Finance History | 2484 Berryessa Road — Three Engineers and Unlimited Coffee

People treat Nvidia as a Santa Clara campus and a later index heavyweight.

The decision to start the company was made in this diner.

In late 1992 Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem sat in a booth at the Denny's at 2484 Berryessa Road in East San Jose.

Huang had washed dishes and waited tables in the same chain as a teenager.

Malachowsky and Priem were still at Sun Microsystems. Huang ran a division at LSI Logic.

They wanted a chip that would draw three-dimensional scenes on an ordinary personal computer, work that then lived on expensive workstations.

The diner stayed open, poured coffee, and did not ask them to leave.

On 5 April 1993 the three men incorporated the company.

They had about 40,000 dollars of their own money in the bank that year.

The working label was NV, for next version. The legal name became Nvidia, from the Latin invidia, envy.

Later in 1993 Sequoia Capital and Sutter Hill Ventures put in seed capital. The first rented rooms were in Sunnyvale, after the work outgrew a Fremont townhouse.

The first product line, the NV1, shipped in 1995.

On 22 January 1999 Nvidia sold 3.5 million shares at 12 dollars each on Nasdaq and raised about 42 million dollars in gross proceeds.

The GeForce 256, marketed as a graphics processing unit, followed the same year.

The mechanism is a parallel graphics chip sold into the consumer PC, not a workstation board sold to a lab.

The ticker NVDA later entered both the S and P 500 and the Nasdaq-100.

On 26 September 2023 Denny's installed a plaque on the booth. The restaurant is still a restaurant.

The public view is the parking lot and the glass front on Berryessa Road. The booth itself is an interior table in an operating diner.

Photo: Coolcaesar, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.