NVIDIA - Jen-Hsun "Jensen" Huang

Huang was born in Taiwan's coastal city of Tainan in 1963. His family sent him to his uncles who lived in the US state of Washington due to the war environment in his country. His uncle sent him to a boarding school in Kentucky. The school is located at the top of the mountain and is built in a very poor environment with gangs hostile to each other. The main purpose of the school is to teach the wrongness of hostility and to be helpful.
Jensen mentioned that the children at the school were very tough and belligerent and that they carried knives in their pockets. He explained that there were bloody injuries when there were fights. Everyone at the school had to work in addition to the education they received. The task given to Jensen was to clean the toilet.
Jensen stated that he had a lot of difficulties at that time, but that it was a great experience for him. He stated that Jensen always tries to make his friends see the positive aspects of his situation. For example, there is an apple tree in the garden of the boarding school where he stays, as he puts it: "Wow, this is incredible, what a beautiful country and school, there are apple trees everywhere and we can eat apples." It has oriented itself positively in the form of.
He graduated from high school at the age of 16 and entered the state university in Oregon. He started studying electrical engineering. While he was studying, he started working part-time at Denny's restaurant.
While working in the university laboratory, he met the girl who is now his wife and fell in love at first sight. In order to show his love to her, Jensen explains that he used a tactic like this. Jensen said, "My biggest strength was my success at school and I asked him if he would like to see my homework." They later got married and now have a happy family with 2 children.
After graduating from university, he moved to the Silikn valley and started working in several companies there. He continued to meet and chat with his friends at Denny's restaurant, and the idea of ​​establishing the NVIDIA company emerged there. Jensen explains their meeting by saying, "We had kids and dogs so we had to find a quiet place to talk."
Three friends decided to start a graphics company. While Jensen has an introverted and sarcastic character, working in this restaurant and dealing with difficult customers helped me come out of my shell. He explains that he learned to deal with difficult situations at that time. Later, after going through so much difficulty in the restaurant where he went as a customer and had to work, he came up with the idea of ​​establishing a world giant company.
As a gift of fate, she goes as a customer to a restaurant where she had to work years ago and gets the idea of starting her own company.
Jensen, who was 15 years old at that time, explains that since he had no idea about the business world, I had to be able to explain my ideas well. To prepare a presentation, he bought a computer and prepared a presentation using Adobe's Persuasion program. At that time, only this program existed. In fact, he wanted to establish the company under the name Envision. However, since a toilet paper company took this name, he derived the company name NVIDIA from the Latin word invidia (to emulation, to envy).
They did nothing for 6 months after establishing the company. As three partners, they had no knowledge about establishing a company, and they tried to understand this problem by reading "company formation" books. Finally, Jensen sought help from a law firm (Cooley). They asked Jensen how much money he had in his pocket, stating that capital was required for share price transactions. Jense said, "There is 200 dollars" and the company operations started based on 200 dollars. The current value of the company 30 years later is $2,056,000,000,000. The $200 in Jensen's pocket was valued 30 billion times after 30 years.
Interesting information: Jensen's cousin became the CEO of AMD.
Jensen states that he has never been able to make a business plan. “I never finished my business plan,” Jensen says. For this reason, he found the book C. Gordon BELL - High-tech Ventures and started reading it. Jensen said of the book, "It was a very thick book and if I had tried to read it all I would be dead by now." However, he prepared the presentation.
After preparing his presentation, he started meeting with investors and realized that the most important thing for investors is that they invest in people they can trust and a vision of a business that is not available in the market. Jensen expresses this issue as follows: "First of all, the question is, do they trust you, your reputation is important, your past is important.
Secondly, it must be a business that is not in the market. The size of the market is important and the vision in this business is decisive. So, they are looking for great people who are reliable and have a vision.
When the company's shares started to rise, the 3 partners started to dream of a target among themselves. Jensen says he will make a tattoo if the share price is 100 dollars and has the company's logo tattooed on his shoulder. He currently has the company logo tattooed on his shoulder.
Jensen's work at the company has 50 people reporting to him within the scope of strategy, which is quite a high number for a CEO. Jensen says this: "In this way, he reduces the layers in the company and creates a horizontal hierarchy."
They are making exploratory developments in many areas. For example, when NVIDIA CUDA was made, there was neither a market nor a buyer for the product. Their policy here is "if you build it, they will come".
Over the years, they have turned to topics such as artificial intelligence and machine learning and made exploratory developments. They continued to develop their products in this field, where no progress was made for years. When Bitcoin was released, NVIDIA powerful processors were in high demand in mining operations.
When the artificial intelligence market finally emerged and the need for truly powerful processors emerged, NVIDIA had already been ready for this situation for 10 years. However, this growth and development process has always been more difficult. For this reason, Jensen said, "I always enjoyed this journey. I focused on living that moment, not looking at the result, and tried to love it."