The improbable rise of Jensen

Jensen Huang’s 33-year tenure as CEO of NVIDIA is the longest of any major tech company. It might also be the most consequential, perhaps ever.

It’s definitely the most improbable.

In 1973, Jensen’s parents sent him and his older brother to live with an uncle in Tacoma, Washington. They wanted the boys to grow up in the United States and didn’t want to wait until their father found work there.

As disorienting as that must have been for a Taiwanese-speaking child, things soon became even more so. At 10, Jensen was sent to a boarding school in Kentucky along with his brother. His parents chose the Oneida Baptist Institute in the belief it was an academically minded college-preparatory institution. In fact, it was a juvenile-reform academy — a last-chance stop for troubled youth located in a town of 300.

“The bullying started at once,” Stephen Witt writes in The Thinking Machine. He was shoved in the hallways and chased in the playground. It was the height of the Vietnam War and Huang’s arrival gave the rural delinquents an unexpected opportunity to persecute a “chink.”

“We were called that every day,” Huang said later.

Huang initially attempted to bluff his way out of fights by claiming to be an expert in martial arts. “This was quickly disproven in the schoolyard,” Witt says. “But what Huang lacked in technique, he made up for in determination. When challenged, he would always fight back.”

The bullies would sometimes lie in wait until Huang was halfway across a swinging bridge he took on his way to class. His tormentors would emerge from hiding on either side of the river, grab the ropes, and start swinging, hoping to dump him into the rocks and water below.

“Somehow it never seemed to affect him,” a classmate told Witt. “Actually, it looked like he was having fun.” 

Huang was assigned to a room with a seventeen-year-old. His new roommate was illiterate. And a fighter. “On their first night together,” Witt writes, “the older boy lifted his shirt to show Jensen the numerous places where he’d been stabbed in a recent fight.”

It turned out to be a good pairing. Huang taught his roommate to read. In exchange, his roommate taught Huang to lift weights. Huang began doing 100 push-ups before bed every night, a habit he’s maintained ever since.

In the summer, when older kids were sent out to do farm work, Huang was assigned to clean toilets. “It wasn’t a punishment,” he said later. “It was just my job.”

Somehow, by the end of his first year at Oneida Baptist, the underaged, undersized Asian kid had emerged as a leader.

“After the final school bell rang,” Witt writes, “Huang would take charge, running ahead of his classmates into forests of hickory and oak. Chasing behind him, in a friendly way, were the ‘rowdy boys’ of Clay County.”

But when his father finally found employment in Washington, Jensen moved back to live with his parents and attend high school.

At Oneida Baptist he learned he had a natural talent for ping pong, dominating the table in the rec room. In Washington, he spent a summer obsessively practicing.

Still just 14, Sports Illustrated published a letter calling Huang “the most promising junior ever to play table tennis in the Northwest.” At that point, he had played competitively for just three months. In less than a year, he was nationally ranked.

“He was a very aggressive player,” one of his playing partners said, “on offense all the time,” 

Away from the ping pong table, Huang “dressed in denim and velour and wore his hair in the shape of a motorcycle helmet.”

He started as a dishwasher at Denny’s and worked his way up to server. There, he discovered he loved to work in high-pressure environments. “I think best when I’m under adversity,” he told Witt. “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. Anyone who’s dealt with rush hour in a restaurant knows what I’m talking about.”

(Later, he’d meet his two co-founders at an East San Jose Denny’s to hash out a business plan for their as-yet-unnamed startup. Later again, when he met Witt at a Denny’s for an interview, he’d leave the waitress a $1,000 tip.)

Huang had the grades to go anywhere for college but chose Oregon State because it was close to his parents.

He met Lori Mills in the first week of classes when they were paired up as lab partners. “There were, like, two hundred and fifty kids in electrical engineering, and maybe three girls,” Huang told Witt. “She was the best-looking.”

Huang felt he was at a disadvantage in the competition for Mills’s attention. “I was the youngest kid in the class,” he said. “I looked like I was about twelve.”

So he decided to play to his strengths. “I tried to impress her — not with my looks, of course — but with my strong capability to complete homework.” 

It worked. After six months of shared engineering homework, he mustered the courage to ask Mills out on a date. She said yes, “and after that the two were seldom separated,” Witt says.

At 20, Huang began working at AMD (for $28,700 a year) where his first job was manually sketching microchip designs on paper.

Each sheet mapped out a separate layer of a chip and when a layer was finished, Huang brought it to the “photomask” workers, who transferred his sketch onto a transparent sheet of cellophane.

AMD’s photomask group consisted entirely of Chinese women. 

They didn’t speak much English, and Huang, whose first language was the Taiwanese dialect of Hokkien, didn’t speak any Mandarin at all. But chatting with the photomask crew, he began to learn. “Just phonetically, through regular conversations.”

He told Witt the women reminded him of his mother.

After a year at AMD, he’d saved enough money to buy both a Toyota Supra and an engagement ring. He proposed to Mills at the AMD Christmas party.

(Note: AMD shares were up as much as 13% today.)

That was a good decision: she said yes. 

The next decision was not so good: leaving straight from the late-night party, they set out on a nine-hour drive, over snowy mountain roads, to tell Mills’s parents the good news.

Around sunrise, Jensen’s rear-wheel-drive sports car lost traction on a patch of black ice and flipped off the road. First responders had to cut the newly engaged couple out of the wreck. Lori was unharmed but Jensen had to be stitched up in multiple places and wore a neck brace for several months thereafter.

Asked about the incident many years later, Huang mostly expressed regret for the Supra. “Incredible car,” he told Witt.

Mills graduated the next year and began as an engineer at Silicon Graphics, where she immediately made more money than Huang.

They worked long hours and didn’t have much of a social life. When one of Huang’s colleagues, Jens Horstman, introduced him to a friend who ran a microbrewery, Huang was incredulous. “Jensen was just, like, ‘How do you know this person? How is this possible?’”

When you spend all your time working, your work life becomes your social life, too.

By all accounts, Mills was at least as good an engineer as Huang, if not better. But in the early ‘90s, even the best young engineers didn’t earn enough to pay for childcare. Shortly before Huang cofounded NVIDIA, Mills quit working to raise the kids. 

Witt says that when he asked Huang about his wife agreeing to sacrifice her career for his, he could see the discomfort on his face.

Then, with just six months of savings in the bank, Huang asked his wife’s permission to leave his job at AMD and pursue a long-shot startup. 

Mills told him to go for it.

“She always believed in me,” he told Witt.

— Byron Gilliam

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