Industry Connect

Jen-Hsun Huang was a 32-year-old entrepreneur at the helm of a startup company he’d launched in the high-stakes, high-tech, high-failure-rate heart of Silicon Valley when he found himself and his fledgling company on the brink of total disaster.

The two years of intense design innovation Huang’s company had invested as a way to get around the high price of DRAM memory was suddenly irrelevant when the price of DRAM went into free fall. It went from $50 a megabyte to $5 as more than 80 competitor companies jumped into the 3D graphics chip race. Huang’s venture funding and personal savings had all but evaporated, leaving him, his wife Lori (’85, B.S. Electrical Engineering), and their two small children vulnerable.

“Until that moment, I don’t know that I’d ever experienced failure,” said Huang (’84, B.S. Electrical Engineering), who came to Oregon State University at age 17, graduated with honors, and worked at several high-tech jobs before co-founding NVIDIA in 1993.

NVIDIA invented the graphics processing unit (GPU) and today is one of the world’s most successful technology companies, but “back then, we were surrounded by competition, our company was the smallest of all of them, and the first product we built after two years was a failure of spectacular proportions — spectacular because we took a gigantic risk, and it didn’t work out,” said Huang.

Failure transformed

As Huang and his company teetered on the precipice of collapse, he experienced something he still taps into today as chief executive officer of NVIDIA.

“I think the defi ning moment of any career or company is when everything’s on the line for the first time — all the people you’ve convinced to fund your idea, all the people you’ve hired, your family, everything,” he said. “That’s when you’re truly at the brink.”

He compares his experience to the moment when a world-class athlete is competing on a level so extreme that you can almost see them reach down and access something extra to get them through.

“They seem to have an ability to dig deeper when times are really, really tough and tap some extra gear, a spare tank, some special reserve that makes them seem super human, super capable,” Huang said. “Well, we found that. When I was 32, I experienced it, and we learned as a company how to tap into it and fi nd a winning strategy to get out of where we were.”

Huang said he and the people he worked with — many of whom are still with the company today — reinvented themselves and the company, and their true character came out.

“That moment taught us how to tap the greatest strength in ourselves,” he said. “I know exactly where that extra reserve is now, what it looks like, and when to go to it. And the company knows that, too, and it’s great to have. But you won’t have it — you won’t discover it — unless you’re at the brink.”

The rest, as they say, is history. Huang and his team were able to pull the company back from the edge of failure, and today NVIDIA employs 8,500 people, owns more than 5,500 granted and pending U.S. patents, and has its ubiquitous graphics processing technologies embedded in everything from smartphones and supercomputers to medical imaging devices, NASA workstations, and new cars.

Competition reimagined

Huang agrees that he’s competitive, but he said it’s not in the traditional way.

“I’m competitive, but I don’t feel a great desire to need to win at everything — I’m not competitive like that,” he said. “I just want to make sure I’ve done the best I could. And my defi nition of doing the best I could happens to have a very high standard.”

He said his high standard probably comes from his father, a chemical engineer, and his mother.

“My dad’s a perfectionist,” he explained. “Nobody’s got better handwriting than my dad. When he fi xes something, he fi xes it perfectly. When he works on something, it’s always perfect. He’s an engineer’s engineer. My mom, on the other hand, is a little more random, but nothing’s ever quite good enough for her. So she’s always nitpicking this and nitpicking that. So I’m probably a combination of both of them.”

Huang’s obsession with doing the best he can is recharged and refocused every day when he wakes and asks himself three questions: “What could I do better? What are the most important things I could do that will make a contribution to the world? And what are the things I love to spend my time doing and that I want to fill my day with?”

Those three questions also inform NVIDIA’s business operations. “We ask ourselves some permutation of those same questions almost every single day,” Huang said. “And our answers can’t possibly be the same answers as Intel or Qualcomm or AMD or others, right? Because we’re different people and we have different skills and different perspectives on life.”

And this is where Huang’s distinctive orientation to competition comes in. “Ultimately, it’s not about beating our competitors, but it’s really about making a contribution that’s unique among them,” he explained. “Doing what they do better is not a likely outcome for success.”

Sharing the passion

Huang believes that many of his top management team and others have stayed with NVIDIA over the years because they’re doing their lifework.

“We’re not just working anymore,” he said. “I think for me, and for many on my management team, and for the really, really passionate computer graphics engineers in the company, we’re all doing our lifework here. There are many companies who can run a very good business, but there are very few who can say they are the world’s best at what they do.”

Huang is quick to credit Lori, whom he met at Oregon State in an electrical fundamentals class, for the role she has played in his success.

“It’s good to have someone in your life who unconditionally believes in you, who believes you’re doing your best,” he said. “You need people like that, and Lori’s always been that person for me — ever since I was 18, she was there believing in me and knowing I could do it. Even when I had self-doubts, she didn’t.”

— Gregg Kleiner