The staff at the Denny’s on Berryessa Road in San Jose probably get more calls than most Denny’s. Tour buses pull into the parking lot carrying visitors from across the country, or even from the other side of the world.
“Is this the Nvidia store?” callers ask. The answer, every time, is that it is very much still a Denny’s.
The booth in question sits in a corner of the restaurant, now marked with a plaque reading “The booth that launched a multi-trillion-dollar company.”
Maria Vo, the restaurant’s general manager, says she hopes the booth will keep inspiring young people long after they’ve first heard the story, because there’s still something different about seeing it in person.
In 1993, three engineers met here for cheap coffee. Jensen Huang was 30 years old, freshly departed from his job at LSI Logic. His two colleagues, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, were engineers from Sun Microsystems who were ready to leave. Together they had no office, no funding and no finished business plan.
They couldn’t even agree on a name for the company at first, and attempts to combine all three surnames went nowhere. They settled on Nvidia, after working through every word with “NV” (short for “next version”) and landing on invidia, the Latin word for envy, so competitors would turn green.
Their path to funding wasn’t smoother. When Huang pitched his former boss at LSI Logic, Wilfred Corrigan, Corrigan called it “one of the worst elevator pitches he’d ever heard” — but still vouched for Huang to Don Valentine at Sequoia Capital. That chain of trust, from a booth to a boss to a check, is what got Nvidia off the ground.
The idea itself came from this booth too: not just to build a graphics chip, but to decide how to bring it to market. Should they build a standalone game console, or build the component that would go inside every PC? They chose the latter, betting that if the technology was good enough, the entire PC industry would carry it for them. It was, as Huang later put it, a decision to build the thing inside the machine that would change everything.
For Huang, the choice of venue had a certain symmetry. His first job at 15 was as a dishwasher at a Denny’s in Portland, Oregon. Decades later, the same chain of restaurants that gave him his first paycheck became the birthplace of the first company in history to reach a market capitalization of over five trillion dollars.
Like the ending question on the plaque in the booth: “Who knew that an idea started here would change the world?”
VR video credits: Cinematography by Julian Zhu and Meisi Li. Produced and edited by Meisi Li. Voiceover by Meisi Li. Maria Vo interviewed by Julian Zhu. Additional footage by Xiyuan Wu.
Audio credit: Jensen Huang oral history courtesy of Silicon Genesis, Stanford University Libraries.
