FOUNDING

A startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed.

We started NVIDIA at a Denny's. If you are going to build a trillion-dollar company, you might as well start at a place with good pancakes.

We started delivering hookah and snacks from a storage unit in college. Same idea, different scale.

I built my first rocket engine in my garage in Invercargill, New Zealand. Population 50,000. Nobody told me I could not do it because nobody around me knew enough about rockets to say that.

I was studying how to protect steel from rusting. Then I thought: what if I could protect an avocado from going bad using the same principle?

Bill Gates funded our first grant. He understood that food waste in developing countries is not a luxury problem — it is a survival problem.

I was a Navy SEAL. I saw teammates die clearing buildings. I thought: a drone should go first, not a person. That is why Shield AI exists.

We built our first satellites in a garage using smartphone components. A CubeSat the size of a loaf of bread can photograph a city.

Three air mattresses on the floor. That was the entire business plan. Every VC in Silicon Valley said no.

I built Shopify because I wanted to sell snowboards and every e-commerce platform was terrible. Solve your own problem first.

30 million users and growing. Not bad for an app that started as a research project funded by the guy who created Twitter.

We started Atlassian because we wanted to work together. We had no idea what we were building. We just knew we wanted to build something.

We started Anthropic because we believed there was a better way to build AI — one that doesn't require choosing between capability and safety.

At the start there was no expectation. We had nothing to lose.

When I started out I said I wanted to build a Chinese investment bank of our own. A lot of people said I was crazy, that a private firm could never run an investment bank. Back then I had no money and no connections.