Jensen Huang: How Studying at Stanford Helped Build Nvidia and Make Him a Billionaire

Even if you’ve never heard of Jensen Huang personally, you’ve almost certainly heard of Nvidia.

But this isn’t just another “rags-to-riches” story. It’s a perfect example of how education can be the first stepping stone toward a sky-high career — even if you start out as a modest immigrant from Taiwan.

Contents:

• Who Is Jensen Huang
• Education
• Founding Nvidia
• First Big Break
• “A Proud Moment”

Who Is Jensen Huang

The future billionaire and Nvidia founder, Jensen (Jen-Hsun) Huang, was born on February 17, 1963, in Tainan, Taiwan. When he was five, his family moved to Thailand. At the age of nine, due to the Vietnam War, his parents sent him and his older brother to live with relatives in the United States.

Jensen’s early years in America were anything but easy. His uncle and aunt, who were supposed to host him, mistakenly enrolled him in a reform school for troubled teens, thinking it was a prestigious boarding school for boys. At the same time, Jen-Hsun started working part-time as a dishwasher and waiter at a local Denny’s. Looking back, he says this experience helped him overcome shyness and build early resilience.

It was also during this time that Jen-Hsun adopted a more “Americanized” name — Jensen.

Two years later, Jensen’s parents joined the family in the U.S., settling in Oregon, and the family was finally reunited. Jensen transferred to a local high school in Beaverton, where his American journey continued.

Education

During high school, Huang developed a strong interest in computers. After graduation, he enrolled at Oregon State University, where he studied electrical engineering and computer engineering, earning his bachelor’s degree with honors in 1984.

Looking back, Huang recalled, “I was the youngest kid in school — and the only student who looked like a child.”

After completing his undergraduate degree, Jensen moved to Silicon Valley and started working as a chip designer at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). But he didn’t stay long — only about a year — before accepting a position at LSI Logic Corporation. There, he climbed the ranks and eventually became director of one of the company’s divisions.

Ambition, however, pushed him further. While working full-time, Jensen enrolled in Stanford University for a master’s degree. For two years, he balanced career and evening and weekend studies, earning his Master’s in Electrical Engineering in 1992.

Founding Nvidia and the Early Years

Who knows — maybe it was the spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship at Stanford that shaped Jensen’s next steps?

Whatever the reason, in April 1993, Jensen and two friends from Stanford, engineers Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, decided to start their own company. Their business plan was literally sketched out “on the back of a napkin” over coffee at a Denny’s — yes, the very same diner where Huang had once washed dishes as a teenager.

The trio bet on graphics processors (GPUs). At the time, the video game market was exploding, promising huge future profits. Their starting capital was modest — about $40,000 — but that didn’t stop them from taking the leap.

A funny fact: the company was initially going to be called NVision, but they quickly discovered the name was already taken by a toilet paper manufacturer. They swiftly renamed it Nvidia, derived from the Latin invidia — meaning “envy.”

The early years were tough. The young company desperately needed external funding. Thanks to their tech-industry connections, Huang and his partners met an investor who saw the potential and decided to back the project financially.

Huang later described Nvidia as a company with “approximately zero chance of success” and admitted that he himself wouldn’t have funded it in its infancy. But that was exactly the ambition of the 30-year-old CEO — to push beyond the ordinary and aim for the impossible.

First Big Break

In the 1990s, things weren’t going well for the young company — the first products struggled to find a market. In 1996, Huang had to lay off more than half of his staff, and the remaining funds were redirected toward developing new microchips.

The result came in 1999, when the company launched the GeForce 256 — a next-generation graphics processor that allowed computers to handle 3D graphics much faster than ever before. This release was a turning point for Nvidia, and from that moment on, the company’s role in the global tech market has only grown.

That same year, Nvidia went public. When the stock price hit $100 per share, Jensen Huang got a tattoo of the Nvidia logo on his left shoulder.

In 2000, Huang was named “Entrepreneur of the Year in High Technology” by Ernst & Young, and in 2017, Fortune recognized him as “Businessperson of the Year.”

“A Proud Moment”

A few years ago, Jensen shared a touching story. In 2022, the CEO of Denny’s reached out to him with news that a commemorative plaque had been installed at the very table where the decision to start Nvidia was once made. The inscription read:

“The NVIDIA Booth — The booth that launched a trillion-dollar company.”

According to Huang, this was a true proud moment — a moment of pride and reflection on how far the company had come.

Takeaways

So, what’s the lesson here? What can you take from this story? That’s for each reader to decide. We’ll just note that behind every major success, there’s years of hard work and, almost always, a solid education.

Both of these are in your hands. Keep that in mind!