Businesses That Almost Died

Jensen Huang's story starts about as far from a trillion dollars as a story can start. Born in Taiwan in 1963, he was sent to America as a boy and, through a family misunderstanding, enrolled in a rural Kentucky boarding school that was closer to a reform academy than the prep school his relatives imagined. He cleaned bathrooms. Later, as a teenager in Oregon, he took his first job at Denny's — dishwasher, then busboy, then waiter — and he has said ever since, with complete sincerity, that he approached it like a craft: nobody was going to wash dishes better than him. No task beneath him. That sentence turns out to be the whole story in miniature.

In 1993, at thirty years old — a deadline he'd set for himself — Huang sat down in a Denny's booth in East San Jose with two engineer friends, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, and over endless coffee refills they sketched a company that would bet everything on 3D graphics chips. They named it Nvidia. Today that booth has a plaque on the wall: "The booth that launched a $1 trillion company."

But between the booth and the plaque came the part the plaque doesn't mention. Nvidia's first chip bet on the wrong technical approach and flopped; the company burned toward empty. Their contract with the Japanese game giant Sega was built on the same doomed architecture — and Huang made one of the most painful calls in business history: he told Sega, honestly, that continuing with Nvidia's design would sink them both, effectively talking his biggest customer out of his own product. Then he asked Sega to pay anyway. Astonishingly — moved by the honesty — Sega's chief agreed, and that money, several million dollars, kept the lights on. Even so, Nvidia had to lay off more than half its people, shrinking to a few dozen souls with roughly thirty days of payroll left. They put everything remaining into one chip, with no budget for a second try. The RIVA 128 shipped in 1997 and sold a million units in four months. The company survived — and Huang institutionalized the terror: for years he opened company meetings with the words "our company is thirty days from going out of business," long after it wasn't, because he never wanted Nvidia to lose the humility and hunger of the almost-dead.

Then he did it again. In 2006, Nvidia poured fortunes into something called CUDA — a way to use graphics chips for general computing — years before anyone wanted it. Wall Street punished the stock and called it a costly detour, and Huang absorbed the criticism for the better part of a decade. Then artificial intelligence researchers discovered that neural networks ran beautifully on exactly what Nvidia had spent a decade preparing. The AI revolution arrived, and it ran — and still runs — overwhelmingly on Nvidia's chips. The company crossed one trillion dollars in value in 2023, the year Denny's hung the plaque, and went on to become one of the most valuable companies in history. Huang now tells students, without irony, that he wishes them ample doses of pain and suffering — because in his experience, that's the raw material greatness is actually refined from.

And one more thing, worth saying plainly: if you have ever talked to an AI — including whatever brought you to this page — the conversation almost certainly ran on chips that trace their lineage to two engineers and a dishwasher-turned-founder filling napkins with sketches in a Denny's booth. Nobody in that restaurant knew what was being carried at table whatever-it-was. Nobody ever does.

Howard Schultz pitched investors well over two hundred times to fund his vision of Italian-style espresso bars in America, and the overwhelming majority said no — too niche, too expensive, Americans won't pay for coffee.

He kept pitching until the yeses arrived. Starbucks went on to change how the world drinks coffee.

In the early 2000s, the beloved brick maker was losing hundreds of millions and drifting toward bankruptcy, scattered across theme parks, clothing, and side ventures.

The turnaround came from an almost embarrassing insight: go back to the brick. Lego refocused on what only Lego could do — and produced one of the great turnarounds in toy industry history.

Henry Heinz's first food company went bankrupt in the 1870s. He started again — famously committing to quality and honesty at a time when food adulteration was normal, selling ketchup in clear glass bottles so customers could see exactly what they were buying.

The second company became one of the most recognizable food brands on earth.

In 1997, Apple was widely reported to be roughly 90 days from insolvency.

The company brought back the co-founder it had fired a decade earlier, cut the product line to a handful of things worth making, and began the most storied corporate resurrection in modern history.

The company behind Spider-Man and the X-Men filed for bankruptcy in 1996, its characters' film rights scattered for cash.

Less than a decade later it bet everything on making its own movies — and built the most successful film franchise ever created.

In 2008, the founders were maxing out credit cards and famously funded the company by selling novelty election-themed cereal boxes to stay alive after investor after investor passed.

The idea investors called crazy — strangers sleeping in your home — became a global travel company.