Jensen Huang says bussing tables at Denny's as a shy teenager taught him the people skills that helped him co-found Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA), now an AI colossus worth roughly $3 trillion.
What Happened: Speaking on Hewlett-Packard's "The Moment" show back in October 2023, he added that the all-night diner doubled as the brainstorming lab where he and two friends "talked me into building Nvidia."
"My job at Denny's… I was incredibly shy and it got me to be able to interact with people a lot better," Huang recalled, praising the chain's bottomless coffee for fueling their late-night design sessions.
He and co-founders Curtis Priem and Chris Malachowsky "had kids and dog," so they commandeered a booth near their San Jose homes to sketch out what became the first GeForce chip in 1993.
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Three decades later, Huang still wraps sausages in pancakes -- “This is exactly how I eat a pancake, to this very day,” he laughed -- and tries to dissuade milkshake orders because “nothing kills me more than when somebody orders a shake.”
Denny's has since dedicated that corner booth to Nvidia's origin story, a tribute Huang calls “the real birthplace of trillion-dollar silicon.”
What To Know: The former busboy now ranks 16th on Forbes' billionaires list, with a fortune topping $116 billion. Nvidia's shares have surged on demand for its H100 and upcoming Blackwell GPUs, positioning the firm to capture a projected $400 billion slice of data-center spending next year.
Similar to Nvidia, Reddit traces its spark to an eatery too -- a 2005 after-class stop at a Waffle House in Charlottesville, where University of Virginia roommates Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman ditched LSAT plans, brainstormed a new online hub and soon pitched the idea to Y Combinator, laying the groundwork for what would become "the front page of the internet."
Image via Shutterstock
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