Oral History of Jensen Huang
Interviewed by Douglas Fairbairn and Hansen Hsu, on August 09, 2024 in Santa Clara, California,
© Computer History Museum
In this oral history, Jensen describes the unlikely path he followed from Taiwan where he was born, to Thailand where his father was starting an oil refinery, to a boarding school in Oneida Kentucky, to Oregon for college, and finally to Silicon Valley where he got an MSEE, and where he eventually co-founded Nvidia, a company destined to become one of the most valuable companies in the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0c8i4T9BSqY
His first job after graduating from Oregon State University was to work at AMD because of the opportunity to work on microprocessor design. In a year he was recruited to LSI Logic, largely because of the opportunity to work with the new generation of design automation tools which were evolving at the time. While working at LSI, part of his job was to collaborate with two engineers, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, working at Sun Microsystems in the development of a new chip.
At one point Chris and Curtis decided they wanted to leave Sun and start their own company. They asked Jensen to join them in formulating a plan for this new enterprise. They eventually decided to focus on computer graphics and in April 1993, they formed Nvidia with Jensen as CEO.
Throughout this interview Jensen describes Nvidia’s early challenges and missteps and a couple of “near death” experiences and the important lessons learned along the way. He also outlines the vision they had to leverage their system architecture to solve problems far beyond the original 3D graphics products they started with. This vision and their unique software/hardware system architecture allowed them to expand into other important markets, including artificial intelligence, which has been the rocket fuel which ignited the company’s spectacular growth.
None of this technological insight would have been enough without the brilliant guidance provided by Jensen. He says his management style is “to simultaneously work in the future and work in the present, and I'm very hands-on. I create the conditions by which amazing people could do great work. I tend not to be very operational. So, I take myself out of the day-to-day meetings, and I focus my energy on two areas, the areas that create the future and the area which solves problems for the company.”
