這段故事的核心，是 1993 年黃仁勳糟糕的推銷。當時 29 歲的黃仁勳向他的前老闆 Wilf Corrigan 介紹創業點子，但推銷內容極其失敗，Corrigan 直言這是他「聽過的最糟糕的推銷之一」，他完全不理解黃仁勳在說什麼。然而，真正的轉捩點發生在 Corrigan 隨後給著名創投家 Don Valentine（紅杉資本創始人）打的那通電話。Corrigan 儘管不看好推銷本身，卻極力推薦黃仁勳的為人和能力，稱他是「遇到過的最好的員工之一」。
隨後，黃仁勳拜訪 Don Valentine 時再次因為緊張而搞砸了推銷，Valentine 也承認「聽完感覺好像不太好！」然而，基於對 Wilf Corrigan 判斷的信任，Valentine 最終決定投資。這筆資金促成了 Nvidia 的誕生，公司最初專注於 GPU 以提升電玩圖形品質。隨著技術的迭代和擴展，Nvidia 成功將其技術應用於人工智慧、自動駕駛和氣象預報等更廣泛的領域，最終成長為一家市值約 3.0 兆美元的科技巨頭。
故事引申出第一個重要觀點：偉大創意常無法通過「電梯推介」。Pixar 聯合創始人 Ed Catmull 曾指出，如果一個創意是全新的、前所未有的，那麼它將很難在短短 20 或 30 秒內被令人信服地描述出來。黃仁勳的點子之所以失敗，正是因為它的開創性，證明了真正具有顛覆性的想法，往往會在一開始被認為是糟糕的。
第二個，也是更為關鍵的哲學是：人性重於天賦。導演 Tommy Kail 偏愛選擇「人品」而非「才華」作為合作標準。黃仁勳正是在推銷技術失敗的情況下，憑藉著他作為一名優秀員工的過去記錄、與前老闆保持的良好關係，獲得了啟動資金。黃仁勳從中領悟到：「你的過去比你的推銷，面試或類似的能力更重要。你無法逃避你的過去。所以如果要有美好的過去，一定要努力擁有美好的過去。」這強調了個人信譽和長期的人品累積才是商業成功中最穩固的資產。
原始文章或短片來源
這段內容是將 Nvidia 創辦人黃仁勳親自分享的創業軼事，結合相關的商業哲學觀點整理而成的一篇文章。這則關於他與 Wilf Corrigan 和 Don Valentine 之間的故事，是他本人在多次公開演講和訪談中（例如：Bizcast podcast、史丹佛大學演講）反覆強調的核心人生經驗。
I: Jensen, this is such an honor.
I: Thank you for being here.
J: I'm delighted to be here, thank you.
I: In honor of your return to Stanford, I decided we'd
start talking about the time when you first left.
You joined LSI Logic, and that was one of the most exciting companies at the
time.
You're building a phenomenal reputation with some of the biggest names in tech,
and yet you decide to leave to become a founder.
What motivated you?
J: Chris and Curtis.
J: Chris and Curtis — I was an engineer at LSI Logic, and
Chris and Curtis were at Sun.
And I was working with some of the brightest minds in computer science at the
time, of all time — including Andy Bechtolsheim and others — building
workstations and graphics workstations, and so on and so forth.
J: And Chris and Curtis said one day that they'd like to
leave Sun, and they'd like me to go figure out what they're gonna go leave for.
And I had a great job, but they insisted that I figure out with them how to
build a company.
J: So we hung out at Denny’s whenever they dropped by —
which is, by the way, my alma mater, my first company.
My first job before CEO was a dishwasher — and I did that very well.
J: So anyways, we got together, and it was during the
microprocessor revolution.
This is 1993 — actually 1992 when we were getting together.
The PC revolution was just getting going.
J: You know, Windows 95 — which was the revolutionary
version of Windows — hadn’t even come to the market yet.
And Pentium wasn’t even announced yet.
And so, all of this was before the PC revolution.
J: It was pretty clear that the microprocessor was going to
be very important, and we thought:
Why don’t we build a company to go solve problems that a normal computer
powered by general-purpose computing can’t?
J: And so that became the company’s mission — to build
computers that can solve problems normal computers can’t.
And to this day, we’re still focused on that.
J: If you look at all the problems and markets we opened up
as a result — things like computational drug design, weather simulation,
materials design — these are all things we’re really proud of.
J: Robotics, self-driving cars, autonomous software we call
artificial intelligence.
And then, of course, we drove the technology so hard that eventually the
computational cost went to approximately zero.
J: That enabled a whole new way of developing software,
where the computer writes the software itself — artificial intelligence as we
know it today.
J: So that was it. That was the journey.
I: Yeah. Thank you all for coming.
I: Well, these applications are on all of our minds today.
But back then, the CEO of LSI Logic convinced his biggest investor, Don
Valentine, to meet with you.
He is, of course, the founder of Sequoia.
I: Now, I can see a lot of founders here edging forward in
anticipation.
But how did you convince the most sought-after investor in Silicon Valley to
invest in a team of first-time founders, building a new product for a market
that doesn’t even exist?
J: I didn’t know how to write a business plan.
So I went to a bookstore — and back then, there were bookstores.
J: In the business book section, there was this book
written by somebody I knew, Gordon Bell.
I should go find it again, but it’s a very large book.
And the title was How to Write a Business Plan.
J: That was a highly specific title for a very niche market
— it seemed like he wrote it for 14 people, and I was one of them.
And so, I bought the book.
J: I should have known right away that that was a bad idea
— because Gordon is super, super smart.
And super smart people have a lot to say.
And I’m pretty sure Gordon wanted to teach me how to write a business plan completely.
J: I picked up this book — it’s like 450 pages long.
Well, I never got through it, not even close.
I flipped through a few pages and thought, “By the time I’m done reading this,
I’ll be out of business. I’ll be out of money.”
J: Lori and I only had about six months in the bank.
We had Spencer, Madison, and a dog.
So the five of us had to live off whatever money we had.
J: I didn’t have much time, so instead of writing the
business plan, I just went to talk to Wilf Corrigan.
J: He called me one day and said, “Hey, you left the
company. You didn’t even tell me what you’re doing. I want you to come back and
explain it to me.”
J: So I went back and explained it to Wilf.
And at the end, he said, “I have no idea what you said. That’s one of the worst
elevator pitches I’ve ever heard.”
J: Then he picked up the phone and called Don Valentine.
He said, “Don, I’m gonna send a kid over. I want you to give him money. He’s
one of the best employees LSI Logic ever had.”
J: And so the thing I learned is: you can make up a great
interview, or even have a bad one, but you can’t run away from your past.
So — have a good past. Try to have a good past.
J: And when I say I was a good dishwasher, I meant it
seriously.
I was probably Denny’s best dishwasher.
I planned my work, I was organized, I was Nissan Plus (efficient).
I washed the living daylights out of those dishes.
J: Then they promoted me to busboy — and I was certain I
was Denny’s best busboy.
I never left the station empty-handed, never came back empty-handed.
I was very efficient.
J: And so, eventually, I became a CEO.
I’m still working on being a good CEO.
I: You talk about being the best.
You needed to be the best among 89 other companies that were funded after you
to build the same thing.
And with six to nine months of runway left, you realized that the initial
vision was just not gonna work.
How did you decide what to do next to save the company when the odds were so
stacked against you?
J: Well, we started this company for accelerated computing.
And the question was: What is it for? What’s the killer app?
J: That became our first great decision — and that’s what
Sequoia funded.
The first killer app was going to be 3D graphics.
The technology was 3D graphics, and the application was video games.
J: At the time, 3D graphics was impossible to make cheap —
it was million-dollar image generators from Silicon Graphics.
So you had an incredible technology that’s hard to commercialize, and a market
that didn’t exist.
J: That intersection was the founding of our company.
J: I still remember when Don, at the end of my presentation,
said something that made a lot of sense then — and still makes sense today:
“Startups don’t partner with startups.”
J: His point was that for NVIDIA to succeed, we needed another startup to succeed too.
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