Jensen Huang on Vision, Risk, and the GPU

Jensen Huang:

My parents had nothing, sold everything, came to America. That was the beginning. Along the way, the jobs I had, the schools I went to, the opportunities I had, and here we are, NVIDIA being the most consequential technology company in the world. This can't possibly happen anywhere else.

Condoleezza Rice:

America leads the world in technological innovation. This innovation taking place all around us in Silicon Valley is possible here because of our American freedoms. But to take advantage of the opportunities that freedom affords us, it requires taking risk and facing the unknown with courage and determination. Jensen Huang, the founding CEO of NVIDIA, had a vision, took significant risks and now leads an iconic American business driving change at the heart of global technology. His journey as an immigrant is fascinating and it has so much to tell us about our country and what makes it exceptional. America presented the opportunities that enabled Jensen's risk-taking to change the world. Now for Only in America, my conversation with Jensen Huang.

Jensen Huang:

The amazing Condi Rice.

Condoleezza Rice:

I'm in uniform. How are you? Good to see you.

Jensen Huang:

Nice to see you.

Condoleezza Rice:

Nice to see you too.

Jensen Huang:

Welcome.

Condoleezza Rice:

Thank you.

Jensen Huang:

What do you think about our new building?

Condoleezza Rice:

I think this is amazing.

Jensen Huang:

This is a building that is only possible with science and a supercomputer.

Condoleezza Rice:

Right. It's fantastic.

Jensen Huang:

This was completely built in a simulation first.

Condoleezza Rice:

You're kidding?

Jensen Huang:

This building is designed so that we make maximum use of this incredible space called California. And so we decided let's use the space for the beautiful sunlight and the weather. And this entire space is very energy efficient, so we use the maximum amount of sunlight and that's why they are light wells on the roof. But when you have light wells in the roof, it is extremely difficult to remove the heat. And so notice where the triangles are, the light wells are only where it needs to be.

Condoleezza Rice:

I see.

Jensen Huang:

And the roof looks flat to us from here, but is undulated to track the sun. So it lets sun in just enough, but doesn't let any more sunlight in than is needed.

Condoleezza Rice:

Than necessary.

Jensen Huang:

Otherwise, we'll have to remove the heat.

Condoleezza Rice:

So it's completely efficient then.

Jensen Huang:

Completely efficient. We simulated this building every single hour of the day through a simulation of the entire year and we moved everything until it was perfect. Perfectly harmonious mathematically.

Condoleezza Rice:

Well, I would expect that of you, Jensen.

Jensen Huang:

That's an engineer trying to be an architect.

Condoleezza Rice:

I like it. I like it. Yeah.

Jensen Huang:

And the undulation, this one creates a baseball cap. And the reason for that is because you can see in the afternoon when the sun's about to set, it comes right into the building. And so I sloped the walls to move the offices further back in. And so this is the baseball cap of the building and it fits right into the beautiful design.

If you make me look too put together, everybody knows it's fake. I've got to be a little wicky wonky.

Condoleezza Rice:

Okay.

Jensen Huang:

Something's got to be a little off.

Condoleezza Rice:

There it is.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Do we still call you Madam Secretary?

Condoleezza Rice:

Oh, no. You're good. I tell people-

Speaker 3:

Would you like [inaudible 00:04:18].

Condoleezza Rice:

Oh, no. I'm good for now, thank you.

Speaker 3:

Okay, [inaudible 00:04:19].

Condoleezza Rice:

I tell people, Madam Secretary was a while ago. Dr. Rice was my father, and Professor Rice is with my students. So I think that leaves us with Condi.

Jensen Huang:

My goodness. That's a lot of good titles.

Condoleezza Rice:

Jensen Huang, thank you. Thank you for having me here at this beautiful NVIDIA campus. You and I have known each other a very long time, and have a lot of ties, Stanford ties and the like, so I'm really looking forward to our conversation. But let me start with this young kid, nine, that comes to the United States of America. America is in many ways one big immigrant story. Very different stories, but one big story of people who come seeking a better life, people who believe that their children are going to do better. So talk about arriving here. It couldn't have been easy.

Jensen Huang:

I was born in Taiwan. When I was five, my father got a job in Thailand to help start an oil refinery. And so we moved to Thailand. We were there for about four years. In 1973, there was a coup as it happens every now and then. And my parents thought it was unsafe for us to be there. My older brother was one year older than me. He was 10. I was nine. My parents wanted to send us out as soon as possible. And so they got our uncle who lives in Washington, Tacoma, Washington, to take us for a little while.

My first impression was I'd never stood in a house with carpets before. And it was the strangest feeling. I felt like I was walking on my bed with my shoes on and just everything from cereal and the morning television, Speed Racer, and in the afternoon Partridge Family and all the candy, the Snickers bars, everything was like, I couldn't imagine what this amazing country was. And everything was so beautiful, the cars, everything was just incredible.

And we were in Tacoma, Washington for about three months. And then they sent us to the most affordable, accessible boarding school in America because my parents couldn't afford much. A wonderful school. They welcomed students of all backgrounds, many from difficult homes, some international kids and that's how we were able to come. They sponsored us and allowed us to come to United States and stay in that boarding school. And I was there for about two years in Oneida, Kentucky.

Condoleezza Rice:

I have never heard of Oneida, Kentucky till this particular moment.

Jensen Huang:

If you look at Oneida, Kentucky in Google Maps, the beautiful thing is there's nothing around it. It's just one little dot. I think when I was there, it was probably population 600. It's probably population 600 now. Beautiful, incredible. I had a wonderful, wonderful childhood there. It was very difficult and very scary coming to United States by yourself, but it's amazing what my older brother did, frankly. I just followed him around. He was 10 years old. Could you imagine a 10-year-old bringing along a nine-year-old, traveled all the way from Thailand, never been to the United States, landed in Tacoma, Washington, and went to Kentucky, but laid over in Chicago.

Condoleezza Rice:

Oh my goodness.

Jensen Huang:

The Chicago airport is gigantic.

Condoleezza Rice:

Yes, it is.

Jensen Huang:

And so we had to go find a connecting flight and a 10-year-old did all that by himself. My older brother's incredible.

Condoleezza Rice:

That's amazing. So this was risky in a lot of ways, but your parents felt that the greater risk would be to stay where you were. How were you treated? Were people friendly? Were they surprised? How did that part of it go?

Jensen Huang:

You know, 1973, United States in Kentucky, there were still biases and nobody had ... The school had never seen a Chinese kid before. Wonderful kids there, but none of them had ever seen a Chinese before. And so there were all of the things that comes along with being a stranger in a town where nobody's ever seen someone like you before. And so there's a lot of biases and of course things like that, but kids are kids. And so for us at the time, the United States was amazing and I was part of the swim team and I was part of the soccer team and the food was interesting and sausage and gravy, who wouldn't like that? Hamburgers. And after swim meet, the coach just took us to the most amazing restaurant in the world and the food came in boxes and the menu was all lit up and we sat in a restaurant that seemed like a spaceship and it was McDonald's.

Condoleezza Rice:

McDonald's, right?

Jensen Huang:

Yep. And so I think it's really all about expectations in life. When you came from an even more difficult circumstance. That's the thing about immigrants is that when you come to America, you came because of choice, you wanted to be here. My dad sent us here, but in fact, when I was four years old, he had the opportunity to come to be trained in the United States and it turned out the place he came to was New York.

Condoleezza Rice:

Oh, boy.

Jensen Huang:

Could you imagine?

Condoleezza Rice:

Yeah.

Jensen Huang:

To come to the United States and it's New York City from Taiwan in the '60s. And so he always said that he wanted his family to eventually come to America, to come to this incredible place. So the thing that's really great about immigrants is you came with very little expectation, you came with great hopes and dreams. You appreciate everything.

Condoleezza Rice:

And with a sense of gratitude for where you are and the new opportunities.

Jensen Huang:

Exactly. And this miracle that you're witnessing, I remember very clearly what it's like to see America for the first time, this miracle and all these people and how welcoming they are.

Condoleezza Rice:

To see it through those eyes. But then of course you go from this little kid in Kentucky, you're on the swim team. Sounds like you were doing okay.

Jensen Huang:

I was a good athlete. Yeah, I was a good athlete. And so we met our parents back in Tacoma, Washington. They had nothing and literally they put all their belongings on the plane so they had nothing and they came with literally the suitcase. That story, the immigrant story. And they saved their way to build a life for their kids. My mom was a maid at a Catholic school and my father was an engineer. They saved everything they had. My dad bought a green truck, a van, and there were no seats in it. So he put a carpet in the back and put some milk crates. We got into that green van and he drove us all the way from Oregon down to LA so that we could go see Disneyland. And that was the one vacation of our family.

Condoleezza Rice:

How did you end up going on to college and then Stanford and working at Denny's, which we have to cover at some point?

Jensen Huang:

No, I must be Denny's best ambassador.

Condoleezza Rice:

Yeah, I think you are, definitely.

Jensen Huang:

No, I love Denny's so much. It never occurred to me to be able to afford or go anywhere for college. So it was always just my plan that I would grow up in Oregon, and I loved math. I loved science. And when you're in high school and you love math and science, you're only going to have three other friends who also love math and science.

Condoleezza Rice:

And science, right?

Jensen Huang:

And so the two or three friends of ours, we were all in a club so that we were in a math club. We were also in the science club, and then we were in the computer club.

Condoleezza Rice:

All together.

Jensen Huang:

All together. And then afterwards, after clubbing, we would go play arcade games, play pinball or go play arcade games. And that was growing up. And my best friend, Dean Verheign, he said, "I'm just going to go to Oregon State University. My brother went there, my parents went there." And I said, "That sounds great." Oregon State had a good engineering program. That was just good happenstance. I loved the school and it turned out that there was another kid there, Lori. She was one of three girls in a class of 250 other boys. I was the youngest kid in school. I was only 16 and she was a year and a half older than me and I was determined to go meet her. And so I statistically weeded out everybody by getting myself maneuvered into her lab class. So now I've reduced the population from 250, competition from 250 to 4.

Condoleezza Rice:

That's quite clever.

Jensen Huang:

That's very clever. Oh, I was very strategic even when I was a kid. Well, I knew odds. And then I gave her the ultimate pickup line. I asked her if she wanted to see my homework.

Condoleezza Rice:

That was so smooth. That was really smooth of you to do.

Jensen Huang:

I cinched it. And so we've been together ever since.

Condoleezza Rice:

That's great. So that's how you met.

Jensen Huang:

Yeah, we met in college.

Condoleezza Rice:

So you're in Corvallis, Oregon State. You are doing well in school. How does Stanford come onto your radar screen?

Jensen Huang:

I always wanted to go to a great school. I always imagined getting a master's, but I never imagined that I could afford it. And so during Oregon State, the recruiters came from Silicon Valley. And so I took a job at AMD and that was a really good choice because the work was really interesting. I had really great colleagues and they had this program where you could go to Stanford and work at AMD and they paid everything. And so it was an incredible thing. So when they were pitching the offer to me, I said, "Hang on a second. I can work at AMD. You can pay me a great salary and you're going to pay me to go to Stanford at the same time." And they said, "Yep."

Condoleezza Rice:

And you said, "That sounds good to me."

Jensen Huang:

And that sounds like a dream come true. So I took that job. And then of course a year later, Lori graduated, we got married and then life started. So I took some classes, took some time off, took some classes, took some time off and altogether it must have taken me some eight years to grad. I'm probably the longest-running student at Stanford. Nobody paid Stanford more for the education. And along the way, Spencer and Madison came and along the way I founded NVIDIA. And literally during my entire tenure, during that time of being at Stanford, my life happened. When you're going to school, you think that the schoolwork is awfully academic. And the reason for that is because you're not sure whether there's any purpose and any benefit in learning this, but the benefit of working and going to school at the same time, especially at Stanford, is I could see so much of the principles being taught and how important it is in everything that I do today.

And so it was a great privilege to have all of that happening to me at the same time. My family, my kids, my company, Stanford, working, all of it kind of in one giant soup.

Condoleezza Rice:

People talk about Silicon Valley and the ecosystem and so forth, but you've just used a really great term. It is really kind of a big stew and you meet very interesting people and they change your thinking about something and that leads to something. It sounds like Stanford was a place like that for you.

Jensen Huang:

It completely shaped my attitude and my perspective about computer science and its impact to industry and industrial strategies. That entire intersection between technology, applications, the fundamental science and the strategies of computer science really for me formulated during that time and it was really cool.

Condoleezza Rice:

Now talk about the founding of NVIDIA. The early day founder stories are really fascinating because you have to take a chance, you take a risk. You don't know if it's going to work out, but what was the kernel that made you and your co-founders think maybe we have something here?

Jensen Huang:

During that time, it was at the beginning of the PC revolution. It was the beginning of really Moore's Law, the beginning of the CPU era, this incredible technology engine that really changed everything. All of that in Silicon Valley was all about CPUs. Everything was about general purpose computing. Everything was about CPUs. Everything was about Moore's law. Everything was about the PC. And there were two simultaneous ideas that Chris, Curtis, and I were considering. And one idea, of course, is every application that's interesting and meaningful, can it be run on a CPU? And we believed that there were so many interesting problems to solve, whether it's real-time computer graphics, which is at the time, one of the hardest problems to do in computer science or simulation or other things beyond that. A normal computer like a CPU can't possibly be the right format.

And so we imagined that there would be a way to accelerate the CPU, offload the work that is not suitable for general purpose things. It's kind of like in your house, you only have one tool, one tool in the kitchen, or you go into your garage, there's only one tool in your garage, you come to your company, there's only one tool. There's the right tool for the right job. And we believe that there's another tool that could augment the CPU and make that computer essentially a super computer. And so that's one idea. The second idea was how do we even get this company started? The problem is the CPU at this point, general purpose computing as of today is probably about 64 years old.

And so the nature of the computer industry is that if you create an architecture that produces benefits to applications, the install base goes up, the sales goes up, applications use more of it, this positive virtuous cycle would cause the two to reinforce itself. And so in fact, over the course of the last 64 years, so many applications are built on top of the CPU. 

Jensen Huang:

How do you even cause the application developers to consider another architecture?

Condoleezza Rice:

Another architecture, right?

Jensen Huang:

That chicken or egg problem is incredibly hard to solve and has never been solved. In fact, aside from NVIDIA today, really everything else runs on CPUs.

Condoleezza Rice:

Right.

Jensen Huang:

And so the idea that we would get this new architecture to be adopted by developers was incredibly hard. And so the question is, what's the first application? Which brought NVIDIA to its second idea, which was maybe the first application is computer graphics. But the problem is, computer graphics was such a small market at the time. It was just Silicon Graphics.

Condoleezza Rice:

Right, right.

Jensen Huang:

And Silicon Graphics, it was a large company, but by the standards of computer architectures, very, very small. And so the question is, how do we find an application that would, on the one hand, need this architecture, on the other hand, be sufficiently high volume to cause this architecture to proliferate? And so we thought maybe 3D graphics for video games.

Speaker 5:

Computer games are not only fun, but they perhaps, more than any other application, push the edge of computing power. Those PC upgrades for consumers are driven not by the grownups in the house, but by the kids who want a more powerful gaming machine. All right, so you've got the brand new GeForce graphics card here.

Speaker 6:

That's exactly right. The GeForce 3 is the latest generation graphics processor from NVIDIA. So this product actually includes a 57-million transistor graphics processor. To put in perspective, that's more transistors than a Pentium IV, plus a Pentium III put together.

Jensen Huang:

I just described the business plan.

Condoleezza Rice:

Yeah.

Jensen Huang:

That is impossible to fund. And I still remember explaining it and everybody's going, "Yeah, but this and that, this requires this to be solved, and multiple chicken and eggs." And yet, Silicon Valley, right here, Sand Hill Road would finance me. Sequoia Capital and Sutter Hill would be investors in this company and that we would be able to attract the brightest minds, the brightest computer scientists in the world to come work here. But we were just determined that on first principle basis, the general purpose computer cannot possibly be the only computing platform, and that there were too many interesting problems that we could solve if we were to introduce this new idea.

Speaker 5:

What's key about this is it's programmable, right?

Speaker 6:

That's exactly right. For the first time, the graphics processor is as programmable as the CPU. We have an instruction set. Just like the Intel processors have an instruction set that you can program, Microsoft Word or Windows with, we now have an instruction set that game programmers can program to create special effects on our processor.

Condoleezza Rice:

So you literally were swimming upstream on this, people you were trying to convince-

Jensen Huang:

For 30 years.

Condoleezza Rice:

... for 30 years. But then, something happens and the problem that you've solved, it turns out has many other applications.

Speaker 7:

NVIDIA. The best way to play the Netbook explosion, that's right, N-V-D-A. First of all, the company understands the netbook opportunity. "There's more and more people proving that they want to be able to take their computer with them."

Steve Jobs:

NVIDIA came to us many months ago and talked to us about an amazing graphics part that they wanted to build. And we said, "This is fantastic, but we'd like to use it in a notebook. Can we work together on this?" And we've been working together with NVIDIA for many, many months and they've created something really great.

Condoleezza Rice:

I remember listening to you at Stanford at a talk and you said, "We just kept trying to solve hard problems."

Jensen Huang:

Computer graphics is basically a simulation of the world. It's a simulation problem. In a lot of ways, artificial intelligence is a simulation of the mind, simulation of the brain. And so the computation of simulation can be done not completely but largely in parallel. And so the architecture, the processor that you want to use for simulation versus the architecture used for task execution, a recipe is step one, step two, step three. In the case of simulation, the world is happening concurrently and in parallel all at the same time right now.

And so on that first principle, you would think that simulation of the world, whether it's quantum, Newtonian, or otherwise, should be something that is a different architecture than recipe execution and instruction execution. And so that's the big, big idea. Now, the question then is how do you manifest that idea in technology, number one. Number two, how do you go find applications for it?

And so we found, of course, the first application, computer graphics. The second application was seismic processing, or inverse physics, CT reconstruction, ultrasound, seismic, very similar problems. The next problem we found was molecular dynamics, Newtonian physics, and on and on and on and on. And we just kept finding one problem after another.

And then one day, some researchers, one at Stanford, Andrew Ng, Jeff Hinton at the University of Toronto, Yann LeCun over at New York University, they were all trying to solve for a similar problem, which is deep learning. And they reached out to us and, being alert, I realized that this is a problem that we could really make a contribution to and I was happy to help. And because of the work that we did together, it achieved a level of computer vision capability that no one had ever imagined.

And because of its success, it triggered even further introspection. Why does it work? What else can it do? How far can it go? What is the implication to computer science? What is the implication to the whole industry that we're built on? And so step by step by step, we broke everything down to its first principles, and then we rebuilt back where NVIDIA is going to be in that world. How do we apply all of the techniques that we know? How do we navigate step by step so that, on the one hand, we can pursue this unknown future? And so all of this is about reasoning, vision, strategy, discipline, patience.

Condoleezza Rice:

Belief.

Jensen Huang:

Belief. At the core of grit. We suffered our way here. We suffered every single step of the way we suffered our way here, because nobody believed in it. So we had the benefit of building all of this for a decade before anybody even paid attention. The hard part, of course, is that you're endeavoring something that has no positive feedback, no external motivation.

Condoleezza Rice:

And how do your employees stay motivated? Because there was this period of time where NVIDIA was not on the tip of the tongue of anybody here in the valley. All kinds of other things were going on. How did you stay, not just you stay focused, but how did you keep a workforce believing and people believing, engineers believing that this was ... That must have been a tough inspirational speech at some time. How do you do that?

Jensen Huang:

First of all, we have to believe in what we're doing. We have to go back to our core values. As you know, in almost everything great that's done, you have to go back to your core foundations. You have to demonstrate that you are determined to go pursue that, that you see that future in your mind's eye, even though nobody else can. You see that future in your mind's eye. You have to tell the story so that everybody else could see it in their mind's eye and you have to believe it yourself.

Speaker 4:

Welcome to the world's first conference dedicated to our industry, dedicated to the visual computing industry.

Welcome to GTC 2010. GTC is all about the celebration of the wonderful discoveries and amazing inventions that are made possible because of the GPU computing revolution. GTC is a celebration of your work.

Jensen Huang:

It has to first start from what are your core beliefs. For what reason do you believe this future will happen? You could say that about America, you could say that about Stanford, you could say that about Nvidia. America has core foundations. We spoke a little bit about it. The American dream has a core foundation. There's a reason why it exists. There's a purpose that drives it. There's a promise of it. There are pillars that keep it up.

When you see the world from my lens, when you see America from my lens, and when you see America now today as I travel around the world and see America from the lens of everywhere I've been, and the countries that aspire to be us, the industries that would aspire to want to be part of our industry, it is just genuinely a miracle.

Condoleezza Rice:

It is a miracle. And very often, I teach young people, of course. And sometimes, I think that some of this has gotten lost. There is something about this risk taking, this willing to fail. The fact that you are in a place where you'll get a second chance. The role of free speech, the role of laws that are reliable, that is really quite extraordinary.

Jensen Huang:

Exactly. We have a word for that. We call it freedom.

Condoleezza Rice:

We call it freedom. And that freedom has enabled so much.

Jensen Huang:

That's right.

Condoleezza Rice:

What would you say to these young people? Because there is unfortunately right now, among my students, there's a fearfulness, there's a sense of I'm not going to be able to achieve those things. Maybe this world, whether it's I won't have a job because of AI, or is that American dream still really there? What would you say to them?

Jensen Huang:

I would always retreat back to first principles. I would always reason from first principles when I'm uncertain about the future, when things are moving too fast. You always go back to first principles. What are my core values? What makes me great today? What do I aspire for? And to go back to that.

I would say to young people that it's possible to have multiple feelings at the same time. It's possible to be grateful for everything that you have, to be unsatisfied with where we are at, and to have aspirations for greatness. You're allowed to have all of those feelings at exactly the same time. Doing technology change, doing world change, is the only opportunity for greatness. Status quo, it's really hard to make a difference. And so, I would deeply dive into the capabilities of artificial intelligence and use it in every possible way. And it's not just about master of science, mastery of science, but it's about mastery of using artificial intelligence in my field of science.

Your purpose if you decide to go into medicine is to care for people. It's different than studying a radiology scan. Your purpose as an engineer is to either solve a known problem or discover problems that have never been solved, that are worthy to be solved. There's a fundamental difference between the task that we do in our job versus the purpose of our job. Everybody's purpose, every job's purpose surprisingly consists of tasks but not defined by the tasks.

Condoleezza Rice:

Let's talk about AI actually because you are foundational now to that entire revolution, but you're an optimist about the technology.

Jensen Huang:

Cautious optimist.

Condoleezza Rice:

Describe for me cautious optimism because there's some people who are... We've lived in the valley a long time. There are people who are kind of wild-eyed optimist as well. But talk to me about what cautious optimism means and how you think about that.

Jensen Huang:

Yeah. Intelligence is foundational to every aspect of society, every aspect of industry, everything we endeavor. In almost everything that we do, the fundamental ingredient is intelligence. Now, of course, we have to be cautious. We have to be cautious so that we advance the technology as quickly as we can so that it works as we promised, so that it's functional as we expect, so that it doesn't produce intelligence, that sounds like it's intelligence, but it's not. It's flawed. Functional things are safer. I want my car to function as promised. AI needs to function as promised.

Condoleezza Rice:

When you think about this whole question, internationally and the like, what concerns you about where we are now?

Jensen Huang:

I think that one of the challenges is to define what is AI. That is probably one of the most... There's a lot of different ways to think about the technology, but one way to think about it is it's like a five layer cake and we have to win every single layer. The first layer is just energy. Energy is land power and shell, first layer. Second layer is the chips layer where I'm at. The third layer is the infrastructure layer, which is like cloud services. The next layer above that is the AI model layer. This is where everybody talks-

Condoleezza Rice:

Yes, right.

Jensen Huang:

... but it's not the only layer. Everything about that layer is very important, but ultimately, the most important layer to our nation is the layer above that, which is the application layer. Using AI for healthcare, using AI for military applications, using for defense, for cybersecurity, using AI for transportation, for manufacturing, that is what's going to drive our industry forward. But I do think that our nation also has to be very alert that this is a very important time. And although we are ahead, although we are the world leader, during an inflection in technology, this is exactly when leadership can change; and that we have to make sure that as we come up with policies, we don't hinder the most important layer, which is the highest layer, the application layer. That is the layer that whoever advances that layer most will exploit this industrial revolution the most.

Condoleezza Rice:

Somebody comes here from Taiwan, they're nine, they end up in Kentucky of all places. They somehow go to Oregon State because their friend goes to Oregon State and the family's there and then they go to Stanford because somebody will pay for it. You meet a collection of people who are intellectual-

Jensen Huang:

Geniuses.

Condoleezza Rice:

... geniuses, but they're a push on your own intellect.

Jensen Huang:

Yeah, that's right. I'm the busboy at Denny's that met up with Chris and Curtis, the two geniuses. I mean, that's how the story goes.

Condoleezza Rice:

Yeah, that's the story, right?

Jensen Huang:

Yeah, yeah.

Condoleezza Rice:

And you found this company on an idea. It's a while before this idea actually shows that you were right. Does that happen only in America because of some of those foundational institutions, ideas that you talked about?

Jensen Huang:

I think that it's a chain of extremely low probability events that leads to NVIDIA. And without the tailwind that America provides... America provides tailwind, not headwind. It provides tailwind, laws and rules that are understandable and that you can count on, a business environment, an industrial environment with people playing by the rules that you can understand and count on. When everybody's playing by the rules, and rules and laws are for good reason, then at least you can find where there are segments in the market that are underserved and that you can rely on that. You can rely on the fact that you can create something great and take it to market in a way that serves a market that has a demand and that it won't be foreclosed on you randomly, arbitrarily, unknowingly, unpredictably. Those things that entrepreneurs rely on are alive and well here.

As an immigrant, you come here by choice. You witness a miracle because compared to where you came from, the circumstances you came from, it is a miracle. The resources are incredible, are abundant. You want to work hard because you're desperate to succeed. An entrepreneur, you're desperate to succeed. If you don't work hard every single day, you will perish. The entrepreneurial spirit, the immigrant spirit is rather similar, actually.

Condoleezza Rice:

Similar. Very similar. Yeah. Right.

Jensen Huang:

You have the same feelings. I am certain my feelings about NVIDIA and my constant desperation to do better is exactly the same feelings my parents had, to secure a living for their family. They have nothing else to rely on, nothing to fall back to. I can't imagine another place where this is possible. This is genuinely, NVIDIA genuinely is an only in America story. In a lot of ways, I'm an only in America story. This is in one lifetime. I'm not talking about a fifth generation thing. I'm not talking about third generation thing. This all in one body in one generation with parents that gave up everything to be here, with no way to fall back, and they sacrificed their whole life to build a life for their children so that we could have more opportunities than they did and for a country to create the opportunities for me and all the resources, the systems, the institution, the foundation that makes a company like NVIDIA to be possible. I am the embodiment of the American dream.