Billionaire CEO Jensen Huang has come a long way since his days of working the graveyard shift at a Denny's restaurant. It started in 1993. On Huang's 30th birthday, the young entrepreneur made history when he co-founded Nvidia. At first, the company merely produced graphics cards for PCs. But after years of radical innovation and growth, it has become one of the most influential technology companies in the world.
Thanks to Huang's vision, in 1999 the company invented the GPU, thus sparking the growth of the PC gaming market, redefining modern computer graphics, and revolutionizing parallel computing. More recently, Nvidia is credited with fueling modern AI, with the GPU acting as the brain of laptops, robots, and self-driving cars that can perceive and understand the world, among many other uses. In fact, Nvidia’s fingerprints can be found all over. It played a part in the making of movies like Harry Potter and Avatar while also being the center of the most cutting-edge trends in technology, such as virtual reality. Today, with Huang still at the helm as CEO and president, Nvidia ranks as one of the largest U.S. companies, with a staggering market capitalization of around $500 billion. To add some perspective, Huang's company makes as much money in a day as his former employer, Denny's, makes in a year.