> born in taiwan > worked as a dishwasher at Denny's > went to Stanford > got a job > quit the job > went to california > started nvidia > pitched sequoia w/o a business plan > ventured into 3D chips > launched failed with NV1 chips > sold 250,000 to Diamond multimedia > 249,000 returned back to nvidia > NV1 ended in disaster > developed NV2 with Sega > NV2 was also doomed > had 1 shot to create the perfect chip > bought "emulator" from a dying company > made RIVA 128NV3 > nvidia engineers made the best inverse texture mapping engine > sold 1 million units > developed first programmable chip GeForce 256 > that was the world's first GPU > massive success > went public in 1999 > partnered with Microsoft to build XBox > didn't want to get trapped in the gaming market only > 2006, decided to put CUDA in GPUs > molecular dynamics, seismic processing, CT reconstruction, image processing were now open to explore > andrew ng came in with his ug student ian goodfellow to build a GPU server in his dorm room > 100x seedup in training neural networks on GPUs...