Jensen Nvidia Quotes

Nvidia was founded in 1993 by Chris Malachowsky, Curtis Priem, and Jensen Huang, the latter of whom remains CEO today.

People with very high expectations have very low resilience. Unfortunately, resilience matters in success,” he later said. “Greatness is not intelligence. Greatness comes from character.”17 And character, in his view, can only be the result of overcoming setbacks and adversity. To Jensen, the struggle to persevere in the face of bad, and often overwhelming, odds is simply what work is. It is why, whenever someone asks him for advice on how to achieve success, his answer has been consistent over the years: “I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering.

Ernst felt Jensen was growing frustrated and would soon leave the table, so he decided to ask him something different. “Jensen, I have a two-year-old daughter at home. I bought a new Sony A100 DSLR camera and regularly download photos to my Mac to do some light editing in Photoshop. But whenever I do this, my Mac slows down as soon as I open one of these high-resolution images. It’s even worse on my Think-Pad. Can a GPU solve this problem?” Jensen’s eyes lit up. “Don’t write about this because it’s not out yet, but Adobe is a partner of ours. Adobe Photoshop with CUDA can instruct the CPU to off-load the task to the GPU, and make it much faster,” he said. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about with the coming ‘Era of the GPU.

The “Top 5” e-mails became a crucial feedback channel for Jensen. They enabled him to get ahead of changes in the market that were obvious to junior employees but not yet to him or his e-staff. “I’m looking to detect the weak signals,” he would tell his employees when asked why he liked the Top 5 process. “It’s easy to pick up the strong signals, but I want to intercept them when they are weak.” To his e-staff, he was a little more pointed. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you may not have the brainpower or the wherewithal to detect something I think is pretty significant.”15

So Jensen asked employees at every level of the organization to send an e-mail to their immediate team and to executives that detailed the top five things they were working on and what they had recently observed in their markets, including customer pain points, competitor activities, technology developments, and the potential for project delays. “The ideal top five e-mail is five bullet points where the first word is an action word. It has to be something like finalize, build, or secure,” said early employee Robert Csongor.

Before making the transcontinental move, however, Malachowsky decided to apply for jobs at other companies, solely for the purpose of getting some practice interviewing. His first invitation came from the nascent supercomputer division at Evans and Sutherland, a graphics company otherwise known for making high-end flight simulators for military training. He was rejected right away; his interviewers thought he questioned the status quo too much and felt that he would be a poor fit at the company. (Malachowsky believed their feedback didn’t bode well for the company’s future. He was right. Evans and Sutherland’s first supercomputer later failed to sell, and the looming end of the Cold War meant that simulator demand from the military was already drying up.)

Even though they had not yet made the move to the United States themselves, his parents wanted to send their children to an American boarding school so they could get a good education. They found one called Oneida Baptist Institute, which was located in eastern Kentucky and accepted international students. They could afford the tuition only by selling nearly all of their possessions. Jensen remembers the initial drive through the mountains of Kentucky, past the single building that was the town of Oneida’s only gas station, grocery store, and post office all at once. The boarding school had around three hundred students, evenly split between boys and girls. But it was not a prep school as Jensen’s family originally thought. Oneida Baptist Institute was, instead, a reform school for troubled young people. It had been founded in the 1890s to remove children from feuding families in the state and thus keep them from killing each other.

Most of the other possibilities on Priem’s list incorporated “NV” as a reference to their first planned chip design. These names included iNVention, eNVironment, and iNVision—the kinds of everyday words that other companies had already co-opted for their own brands, such as a toilet paper company that had trademarked the name “Envision” for its environmentally sustainable product line. Another name was too similar to the brand of a computer-controlled toilet. “These names were all stinky,” Priem said.

The last remaining option was “Invidia,” which Priem found by looking up the Latin word for envy—in a sense, another callback to their work on the GX, when he and Malachowsky believed that their rivals, both within and beyond Sun, had envied their success. “We dropped the ‘I’ and went with NVidia to honor the NV1 chip we were developing,” said Priem, “and secretly hoped that someday Nvidia would be something that would be envied.” With a name in hand, Jensen sought out a lawyer and chose James Gaither, who worked at the law firm of Cooley Godward. Gaither’s firm was midsized, with fewer than fifty attorneys on staff. Even so, it had carved out a niche for itself as the go-to firm for early-stage Silicon Valley start-ups. During their first meeting, Gaither asked Jensen how much money he had in his pocket. Jensen said $200. “Hand it over,” said Gaither. He then told Jensen he now owned a large equity stake in Nvidia.

We were diluted across too many different areas,” Jensen recalled.8 “We learned it was better to do fewer things well than to do too many things even though it looked good on a PowerPoint slide. Nobody goes to the store to buy a Swiss Army knife. It’s something you get for Christmas.”9

And that’s not even close to the most expensive Nvidia product. Nvidia’s latest server rack system as of this writing, the Blackwell GB200 series, was specifically designed to train “trillion-parameter” AI models. It comes with seventy-two GPUs and costs $2 million to $3 million—the most expensive Nvidia machine ever made. The company’s top-end-product pricing isn’t merely increasing; it is accelerating.

Current AI models can now understand requests via context and because they can grasp natural conversational language. It is a major breakthrough. “The core of generative AI is the ability for software to understand the meaning of data,” Jensen said.16 He believes that companies will “vectorize” their databases, indexing and capturing representations of information and connecting it to a large language model, enabling users to “talk to their data.

Nvidia remains the only stand-alone graphics-chip firm to this day, even though hundreds of others have thrown their hats in the ring. Jensen himself is now the technology industry’s longest-serving CEO.

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