The Jensen Huang Playbook

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Friends,

In 1973, a ten-year-old Taiwanese boy arrived at the Oneida Baptist Institute in eastern Kentucky. His parents, a chemical engineer and a schoolteacher, had sold most of their possessions to pay for what they believed to be an elite boarding school—a little Andover in Clay County. In fact, Oneida was a reform school dedicated to righting the paths of Kentucky’s wayward youths. The boy’s roommate, a seventeen-year-old illiterate, spent their first night together showing off the knife scars he’d accumulated.

The boy was small in size, spoke little English, and, save for his older brother, was the only Asian student at the school. Combined with an intelligence that seemed unhindered by the changes around him, such qualities made him a natural target for bullies. However, something in his personality would not allow him to become a victim of attacks. He fought back ferociously, unfazed by his small stature. He built muscle, too – in exchange for teaching his older roommate how to read, he was taught how to bench press. By the end of his first year at Oneida, the boy had not only adapted but flourished, becoming a leader among his classmates.

In miniature, this tells you almost everything one might wish to know about Jen-Hsun (Anglicized to “Jensen” during his time at Oneida) Huang. From his earliest days, the Nvidia CEO has exhibited a talent for entering foreign circumstances, often as an unfancied figure, and emerging as the victor. He does so not by dazzling with grandiosity or casting the longest shadow, but by allying intelligence, resilience, courage, and a ferocity prone to spill into fury.

It is this combination that allowed a first-time founder to outmaneuver two hundred direct competitors, outwit giants like Intel, and build what is now the most valuable company on the planet. At the time of writing, Nvidia boasts a market cap of more than $4.15 trillion, a cool $400 billion over Microsoft.

Nvidia is not simply a market-topping juggernaut, but the purveyor of the most existentially important technology on the planet. It is not fair to say that Nvidia is responsible for the modern artificial intelligence renaissance, but it would not have happened