Zero to Tesla: Confessions from My Entrepreneurial Journey

AFTERWORD

PREFACE

This book contains my entrepreneurial memoirs, and it’s filled to overflowing with heart-warming stories of failed relationships, bad judgment, and running from the law. The stories are all based on true events, and my intention is to chronicle twenty years of learning from my corporate, entrepreneurial, and investment careers. There is a common misconception that a book like this is supposed to help you avoid making the mistakes I made, but that is impossible. You can only truly learn by making your own mistakes, but maybe this book can be the company to your misery and make you feel a little less bad when you mess up.

Now, I’ve been a bit of a dick or a bit of a patsy, or some combination of the two, for much of my life, and so on a number of occasions I’ve changed the details of real events—sometimes to avoid excruciating embarrassment, sometimes to make the story slightly more readable, and sometimes to protect those who can still mount reprisals against me. The lessons, however, remain true. To protect privacy, I have changed some of the names in the stories, indicated by an asterisk (*) when first introduced.

I never planned to write a book, so I didn’t take meticulous notes when interesting things happened to me. As a result, I’m sure to have gotten a few things wrong when reconstructing conversations or events. I didn’t do this on purpose, so if you recognize yourself in these pages, and I’ve done you a disservice, e-mail me. But really, I’d prefer it if you just smiled and thought to yourself, He’s still a dick.

INTRODUCTION

Hello, Mr. Singhal, please have a seat. I understand this is the first time you’ve declared bankruptcy?

I didn’t realize people went bankrupt multiple times. Yes, this is my first time.

The guy at the front of the room, Frank, was in his forties and humorless. I thought he was probably a reformed multiple-bankrupt himself. He said, Please review this form, and check off all the types of debt and associated amounts that put you in bankruptcy. I looked at the form, and in an attempt to shock Frank I included my US debts. It was a total of $500,000 spread across credit cards, cell phones, suppliers, consultants, support payments, and investors.

Frank looked at the completed form and began the heart of the session. It appears that you’ve had a problem controlling your purchases.

Duh, yeah, I thought.

He added, It’s important to realize that making only minimum payments on credit cards substantially increases your debt load.

I knew that. That’s why I always paid off my credit cards in full…until I stopped paying them altogether.

He then began in a pedantic tone, Mr. Singhal, you don’t seem to understand. It’s important to match your expenses to your income. Clearly you are spending more than you’re making, and we have to work together to reduce your expenses. For example, how much is your monthly phone bill?

I suddenly realized that Frank had no clue what had happened to me. I hadn’t gradually gone bankrupt by having a high mortgage payment and spending too much on ice cream sandwiches and DVDs. I had five-hundred-fricking-thousand dollars in debt. How was reducing my phone bill going to help? I said, Um, Frank. I think my situation is different—

Now, now, Mr. Singhal, everybody who has declared bankruptcy feels that their situation is different and that they’ve been wronged. Trust me, everyone needs to learn the same lesson, and I’m here to teach it.

DON’T TAKE YOURSELF SO SERIOUSLY

Growing up, my parents called me Happy because I was a pretty happy baby. It was a common enough practice among Indians. My family friends all had nicknames like Bubbly, Lucky, Pretty, and Baby—we’d have done great at a Disney casting call. The problem was my last name, Singhal. Put them together, and by fifth grade the kids had both a precocious comment on society and a horrible taunt, Happy single, sad married, happy single, sad married… The first time I heard it, I ran home crying, but instead of understanding, my parents laughed just as hard as the kids at school had.

I think what they were trying to tell me was, Don’t take yourself so seriously.

By high school I was introducing myself as Sanjay. I joined debate because my homeroom teacher, Mrs. Somerville, was the coach. I wasn’t particularly good, but after one event in another city they were handing out awards for various categories, including best rookie. My teammate Cal, sitting beside, me said, You’re going to get the rookie award for sure. I was elated at the comment; I hadn’t thought it was even a possibility, and now I was the odds-on favorite!

As it happened, Cal was a rookie as well, and two minutes later he was collecting his trophy on stage. He had somehow reverse jinxed himself, screwing me in the process. Bastard. When I told my father about the experience, he said, Son, lower your expectations so you won’t be quite so disappointed.

Lowering my expectations didn’t stop me from trying to do well, though, and in eleventh grade I qualified for my high school’s Reach for the Top team. Reach was a high school quiz show televised nationally on CBC, and my team eventually won the provincial championship, going to the nationals in Winnipeg that spring. I was surrounded by well-wishers saying, You’re going to be on national TV! You’re so smart! Not quite quarterback of the football team, but not bad for a geek with nomenclature issues.

I appeared on TV, and all my admirers got to watch as Bob Guest, the host, asked, For two hundred points and the lead, what hero rode a horse named Silver and wore a trademark mask?

I rarely had an opportunity to be the first to hit the buzzer, but this time I slammed my fist down, heard the rewarding BZZZ, leaped to my feet, and yelled, TONTO!

The correct answer, of course, was The Lone Ranger. I was mortified.

When I returned home, instead of villagers with pitchforks at the airport, the same well-wishers were clapping me on the back, enthusiasm unabated. More than one friend commented on my gaff, saying, It doesn’t matter if you make a fool of yourself on national TV. You’re on national TV!

YOU COULD DIE ANYTIME

My mother always wanted me to be a doctor. Technically, she said, Doctor, lawyer, engineer, the mantra of all immigrant parents. But I knew that the only people who ever said that were lawyers and engineers.

Unfortunately for my parents’ ambitions, in 1978 my father bought a TRS-80 personal computer for his office. I immediately commandeered it as a personal toy and learning environment, and I became fascinated with its ability to create something out of nothing. Besides, it was an upgrade from my Atari 2600 as a gaming system.

The day I was supposed to register for the local university, I was on a golf course when a vice principal from my high school saw me on the second green and yelled through his car window. Hey, why aren’t you at the university? I had completely forgotten that it was time to continue my education. Running to the parking lot, I started to consider what program I would enroll in. I had received a tuition scholarship that summer, and my parents were lobbying for a sciences degree (i.e., premed).

When, a few weeks earlier, my father had asked me what I planned to do, I’d said, I can’t do sciences, Dad. What if I don’t get into med school? That degree is useless. It wasn’t a well-thought-out statement—my father had a PhD in molecular physics. Grimacing, he called my mother over, and she started in on me.

Son of mine, you’re so smart, you can be anything. You’ll have no trouble getting into medical school. And for the rest of your life, you’ll be called ‘doctor.’ Look at your father; he gets so much respect because he has a doctorate in physics. You’ll be set for life financially. I was dubious. Medicine didn’t seem like fun, and I really didn’t want to spend ten years getting a PhD.

Okay, let’s compromise, I said. First-year engineering has organic chemistry as a requirement. I’ll take the sciences version, and it’ll make it easier for me to transfer into a premed program later if I change my mind. Mom saw this as a victory, but I could see from my father’s reaction that he knew I wasn’t going to change my mind.

On the drive over to the University of New Brunswick’s registration center, I decided to take electrical engineering. Other than the compromise with my mother, my logic in choosing engineering was that I was pretty good with the new personal computers, but I thought I should take something harder for me than computer science if I wanted a real career. Computers were novel and fun, but there didn’t seem to be much of a future in something that could only play games and replace typewriters.

Engineering suited me. I was perpetually near the top of my class, and I was able to use my talent for computers to accelerate my performance with snazzy-looking lab papers and I got an A plus in every programming course I could take as an elective.

In a microprocessor design course in third year, we had to form teams to build a rudimentary computer and operating system. My partner was Peter, and he was Czechoslovakian by birth but had been raised in Canada. His hardware expertise complemented my software skills nicely, and I didn’t even mind his ’70s porn-star mustache.

I proposed to Peter that we should take a cue from personal computers and design a two-dimensional, full-screen user interface for the rudimentary test-board computer we were building.

Just use the command line that everyone else uses, and help me with the hardware, he protested.

I knew I would wreck the project if I was responsible for wrapping wires and placing chips, so I said, Look, the full-screen interface will let us put more lines of code on the screen when we’re doing demos, plus it’ll look impressive as hell. Come ooonnnnn.

My pleading worked, and the project was successful beyond our expectations. The full-screen interface wowed our professor, and we got the highest grade in the class along with a reputation for creativity among our classmates. By the following semester, full-screen interfaces became the minimum standard for all project teams.

I was learning that glitz was as important as function when it came to doing well—even in an academic environment. Later that year, Peter and I won a major engineering design competition. We programmed our custom microprocessor to do speech recognition, and in a fit of brilliance, Peter suggested, I know all we can do right now is turn a light bulb on and off, but why don’t we tell people that the application is designed to control a wheelchair or something? We had a friend draw some pictures of happy invalids zipping around on automated wheelchairs using voice commands, and our humanitarianism won us a scholarship, a trophy from Nortel Networks, and a trip to the nationals competition in Montreal.

---

While I was in university, I had enrolled in private pilot lessons. I once had the dream of becoming a fighter pilot, but I was stymied by imperfect vision and a lack of conflict in Canadian airspace. I had my license by the time we had to fly to Montreal for the engineering competition, and on a cold Sunday morning, Peter and I loaded our circuit board into the back of a Cherokee Warrior for the two-hour trip. Having been taught on Cessnas, I hadn’t flown this model of plane before, and it made Peter a bit nervous. I comforted him, saying, Don’t worry, these single-engine planes all fly the same. What could go wrong?

Other than a lot of cursing while trying to prime the engine to start, the takeoff and trip to Dorval Airport were uneventful; I was pretty good at maintaining altitude and following a map. I even let Peter take the controls so I could take a quick nap, earning a, This is fun, but um, you know I don’t know how to fly this thing, right? I showed him the autopilot button and nodded off.

An hour later we were approaching Dorval, and I had air traffic control on the radio assigning me runway twenty-four for approach from the south. It was an easy approach, and I lowered the flaps to reduce speed while Peter said, This was great! You should fly us everywhere! As we entered final approach at two thousand feet, the plane’s engine sputtered a few times and then shut down completely. Peter asked me, Are you supposed to turn the engine off on approach? I assured him that it was normal procedure while I frantically scanned the dashboard to see what was wrong. There were a series of lights on, some flashing, but it wasn’t apparent what the actual problem was. The number-one cause of flight crashes in private planes is lack of fuel, but glancing at the fuel gauge, I saw it was full.

Just then, there was a burst of static from my headphones and an angry French voice telling me, Echo Victor Romeo, you are approaching zee wrong runway!

I looked up and saw a large twenty-four on the runway and replied, Negative, we’re approaching runway twenty-four.

He called me something unflattering that I couldn’t understand and then said, You are on twenty-four Right. You were assigned twenty-four Left! What the? Parallel runways? I was about to land in mud five hundred feet short of either one, so I turned back to the dashboard and ignored the control tower’s continued stream of invective, breaking out into a sweat.

Wait a second. Did I see a full fuel tank? After a two-hour flight? Going back to the fuel gauge, I saw a second dial at zero, and it was also labeled fuel. There was a knob underneath labeled L and R. Swearing under my breath, I snapped the switch from L to R, pumped the primer, and restarted the engine on the secondary fuel tank, something I hadn’t had to deal with on Cessnas. Out loud, I said to Peter, Oh, looks like I misjudged it. Better turn the engine back on, while I turned and smiled at him. By then he could see the too-close, rapidly ascending shadow of a rerouted 737 above and behind us, and he knew that something was wrong. I landed safely, taxied to our assigned parking spot, and pretended nothing unusual had happened. As I dealt with a security guard who came running up to the plane, Peter unloaded the circuit board, and we shortly got into a rental car for the drive to McGill. Peter seemed pensive, which I thought was strange. We’d landed safely, and things were going well.

When we got to the university, we went directly to the design showroom, plugged in our equipment, and did a quick test to make sure everything worked. Peter looked like he was going to be sick. When I said, Turn on, and the light came on, he suddenly started to laugh. I stared at him, and he said, Oh my god, I was so nervous. I dropped the circuit board when I was taking it out of the plane. I thought I’d broken it and you were going to kill me when you found out.

So he was worried that I was going to metaphorically kill him, when unknown to him, we had both just escaped actual death at my hands. I never said anything to him about the botched landing. Shortly after returning to Fredericton, I received a letter in the mail stating that I was no longer allowed to fly into Dorval Airport.

---

Throughout university I was perpetually near the top of my class, with academic scholarships allowing me to sail through my degree financially unopposed. I had great summer jobs, was a marginally competent pilot, and even threw a couple of great house parties in my senior year; so I was kind of popular.

But upon graduation the unthinkable happened. I couldn’t get a job. Despite having given me an engineering design award only a year earlier, Nortel, Canada’s top technology company, called and apologetically informed me that they weren’t hiring that year. I was mortified, and I needed time to come up with a plan. I managed to get a summer position on the other side of the country in Victoria, British Columbia, where I wouldn’t have to see any of my employed friends, and while I was there I continued to apply to prestigious companies with no success.

I was determined to find a job and get on with my career, but a few months before I graduated, my father had convinced me to apply for a graduate school scholarship. I wasn’t interested in doing a master’s degree, but I applied anyway. I also half-heartedly signed up to write the medical entrance exams (MCATs) to please my mother, but then I didn’t show up for the actual exams.

While I was flaming out in my job search, I got a letter in the mail from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). I had received a full scholarship to do a master’s in Engineering at any university in Canada. It was beyond anything I’d expected, but I filed away the letter and didn’t even call my father to let him know. I wanted to get a job; having to get a graduate degree was, to me, admitting failure. A couple of months later, as September approached, my father called me and asked, So have you gotten a job yet? I told him that I had not, and he said, I’ve been telling you that you should get a graduate degree. It looks good, and it will help you get a job. Don’t worry about the money. I’ll pay for it. You just have to get into a good school.

I paused for a moment and told half the truth, Dad, I just found out yesterday that I got an NSERC scholarship. He knew instantly what that meant and began to congratulate me and exult in knowing his son was going to go the education route instead of being a common workingman. Dad, don’t get so excited, I said. I still have to get into a school, and I think it’s too late for this year.

Just apply, he replied. Every graduate school wants students who are NSERC funded. You’ll get in.

Dad was right. Two weeks later, the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver accepted me to do a master’s in electrical engineering. It was a top national school, and I was looking forward to doing well, graduating as soon as possible, and getting back to my real objective: a great job.

---

When I was at UNB, I got a good engineering education, but the school was a smaller, regional university. Now, at UBC, I was at the second largest university in Canada, studying alongside some of the smartest graduate students in the country. I quickly discovered that although I did okay academically, I was never going to be a superstar against such world-class competition. During a 3D mapping project, my professor asked for a demonstration of software I wrote to map a pattern onto a sphere. I knew how to program in assembler, Fortran, Pascal, and of course BASIC, but I didn’t know the latest and greatest language, C. The mainframe at UBC used C, so I resorted to BASIC on a Macintosh in the computer lab. My algorithm was so slow I booted up a second Mac beside the first one so I could play Dark Castle while it did the mapping.

The first day I did this, the computer lab supervisor, Larry, came over to me and said, Hey, Sanjay, stop playing games. This lab is for schoolwork only. I pointed to the other Mac and said, I’m doing research. He bent down and stared at the other screen for a few moments as the spinning sphere gained a diamond pattern one slow pixel at a time. He smirked and asked, Is this for Professor Graeme’s class project? I nodded and he laughed, gave a dismissive gesture, and walked back to his desk, saying, Go ahead and play your game. Larry turned out to be a second-year master’s student, and Dr. Graeme was his thesis supervisor.

As it happened, I got a B plus on the project despite its abject inadequacy in execution because my approach was theoretically sound. But I later asked to see