Wanja S. Oberhof

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 ↓

KFC hired 23 of 24 applicants in Jack Ma's city. He was the 1 rejection. He later ran a $25 billion IPO. The clip is Ma at Davos, 2015, reading out his rejection resume with a grin. Harvard: applied 10 times, rejected 10 times. The police: 5 classmates applied, 4 got in. His rejection came with a review: "you're no good." KFC arrives in his city: 24 apply, 23 hired. He's the leftover, again. Even the future disagreed with him. In 1996 he pitched internet businesses door to door in Hangzhou and got called a con man. In 1999 he gathered 17 friends in his apartment and founded Alibaba on $60,000 of pooled savings. In 2014 it listed in New York at $25 billion, the largest IPO in history at the time. His English-teacher salary had been $12 a month. His Davos advice from the pile of rejections: get used to it, the no's are training. Then the sequel proved him right again. A 2020 speech criticizing regulators cost him the $317 billion Ant listing, and he vanished from public view for months. Rejected by KFC, erased by Beijing. Still worth $25 billion. Every door closed on him once. He owns the building now.