Hacker News Reader

Comment by musicale | Hacker News Reader

GPU chip company started in Silicon Valley by electrical engineers with extensive design experience, right when GPUs were ready to take off.

Now it's worth a $1T.

View on HN

I understand this sort of articles are for entertainment and are meant to be relatable, but this one is pretty ridiculous, what does "started in a Denny's" even mean? did Nvidia's founder teach himself electrical engineering while he was waiting tables at Denny's or something. Next time I start something I'm only talking about it at el pollo loco.

Everyone's been to a Denny's*. It's humble and relatable.

* Please do not respond that you haven't been to a Denny's. It is a figure of speech called hyperbole.

I have been to Dennys

not to brag but me too.

Sure, lord it over the rest of us

I won't directly say it, but are you calling people snobs for never eating at Denny's?

Snobs, or from different countries. Like, I don't even think Denny's exists in Europe.

I have been to a Dennys. (euro enjoyer here)

Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem were eating at a Denny's one night - because it's literally the only place open at 10 pm in the Bay Area - when Jensen bit onto a piece of silica sand that had made it into his Grand Slam Breakfast and very painfully chipped his tooth.

His yelled "GPUUUUUUUU" in pain, and NVIDIA was born. Instead of a bill, the waiter brought them the prefilled incorporation documents and on the way out the door, the hostess handed them their seed round.

What became of the hostess?

Originally, Malachowsky said in an interview that he thought she was an agent of the Sand Hill Road cult, carefully placed at a known Silicon Valley nexus of innovation ley lines (again, because Denny's is the only place open late). However, after six months of exhaustive searching and $20 million spent on seances and psychics in preparation for IPO, several hundred Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan agents failed to locate her despite a dozen McKinsey partners sacrificing a truckload of silicon wafers at the fiscal solstice.

Some believe her to be an incarnation of Calafia, the ancient queen of California. Other suspect she is the personification of the pay-it-forward spirit of Silicon Valley. Others still believe she was a demon sent to destroy ATI or bring on the dark age of thinking machines.

We will never know.

I heard that Jensen actually saw one of the cooks take the fries out of the frier and remembered that the British called them chips, spurring an inspiration to create a new kind of chips.

I visited a monastery over there back when they still didn't eat meat on Friday, that's when they commonly served fish & chips instead.

I got to meet the fish Friar and the chip Monk.

It means that you need to start your company in a Denny's

Well, two engineers and one mathematician IIRC.

I don't expect any single article to cover all the details of a company that just passed it's 30th year. And even then, they're missing bits of lore, like the CEO playing ping pong as a teenager (see https://engineering.stanford.edu/news/jen-hsun-huang-nvidia-...).

This WIRED article from 2002 gives an interesting snapshot of the same company and CEO:

  Meet Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, the man who plans to make the CPU obsolete.
  https://www.wired.com/2002/07/nvidia/
  - Quote: "What we can do in the next five years is going to blow your mind. In 10 years, we should be bigger than Intel." (which took until July 2020)

Then you can see how things evolved by the 2009/2010 timeframe, plus where they thought they might be headed:

  Mercury News interview: Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder of Nvidia
  https://www.mercurynews.com/2009/10/09/mercury-news-interview-jen-hsun-huang-co-founder-of-nvidia/

  I’m Prepared for Adversity. I Waited Tables.
  https://archive.is/2iUbf

But they talked about it in a Denny’s once. Who else can say they talked about a thing in a Denny’s???

I’ve talked about many things in a Denny’s. ;)

My apologies.

I hear baseball started there. Where else would baseball have gotten the “Grand Slam” from?!?

A grand slam is when you win four world series of poker titles, and the wsop was founded in a men's room at the go kart place in Dallas.

Why are we not talking about all the other companies started at Denny's but that failed??

This is a classic example of survivorship bias. These stories never mention the many stomachs that did not survive the Denny's Super Slam Ham & Five-Cheese Omelette.

Who worked at SGI - the top graphics company in the 90s - and had to settle for patent infringement.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com