And every single day, the world's changing, technology changing. Obviously, this is the greatest time in the last 60 years to start a company. The whole industry has changed. It's a complete reset from a technology perspective. The single most important technology in human history, the computer, has been completely reset. And so, this is absolutely the single greatest time to start a company. And I'm jealous of all of you, and the opportunities you have ahead. I mean, it's going to be incredible. So, it's the perfect time on the one hand. On the other hand, the technology's changing so fast. And so, the question is, what's the right feeling for you? And eventually, and I told you the story of me buying the other book, the textbook. I think the psychology and the feeling that I have today on all of the new experiences and the new technology and new markets and new dynamics, I look at it and I say, this is important. I've got to go learn it. And I've got to go do something about it. And I better get to it as fast as I can. And how hard can it be? I always had this feeling, how hard can it be? And truth be told, it is way harder than you think. But you don't want your mind to be there. You want your mind to be, how hard can it be? And let the suffering come to you a little bit at a time. You know, don't imagine how hard it's going to be and let all of that turn into anxiety and not doing something about it. You want to imagine in your head, how hard can it be? You know, I got a whole bunch of AI agents helping me anyways. And so, how hard can it be? And then you get going on working on it. And so, that's probably the attitude of an entrepreneur. You know, you have to learn a bunch of stuff along the way. You believe in your ability to learn, which is, you know, learning is the single greatest superpower. And if you go into it with the attitude, how hard can it be? If anybody can do it, I can do it. And just realize that it will be hard, and you just have to have the resilience to overcome it every single day. You don't have to overcome life in one day. You just have to overcome that morning. That morning, you know, you have to overcome today. And so, it's not a big deal. Just get through today. Work towards tomorrow. Keep following your dreams. And the rest of everything, if you stick with it long enough, you know, Nvidia happens. And so, you know, I think the wisdom that I can offer, if there's anything, is resilience is probably the single most important thing. And if you believe in something, just get going on it. And get your mind, you know, out of keeping yourself from pursuing it, because you have, you know, fear or anxiety or lack of confidence or whatever it is. And then you're just going to tell yourself, I'm going to learn my way there.
Jensen Huang, everybody. Well, for the students who only know Nvidia as a company at the center of AI, what part of the early Nvidia story do they most need to understand?
The thing that most people don't believe is that the choice of our technology that we started the company with was absolutely wrong. And so, we had started with the idea that we would reinvent 3D graphics. Well, the company's philosophy and perspective was that the general purpose computers, the CPUs, were really useful, but if we could augment it with accelerators, we could solve problems that were otherwise too hard to solve. And one of the first problems we chose was 3D graphics. And during that time, 1993, the PC was just rumored to be coming. And our big idea was that we would turn every single personal computer into a game console because we grew up in the era of game consoles. And so we thought, you know, what if we could design a system that would fit into the personal computer and it would turn it into a game console. And so we thought we would reinvent the algorithm that would require these large supercomputers and we would fit it into the PC. And we came up with some new algorithms. And we were excited about it. We believed in it. We reasoned about it in a thoughtful way. And we went to start the company to go build it. Well, turns out the algorithm was exactly wrong. And the technology that founded the company turns out to be exactly wrong. And so in 1995, we realized that, and it was almost too late because by then there were some 35, 40 other companies that were building 3D graphics for PCs. And so we realized that it didn't work and I went back to the company and we were at the company and I said, what are we going to do? It doesn't work and we were all talking about it and I said, look, we won't have a company if we don't confront the fact that this doesn't work and start working towards the right algorithm. And then somebody told me it turns out none of us knew how to do it the right way. And not only did we choose the wrong technology, we didn't know how to do it the right way. And so that was a big day for me. I had a couple of hundred dollars in my pocket and so I went down to Fry's and I bought three textbooks. And the textbooks were about OpenGL and how to design OpenGL pipelines. I brought it back to the company and I gave it to the engineers. And here we are. We reinvented computer graphics. We're the world leader in modern computer graphics. We've invented most of the major breakthroughs in the last 25 years.
Everybody would have thought that Nvidia started out as world leaders in 3D graphics. And we learned it from a textbook. And so we actually started the company, raised money, and bought textbooks, when you think about it. And so the big lesson for me is that technology is changing all the time. And so long as you're able to confront the reality, so long as you are able to learn, the technology itself actually doesn't matter. And so since then, Nvidia has been, you know, inventing all kinds of technology since. All kinds of technology we'd never really done before. And we approach everything with the same attitude, you know, if it's important to do, we're going to go learn it, and how hard can it be? And it always turns out to be much, much harder than we expect. But you go into it with the attitude, how hard can it be?
I mean, backstage we were talking about how, I mean, we were talking with some of the top YC companies and you were saying that each one has an expertise in like a domain that you and Nvidia have an expertise in. And they're all just, I forget what you said. It was like an algorithmic domain of a sort. And so it sounds like 3D graphics was merely the first of an algorithmic domain.
It came from a textbook, but then, you know, anyone could have read that textbook. You created...
Particle physics, fluid dynamics. Yeah.
