How Jensen Huang created one of the most valuable companies in the world

Nvidia founder Jensen (Zhenxun) Huang was born in Taiwan in 1963. There (and a little in Thailand) he spent his early childhood.

Then the parents sent Huang and his brother to the United States to live with close relatives. Various reasons were given: according to some sources, the move was provoked by the Vietnam War, according to others, Huang’s father somehow got there to the States for worker training courses, and upon returning home, he promised to send his children there.

One way or another, the mother of the future billionaire tried to teach her children English before a potential relocation, although, admittedly, she herself did not understand anything in this language. The training scheme was approximately as follows: my mother chose 10 random words from the dictionary, and then asked my brothers to write them and translate them.

This minimal training helped Huang in the United States. Although, of course, the move was not without problems… Relatives (aunt and uncle) made a serious mistake: they enrolled the future businessman not in a private school, but in the Oneida Baptist Institute (it was positioned as a correctional institution in a rural area). There, by the way, Huang began his career: he worked part-time as a dishwasher and waiter in a restaurant.

RBC writesthat after some time Huang's parents moved to America. The family was reunited. Jensen attended high school in Beaverton, and then became a student at the University of Oregon and Stanford University (specializing in electrical engineering).

After graduating, Huang briefly worked at AMD and LSI Logic.

The entrepreneur and his friends (Chris Malachowski and Curtis Priem) created Nvidia in 1993. The company's starting positions were extremely poor by the standards of Silicon Valley – 40 thousand dollars and a small office in one of the towns in California.

The first years of the future multi-billion dollar corporation, the businessman stated, were difficult. The developments of Huang and his friends did not find a place in the market. In 1996, the entrepreneur was forced to fire some of the employees of his young company. He spent the remaining funds on developing new microchips.

It was they who ensured the company's success.

In 1999, the company held an IPO and issued GeForce 256. It was the world's first graphics processor with technical characteristics: 32/64 MB DDR memory, 120 MHz (GPU frequency), 4.8 GB/s memory bandwidth;
In June 2000, NV11 was released – GeForce 2MX (a project, as experts later wrote, classified as “cheap and cheerful” – its presentation was necessary to cover “entry-level” products);
In 2002 appeared NV17 – GeForce4 MX 460 – 64 MB DDR memory; 300 MHz – GPU frequency; 8.8 GB/s – memory bandwidth. At the same time, the NV25 was presented – GeForce4 Ti 4600 (128 MB DDR memory; 300 MHz – GPU frequency; 10.4 GB / s – memory bandwidth);
In April 2004 – NV40 – GeForce 6800 Ultra was introduced. In 2005, the G70 became available to the public – GeForce 7800 GTX;
In 2006, the G80 appeared – GeForce 8800 GTX (768 MB of memory; 384-bit memory bus; 575 MHz – GPU frequency);
In 2007, they introduced the G92 – GeForce 8800 GT, in 2008 – the GT200 – GeForce GTX 280. The latest development, by the way, was not entirely successful: the company set extremely high prices compared to its competitors, which (among other things) led to serious financial losses;
In 2009 – at Nvidia developed and presented new generation Cuda architecture;
In 2011 – company bought mobile phone chip manufacturers;
In 2015 – company presented mobile superchip Tegra X1. It had 8 central cores and 256 graphics cores;
In 2017, the company showed new technologies in the field of machine learning, artificial intelligence and clouds (the Volta architecture was announced, the first graphics processor Volta GV100 based on it and the first graphics accelerator on this chip – Tesla V100, while the cost of the chip was assessed the company itself is worth 3 billion dollars);
In 2018, the company offered users the most powerful Titan RTX graphics processor. CNews then notedthat the new GPU had: 576 tensor cores with support for mixed precision calculations with a total performance of 130 teraflops in deep learning operations; 72 RT cores that provide real-time ray tracing at speeds of up to 11 gigarays per second; 24 GB of high-speed GDDR6 memory with 672 GB/s bandwidth.

Now Nvidia has a monopoly (about 80% of the market) of specialized chips for development in the field of artificial intelligence.

What are the financial performance of the corporation?

For the last quarter of 2023, revenue increased by 265% (compared to the same period in 2022). The company's market value at the end of February 2024 is more than $2 trillion.

By the way, the condition of Huang himself is assessed Forbes at $123.5 billion.

Huang's Principles of Life

Entrepreneur believes successful business leader your company:

Not afraid to get your hands dirty (“There is no task for me that is beneath me because, remember, I used to wash dishes and clean toilets. I mean, I cleaned a lot of toilets,” Huang said at the Stanford Graduate School of Business);
Takes an active interest in the projects of his employees (Huang demands that he be sent weekly by e-mail – the five most important cases that his subordinates are currently working on);
Is a perfectionist.

By the way, Huang himself distributes correctly time, trying to complete all the difficult tasks in the first half of the day: “Every morning I start by completing my highest priority work. Before I even get to work, my day is already a success. I have already completed my most important work and can spend my day helping others. When people apologize for interrupting me, I always say, “I have plenty of time.”

Are these Huang principles of life being implemented in practice?

Not always. At the end of 2023, the company experienced a serious corporate conflict. Young employees of the company (who had worked less than five years) opposed the “veterans”. The latest accused the fact that they are too sluggish (semi-retirement mode – half-retirement mode).

The reason for the confrontation was that the working “old people” were acquiring the company’s ever-growing securities. This led to relaxation and a reluctance to do anything at the same pace: life was already not bad, taking into account the purchased shares, because the income per year reached a million dollars! Huang tried to improve the situation by motivating people to be more active.

What's happening with Nvidia now?

The history of the corporation has never been characterized by constant growth. Ups were followed by extreme downs. Let's remember the same Dotcom Crash or the 2008 Crisis. However, the company did not go bankrupt, but survived. It is possible that thanks to the activity of Huang himself.

Now Nvidia has several crises at once:

The first one is Chinese. Chinese authorities demanded their companies to abandon AI accelerators produced by the American company. If the threat is carried out, Nvidia will take a huge hit to its budget (China was the company's third largest market);
The second is domestic (American). Antimonopoly authorities turned attention to corporate policies. This could even end with a forced Nvidia partition. In US history have already been examples of such manipulations. It is believed that the splitting of firms has a positive effect on competition and prevents price monopoly.

What else should you know about Huang?

He is quite an active inventor. In the Google Patents database there are 23 patents where his name is also mentioned (for example, “Cloud generation of content for streaming to virtual and augmented reality platforms using a virtual broadcaster”, “Remote Control System for Training Deep Neural Networks in Autonomous Machine Applications”, “System and method of cooperative application management”).

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