"I would not be where I am now without the dreams and aspirations of my parents," says Jensen Huang, founder of Nvidia.

His father was a chemical engineer; his mother taught grade school. In the 1960s, Huang's father stepped onto U.S. soil for the first time thanks to an employee training program organized by the air conditioning company Carrier. It paved the way for him to one day send his sons to study in the 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 surpassed a trillion U.S. dollars. It was the first semiconductor company in history to cross this threshold. Huang's net worth was valued at over NT$1.04 trillion.

A stint in a reform school

It wasn't until Huang was nine that he actually resided in the United States. The family had previously settled in Thailand due to the elder Huang's work. However, the tumultuous political situation compelled his parents to send the two boys to live with their uncle in the U.S. in 1973.

At the time, Huang's uncle had also just immigrated. He unwittingly sent the brothers to a reform school instead of a prep school.

The reformatory was the Oneida Baptist Institute, hidden away deep in the mountains of Kentucky.

Huang remembers: "The kids were really tough; they all had pocket knives."

Bud Underwood, who later became Dean at the Institute, explained on an NPR program that the school was founded in the 1890s to take in students who were rejected by other establishments. "In the 1970s, it was true that many considered Oneida a reformatory, but it's not who we are anymore," he says.

The Huang family was finally reunited in Oregon. Huang met his future wife, Lori Mills, at Oregon State University; they married five years later and have a son and daughter. In 1990, Huang got his Master's in electrical engineering from Stanford.

Nvidia's birthplace: A restaurant chain where Huang part-timed

Huang worked for AMD and LSI Logic after graduating from college. On his 30th birthday, he founded Nvidia at a Denny's restaurant with friends and fellow engineers Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem.

The three foresaw that customers would need more powerful hardware for rendering computer graphics in the future. At the time, such professional and high-performing tools simply did not exist.

Coincidentally, Denny's was also where Huang part-timed as a student. "I was a very good student, and I was always focused and driven. But I was very introverted. I was incredibly shy," Huang told The New York Times. Working as a waiter at Denny's pulled him out of his shell.

He learned to face customers and find compromises in difficult situations. He learned to face mistakes—whether the fault was his own, his colleagues', or even the customers'.

The three's gamble paid off in spades. As the video game industry boomed, Nvidia's graphics cards offered parallel computing capabilities that really made the games come alive. Years later, the cryptocurrency fad once again put Nvidia on the map. The current wave of generative AI also benefits greatly from Nvidia's GPUs, which lie at the heart of machine learning AI models.

Investor Tench Coxe, who has sat on the board of Nvidia since its founding in 1993, says, "(Jensen's) vision is out in five to ten years—he isn't talking about going to Mars or something."

(Source: Ming-Tang Huang)

The 60-year-old Huang is known for his favorite all-black leather jacket and the Nvidia tattoo on his arm. He's an avid auto aficionado: he owns two Ferraris and a Koenigsegg, as well as a Mercedes. He got his tattoo as a memento the first time Nvidia's share price passed US$100.

Huang also exhibits all the traits of a hardworking Silicon Valley entrepreneur. He starts his day at four in the morning and can work for 14 hours after a morning exercise session.

Huang's management style may be 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. This means frankly admitting failure and course-correcting when necessary, instead of trying to disguise a mistake and misdirecting efforts to fix the problem.

Back when Nvidia was founded, there was nothing like it on the market. The technology was not quite there yet, and the company faced bankruptcy.

Huang says of that time: "I learned that it was O.K. for C.E.O.'s to say that the strategy didn't work, that the technology didn't work, that the product didn't work, but we're still going to be great, and let me tell you why."

(Source: Commonwealth Magazine)

Nowadays, to put it simply, Nvidia's corporate personality is this: If you think something is really worthwhile and you have a great idea, and it's never been done before but you believe in it, it's okay to take a chance. It's okay to try, and if it doesn't work, learn from it, adjust, and keep failing forward. If you can fail forward all the time, then you are really a great company.

Of course, this tolerance for failure is built on "intellectual honesty." If a person clings too much to an idea that is bad or isn't working, they might feel like their reputation is tied up in it, which makes it harder for them to admit failure.

Another thing that Huang does as C.E.O. is that he doesn't give too many answers but he likes to ask questions. He realizes that it's not possible for the C.E.O. to know everything, but a C.E.O. is better at looking around corners than most, and a C.E.O. has better intuition than most, so they can bring a unique perspective to the table.

Microsoft's Bill Gates left day-to-day operations at age 52; Amazon's Jeff Bezos at 57. At 60, Huang is the longest-serving C.E.O. in the tech industry. But he feels like 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."

(Sources: CNBC, WIRED, NYT, NPR)

---

Have you read?

• Can Taiwan Find an AI Niche? 
• AI medical records assistant Copilot 
• The story behind Taiwan’s ChatGPT 

Translated by Jack Chou
Uploaded by Ian Huang