LinkedIn Presents.

I'm Rufus Griscombe, and this is the next big idea.

Today, how Jensen Huang took NVIDIA from Laughingstock to the most valuable company in the world.

In 1973, a typical school day for Jensen Huang, age 10, began like this.

He awoke in his dormitory at the Oneida Baptist Institute, a boarding school in southeastern Kentucky, surrounded by the Appalachian Mountains, and not much else.

He'd enrolled there at the behest of his uncle who believed Oneida was a prestigious prep school.

In fact, it was a religious reform academy.

Jensen's classmates were malcontented reprobates.

Everyone smoked.

Many carried pocket knives for self-defense.

Some were illiterate.

To them, Jensen was the perfect target. Unusually small for his age and speaking very little English, he'd only recently immigrated from Taiwan. Jensen attracted bullies

the way a bare light bulb attracts mosquitoes. They shoved him in the hallways, chased him on the

playground, hurled every racist epithet you can imagine, and some you probably can't.

But their favorite stratagem was to surprise him on his way to school, which required crossing a rope bridge.

It's like a bridge from like Temple of Doom. It's like swinging rope bridge with like planks, okay? And the blanks are like busted. You can see through and there's like a bridge from like Temple of Doom. This like swinging rope bridge with like planks, okay?

And the planks are like busted.

You can see through and there's like a frigid river below you.

That's Jensen's biographer and my guest today, Stephen Witt.

As he tells it, Jensen's bullies would position themselves on either side of the bridge.

Waiting for you to be in the middle of the bridge and come on and grab the ropes and swing it back and forth to try and dislodge you.

I mean, it's just, you know, Jensen lived through this.

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