Zero to Tesla Read online

  Despite my problematic tongue, I was doing well on the Qualcomm assignment, and one day I had lunch in the Qualcomm executive lunchroom with Tony, my old mentor from Nortel. Tony knew I was still interested in Qualcomm but explained to me, “Sanjay, people here really like you, but we’ve been warned off making you an offer as long as you’re employed by PRTM.”

  I was upset and decided to quit PRTM, spending two days writing up a detailed resignation letter. It had graphs of the monetary injustice being perpetrated on junior consultants, a long tirade against the partner responsible for training new associates, and numerous bullet-pointed lists. I was quite pleased with it and showed it to a friend at the firm, but he advised me it was pointless to be so detailed. It’s not like I was going to change their minds. So I opted instead for a one-liner. “Dear Christine, I’ve decided to leave PRTM. Consider this my two weeks notice.”

  Unsurprisingly, they didn’t put up much resistance; after all, all I’d done was confirm their preexisting suspicions of my lack of commitment. Qualcomm hired me almost immediately.

  ---

  You know the saying, “Be careful what you wish for?” Qualcomm was a different company now, only a year and a half since I’d been so excited about joining them. A new management layer had been added, and my responsibilities weren’t strategic—they were managing documentation for product roadmaps and reviewing Request for Proposal (RFP) submissions. I was grateful for the opportunity, but at the same time unmotivated by my actual responsibilities. Part of the demotivation was because my division, Infrastructure, wasn’t responsible for the handset or core technology where Qualcomm was making great leaps in business. My division was responsible for pitching new telecom carriers on using Qualcomm switches and base stations, and we weren’t having any success.

  I soon discovered that the reason we weren’t selling any equipment was because our purpose wasn’t to actually sell any equipment; it was to make sure that there were lots of proposals floating around to install Qualcomm gear that our licensees for technology could easily beat. In other words, we were there just to demonstrate commitment to the product line.

  My manager was never around, there were politics I’d never encountered before in the rapidly growing groups, and I felt lost. It was the first time I had my own office with a closed door and no window for prying eyes to see what I was up to, so with no real commitments, I spent hours every workday with the door closed, surfing the company network, looking for colleagues who hadn’t secured their computers so I could scan their files for games.

  I’d been given a significant number of stock options when I joined Qualcomm, but over the course of a year, the stock price hadn’t budged. I gradually became convinced that I was stuck in a dead-end job with no upside. Two years later, Qualcomm came to the same conclusion and sold the division to Ericsson, becoming largely a technology licensing company. Its stock rose by a factor of ten almost immediately, and the options I had been given when joining the company became worth over $2 million dollars. Unfortunately, I didn’t happen to have them at the time.

  YOU’RE NO GOOD TO ME

  After only one year at Qualcomm, a recruiter contacted me to tell me about an exciting new opportunity. Uniden, a Japanese company that was a world leader in electronics design and manufacturing, was opening a new research center in San Diego, and they needed a director of marketing. I had become an interim director at Clearnet by age thirty, but it didn’t really count. My disillusionment with Qualcomm and my unfulfilled ambition combined to make me take the interview and then accept the position. I reported to Hugh*, the president of the research center.

  It was only a small bump in salary, and a reduction in staff reporting to me, but it had some more visible perks; I was sure my friends at Qualcomm would be impressed with my beautiful cherrywood-furnished office, and the title of “Director of Marketing” on my business card. The biggest perk to me, however, was that the job really mattered, and I was part of the executive team, so I participated in many of the major decisions being made at the company.

  The research center was the brainchild of Dr. Kai*, a senior vice president of Uniden in Japan, and three months into my new job, I was at a cocktail reception honoring Kaisan as he came from Japan to tour his shiny new facility. I knew I was young for my position, so I dressed in my best suit and wore glasses instead of contacts that day. I considered going to a salon and getting some gray dusted into my hair, but I decided it wasn’t necessary.

  Dr. Kai turned out to be a short, aggressive man in an expensive pinstripe suit. As he was being introduced to me, he suddenly asked in a thick Japanese accent, “How old are you?”

  “Uh, I’m thirty-one?”

  Apparently this wasn’t what he was looking for. He raised a stubby finger and poked me hard on my chest, saying, “You no good to me!” Then he poked me two more times and repeated, “You no good to me, you no good to me!”

  My age and ambition were backfiring. I might have reacted to the poking with indignation, but I badly needed this job to work out, so I just stood there until my boss interceded and said, “You should leave now.” I gave my drink to a waiter, gave a half bow, and went to my office to wait for the other shoe to drop.

  ---

  That afternoon, after being physically assaulted, I had the thought that a dusting of gray in my hair wouldn’t have helped. Clearly Kai had already known my age, and the question was just an excuse to embarrass me in front of my coworkers.

  Waiting in my office until Kai departed, I considered the possibilities for what might happen next. If I got fired, I had an unusual but viable lawsuit I could pursue, since everyone had seen me discriminated against for being too young. What else could they do? I hoped that after the commotion died down, my boss, Hugh, would let me just go on as before but make sure my name didn’t appear on any Uniden press releases.

  Hugh came into my office with Operations VP Yong*. I had seen Yong around the office but hadn’t had to interact with him before. He was a recent transplant from China, where Uniden had significant manufacturing operations, and since we didn’t actually manufacture anything in the research center, his job was largely ceremonial.

  Hugh sighed and said, “I’ve decided the best thing to do is to have you report to Yong. Your title will change to Senior Manager. Your actual role won’t change, and neither will your salary.” I was dumbfounded. Their response perfectly ensnared me. I don’t think it met the criteria for constructive dismissal (being forced to quit by reducing your job role or salary), and I wasn’t being fired. I was just having my heart ripped out. Given the reason I’d taken the job, the loss of title devastated me. I was sure they hoped I would quit. I knew I could go back to Qualcomm—I’d received overtures since departing—but I wouldn’t be able to take the embarrassment. So I decided to stick with it and hope Kai didn’t show up regularly.

  It became Yong’s job to make my life miserable. I would ask, “Yong, can I get a printer in my office?” He would answer with an almost comical Chinese accent, “No. Why you need to print things? Ask secretary.” I asked for business cards. “No. You lucky to have a job—no need meet people outside the office.” I had successfully argued earlier for a Ping-Pong table to be installed in an empty basement room, and the staff really enjoyed it. “Sanjay, please remove the Ping-Pong table. It is annoying to the president to hear the click click click.” The president’s office was two stories above the Ping-Pong table, but I lost the argument, and the Ping-Pong table ended up in a dumpster.

  A friend of mine asked me, “Why don’t you just quit? They’re being jerks, and they’re not going to stop.” I said, “I don’t want to be seen as a failure! Kai said I was too young for the job, and I don’t want him to be right. I’m making progress professionally. I think I can bring them around.”

  ---

  Life wasn’t all bad at Uniden. It was a research center, so I got to play with some cool toys, and the marketing job was fun until the poking incident. One of the produc
ts I was charged with marketing was a small, flat device called a Cellular Digital Packet Data (CDPD) modem. It plugged into a laptop and provided a wireless data connection. Only two companies made them besides Uniden: a little-known company in Ontario called Research In Motion and Novatel Wireless, a Calgary-based maker of cell phone towers.

  CDPD was a massive step forward in the telecom world, but it was expensive and slow. Still, it let you get your e-mail when there wasn’t a wired connection around. Another item that was becoming popular in 1996 was the PalmPilot. It was the first truly mobile personal digital assistant, or PDA. People had been trying to make one for years, but the PalmPilot finally hit it and it was getting popular fast.

  One day I was in my office playing around with my new PalmPilot when I picked up the latest CDPD modem from our lab and held them together. They were almost exactly the same size, so they fit nicely in my hand. It occurred to me that one of them let you read and write text, and the other transmitted data. “Maybe you can strap them together and get mobile e-mail?” I wondered.

  I went to see Rajan*, a senior research engineer at Uniden, and threw my idea past him. He said he didn’t see why it couldn’t work and agreed to join me when I suggested we start a stealth operation to investigate, as long as he didn’t have to quit his job. I called the new venture “Nikean.” With my daughter named Nikki, I fell in love with the name Nikean—in Greek mythology, Nike was the winged goddess of victory. Nikea would then be the city of victory, and Nikean would be a citizen of the city of victory.

  Could there be a cooler name than Nikean? I became very proud and made sure that I told everyone the meaning of the name, whether they asked or not. I knew that having a secretly awesome name was one of the essential keys to founding a great company. I began calling on my professional network to get the staff needed to start work without spending any cash, and I began to look for investment capital as well.

  Rajan worked on the hardware and software design, while I asked Mona, whom I had met at a Toastmasters club, to help me with marketing, doing things that I couldn’t easily do without compromising my job at Uniden. I started putting together a basic design that I could use in a business plan, and I also started calling around to find out how much it would cost to make this device, which didn’t really have a name.

  I was one of a small number of people at that time who had a cell phone (a perk of my job), and I rarely used it for work, so I gave out the number as a contact number for Nikean as I made phone calls. I made sure to always answer the phone, “Hello, this is Sanjay,” as opposed to, “Hello, this is Nikean.” After all, you never know—I might actually get a work call.

  We were making good progress on the business plan, and I had early success in discussing the idea with my mentor, Tony, at Qualcomm. He said that Qualcomm Ventures might be able to fund Nikean once we were ready to go, but that I should talk to other VCs as well. By that point, I had gotten both a law firm and a software-consulting firm to agree to work with me for equity, and I had a complete virtual company going. I had requests out to several VCs for meetings, and potential hardware suppliers were calling me as well. This was a much bigger deal than VideoDrive, and I thought I needed at least $2 million as a first-round investment.

  As I worked on the business plan at my Uniden desk, my cellphone rang. “Hello, this is Sanjay,” I answered, hoping that it was a venture capital firm. The voice on the other end said, “Hello, is this Nikean?” I grinned and said, “Yes it is!” The response was a curt, “I thought so.”

  I looked up, and Yong was standing in the door of my office with his own cell phone to his ear. He had finally won his personal mission to get rid of me. All he said was, “You fired.” Then he grinned and walked away.

  ---

  “Your father’s had a heart attack.” It was my mom on the phone. “Come home.” My family had a history of it—in a way, I’d been waiting for this call for some time; I immediately made the trip to Fredericton. Bypass surgery was successful, and during his recovery my father and I spent many hours discussing the experience and how happy he was to still be alive. Once he’d recovered a bit, I came in to his hospital room one morning, sat down, and said, “Dad, I didn’t want to tell you this earlier, but I just got fired from Uniden. I’ve been looking into a new business idea, and they found out.”

  Lying in his bed, my father shook his head from side to side, saving himself the trouble of saying out loud, “Oh no, I knew this was going to happen someday.” I wanted my Dad’s approval of my business venture, so I said, “Dad, I could get a heart attack one day, and I wouldn’t want to have regrets. Shouldn’t I take this chance while I have it?”

  “Son, you’ve been doing so well. I’ve been an entrepreneur, and it’s stressful. It’s probably why I’m lying here right now.” He sighed. “You’re going to need money, and I’m not going to give it to you to start a business. I think you should just get another great job. But if you can raise funding on your own, then I’ll be supportive of you starting another business.”

  Returning to San Diego, I began a half-hearted job search while I worked on Nikean in earnest. I needed a software firm that could hack the PalmPilot, engineers to build a power supply, and a design firm to prototype a cradle to connect the PDA to the modem. But most of all I needed money—a lot of money. I spoke to Tony at Qualcomm, and he continued to be optimistic about Qualcomm’s venture division funding it, but again he repeated, “Make sure you’re talking to lots of firms.” I took that as a guarantee of funding as long as the thing worked, so I began spending my own money on the business, but I told my father, “Qualcomm’s going to fund me, Dad. I’m going after this for real.”

  I had read Harvey Mackay’s book Dig Your Well before You’re Thirsty a few years earlier, and it had transformed my attitude toward networking. My network was phenomenal. I got an introduction to the inventor of the PalmPilot, Jeff Hawkins, and met with him to discuss the idea and the design. He was encouraging, although one of his product managers said to me on the way out of the building, “Give it up. It’s not going to work. People have been talking about mobile e-mail, but nobody will actually use it.”

  Still, I was enthusiastic, and in December I had a PR agency issue a press release for me, announcing that a new company, Nikean, would be releasing a mobile e-mail device at the Consumer Electronics Show a few months hence.

  At the same time that we were designing the device, I was doing the rounds at the Silicon Valley venture capital firms. I felt that I had the Qualcomm funding practically in my bank account, but I thought that one of the Valley firms could provide contacts and higher-level funding, so I had meetings with all of them. Sequoia, Sand Hill, Kleiner-Perkins… They were all encouraging, saying to develop the business plan further and come back to them.

  As New Years arrived, I still had no funding, and I called Tony, telling him, “Tony, I’ve met with all the top Valley firms, and they’re all telling me to develop the business plan further.”

  “That’s what they said? To work on your business plan?” he responded. “Sanjay, that’s just how those Venture firms say ‘no’. Have you spoken with the smaller firms? There must be fifty firms that you should be speaking with.”

  I didn’t believe him about the major firms not being interested, so I lied and said, “Yes, I’ve spoken to everyone. What about Qualcomm Ventures, Tony? Are they ready to help? I’m sure your funds will bridge me until I find another firm that will put in more.”

  Tony sighed. “Sorry, Sanjay, but I’ve been told that Qualcomm’s venture fund isn’t moving on anything right now. There’s a financial crisis in Asia, and we’re holding onto cash in case it’s needed to fund a change in our manufacturing strategy.”

  “At least he’s not telling me to work on my business plan,” I thought. Then I said, “Thanks anyway, Tony. I’ll keep you posted on what happens.” I hung up, despondent. Twenty-four hours later, still wondering what I was going to do next for funding, I received a call from Scot
t Silverman* at Novatel Wireless.

  YOU GOT FIRED AGAIN?

  Since I couldn’t easily buy the cellular data modems I needed for Nikean from Uniden, Novatel was one of the companies I had called to discuss pricing of components for the device. Novatel had been bought a year earlier by a colorful American named Scott. He was based out of Phoenix, but the company was really located in Calgary, Canada.

  Scott started the conversation saying, “Sanjay, I’ve heard that you’re looking to raise money for a new venture that might be using our modems.” I confirmed what he had heard, and he said, “How about if I back your new company? Novatel will provide all the funds to create and market the product. I’ll give you shares in Novatel and a nice little cash bump for the technology. It can be the basis for a new division of my company.”

  “Thanks, Scott. I appreciate the call, but I’m not interested,” I said. “I really want to just get funding and do this on my own.”

  “Well, what would make you interested in working together?”

  “I really want to run this on my own,” I said.

  “Listen, I’m coming to San Diego. We’ll go for a walk.” Scott was big on walking and talking.

  The next afternoon at four o’clock., I walked into the lobby of the Westin hotel in downtown San Diego. Scott was thin, with a light-gray beard and a penchant for black turtleneck sweaters. He spotted me instantly and walked over quickly. “Sanjay?” I nodded, and he did the strangest handshake. He held his own forearm with his left hand, and shook with his right hand, very deliberately.

  “What was that?”

  “I learned it in Japan, it’s a sign of respect.”

  We went for a walk, and he asked me, “Do you have ‘F U’ money?” I had no idea what that meant, and I said so. “It’s enough money that when someone like me makes you an offer you don’t want to accept, you can say ‘F U.’”