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Before leaders conquer the world, they have to conquer themselves first. Learn about global leaders' stories and find principles you can apply to your own life.
Hi everyone.
Welcome to Conquered the podcast
about how global leaders conquer
themselves before conquering the world.
I am your host, Alex Wu.
In the second episode, we're talking
about the one and only Jensen Huang.
There are so many interviews and
podcasts about Jensen already.
Why am I still doing
this like everyone else?
I am fascinated by his accomplishment
leading the AI revolution.
But I'm actually more interested in
his journey before founding Nvidia.
I want to look backwards.
And connect the dots to really understand
what made Jensen Jensen, that's why I
named this second episode Young Jensen.
Like young Sheldon, you get the reference.
I know Jensen mentioned a few times in
his interviews that he does not like
analyzing himself, so I'll do it for him.
The main source of my
research are two books.
The first one, the Nvidia Way
by Tae Kim, and another one
that is a little more recent.
It's on my Kindle, the Thinking machine.
By Stephen Witt.
Also the acquired podcast had a
three episode series on Nvidia
plus interview with Jensen himself.
I think the total time is around 10 hours.
It's very well done, so I
encourage you to check it out.
Besides all of those there were
so many interviews and talks
that Jensen gave over the years.
He is just very productive.
He works super hard.
But I wanna say most of the videos
are him talking about his vision
about him preaching the need for
accelerated computing et cetera.
There's not much content or material about
his early childhood and early career.
Like I said, he does not
like to analyze himself.
He focuses more on what's
happening right now.
He's a very practical CEO.
So in this episode, let's uncover
how Jensen conquered himself
before he conquered the world.
Jensen one was born on February the 17th.
1963. His family was poor.
His dad is a chemical engineer.
His mom is a teacher.
Jensen has an older brother
and a younger brother.
The family relocated a lot to
accommodate Jenssen's dad's work.
When Jensen was five years old, the
entire family moved from Taiwan to
Thailand to pursue some opportunities, and
Jensen was enrolled in an international
school in Bangkok, in Thailand.
He actually skipped a
grade in elementary school.
His mom is very proud of
his academic achievements.
Apparently.
Jensen is a very smart kid
also.
He is a little troublemaker
in his own words, mischievous.
I actually found an old interview he gave
in Shanghai around 2007, where he was
speaking half Chinese and half English.
It was quite good.
I'm very impressed by his Mandarin
because I thought his family only
spoke Hokkien a local dialect, but.
Yeah his Mandarin was really good.
It was limited but it was not bad at all.
And in 2007, back then, Nvidia was
just a GPU gaming card company.
In this rare interview Jensen shared
an interesting story, and I don't
think I've heard of it anywhere else
on the internet or in any books.
And believe me, I've I've
pretty much watched and read
everything out there about Jensen.
I was obsessed about Jensen
while doing my research.
So this is in his own words.
He was at this interview there was
a ton of audience in the studio,
and he said I was in Thailand.
And it was at nighttime.
I had discovered a lighter fluid.
I went to the swimming pool and
I put the lighter fluid in the
swimming pool, lit it on fire.
Now, the entire audience at the show they
were in disbelief um, including the host.
I guess that's what Jensen wanted
he's a very good storyteller.
Then Jensen commented in Chinese how
uh, which means uh, it was beautiful.
The host then asked what's next?
Jensen just casually said in Chinese
uh, which means I just uh, jumped in.
Now the entire audience burst
it into laughter and applauded.
I believe Jenssen's daughter
was in the audience too.
Yeah, she was laughing and applauding.
Then Jensen continued.
Looking down from above.
It was beautiful, but
from below looking up.
He then took a really long pause
and then said, unbelievable.
To this day, I still remember
the beautiful images.
The host kept asking your
parents must be worried.
Jensen said, no, I don't think
my parents will be concerned.
They always told us, be good
people, be honest, be careful.
And then that's it.
My mom and dad saw that picture and
my mom was very proud of that picture.
And she said, beautiful dive.
Beautiful dive.
End quote I don't know
who took the picture.
Maybe his brother.
Like I said, Jensen has always
been a fascinating storyteller.
It was an amazing story.
So interesting so captivating.
I was especially impressed by this
unique story because I think first of
all, it shows that Jensen is naturally
risk seeking from very early on.
You know, he is, He's smart.
He's naughty, and that's what smart,
naughty kids do to um, you know,
make some trouble here and there.
Second thing is it shows that his family
was very supportive of him with a few
basic rules, and that created a very
safe environment for Jensen to operate.
To experiment and to express himself.
I think Jensen's parents did their
best to protect his curiosity.
The third thing is Jensen stays
very focused and clearheaded even
during chaotic moments, or I should
say, especially during chaotic
moments, imagine yourself in a
swimming pool and surrounded by fire.
And the one thing, one and only thing in
your mind is how beautiful the flames are.
That is borderline crazy, in my opinion.
Even for a 5-year-old.
And all of these are qualities that helped
him later on in life and in business.
And uh, we're about to find out.
At nine years old Jensen and his brother
Jeff were sent to the United States,
and they spent the first two years in
Oneida, Kentucky one of the poorest
towns in the us away from their parents.
'cause their parents, they
they have to stay in Thailand.
But little did their parents know the
school that they were sent to was not
a well maintained boarding school.
It was actually a reform school for
troubled kids in the US it is called
Oneida Baptist Institute, OBI in short.
It is a very disciplined
environment, but it is very harsh.
According to Jensen there were
cigarette butts everywhere and
everyone carried a pocket knife around.
Jensen talked a lot about this
school and his experience in
his interviews over the years.
So I won't bother telling it again.
You can go listen to the Joe
Rogan interview or read the two
books that I mentioned earlier.
Jensen did a Joe Rogan interview
recently, and it was really popular.
He shared a lot of very good, fun
experience with Joe and with the audience.
There's one interesting anecdote
mentioned in the Thinking Machine book.
Jensen being the youngest and the shortest
in school he gets picked on a lot.
And here's how he works around it.
Quote, whatever the local boys
knew about Chinese culture came
from the films of Bruce Lee.
Huang initially ran a bluff
telling his classmates that
he was a martial arts expert.
This was quickly disproven
in the school yard.
End quote.
You can see that he's got some street
smarts in him, not just a book.
Smart.
Yeah.
He's good at studying, but you
know, He knows how to survive
in an environment like OBI.
A little history on OBI I, I found
this on the official school website.
Oneida Baptist Institute
was founded in 1899.
The turn of the century was a dark time in
the eastern Kentucky Mountains, there was
mass illiteracy and few schools, men and
the boys were being killed In bloody feuds
OBI's founder James Anderson Burns sought
to end the feuds by uniting families
of warring clans in a common goal,
Christian education for their children.
The idea was to this is
quoting the founder burns.
To give the children religious education
till they learned to love one another
and forgot how to hate the school.
Opened with a hundred students and
four teachers on January 1st, 1900.
Tuition was $1 per month, which many
families could not afford to pay
at times Burns accepted sheep skin.
Coal and even a bull as tuition.
He turned no one away.
Students also worked on
campus to help pay their way.
The 1950s were marked by a steady
change in the student population.
More young people from other states
began coming to Oneida and the school
was approved for international students.
I think that is the main reason
why Jensen was sent to the school.
Free boarding school for young
international students in the
US are so rare to, to find.
There's nowhere to find schools like that.
In 2020 Jensen donated a building
to Oneida Baptist Institute.
In his speech, he said that his
time at the school was one of the
best things ever happened to him.
I truly admire that.
It's such a harsh environment,
but a positive person can turn
any adversity into a fortune and
to remain a positive attitude.
Yeah that's Jensen.
So while Jensen and his brother
are trying to fit in at the
school, their parents are still in
Thailand with their little brother.
The family like I mentioned,
they were really poor.
They couldn't afford international
calls, but they came up with
this great idea to keep in touch.
And Jensen shared this
story multiple times.
I quote, my parents recorded a tape
every single month, a full tape.
They talk to us.
This is what we did today.
And they mailed the tape to us in
Kentucky, and it breaks my heart because
I took the tape, I turned it around.
I record over last month, and I told
my parents, this is what we did.
This is what we had for dinner.
Hamburgers were so big,
as big as basketball.
We then sent the tape back to them.
It breaks my heart because after two
years, there was no tape end quote.
This is such a moving story.
You realize that today kids and their
parents they live under the same roof.
They sit on the same dining table,
but they don't talk to each other.
Everyone is on their phones.
There's zero bonding happening.
Whereas when Jensen and his
brother talk to their parents via
a cassette tape the bond within
the family is stronger than ever.
I bet Jensen did not talk much about
the challenges they were going through
at the school on a daily basis.
I don't think he would talk about, the
bullies the chores washing toilets, stuff
like that because he didn't want his
parents to get worried and vice versa.
That is a lot of pain for
a 10-year-old to endure.
And Jensen said quote, back then,
there wasn't a counselor to talk to.
You just had to toughen up and move on.
I like this the best.
The following quote, even
though we are far away from my
parents, they love me very much.
I feel very safe, Jensen said.
So let me pause here for a second.
What Jensen experienced before
teenage is highly unusual.
It is a very risky move by his
parents to send him to the United
States with his brother because for
a smart, naughty kid when surrounded
by troubled peers, things could have
easily gone to the other direction.
He could have.
Picked up very bad habits
and ended up in prison.
Yeah.
But Jensen survived and
thrived in that environment.
So let's dive a little deeper.
In episode one, we talked about
how Zhang Yiming, the founder
of ByteDance, that owns TikTok,
improved himself like an algorithm.
I borrowed some machine learning
concepts to explain the process where
newspapers and magazines are data
sets that pre-trained his brain.
And that is considered self supervised
learning in machine learning terms.
It is basically how these language models,
transformers like, chat GBT how they
learn from information on the internet.
In Jensen's case, though, it is different.
It is more like reinforcement learning.
Instead of learning from a rich
structured data set, Jensen was dropped
in this very unfamiliar environment.
And you learn by acting, observing
adjusting to survive and improve.
And one of the most critical things for
reinforcement learning is the reward.
And jenssen's parents set the simple but
fundamental intrinsic rewards for him.
He mentioned in previous interview just,
be good, be honest, and be careful.
His parents have very high
expectations for Jensen with
tremendous amount of trust and love.
Those reward signals are fundamental.
But they are sparse because his parents
are not around to jump in when necessary.
Remember they, they communicate
through cassette tape once a month.
So that's very infrequent.
The Oneida Baptist Institute, on the
other hand, is a very disciplined and
harsh environment for a 9-year-old
immigrant, but it definitely provided
dense and a more immediate reinforcement.
Jensen is not solely relying
on guidance from his parents.
And that's crucial because OBI is a
reform school uh, and it is very strict.
Uh, Any bad behavior warrants, immediate
punishments and that is immediate
negative reward for the naughty Jensen.
Second it values hard physical work.
Older kids are required to work
on the farm, and younger kids like
Jensen are assigned to do chores
like cleaning the toilets, so that
teaches Jensen to stay very humble
to respect and value hard work.
And third it is a school, so it
values good academic performance.
And that reinforces jenssen's
winning strategy policy.
And that is to become the
best student in the school.
The good news is he is
very good at studying.
He also knows that his mom has
very high expectation for him.
And he tries super hard.
He talks about this all
the time in interviews.
He tries super hard to live up
to that expectation of his mom.
So supervised learning is all
about pattern recognition.
But reinforcement learning
is really about survival.
That process is painful.
You suffer a lot.
You fail all the time, but
survival becomes an instinct.
And that instinct stayed
with Jensen for life.
So after Jensen spent two years in Oneida.
His parents finally moves
to the United States.
The Huang family now lives
together in Portland, Oregon.
And Jensen skipped another grade.
And in 1976, he was enrolled
in Aloha High School.
This is a much more stable
and less harsh environment.
He can really enjoy himself
and pursue fun things to do.
He joins the math club, the science
club, and the computer club where he
got to play with an Apple two computer,
but his heart belongs to table tennis.
And you might think this is something
stereotypical where Chinese are good at
table tennis, but the truth is Jensen
never played table tennis in Asia.
It just happened that there was
a table tennis club called Paddle
Palace in downtown Portland that
is close to where Jensen lived.
He starts going there every day.
The owner of the club is named Lou
Bochensky, whose daughter Judy played
professionally and visited Beijing in
1971 as part of the US delegation team
for the purpose of ping pong diplomacy.
There's a very rich history behind that
where I believe Nixon and Mao met the
first time after a long time and ping pong
played a critical role in re igniting that
relationship FYI Marty Supreme was not
part of that 1971 US delegation to China.
I did look it up.
I haven't watched the movie yet, but
it sounds like an interesting movie.
Jensen was crazy about table
tennis in summer 1977 and he pretty
much lived there at the club.
So that he could play all the time.
And Jensen is so good that
the club owner Lou, sent in a
comment to Sports Illustrated.
I quote he is perhaps the most
promising junior ever to play
table tennis in the northwest.
Jan Huang earns his money to travel to
tournaments, to take part in clinics
and to play table tennis by scrubbing
floors here at the Paddle Palace.
He is a straight A student and very
hungry to become a table tennis champion.
He has played only three
month, but I suggest you watch
out for him in another year.
End quote.
So I used to play table
tennis competitively in China
for a little over a year.
I guess I'm somewhat qualified to
comment on jensen's skill level.
First of all, judging by his
daughter's Judy's accomplishment.
Lou the club owner must have a very high
bar when it comes to a player's potential.
What was shocking to me was that
Lou called Jensen the most promising
junior ever in the northwest
when he only played three month.
That is crazy.
Granted real table tennis professionals
starts at a much younger age.
Four or five years old.
And here is Jensen, about 14 years old.
Never played a table tennis before
in his life, working hard for merely
three month and getting the attention
of a very seasoned ping pong veteran.
I think Jensen really stood out
with his unparalleled work ethics.
He simply outworked everybody when he
sets his mind to achieve something.
And he must be a very aggressive
and a competitive player.
I can almost picture him playing
offense all the time, tirelessly
with a very strong forehand
with Western Grip, of course.
Anyway.
Jensen played ping pong competitively
for a few years and even played
in the 1978 US Open Tournament and
got third place in junior doubles.
I think he and his partner lost
to this Swedish team in the
semifinals and to this state.
Paddle Palace still exists.
I actually checked out their website.
They have completely transformed
into an online shop for
anything ping pong related.
If you are a ping pong
fan, check them out.
Maybe you can find something useful
or interesting on their website.
You might wonder why I spent so much
time on jensen's ping pong adventure.
That's because I think it
carries over directly into his
work and business philosophy.
To master ping pong you have
to understand a few principles.
First the competition starts
way before the actual game.
It starts off court where you put in
countless hours of hard work and practice.
Jensen simply outworks everyone
when he plays ping pong.
Later in his career.
He's well known for, working nonstop.
He outworks everyone
when he founded Nvidia.
The second thing about
ping pong is speed is king.
You have to move fast,
swing fast, and react fast.
You have to change your tactics based
on your opponent and the situation.
There's not a strategy or
tactics that works all the time.
You have to change it up.
You have to improvise.
Sometimes Jensen is not the tallest
or the strongest, but he is the
fastest and the smartest, and
those qualities served him well.
It reminded me of Nvidia has this
internal notion called speed of light.
That means everything has to happen or
move at the theoretical speed limit.
And the company would release a new
product every six months when the
industry norm was 18 months at the time.
And the third thing is you
have to be super competitive.
Jensen hate losing more
than he likes winning.
He's extremely competitive and aggressive.
He believes that offense
is the best defense.
He's also a super aggressive
business leader later in his career.
He never sits around.
N vidia is always innovating investing
in the future crushing competitors.
The Thinking Machine book has a story
about him beating up a coworker in
ping pong in the early days at Nvidia.
I find that very funny.
It is kind of like, uh, Michael
Jordan, who would take anything
personal both on and off the court.
That competitiveness is
just so key to success.
You can see that Jensen truly loved
table tennis and, he was all in, he
put all of his heart and effort in.
But at the end he said,
my passion for academics.
Exceeds table tennis.
So I went to college.
That's the end of his ping pong career.
While in high school besides ping
pong there's another thing that molded
Jensen in a big way, and that is
his part-time job at a restaurant.
According to himself he was very shy
in high school and he gained confidence
working in the restaurant industry.
His brother got the job for him and
he becomes a dishwasher at Denny's.
He worked a lot.
He worked the dishwasher the Buser
waiter, he worked graveyard shifts.
And don't get me wrong I know
restaurant work is very hard, but
everything is relative compared to
washing all of the toilets at Oneida.
I think to Jensen washing dishes for
eight hours does not seem that bad.
Plus, you get paid also.
And Jensen said that for those eight
hour shifts, he worked every second of
it and he enjoyed every second of it.
As someone who had experience in
both semiconductor industry and the
restaurant industry I can say that
the two industries are very different.
One thing I find most challenging.
About restaurant is that you
are firefighting all the time.
It could be, equipment failure
or one staff not showing up.
You have to step in or, customer
complaints, food safety issues or,
even extreme weather conditions.
There are just so many things
that are outta your control.
The list goes on and on and you just
have to stay calm and hustle through it.
For Jensen though it seems
like he thrives in chaos.
I quote.
I find that I think best when I'm
under adversity when the world
is just falling apart, I actually
think my heart rate goes down.
Maybe it's Denny's as a waiter,
you've got to deal with rush hour.
Another thing that is worth mentioning
about his restaurant days is that he
really bonded with Denny's the brand.
'cause later in his career, he and
the two other partners they would meet
at a Denny's restaurant frequently
in Silicon Valley to start Nvidia,
I also think that Jensen really valued
his restaurant experience and that
had a huge impact on his children.
His daughter Madison studied culinary
arts in the US and then France.
And then used to work as a chef before
she ventured into marketing his son.
Spencer operated a bar in Taipei
for seven or eight years while he
was learning Chinese in Taiwan.
You can search them up on, on LinkedIn.
I also found this great video by Gary.
Gary Guo.
He had this amazing
episode on the backstory.
Of Jensen's kids their journey.
I have the link in the show notes.
So both Madison and
Spencer work at Nvidia now.
Both of them took a long
detour in their early careers.
Again, I find it super interesting
because Jensen was in no rush to prune
them to take over the Nvidia Empire.
Restaurant is a very tough industry.
It makes you very humble.
You learn how to tolerate a lot of the
pain and you have to work extremely hard
to excel in the restaurant industry.
Going back to my reinforcement learning
framework for personal development to
survive and thrive in restaurant, you have
to be able to multitask because there's
so many things happening at the same time.
It's kind of like, uh, parallel computing,
maybe Jensen find similarity between
restaurant operations and the GPU
operation, for his kids to understand,
restaurant operation, and that would
help them understand, how GPU works.
I'm just kidding.
You also have to stay very focused.
You have to come up with solutions fast.
When something causes the
whole operation to fall apart.
You are always hustling,
pushing and progressing.
You observe, you take actions and you
learn from your own mistakes all the time.
Jensen puts his children in a
restaurant environment for them to
develop personalities and characters.
What an interesting choice
or maybe he did not get to
participate much or dictate much.
Because in a recent interview Jensen
shared that he was mostly absent
from his children's activities.
He's just so busy working, so committed
regardless both of his children are
executives at Nvidia Now Jensen shared
that what he considered a vacation is
just to be physically with his family.
But he's still working during vacation
and now his kids are working too.
Three of them are always working,
even when they're on vacation.
And yeah that is just amazing that
work ethics runs in the family.
To quickly recap Jenssen's early
childhood it is very eventful.
He grew up in Taiwan
then moved to Thailand.
He learned how to survive at OBI he
became competitive playing ping pong.
And then developed work ethics and
master social skills at Denny's.
He's still only 16 years old
when he graduated high school.
And with his grades, he could have gone
to any college like Stanford Harvard, but
he picked Oregon State University, OSU.
I think the main reason is
that it is close to home.
He's still a kid after all.
The family moved around too much in
the past decade and Jensen really
wanted to spend more time with family.
Plus his best friend is going there too.
The tuition is cheaper.
And Jensen considered
himself very good at math.
He thinks that engineering
needs a ton of math.
So he picks electrical engineering.
His college choice seems
casual but it makes sense.
Remember I was talking about
Zhang, Yiming's college
picking process in episode one.
Both of them seems to know
themselves pretty well.
They know what they value the most.
Of course, just like Zhang Yiming
Jensen made the perfect college choice.
Actually later he commented that
studying electrical engineering at
OSU was one of the most important
decisions that he made because not only
did he find his life of work, he also
found his life partner, Jensen's wife.
Lori was enrolled in electrical
engineering at OSU the same year, and
she's two years older than Jensen.
There were 250 boys, but only three girls.
Jensen laid eyes on her very early on,
but he was only 16 and looked like 12.
Luckily for Jensen Lori and him were
assigned as lab partners, so Jensen really
leveraged his biggest asset, his brain.
Me Jensen said quote, every weekend we
were together doing homework because
I'm just very good at homework.
I would call her, do
you want to do homework?
We have to do homework.
It's time to do homework.
Yeah, he was very good at homework.
And they were together after six months
of, working as lab partners and they're
still together after four years.
So again, compared to Zhang Yiming
where he found his girlfriend and they
got married in college, it reminded
me of mark Zuckerberg who married his
girlfriend Priscilla Chang at Harvard.
Do you see what is common
among these people?
Family come first in Asian cultures.
I know Mark is not Asian, but he
is, Hey, he is an Asian son-in-law.
In confucion thought there
is a clear progression.
Master yourself.
First then take care of the
family and then govern the state.
And finally conquered the world.
Apparently Jensen followed that
progression and it served him well.
In college both Jensen and the Lori
majored in electrical engineering.
So they spent a lot of time working
on breadboards wiring components
to build a useful circuit.
I cannot help but bringing
Zhang, Yi Ming up again.
Sorry.
Because Yiming found Breadboarding
so boring and he ended up switching
major, whereas Jensen never complained.
He enjoyed every second of it
and he would stay in hardware
business for another 45 years.
And counting.
I guess people now would argue that
Nvidia's moat is not hardware anymore,
but software like Cuda anyway, I was not
able to find much about his college days.
But in 2009, Jensen gave a commencement
speech at OSU and he gave three wishes.
Number one, work hard.
Love the work you do and
find your life of work.
Number two, embrace
failure and learn from it.
Number three, see the world like a child
take a mental note on that third point.
See the world like a child, because
we will come back to that pretty soon.
After graduating OSU Jensen has offers
from pretty much everyone he's that good.
He has offers from A MD, Intel ti
National Semiconductor, LSI Logic.
He picks A MD because the company would
expose him to everything, bipolar,
microprocessors instruction, decoder and
sequencer pipelines design trade offs.
And most importantly he moved
from Portland to Silicon Valley.
The center of the world where everything
is about to unfold and that relationship
with A MD has come full circle.
After 40 years a MD now is one of
the biggest competitors to Nvidia.
On the personal life side Jensen
proposed to Lori at the A MD Christmas
party after he started working.
Lori said, yes, of course.
And here's the crazy part being 21
and being Jensen he decided to drive
his red Honda Supra from San Francisco
to Portland that evening with Lori.
And they got into a big car accident
and they could have been killed.
The car was totaled and Jensen
was in cast for a few months.
And later when asked about the accident
he mostly expressed regret for the car.
Incredible car, he said.
And there you see what he meant
by seeing the world as a child.
'Cause he completely ignored his
own personal safety and his fiances.
And I had the same feeling about
the time when he lit up the
swimming pool and jumped in.
Maybe his secret in maintaining a
contrarian view on things is that he
indulges himself to be a kid sometimes.
And that's the incredible
car he was talking about.
A Honda Red Supra.
Jensen also started going to
Stanford night School after he
moved to Silicon Valley to get his
master in electrical engineering.
It took him eight years to
get his master's degree.
I quote you, Jensen.
I was working at A MD and LSI logic.
Laurie and I were married by then.
Then Spencer showed up and a year and
change later, Madison, when the kids
came along, the number of classes
I could take dwindled even further,
but I never gave up on it because
I love going to school so much.
I think this is a good
example of my personality.
I can be impatient about certain
things, but infinitely patient
about others, I plug away.
It's been almost 18 years
now and I'm still at Nvidia.
I just plug away.
I have a very long-term horizon.
It took me eight years to
finish my master's at Stanford.
That's gotta be a record.
I remember being concerned that I was
running up against the deadline that
the math I'd learned was going to be
obsolete and they were going to kick
me out and I'd have to start over.
What really strikes me first is
the workload um, is working full
time overtime on a lot of the
days is raising two young kids.
And he's taking night classes at Stanford.
Jensen is a superhuman.
But what's impressed me
most is his patience.
Like he said, he can be demanding
and impatient when it comes to
execution, for example, releasing
products on a six month cadence.
Um, But he can also be extremely
patient by spending almost a decade
at Stanford not as a full-time
student just passing through, but as
a working engineer, sitting alongside
professors, PhD students and researchers.
I think Jensen absorbed something
that most industry leaders
never really internalized.
And that is how slow and fragile
fundamental research actually is.
Because, research doesn't
move on quarterly timelines.
It doesn't have obvious
return on investment.
It requires patience institutional
support and a tolerance for long
periods of apparent nothing happening.
So years later, when Jensen insists
on investing heavily in Cuda
building tools for graduate students,
professors, and researchers, almost
no one sees the short term payoff.
Wall Street doesn't, competitors don't
even board members and VPs at Nvidia,
they don't see the value, but Jensen does.
In that sense.
Jensen's patience at Stanford
wasn't a detour from his career.
It was training for the most consequential
long-term decision he would ever make
to invest in accelerated computing.
To invest in Cuda to invest in the future.
Now I want to take a little tangent and
talk about Morris Chang a little bit.
Morris also went to Stanford.
He got his PhD in electrical
engineering in 197, 4.
I wanna draw some parallels between
Morris and Jensen, because on the
surface there are many similarities.
They're both Asian Americans.
They receive the best
education in the United States.
They both run the most important and
respected tech companies in the world.
And they're very good friends.
They're very close friends.
And rumor says that at one point,
Morris was considering Jensen
to be his successor to run TSMC.
Of course, that's before Nvidia becomes
the most valuable company in the world.
At a fireside chat Jensen asked
Morris how he started small when
founding TSMC after the TI experience
because Jensen started Nvidia.
In a small way, he was discussing
business plan, doing sales
projections at the Denny's restaurant.
They set up office in his partner's house.
Yeah, Jensen was really frugal.
After NV one failed, they fired
more than half of the people and
operated with fortyish employees.
And that's how Jensen
started his own venture.
And.
You know what's interesting is
that Morris was confused about the
question because he has never gone
through that garage startup phase.
He never worked in the restaurants.
Even at ti he got promoted very
fast to become an executive.
When TSMC was founded it was
backed by the Taiwanese government.
They raised a hundred million
in 1987 and built a one 50.
People team right off the bat.
But that difference in life experience
does not get in the way of them becoming
lifelong friends and business partners.
What I'm trying to say is
that Jensen is truly special.
He combines book smart and street
smart at the highest level.
I cannot think of any other
tech CEOs who gives that vibe.
Jensen is just, very cool
with his, leather jacket.
But he's very composed.
He's very down to earth, he jokes around.
He's just very approachable.
Fascinating person.
Okay.
Now back to Jenssen's career.
During those eight years at
Stanford Jensen even switched job.
After working at A MD for about
a year, Jenssen started feeling
limited with the chip design process.
A MD was building the
chip by hand pretty much.
And it was very inefficient.
A friend from LSI Logic poached
Jensen during that time.
He decided to give this new company a try.
The founder Wilf Corrigan
founded the company LSI Logic.
After serving as the president
of Fairchild Semiconductor
he took the company public.
In 1983, the company focused
more on providing tools to
enable more focused chip design.
And Jensen said that he got the intuition
on Nvidia while working at LSI Logic.
That's a big deal.
How you put everything together.
EDA system, design tools
semiconductor design, everything.
And he worked extremely hard.
There's no weekends and every day he
works from 7:00 AM to 9:00 PM every day.
I'm not surprised that he
got promoted multiple times.
And within a few years he
was managing a big group.
And one of the customers he was
serving was Sun microsystems.
And he delivered big time.
And he got two big wins
out of this project.
Number one, his work ethics and
business skills, project management
skills were recognized by the two
engineers at Sun microsystems.
After the project was done those
two reached out to Jensen and asked
him to be the co-founder and CEO
of a startup graphic chip company.
And that was how Nvidia was founded.
The second one Jensen was
noticed by the founder and CEO
at LSI Logic Wolf Corrigan.
When Jensen told Wilf that he was
leaving LSI Logic to start his company,
Wilf connected him with Don Valentine
from Sequoia for the seed funding.
So Jensen now completed his
master's degree at Stanford.
He had eight years of semiconductor
industry experience under his
belt where, he designed circuits,
he managed projects, led teams.
He's ready for something bigger.
And as far as founding Nvidia goes
unlike a lot of the startup founders,
Jensen did not come up with the idea
he was poached by Chris and Curtis.
The two engineers from Sun Systems.
In one of his interviews, Jensen
said that if not for Chris and Curtis
approaching him he would still be
working at LSI Logic maybe to retirement.
I, I believe him.
I think Jensen is a very
uh, grounded person.
He only takes calculated risks.
He's not like a super ambitious
visionary, from day one.
Now he is a visionary leader in ai,
but when he was about to turn 30 uh,
he was not uh, he made the decision
to join Chris and Curtis because he
thought he would enjoy working with them.
And he had no concern to
find another job fast.
If the venture failed.
In fact his boss at LSI Logic
Wilf said that he would keep his
desk in case Jensen comes back.
Jensen once said to Lori that by
age 30 he would be the CEO of a
company, and he kept his promise.
Jensen started his first day
at Nvidia on February the 17th,
1993 on his 30th birthday.
And his timing is impeccable
over the next three decades.
Nvidia rode and in some ways
shaped three massive waves.
First the boom of PC graphics and gaming.
The second the end of Moore's
Law which made parallel and
accelerated computing inevitable.
And finally the AI revolution that
we're witnessing now and Nvidia is
at the center of that revolution.
And Jensen didn't just catch good timing.
He stayed in the seat long
enough to compound it.
Nvidia did go through a few
ups and downs along the way.
One of the most distinct things about
Jensen is that Nvidia never stops shipping
new architectures, new products, new
platforms often faster than the market.
Feels comfortable with.
From the outside, this
can look very risky.
Even irresponsible.
Why not wait why not be more conservative?
But through a reinforcement learning
lens, this behavior makes perfect sense.
Because you don't learn by sitting around.
You learn, by acting in the
environment, observing feedback,
and updating your policy.
If you don't act, then you know,
you don't get reward signals.
If you don't get reward
signals, you don't learn.
And Jensen understands this deeply.
By continuously releasing new products,
Nvidia is constantly probing reality.
Every launch generates information.
What worked, what broke
where customers struggled.
Where the bottlenecks really
are mistakes are welcomed.
They are data.
Of course there are risks.
N vidia went through
multiple near death moments.
But as long as you recover over time
that learning advantages compound.
For example, AlphaGo is not very good
after the first few games, but after
tens of thousands of the games it can
beat the best human player in the world.
So to sum it up Jensen didn't just build
a company, he built a thinking machine.
N vidia works because
it is natural to him.
It is an extension of how he thinks.
He thinks in parallel.
He thinks long term, he's
comfortable with chaos.
He is obsessed with,
learning through iteration.
In fact, I would argue Jensen
himself is a thinking machine running
continuously for more than 30 years.
And that thinking and learning
keeps compounding for over 30 years.
Before I wrap up I want to compare
Jensen with Elon for a little bit
because researching on Jensen's early
childhood and early career got me really
thinking about uh, Elon's journey.
I have read a lot about Elon the
biography by Walter Isaacson.
I read that multiple times.
I'm currently reading liftoff Elon
Musk and the desperate early days
that launched SpaceX by Eric Berger.
I have tremendous respect
for both Elon and Jensen.
The Thinking Machine Book has
this quote, the parallels between
Musk and Huang were obvious.
They were immigrants, they were
screamers, they were gamblers,
they were world class engineers.
It took a sharper eye
to spot the differences.
There was the vision, the question
with Musk moving backward from fantasy,
and Huang moving forward from reality.
So insightful.
Yeah, no question about it.
Elon is a dreamer.
His inspirations come from,
sci-fi books and movies.
He reads a lot of them as a child.
His companies are working on things you
would only find in the science fiction.
Jensen, on the other hand does
not read much science fiction.
He does not read much a biography either.
However, he has read
tons of business books.
He's super practical.
He's not looking for
inspirations in books.
He's looking for practical information
on how to write a business plan,
how to position the product, how
to do sales, marketing, et cetera.
What he really focuses on is how he can
keep pushing himself and his company to
be a little bit better every single day.
And I believe their early childhood
experience shaped their inspirations
and motivations for life.
And also, that childhood experience
had a huge impact on how they
treat people and employees.
I keep quoting.
There was also the topic of loyalty.
Musk did not value it.
He often fired people
arbitrarily and without warning.
In one case, canning the entire
starlink engineering team almost
at random on a Sunday afternoon.
Huang almost never fired anyone,
and when he did, it was only after
multiple cautions and the offer
of a performance improvement plan.
It took truly egregious behavior to
get kicked out of Nvidia, and many
employees worked there for decades.
My take on this is that, both of them
went through childhood hardship that
molded their personalities characters.
And that is why both Jensen
and Elon are talking about pain
and suffering all the time.
However, the real impacts of those pains
and suffering on them are different.
I think Elon's childhood was not happy.
His parents got divorced,
his dad abused him a lot.
He got bullied at school and
he immersed himself in books
almost as a defense mechanism.
The pain really internalized
and became part of him.
Deep down he feels insecure.
Whereas Jensen grew up
feeling loved all the time.
Remember he said even when his parents
were not around, he felt loved.
He felt safe.
He's very secure and that is why he's
capable of practicing tough love.
To his employees, his direct
reports his business partners.
He truly sees them as family.
He wants them to be successful.
However, being on the receiving
end of his criticism which is
called the wrath of Huang you
just cannot take it too personal.
You have to understand
where he's coming from.
I guess wrapping up the episode here, I
think my main takeaways from researching
young Jensen are the followings.
A safe family environment is
so key so critical so crucial
in childhood development.
And, as parents I think the best
thing we can do is to make sure that
our kids feel safe all the time.
And they stay curious and stay focused.
And then that's about it.
Next one.
Love what you do and do it to the best of
your capability no matter what the job is.
For Jensen, cleaning toilets at the
boarding school, scrubbing floors at the
table, tennis club even washing dishes
at Denny's Jensen gave everything he had.
How you do everything
is how you do anything.
I think Jensen said multiple times, he's
the best dishwasher that Denny's ever had.
He has no doubt he's the best buser.
He's the best waiter at Denny's.
I guess that just shows how
serious, how dedicated he is when
he's working on something, he
gives a hundred percent, 120%.
And then you should embrace adversity
and turn it into something beneficial.
Jensen survived and thrived at Oneida.
And he came out a different person.
Yeah, that experience did not crush him.
Instead he learned valuable lessons
and qualities that's gonna stay
with him for his entire life.
Then the next one when you
are early in your career, you
have to work extremely hard.
This is similar to one of the takeaways
at the first the Yiming episode.
You have to work extremely hard
normally that is easier for
people in their early twenties.
No family, no kids nothing to lose.
However Jensen was built different.
He had a family with two little kids and
he was attending classes at Stanford for
eight years, and he somehow pulled hold,
80, 90 hours work week consistently.
That is insane.
Work ethics.
Finally try to see the world as a child.
You should be serious about your work.
Also, you should try to
have some fun sometimes.
Life is a long journey you
have to learn how to enjoy it.
Like Jensen said don't get fired.
Don't get bored either.
And yeah, I think that's about it.
Thank you for tuning in.
Thank you for listening.
I'll see you next time.