they attended Oneida Elementary School, the two brothers were allowed to live, eat and work at the facility.
Young Jensen’s job was to wash the toilets.
“The kids were really tough,” he said in a 2012 interview with NPR. They all had knives in their pockets and when a fight broke out it was not a good scene. Children were injured.’
Despite the difficulties, Huang has always maintained that it was a great experience and that he enjoyed his time there.
In 2016, Huang and his begum Lori donated 2 million dollars for the construction of girls’ classes and a dormitory building at the educational center.
Sometime later, when their parents arrived in America, the two boys moved to the state of Oregon to live with them.
Huang studied electrical engineering at Oregon State University. He says that is where he was introduced to the ‘magic’ of computers and where ‘fate’ met him with his wife Lori, who was his lab partner.
She was one of three girls in a class of 80 students.
In a 2013 talk to students at the university, Huang highlighted how he met by chance two of Nvidia’s co-founders, Chris Malachowski and Curtis Prem.
“I always say that coincidences are very important to success,” he said.
The three co-founders of Nvidia came up with the idea for the company while having breakfast at a Denny’s fast food chain in San Jose (California).
For the first time since 2023, this technology company has been included in the list of billion dollar companies. A plaque was placed there to commemorate this fact.
Huang’s relationship with Danny is old. At the age of 15, Huang got his first job at a chain store in Portland. They used to wash dishes, clean tables and work as waiters there.
‘It’s a great choice of job,’ says Huang. I advise everyone to take their first job in a restaurant, it teaches humility and hard work.’
He often bragged about how good he was at these tasks at Danny’s.
“My first job before I became CEO was washing dishes and I did it very well,” he said recently in a talk at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
He said that working at Denny’s helped him overcome his shyness.
Huang graduated in 1984 as an engineer. He says that year was ‘a great year to graduate’ because it was the year the era of personal computers began with the release of the first Mac.
He then earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University, which took him eight years to complete.
Along with his studies, he worked in various capacities at technology companies such as Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and LSI Logic. which he left shortly before founding Nvidia.
He said in a 2013 talk at Oregon State University that the three founders asked themselves three questions before building the company: Is this work something we’d ‘really like?’ Is it worth it? And is it ‘really hard’ to do this?’
He said, ‘Today I ask myself the 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 are important.’
Part of their work philosophy is to do these important things even when they don’t have a clear market.
“We are motivated not by the size of the market, but by the value of the work, because the value of the work is an early indicator of the future market,” he said at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
There he also advised a constant return to fundamentals, which he assured is something that creates many opportunities.
Nvidia achieved its initial success in the market with graphics chips that revolutionized the world of video games.
Applying this style of thinking, Huang has built a balanced company that not only has more than 40 people reporting directly to him, but also motivates everyone in the company through two-way communication.
As he explained, it’s also a way to facilitate the flow of ideas and information, and to keep up with the best ideas of his team.
“Leading people to achieve great things, inspiring, empowering and supporting others are what make a great team,” he added in his talk at Stanford. which serves everyone working in the company’
And judging by Nvidia’s results, it’s a philosophy that works. But it’s not as if bad times never hit the company.
The first of these occurred very quickly when the price of DRAM dropped by 90% during its first two years after finding technical solutions to overcome the high cost of DRAM memory.
This made the investment effort worthless and opened the door for dozens of other companies to enter the race to produce the best graphics chips.
Nvidia was able to refocus its efforts and in 1999 introduced the graphics processing unit (GPU), a type of microprocessor that revolutionized computer games.
From there the company continued to work on the development of GPU-accelerated computing. It is a computing model that makes extensive use of parallel graphics processors and it speeds up the work of programs that require large computational power. such as analytics, data, simulation, visualization and artificial intelligence.
Nvidia’s share prices have skyrocketed and with them Huang’s personal fortune has reached US$79 billion, making him the 18th richest man in the world, according to Forbes magazine.
And it could go even further thanks to Nvidia’s quasi-monopoly position with the production of these superchips, whose demand is only expected to grow in the near future.
As a Wall Street analyst quoted by The New Yorker magazine wrote, ‘The artificial intelligence war is on and Nvidia is the only hardware seller.’
It seems that the goddess of fortune will be kind to Jensen Huang.
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Ont-size: 12pt;”>of the company’s early struggles but also underscored the resilience and determination of Huang and his team.
He persevered, focusing on innovation and moving beyond the challenges they faced. This commitment to pushing boundaries led Nvidia to not only recover from its setbacks but to emerge as a leader in the tech industry.
Under Huang’s leadership, Nvidia expanded its product lines, venturing into new markets such as artificial intelligence and deep learning. This strategic shift positioned the company at the forefront of technological advancement, highlighting Huang’s foresight and adaptability.
Despite the successes, Huang often emphasizes the importance of maintaining humility and a strong work ethic, values ingrained in him from his early experiences. He encourages aspiring entrepreneurs to remain curious, to embrace learning, and to persist through challenges.
His journey from washing dishes to leading a billion-dollar company is a testament to the power of hard work and dedication. It proves that with vision and commitment to one’s dreams, even the most humble beginnings can lead to extraordinary achievements.
