If the rags-to-riches story feels a little, well, tattered, Nvidia’s CEO hasn’t noticed. One of the richest people in the world, Jensen Huang is not afraid to touch on his origins when speaking about his ascent in the tech world.
“I had all kinds of jobs and we went to a school that included a lot of chores,” Huang said last spring in fireside chat with Stripe CEO Patrick Collison. His parents “‘weren’t wealthy,” Huang noted, and both their influence alongside his Kentucky boarding school instilled in him the value of hard work.
Living in more of an old-fashioned dormitory at the Oneida Baptist Institute, Huang described that more senior students were assigned harder menial jobs like farming and he was stuck cleaning all the bathrooms.
“You can’t unsee that kind of stuff. But that was my job and so I did it delightfully,” he said of his chore as a 9-year-old boy.
Huang speaks of his days at Denny’s not infrequently, with the underlining thesis that he worked hard and put his all into a difficult job. Starting as a dishwasher when he was a teenager, Huang became a busboy and then a waiter. He described wanting to be top tier at said gigs, “just everything that I was doing, I wanted to do the best I could.”
He called upon his past experience, claiming he applied his childhood boarding school days to being “definitely the best bathroom cleaner the world’s ever seen.”
Denny’s later became the equivalent of a Steve Jobs garage for Huang, as the CEO said that he met future cofounders Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem in 1993. There, the three discussed what would become the kernel of Nvidia over cups of coffee and Moons Over My Hammy.
Over the next few decades, the chip manufacturer heated up in a major way and demand for its AI hardware soared this year. In June, the company was valued at $3 trillion, catapulting Huang’s net worth to $106.1 billion. While he still has a major stake in the company, Huang has since spent this summer shedding about $14 million worth of shares almost on a daily basis.
Either way, Huang is certainly proud of his accomplishments and where he’s been. “Look, I used to clean bathrooms, and now I’m a CEO of a company,” he said at the fireside chat, explaining that there are few unlearnable jobs.
He maintains that his time as a janitor applies to his current role. “To me, no task is beneath me, ” he said last spring during an interview at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. “Because remember I used to wash dishes, and I mean I used to clean toilets. I cleaned a lot of toilets. I’ve cleaned more toilets than all of you combined,” he continued. “That’s life,” the billionaire concluded.