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In the name of Nvidia, the company founded by Jensen Huang in 1993, three revealing elements are mixed: NV, for next vision (the vision of what is coming); VID, a reference to video - since the company began by betting on the development of graphics cards for computers -; but also the word invidia, which is used in Latin to refer - you guessed it - to envy.
And, judging by the amazing results that this technology company has had during the last year, it is likely that this is indeed the feeling that both the company and its founder have awakened in their competitors.
The value of the company on the stock market exceeded US$2.5 billion this May and it is the third most valuable publicly traded company in the world, surpassing Alphabet (Google), Amazon and Meta; and only behind Microsoft and Apple.
This Wednesday the company reported that its profits reached US$14.9 billion in the first quarter of the year, which represents an increase of 600% compared to the same period of the previous year.
The rapid multiplication of Nvidia's value is explained by the furor around artificial intelligence and the fact that this company is the supplier of more than 70% of the chips that make this technology possible.
But these, in turn, would not exist if it were not for the vision of Huang, who opted for this market when it did not yet exist and, in this way, contributed to making it a reality.
Today, as Wired magazine recently said, Huang is considered "the man of the hour, the year and perhaps the decade"; while Jim Cramer, investment analyst for the American network CNBC, has stated that the founder of Nvidia surpasses Elon Musk as a visionary.
Huang's story, however, has not been without difficulties, risks and hard work, including many hours spent washing toilets and waiting tables as a waiter.
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Born in Taipei in 1963, Huang spent part of his childhood in Taiwan and Thailand, until his parents decided to send him and his brother to the United States.
The boys - who did not speak English - were taken in by uncles, also recently immigrated, who sent them to study at the Oneida Baptist Institute in Kentucky, which by then was more similar to a reformatory than a regular school.
According to a newsletter published by that school in 2016, both brothers were allowed to live, eat and work at that institution - which then only offered high school classes - while they attended classes at Oneida Elementary School.
Little Jensen's assigned job was to wash the toilets.
"The kids were really tough. They all had pocket knives and when there were fights, it wasn't pretty. The kids got hurt," the businessman said in an interview with NPR in 2012.
Despite the difficulties, Huang has always maintained that it was a great experience and that he enjoyed his time there.
In fact, in 2016, he and his wife, Lori, donated US$2 million for the construction of a building with classrooms and dormitories for girls at that educational center.
Finding luck
A few years later, the boys moved to Oregon to join their parents when they emigrated to the United States.
Huang attended Oregon State University to study electrical engineering.
He says that it was there where he opened his eyes to "the magic behind" computers and it was also there where "luck" led him to meet his wife, Lori, who was his laboratory practice partner.
She was one of three girls who belonged to a class with 80 students.
In a talk he gave to students at that university in 2013, Huang highlighted how he had also met by chance the two co-founders of Nvidia, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem.
"I'm largely saying that serendipity is very important to success," he said.
The three co-founders of Nvidia came up with the idea of creating the company during a breakfast at a Denny's fast food chain in San José (California).
A plaque was placed there that commemorates that fact, after in 2023 that technology company managed to be listed for the first time for US$1 billion.
Huang has a long relationship with Denny's, as it was at a store of that chain in Portland where he got his first job at the age of 15 washing dishes, cleaning tables and serving as a waiter.
"Excellent job choice. I highly recommend everyone start their first job in the restaurant business, it teaches humility and hard work," said Huang, who often brags about how good he was at those tasks.
"My first job before becoming CEO was washing dishes and I did it very well," he noted recently in a talk at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
The businessman has said that working at Denny's helped him overcome his extreme shyness.
"I was terrified of having to talk to people," he told The New York Times.
Betting on the unknown
Huang graduated as an engineer in 1984. "A perfect year to graduate," he said, because it was the same year that the era of personal computers began with the release of the first Macs.
He then pursued a master's degree in electrical engineering at Stanford University, which took him eight years to complete.
In parallel, he was working in different roles in technology companies such as Advanced Micro Deviced (AMD) and LSI Logic, which he left shortly before founding Nvidia.
As he said in the talk he gave in 2013 at Oregon State University, before creating that company, the three founders asked themselves three questions: Is this work something we would "really love" to do? Is this work worth doing? And is this work something "really difficult" to do?
"Today I ask myself those same three questions all the time. Because you shouldn't do anything you don't love. And you should only work on the things in your life that matter," he said.
Part of their work philosophy is based on betting on doing these important things even when there is no clear established market.
"We find inspiration not in the size of the market, but in the importance of work, because the importance of work is an early indicator of the future market," he said at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
There he also recommended constantly returning to basic principles because - he assured - that is something that creates many opportunities.
Applying ideas of this style, Huang has created a company with a fairly horizontal structure in which not only are there more than 40 people who report directly to him, but in which he also encourages transversal communication, as well as from the bottom up.
It is a way, as he explained, to facilitate the flow of ideas and information, but also to keep up to date with the best ideas of his team.
"Leading people to achieve great things, inspiring, empowering and supporting others, those are the reasons why a management team exists, to serve everyone else who works in the company," he noted in his talk at Stanford.
And judging by Nvidia's results, it's a philosophy that works.
That, of course, has not prevented the company from going through tough times.
The first of them occurred very soon when, after having searched during its first two years for technological solutions to overcome the high price of DRAM memory, its price fell 90%.
This made the invested effort useless and opened the doors for dozens of other companies to compete in the race to develop the best graphics chips.
Nvidia managed to redirect its efforts and in 1999 launched the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), a type of microprocessor that redefined computer games.
From there, the company continued working on the development of GPU-accelerated computing, a computing model that makes use of the massive use of parallel graphics processors and that allows to accelerate the work of programs that require great computational power, such as data analysis, simulations, visualizations and artificial intelligence.
The bet on the latter has skyrocketed the price of Nvidia shares and, with them, Huang's personal fortune, which on May 23 exceeded US$92 billion, which - according to Forbes magazine - makes him the 17th richest man in the world.
And it can go even further thanks to the quasi-monopoly position that Nvidia has with the production of these superchips, whose demand is expected to only grow in the near future.
As a Wall Street analyst quoted by The New Yorker magazine has noted: "There is a war going on in the field of artificial intelligence and Nvidia is the only arms seller."
Jensen Huang's luck, it seems, may continue to improve.
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