Nvidia CEO paid for high school table tennis tournaments by scrubbing floors and is now worth $115 billion.

Before Nvidia became a $3 trillion tech giant, Jensen Huang, the billionaire co-founder and CEO, had an unpredictable dream.

Tae Kim, in his book "The Nvidia Way," wrote that as a teen, Huang was so determined to become a table tennis champion that he worked at Paddle Palace, an equipment store in Portland, Oregon, to earn the money needed to pursue his dream.

At age 15, Huang finished third in junior doubles at the U.S. Open Table Tennis Championships and even competed in national tournaments, but he never loved the sport more than academics, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 2005.

Huang's estimated net worth is $115 billion, according to Bloomberg, and his worth has increased alongside Nvidia's market value due to the tech industry's growing demand for the company's computer chips, fueled by the artificial intelligence boom.

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Huang, who was born in Taiwan, relocated to the U.S. in the early-1970s and eventually settled near Portland. According to The Oregonian, he worked the graveyard shift at a Portland Denny's and spent his free time at Paddle Palace.

Lou Bochenski, owner of Paddle Palace and father of Judy, a table tennis champion and member of the U.S. national team, recognized Huang's skills and considered it his duty to help develop promising young table-tennis players into national-level talents, as Kim wrote in "The Nvidia Way."

In a letter published in Sports Illustrated in January 1978, Bochenski praised Huang's table tennis skills, calling the teenager "perhaps the most promising junior ever to play table tennis in the Northwest."

Huang was a dedicated student who earned his money for traveling to tournaments, attending clinics, and playing table tennis by cleaning floors at the Paddle Palace, as Bochenski described.

Huang, a former table tennis champion, has shared his experiences of learning valuable lessons while striving to become a champion. As a teenager, he participated in a national tournament in Las Vegas and instead of resting before the tournament, he stayed up late to walk the Las Vegas Strip, he revealed to the Post-Intelligencer.

Huang couldn't remember how he did in the tournament, but he said he didn't win, which taught him the importance of staying focused to achieve your goals.

"Huang regrets not being more focused on the tournament when he went to Las Vegas for the first time at 13 or 14 years old."

Huang often emphasizes the significance of accepting and profiting from failures in order to cultivate resilience. He believes that without this trait, he would not have been able to surmount the obstacles and setbacks faced by Nvidia during its early years and transform it into a multibillion-dollar corporation.

"Unfortunately, success requires resilience, as Huang stated to students at Stanford University in March. "I'm not sure how to teach it to you, except for hoping that you experience suffering," Huang added."

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