Jensen Huang on his Denny's dishwasher days
The part that got me is Jensen Huang saying he cleaned more toilets than everyone listening combined. Before any of the CEO stuff, that was the first job, and he's upfront that thirty years on he wouldn't do it again. In between came Denny's, where by his own account the dish pit ran on mise en place and he washed the living daylight out of those dishes, and he'll tell you nobody there did it better. That got him bumped to busboy, another title he claims outright, and the efficiency pitch is that he never came back to the station empty handed. From there, eventually, CEO. Wild ladder when you lay it out like that.
Transcript (en)
And I said I was a good dishwasher. I was probably Denny's's best dishwasher. I planned my work, I was organized, I was Mison Plus, and then I washed the living daylights out of the dishes. And then they promoted me to bus, I was certain I'm the best busboy Denny's ever had. I never left the station empty handed, I never came back empty handed, I was very efficient. And so anyways, eventually I became a CEO. I'm still working on being a good CEO. You talk about being the best. You needed to be the best among 89 other companies that were funded after you to build the same thing. And then with 69 months of runway left, you realized that the initial vision was just not going to work. How did you decide what to do next to save the company when the cards were so stacked against you? Well, we started this company called For Accelerated Computing, and the question is what's it for? What's the killer app? And that came our first great decision. And this is what Sequoia funded. The first great decision was the first killer app was gonna be 3D graphics. And the technology was gonna be 3D graphics, and the application was gonna be video games. At the time, 3D graphics was impossible to make cheap. It was million dollar image generators from Silicon Graphics. And so it was a million dollars, and it's hard to make cheap.
