Jensen Huang: The Mindset That Built NVIDIA

**Garry Tan** (0:07)
Welcome to Startup School 2026 Now, let's get started. Please join me in welcoming to the stage, the founder and CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang.
Please.

**Jensen Huang** (0:39)
Hey, everybody. Oh, my God.

**Garry Tan** (0:44)
This is a surreal moment for me. Thank you. Thank you for being here, Jensen.

**Jensen Huang** (0:48)
I'm delighted to do it. It's great to be here. Apparently, if you're here, you are going to make it.
So I'm happy I'm here.

**Garry Tan** (1:06)
Oh, Jensen. Well, for the students who only know Nvidia as a company at the center of AI, what part of the early Nvidia story do they most need to understand?

**Jensen Huang** (1:19)
Well, the thing that most people don't believe is that the choice of our technology that we started the company with was absolutely wrong. So we had started with the idea that we would reinvent 3D graphics. Well, the company's philosophy and perspective was that the general purpose computers, the CPUs were really useful, but if we could augment it with accelerators, we could solve problems that otherwise too hard to solve. One of the first problems we chose was 3D graphics.
During that time, 1993, the PC was just rumored to be coming.
Our big idea was that we would turn every single personal computer into a game console, because we grew up in the era of game consoles. So we thought, what if we could design a system that would fit into the personal computer, and it would turn it into a game console? So we thought we would reinvent the algorithm that would require these large supercomputers, and we would fit it into the PC. We came up with some new algorithms, and we were excited about it. We believed in it. We reasoned about it in a thoughtful way, and we went to start the company to go build it. Well, it turns out the algorithm was exactly wrong. And the technology that founded the company turns out to be exactly wrong. And so in 1995, we realized that, and it was almost too late, because by then, there were some 35, 40 other companies that were building 3D graphics for PCs.
And so we realized that it didn't work, and I went back to the company, and we were at the company, I said, what are we gonna do? It doesn't work, and we're all talking about it. And I said, look, we won't have a company if we don't confront the fact that this doesn't work and start working towards the right algorithm.
And then somebody told me, it turns out, none of us knew how to do it the right way. And not only did we choose the wrong technology, we didn't know how to do it the right way. And so that was a big day for me. I had a couple of $60, a couple of $100 in my pocket, and so I went down to Fry's and I bought three textbooks. And the textbooks was about OpenGL and how to design OpenGL pipelines. I brought it back to the company and gave it to the engineers, and here we are. We reinvented computer graphics. We're the world leader in modern computer graphics. We invented most of the major breakthroughs in the last 25 years.
Everybody would have thought that Nvidia has started out as world leaders in 3D graphics, and we learned it from a textbook. And so we actually started the company, raised money and bought textbooks when you think about it. And so the big lesson is that, for me, is technology is changing all the time. And so long as you're able to confront the reality, so long as you are able to learn, the technology itself actually doesn't matter. And so since then, Nvidia has been inventing all kinds of technology since, all kinds of technology we've never really done before. And we approach everything with the same attitude. This is, if it's important to do, we're going to go learn it and how hard can it be? And it always turns out to be much, much harder than we expect. But you go into it with the attitude, how hard can it be?

**Garry Tan** (5:06)
I mean, backstage we were talking about how, I mean, we were talking with some of the top YC companies, and you were saying that each one has an expertise in like a domain that you have, you and Nvidia have an expertise in. And they're all just, I forget what you said, it was like an algorithmic domain of a sort. And so it sounds like 3D graphics was merely the first of an algorithmic domain. That's right. And it came from a textbook, but then, you know, anyone could have read that textbook, you created particle physics, fluid dynamics, yeah.