Jensen Huang founded Nvidia on the wrong graphics technology, and when no one knew the right way, he bought three textbooks from Fry's for a couple hundred dollars to rebuild the algorithm. Nvidia is worth more than $4 trillion today. This is him at Y Combinator on the day he realized Nvidia was building the wrong thing: Nvidia had chosen the wrong graphics approach, finished dead last, and run out of money. Then came the worse discovery. "Not only did we choose the wrong technology, we didn't know how to do it the right way." He said it to the whole company out loud, because the alternative was pretending it wasn't true. "We won't have a company if we don't confront the fact that this doesn't work and start working towards the right algorithm." There was no research budget and no expert to call, so he went and found the answer himself. "I had a couple hundred dollars in my pocket. And so I went down to Fry's and I bought three textbooks. And the textbooks were about OpenGL and how to design OpenGL pipelines. I brought it back to the company and gave it to the engineers." The engineers rebuilt the whole thing from those pages, and it became the foundation for everything Nvidia made after. "Everybody would have thought that Nvidia started out as world leaders in 3D graphics. And we learned it from a textbook." Decades later, he still tells it as a punchline against himself. "We actually started the company, raised money, and bought textbooks, when you think about it." Bookmark & watch ↓