Part III
Building Companies
Q: What fuels your creativity?
Pressure. Necessity.381
Becoming a Founder
You want to embark on something where success is certain to be one of the possible outcomes.382
Q: What was the path to starting your first company?
Growing up in South Africa, it seemed like a lot of the advanced technology was being produced in America and Silicon Valley, especially. I wanted to go where I could be involved in the creation of new technology. That’s what took me first to Canada (because I could get citizenship in Canada through my mom) and then ultimately to the US.383
When I was seventeen, I got my Canadian passport. Three weeks later I was in Canada.384 I left South Africa and landed in Montreal. I arrived with a backpack, a suitcase of books, and $2,000.
I stayed in a youth hostel for a few days, then bought a bus ticket for one hundred bucks to go across the country, making stops along the way.385
I managed to get to Swift Current in Saskatchewan. My cousin’s son had a wheat farm where I worked for about six weeks, as I turned eighteen. We did a barn raising, cleared out the wheat bins and grain silos, and worked the vegetable patch.386
Then I got back on the bus and went to Vancouver. I had a half-uncle there in the lumber industry. I ended up working at a lumber mill chainsawing logs and cleaning out the pulp boiler. That might be the hardest job I’ve had. You had to crawl through this little tunnel in a hazmat suit and then shovel this steaming sand and mush out of the boilers to clean them out. There’s only one entrance or exit, a little tunnel. If you’re claustrophobic, it would be real bad. It did not seem safe. But it was the highest-paying job at the employment office. Other jobs were under eight dollars an hour, and this one was eighteen dollars an hour.387
I worked there as a lumberjack doing odd jobs for a few months. Then I applied for college, and went to Queen’s University in Kingston. I was there for a couple years before applying to UPenn. I didn’t think I’d be able to go because I was paying my own way through university. That’s not too hard in Canada because tuition is highly subsidized, but in the US college is more expensive.388
I paid my own way through college and dropped out of Stanford grad school with $110K in college debt.389
Physics and computer science were always my two best subjects, because I wanted to figure out the nature of the universe. I thought I might do physics at a particle accelerator, banging particles together to see what happens in a research facility. Then, the supercollider got canceled in the US, and I realized I could study for years to work at a collider, and then the government could arbitrarily cancel it. Decision made: I could not do that.390
Q: How did you decide to leave your PhD program and start your first company?
Because of my interest in electric cars as a college student, I took an internship at a company that made high-energy-density capacitors. My intent was to get a PhD in energy storage solutions for electric vehicles. I was going to Stanford to study material science and the physics of high-energy-density capacitors for use in electric vehicles.391
But, I wasn’t sure if my work during that PhD would actually be useful. I was concerned it could be academically useful but not practically useful.392
Success on an academic level would have been quite likely. I could publish a paper, but most papers are pretty useless.393 Once in a while you get something spectacular but it’s pretty rare.394 How many PhD papers are actually used by someone, ever? Percentagewise, not many. You add a leaf to the tree of knowledge, but that leaf could be saying, Nope, not possible. This is not good enough technology to be used in an electric vehicle. There goes seven years of my life.395
Not that I cared about the PhD, actually. I just needed a lab. I could spend years working in a lab and maybe the technology would work…or maybe it wouldn’t.396
I was not sure success was even a possibility. I thought maybe it was, but I wasn’t sure.397
Then the internet started taking off. It was clear to me the internet was happening in 1995, although most people weren’t aware of it then.398 I was pretty sure success was one of the possible outcomes for an internet company. I knew watching the internet get built while doing a PhD would be frustrating.399 I decided to put graduate school on hold and start an internet company.400
I thought I’d be able to come back to electric vehicles. I figured electric vehicle technology and energy storage technology would have a natural progression, and that ended up happening.
In 1995, it was not obvious you could make any money on the internet. Until Netscape went public in late 1995, nobody thought you could make a valuable internet company. Now it seems obvious. But back then, it was not at all.
Humanity was effectively becoming a superorganism, qualitatively different from what it had been before. I wanted to be part of that. I wanted to help build humanity’s nervous system.401
The internet turned out to be a good idea for my first company because software is a low-capital endeavor. I didn’t have any money, and had a bunch of student debt. You don’t need a lot of tooling and equipment to get started. Software you can just write by yourself. It’s not capital intensive. Starting something software-related as your first company is much, much easier.402