Retry Hub

Jensen reveals he first met the Founder of TSMC by cold calling their number off Yellow Pages "I heard about this company in Taiwan, TSMC and UMC at the time. They were of course quite poor companies themselves, and they were barely making it." "TSMC was probably about $300 million, something like that. It's a tiny little company. I heard about Morris Chang. And so I tried to call their US office." "Back in the old days there were yellow pages. I looked it up, TSMC. There's a number there. I called their number and it's a recording. I left my name and my number and said a few things about NVIDIA: we're a new startup company building computer graphics chips. I called several times. Nobody called me back." "And so I finally wrote a letter to Morris Chang. Didn't hear anything for a long time, and then one day it was 6 o'clock or something, this person called and said 'this is Morris Chang from TSMC.'" "And meanwhile, everybody outside my office was playing video games and they're all laughing and screaming. 'Hey shut up! It's Morris!' I was so happy that the founder would actually call us back, because hey, maybe we won't have to die." "And so we talked and he invited me to Taiwan. I came back to Taiwan, and that was the start of everything. Not just that partnership, but just the whole industry."