Jensen Huang was once Denny’s “best dishwasher.”

“I planned my work. I was organized. I was mise en place,” Huang said during a recent interview with Stanford Graduate School of Business. “I washed the living daylights out of those dishes.”

Now he’s beating the living daylights out of the competition as president and CEO of Nvidia, the world’s premiere advanced chip manufacturer. He’s now worth nearly $82 billion, and the company he cofounded has a $2 trillion market cap.

But Huang attributes his wild success in business to the work ethic he picked up during his time with Denny’s as a dishwasher, before he was “promoted” to busboy.

“I never left the station empty-handed. I never came back empty-handed. I was very efficient,” Huang said. “Anyways, eventually I became a CEO. I'm still working on being a good CEO.”

How Huang cofounded Nvidia

Huang was born in Taiwan in 1963, moved to Thailand at age 5, and moved to Washington State in the U.S. when he was 9. He went to high school outside of Portland, Ore., where he started working for Denny’s at age 15, according to an Nvidia blog post. Huang then earned his electrical engineering degree from Oregon State University, then went on to get his master’s in the same subject from Stanford University in 1992.

Not only did Huang land his first job at Denny’s—but it’s also the place where he and two of his friends cooked up the idea that would make him a billionaire. In 1993, Huang, along with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem (who both worked at Sun Microsystems), met at what was one of Denny’s “most popular” locations in Northern California to discuss “creating a chip that would enable realistic 3D graphics on personal computers,” according to the Nvidia blog post.

“Chris and Curtis said one day they’d like to leave [Sun Microsystems], and they’d like me to go figure out what they’re going to leave for,” Huang said. “They insisted I figure out with them how to build a company.” But with little runway on how to build a business, Huang said he resolved to visit a bookstore to find books on starting a business and found one titled How to Write a Business Plan by Gordon Bell. But the issue was the book was 450 pages long.

“Well, I never got through it. And not even close,” Huang said. “I flipped through a few pages and I go, ‘You know what, by the time I’m done reading this thing, I’ll be out of business.” So with that, Huang took to a Denny’s booth with his two friends to brainstorm a business.

At the time, Huang was working as an engineer with LSI Logic, a company in Santa Clara, Calif., that sold semiconductors and software. Avago Technologies acquired LSI Logic for $6.6 billion in 2014. But Huang kind of skips over that part when he’s telling his career story.