No Priors Ep. 13 | With Jensen Huang, Founder & CEO of NVIDIA

Thank you for doing this with us, Jensen.

Delighted to do it, Sarah. Delighted.

Why don't we start at the beginning? Uh, you worked at LSI and AMD before starting a company. How did that happen?

They gave me a job. (laughs)

(laughs)

(laughs)

Let's see, uh, let... I was at Oregon State University, and, uh, uh, it was, um, a campus company day, and, uh, I interviewed at a lot of companies. And, and, um, uh, uh, two companies really, really, um, uh, connected with me. I, I love designing chips and designing computers, and, uh, at the time, in our lab, in the computer science lab, there was a, a poster of a 29,000, um, 32-bit, uh, CPU from AMD. And, uh, uh, it... you know, I always thought it'd be kinda cool to build that. Uh, on the other hand, uh, there was a- another company that was a startup at the time, uh, built by, uh, one of the legends of Silicon Valley, Wulf Corrigan. And, uh, they started a company to design chips using software, uh, to design chips not by hand, but by, by, uh, uh, using programmable, uh, logic. And, and you would describe it in language, and it would, it would synthesize it to chips. And of course, uh, I chose to go to AMD. Uh, it turned out, it turned out that I went there to design microprocessors and, and, uh, my lab partner... not my lab, but my office mate, uh, ended up going to LSI. And, and she, uh, uh, insisted that I, I go there, uh, after I was there and after, after she went there. And, and, um, uh, the LSI team, uh, said, "Hey, we were recruiting this kid from, from Oregon State, and we really wanted him to come work at LSI Logic." And, and it turned out to have been her office mate. And so they all reached out to me, and, and I decided to go there because, uh, it was at the beginning of the EDA industry. It was at the beginning of, uh, designing, uh, chips using computers. And, uh, it was probably one of the... one of the best things that's ever, ever happened to me. And, um, uh, it was in the beginning of the, the, uh, ability for every company to build their own chips, and it's the reason why, uh, I met some really great computer architects. Uh, uh, Andy Bechtolsheim was the founder of Sun. I got to work with, uh, uh, a bunch of great architects at Silicon Graphics and, uh, Jon Rubinstein, who, who, um, uh, was at a company called Dana Computer, who became the vice president of engineering for Apple. And, and so I... uh, in, in a very early age, I got the opportunity to work... And then, of course, uh, the two founders of NVIDIA, uh, Chris Malkowski and, uh, Curtis Payne, myself. And, and so I got a chance to work with some really amazing computer architects, and I learned a lot about, uh, about building computers with chips. And so that's, you know, my early days.