NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang currently heads the most valuable company in the world, and he’s displayed much of the same hustle when he was finding himself a wife.
Jensen recently shared the charming story of how he met his wife during his college years, revealing a tale that combines academic strategy with romantic ambition. Speaking with his characteristic blend of humor and earnestness, Huang recounted how at just 17 years old, he approached a 19-year-old woman with an unconventional pickup line that would change both their lives forever.
“Well, I was 17. She was 19. I walked up to her and I said, ‘Do you want to see my homework?'” Huang recalled. But this wasn’t just any casual study session invitation. The young Huang had a master plan in mind, one that would secure him regular time with his future wife while positioning himself as an invaluable academic partner.
“Then I made her a promise. I said, ‘If you do homework with me every Sunday, I promise you, you will get straight A’s,'” he continued. The strategy worked brilliantly: “As a result, I had a date every Sunday and I made her do homework all day. I was with her the whole day.”
But Huang’s ambitions extended far beyond weekly study dates. Even as a teenager, he was already thinking in terms of long-term goals and bold predictions about his future. “Just to make sure that eventually she marries me, I told her that by the time I’m 30, I’m going to be a CEO. I have no idea what I was talking about,” he admitted with characteristic humility.
The gambit paid off spectacularly. “And then we got married. Happily ever after. So that’s all the advice I’m going to give all the entrepreneurs. That’s it,” Huang concluded with a laugh.
The story offers a fascinating glimpse into the mindset that would eventually drive Huang to co-found NVIDIA in 1993 and transform it into a trillion-dollar powerhouse at the forefront of artificial intelligence and computing. His early romantic strategy mirrors the same bold vision and calculated risk-taking that has defined his business career. Remarkably, Huang did achieve his teenage promise — he became NVIDIA’s CEO at age 30, exactly as he had predicted to his future wife decades earlier. This blend of audacious goal-setting, strategic thinking, and the ability to deliver on seemingly impossible promises has become a hallmark of both his personal life and his leadership of one of the world’s most influential technology companies.