NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang had created the most valuable company in the world, and he’s now amongst the richest men in the world. But his LinkedIn can give a misleading impression of how sudden his rise has been.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang famously lists only two jobs on his LinkedIn profile. His LinkedIn says that he worked at restaurant chain Denny’s from 1978 to 1983 as a “Dishwasher, Busboy, Waiter”. It then says that he was the founder and CEO of NVIDIA from 1993.
Jensen Huang’s LinkedIn gives the impression that he was a waiter at Denny’s before he decided to start NVIDIA. But that isn’t quite the case. In the 10-year period that Huang leaves out — as per his LinkedIn, he left Denny’s in 1983, and then started NVIDIA in 1993 — he’d worked two jobs.
Huang had worked at restaurant chain Denny’s while he was studying Electrical Engineering at Oregon State University. He’d graduated in 1984 when he was 20 years old. After graduating, Huang had interviewed for positions at Texas Instruments, AMD and LSI Logic. He ultimately chose California-based AMD because he was familiar with the company. While working at AMD, he designed microprocessors. A few years later, Huang left AMD to assume as a technical officer at LSI Corporation.
At LSI, Jensen Huang met engineers Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, who were working on a new graphics accelerator card. The three of them together worked on card’s manufacturing process. In 1989, they finalized the card, which was called “GX graphics engine”. GX was a financial success, and helped increase the company’s revenue manifold. In 1990, and Huang was promoted to be the director of LSI’s CoreWare, a division that manufactured chips for hardware vendors.
But as business began to slow around that time for Sun Microsystems, LSI’s parent company, Huang, Malachowsky and Priem decided to start their own venture. They resigned from their jobs, and together founded NVIDIA in 1993. Priem retired from NVIDIA in 2003, and sold all his NVIDIA shares by 2006. Chris Malachowsky still serves as a member of the executive staff and a senior technology executive for the company.
Jensen Huang, though, is now the face of NVIDIA. It’s unclear why he doesn’t list his two major jobs before NVIDIA on his LinkedIn. While LSI is now defunct, AMD is still very much around, is led by his cousin Lisa Su, and even competes with NVIDIA in some of its newer GPU offerings. And while Jensen Huang’s journey is incredibly inspiring, going from waiting tables at Denny’s to founding the most valuable company in the world, he did work two jobs at AMD and LSI Corp for substantial periods before founding NVIDIA.