Jensen Huang says one of his key leadership lessons came from learning English from his mother.
In a talk with the Cambridge Union released on Wednesday, the Nvidia CEO shared how his mother encouraged him as a child. Her mindset stuck with him, and he said he reminds himself to take the same approach at his company.
“My mom taught me English, and she doesn’t speak English,” Huang said. “And that kind of tells you all.”
Huang was born in Taiwan, and his family moved to Thailand before he and his older brother were sent to the US when he was nine for a better education. He has previously said that his mother, who spoke Taiwanese Hokkien, began teaching them English to prepare them for the move to the US.
He said that his mother used a “piece of paper and a dictionary” to teach him the language, even though she could not read English.
“In a lot of ways that kind of defines Nvidia, kind of defines me,” he said. “I approach almost everything from the perspective of, ‘How hard can it be?'”
Huang cofounded the chipmaking company in 1993 and took it public in 1999. Nvidia reached a $5 trillion valuation last month, driven by the AI boom.
The CEO is known for fostering open and honest communication and his involved management style, including up to 36 direct reports, Business Insider reported last month.
Huang said things can turn out “to be really hard,” such as being a first-time CEO, raising money for Nvidia, or writing a business plan, which he had never done before.
“Staying in the game is in fact most of it,” he said. “I was able to do what I’m doing today because I didn’t get bored and I didn’t get fired. That I think was the magic, all of it. It’s 100% of it.”
Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of Telegram, is another tech founder and CEO who credits his parents for his mindset toward work.
“Watching my father work tirelessly on numerous books and scientific papers showed me and my brother the meaning of dedication and inspired us to work hard too,” Durov wrote in a post on X in August, on the 12th anniversary of Telegram’s founding.
Tony Xu, the cofounder and CEO of DoorDash, has also said his immigrant parents, who moved to the US from China, made education a priority.
“My mom came to this country, worked three jobs a day for 12 years, one of which was at a local Chinese restaurant. And I got to see that a bit, washing dishes on the side with her,” Xu said in a 2020 interview.