How Jensen Huang went from washing dishes at Denny's to founding a tech company now worth $2 trillion

How Jensen Huang went from washing dishes at Denny’s to founding a tech company now worth $2 trillion

Jensen Huang, the president and CEO of Nvidia, recently shared his humble beginnings as a dishwater before co-founding a tech company now valued at $2 trillion.

Key points:

Huang, 61, started his career at a Denny’s restaurant in Portland, Oregon, as a dishwasher.
Nvidia, now valued at $2 trillion, is known for designing and manufacturing advanced graphics processing units (GPUs), which are essential components in gaming, visualization, data centers and artificial intelligence (AI) applications.

The details:

Born in Taiwan, Huang moved to the U.S. at the age of 9. At 15, he started working for Denny’s as a dishwasher before being promoted to a busboy. “I did that very well,” he said in a recent interview with the Stanford Graduate School of Business. “I never left the station empty-handed. I never came back empty-handed. I was very efficient.”
Huang went on to earn an electrical engineering degree from Oregon State University and a master’s degree from Stanford University. In 1993, he found himself back at a Denny’s in Silicon Valley for a meeting with friends Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, where the idea for Nvidia originated.
The trio of co-founders aimed to create a chip enabling realistic 3D graphics for personal computers. “The PC revolution was just getting going. We thought, why don’t we build a company that solves problems that a normal computer that is powered by general purpose computing can’t. That became the company’s mission,” recalled Huang, who was working as an engineer for Santa Clara-based company LSI Logic at the time.
Nvidia’s technology would go on to revolutionize various industries, including computational drug design, weather simulation, materials design, robotics, self-driving cars and AI. Today, there is a booth honoring Huang at a Denny’s restaurant in East San Jose.