Born in Taiwan, Jensen Huang moved to the United States as a child and was briefly sent to a reform school in Kentucky that his parents mistook for a prep school. He trained as an electrical engineer and worked at LSI Logic and AMD before starting his own company.
In 1993 he co-founded NVIDIA with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, reportedly sketching the plan in a Denny's. The bet was that 3D graphics would become a mass market. NVIDIA nearly died several times in its first years before the RIVA and GeForce lines established it.
Huang's defining decision was to spend a decade and billions turning the GPU from a gaming chip into a general-purpose parallel computer through CUDA, long before there was a market for it. When deep learning arrived, NVIDIA owned the hardware substrate of the AI era.
Patterns
Reading a technology transition before the market does, and moving while it still looks like a mistake.
Funding a conviction through a decade of doubt until the curve finally bends.
Killing your own profitable business before someone else does it for you.
"I don't like giving up on things. I think I have a pretty high tolerance for pain."