How Tesla Was REALLY Created | Founder Marc Tarpenning

Very good. I'm doing... I'm going to put my feet down so my socks aren't showing in the shot.

You know, really bad day to wear a sock with a hole in it. I should have considered that. I said, 'You know what? There's no way he's going to see my socks.' I wore the nicest pants and shirt. Also, very inconvenient time for the sorority living next door to throw a party last night, so I had to stay up and listen to Nicki Minaj for like 7 hours.

You know, when you're interviewing the founder of Tesla, you kind of get your priorities straight. Girls become a distraction, not a thrill.

That worked out.

Well, there was lots of small times that, you know, we failed or I failed. Before I started any companies, I would get parachuted into these projects where the projects were completely, you know, off the rails. And then my job was to fix it. Those didn't always work out. I had one where I actually fired the client. I mean, it's the only time I've ever walked off a job. Basically, the guy who was running it said, 'Well, I agree. You just don't have what it takes to ever start a project.'

I know. I was thinking about that years later. I thought, you know, like I was such an idiot.

No, it does. I never considered a chip on my shoulder. It was like I was so glad to get out of there. I just thought, you know, my life is too short to be dealing with this. Good. Good.

It was super fun. We're in the dorms, which was a big deal. We got super lucky because...

Unit two? Maybe one of the dorms in unit two. I can't remember.

They were terrible at the time. They're much nicer now. But at the time it was like an incredible housing crisis. They had set up tents in the basement of some of the dorms for people who just could not find any housing anywhere.

Well, right. Exactly. So, people did. It was a thing. One of the funny things though is I get to Berkeley and I'm from Sacramento where everything is flat. It's like tabletop flat, right? So, I get to Berkeley and I'm on the fourth floor of the dorm and you know they have this rickety old elevator so everyone's just walking up and down the stairs and then you know my classes are all over the campus and they're all up and down. And about day three I could hardly walk and I thought this is so unfortunate I get to start college and I'm dying of some weird disease. And then I realized oh no it's just that I'm having to go up and down hills for the first time in my life.

Okay, that's sad. Thankfully, Uber wasn't an option, you know, in the 80s.

So, I had always done random projects for people. So it seemed very natural. So my first job was some random project for a company in Sacramento when I was 16. And you know at that time if you knew something about computers, people would come up to you all the time. In fact I got my first job by standing in line in a 7-Eleven, you know, and I was talking to the guy who ran the 7-Eleven who was part of the computer club basically in Sacramento. And that's why I was at the 7-Eleven was talking to him and the guy in line goes like, 'How do you know all this stuff about computers?' And we started talking and he's like, 'Can you come work for us?' I'm like, 'I'm 15 dude, I can't.' He says, 'When you turn 16 call me.' So I did and that was my first job anyway. So it was always these projects to do certain things and I would get approached all the time to do things for people. Yeah. So I was very used to this idea of kind of piecing together a job. In fact, it never occurred to me I would have a job job. I just never thought that far in advance.

Exactly. And I can shop them around and do only the things I want to do.

I like to be doing stuff, you know. So I kind of stopped working years and years ago and then immediately became a local politician within...

It's a very small, I mean like tiny tiny local politician. I was on the school board here in Woodside for nine years, two terms. And then literally I went to my last school board meeting, then spoke at a startup conference, you know, like two weeks later. And the person on the panel next to me said, 'Hey, you know, what are you doing now?' I said, 'Nothing.' And she says, 'Why don't you come hang out at our VC office for just come by?' Anyway, I'm still there. And that was, you know, six years ago or whatever.

Uh, Sparrow Ventures. We're a $125 million fund.

Excellent. I'm not going to act like I know that. I totally looked that up.

The reason why I was so intrigued by it is they only invest in things that make the world better in some dimension. So we don't invest in advertising. We don't invest in guns and there's a whole bunch of things we don't invest in but otherwise it's a generalist fund. So we look at robotics because we believe robotics makes the world better because it automates tasks that people don't want to do really ultimately. I find being on the venture side of the table after having begged for money for so many years in various projects along my lifetime, I now understand why I never understood actually really when we would pitch a VC fund and we clearly had an awesome idea and like why they wouldn't just say yes. Well, I now get it because, you know, we see so many ideas and it's not only do you have to have the best idea or a good idea at least, but you also have to have one that's better than anything that you've seen recently or that you're likely to see in the near future. So, you know, we say no. VCs say no almost always. You know, it's one in a 100 or whatever they say yes to. And being on that side of the table has been super interesting that way. And I love seeing all these different companies not being an operator, being, you know, not being at the company. When you're part of a company, you make decisions all the time and the decisions give you feedback right away, right? And that's just not the case with VCs. You do all this research and then you say, 'Okay, great.' And you write a check and seven to 10 years later, you'll know whether that was a good idea or not. And that's like, you know, the feedback loop is just terrible that way. Yeah. So...

Most startups fail. So, when a startup succeeds, part of that is just luck, you know, it's just the timing and the people and, you know, you like to think you create luck, which you do to some degree, but a lot of it is just you get kind of lucky, right? So, but you know, oh, we got funding. Okay, great. What you don't see is, to get funding for Nuvo Media, we approached dozens and dozens of firms that said no. I mean, it's just the way funding works, right? And then you finally get a lead and you finally fill out the round and you do all this stuff and every round is like pulling teeth and it's always this thing and there's all these disasters along the way. And then hopefully, the product comes out and people like it, which was the case. But in the end, you look back and the narrative is always, oh, and then we did this and then we did that and we did this marketing campaign that worked and it was great. But that's like the successes of this field of disaster that goes on all around it, right?

My co-founder Martin Eberhard, between us we make like a whole person. And I think that's very useful and we've seen that in other companies where the founding team is especially strong that way. Just personality-wise it's not necessarily the skill and the skill sets are shifted and really complimentary. So I think that's important. Not that we don't invest in solo founders all the time, but there is some data from the VC world that co-founded companies are slightly more successful, slightly more likely to exit well than single founders. And I think that's just why because you get kind of the whole brain assuming the founders don't kill each other, which is also, you know, that's the flip side is that there's a risk for that. We had seen lots of things that were super dysfunctional. That really didn't work. So when you look at that and you think, well, I can do better than that. You know, we'll screw up in different ways. We'll become totally dysfunctional in these other ways, but we had at least some idea of a bunch of the disasters that we would come and help fix in these other companies. And I think that having some operational experience is useful that way. And that's one of the reasons why the VCs don't necessarily think that having a failed company is a disaster because those people tend to have learned lots of lessons from that more so than a success because a success everything kind of works out.

Yeah. And hopefully have learned a lot from the last disaster. Hopefully the correct lessons. Sometimes they learn the wrong lessons. They blame lots of external things on their failure, which may be somewhat true, but a lot of times it's internal.

Sold it. And they, you know, when someone buys your house, they can paint it any color they want. Exactly. They killed it. Well, Rupert Murdoch took control of the company shortly after they acquired it and then he famously said, 'No one's ever going to read on screens.'

He's technically extremely good, but there are things that he doesn't do very well. You know, time management perhaps is one of them. And there's a bunch of operational things that he's just, you know, that's not his thing, right? And those are things that I can do pretty well. Yeah. So that combination and then I'm much more skeptical in a sense for a lot of his ideas. And therefore he has to really justify them and sometimes as he's justifying them he's like, 'Oh yeah right, not a good idea.' So that helps. And then we're both relatively positive. We both kind of believe we can do stuff that doesn't... and you know you have to be a little bit delusional and optimistic to be an entrepreneur. So like we both have that and that's kind of important.

Well, so this is part of having a co-founder, I think, because there are days when you're sure that the skeptics are right and that this is the stupidest thing you've ever done. And ideally, at that same moment, the co-founder comes back from some meeting and said, 'You know, we're going to be bigger than Microsoft.' You know, like it's so, ideally, it's sort of manic depressive, you don't synchronize, you're a little bit out of phase, and it keeps everything running. But there is, you know, when you have people who are smart and have arguments against your vision, that's a time when you really have to sharpen the pencils and make sure your vision is right. Yeah. And we did that, you know, at the beginning, with Tesla, we did that. We changed the way we were going to sell the cars really early on. I mean, before we raised money because we got hit by people saying, you know, that's a bad idea. The way you were going to do it, with these dealerships and stuff, that's not going to work. And the more we researched that, we're like, 'Oh, shoot. They're right. They really know that market really well.' And they're absolutely right. So, those are examples where the people attacked the vision, but then it caused us to modify what we're going to do in a beneficial way.

Relatively quickly, we decided that it was possible to make the thing that makes the car go, the drivetrain, and that that drivetrain would be the most efficient drivetrain ever. So, the question was, how can you actually make the car? After a bunch of research, we figured out there were contract manufacturers that screw cars together. We then presented that to some people we knew couldn't invest for a variety of reasons. We told them, 'Hey, we've got this idea and we know that your fund can't invest in it.' And it turns out that if you call up some vague acquaintance and you say, 'Hey, we have this crazy idea for an electric sports car, we want to pitch you. Can you give us feedback?' The whole partnership will show up because they're so starved for seeing anything that's novel. It was great. And then we went out and pitched after refining our pitch to investors that we hoped would invest. And we got two early stage investors, SDL Ventures and Compass Technology Partners to say yes, but they don't lead. So you have to find a lead, right? So we had their money, we had some money from friends and family, angels, but we needed to find a lead and we had heard through the grapevine that Elon was interested in electric cars. So we went down and pitched him and he peppered us with questions over like a long weekend. We flew down again and met with him. And one of the great things about pitching Elon was that, you know, we went down to his rocket company which at that time was only a year old. They were just building their first rocket motor. And to somebody building a rocket ship in a big garage, electric sports cars just don't sound that weird. Like you're not going to be thrown out because, oh, that's a crazy idea. Like, he's building a rocket ship, right? So, and he agreed to lead and he was going to write a bigger check and could lead. Then we were off to the races. Then once you had that, everyone came together. Now, we had seen lots of other firms that had said no in that interim because almost always VCs say no.

You know, he was not super well known at the time, right? But he still had the PayPal success and was building rockets. Yeah, he was building rockets which everyone thought he was crazy. Completely crazy. So it was not... and people still think that today. Demonstrably differently crazy now, but you know I don't think building rocket ships was a real improvement of his image in the bigger picture at the time. Now it turns out it was, SpaceX is the most amazing company in the US I think but that was a long, that was also an overnight success that's like 15 or 20 years in the running. But it did help with a couple of investors that had invested with him before, that had invested in him before.

No, it's a really funny question. You know, with the ebooks, our market timing was a little off. It was a little early for it. The technology was just barely possible, which is where we like to play. So, that fit everything that we were looking for and we got everything out of it that we wanted. And then we sold it to a company that was at the time the largest publisher on the planet. So that was not a bad exit. And then all the investors were happy. Our employees made a bunch of money. And then a few months later Rupert Murdoch took control of that company. He owned 48% of the company to begin with. He took control of it and killed the ebook projects. Those people then went on and worked for Amazon and Kindle years later. I mean there was several years where no ebooks were around at all like nobody thought anything of it and then the technology kept improving and the timing was more right and the Nook came out from Barnes & Noble and the Kindle came out and that completely reinvigorated the industry. And then succeeding is great because one of the goals of starting Tesla was to change the idea of an electric car. I mean from the very beginning we said, you know, startups fail a lot but if we can get to the point where we can show off a really compelling electric car, super fast, it's going to be expensive but it's going to be a sports car, it's going to be sexy, it's going to be beautiful. And if the image of an electric car goes from stupid golf cart no one's ever going to drive to 'Oh when I get rich I'm going to buy one of those fast beautiful electric cars,' we felt that even if it always remained aspirational, that would be a complete win because it would change people's perception. It would mean that the electric car market could exist. There could be other companies were going to do it if we didn't succeed. And then as Tesla succeeded, you know, then it created this existence proof that this was a good idea. And if you've never driven an electric car, maybe you don't understand it, but once you drive electric, almost nobody ever goes back. It's like 96% of electric car owners when they sell their electric car, they buy another electric car. There's no maintenance on them, you know. So, there's zero maintenance interval. There's every morning you wake up, you have a full tank as long as you have someplace to park that you can charge, which, if you live in a house, all houses have electricity, so that's not a problem. So, you wake up in the morning, you have a 300 mile range. Most people don't drive more than 300 miles in a day, right? So, you wake up in the morning, you drive, you do everything you're going to do during the day, and then you just repeat. And the only thing you have to replace is tires and windshield wipers and put windshield wiper fluid in the car. And you think of internal combustion engine cars where you have to stop and get gas all the time, and you don't know where you're going to get gas and it's always inconvenient because you run out of gas at the wrong time. You're racing to a meeting and you're like, 'Oh I got to stop.' All that's just gone. And so once it's gone, you never want to go back. It's just better in all dimensions and it's way cheaper and it's environmentally much better.

The Cybertruck is its own weird beast. But this idea of making electric cars ever more affordable while keeping the performance very high is what we wanted to do. I mean, the next car was a sedan. The sports car market is great, but it's relatively small. So, I mean, it's still billions of dollars a year, but it's kind of small. You have to go into the sedan market to really play and to have the volumes that you need to push the price down. So, we knew the next car was going to be a sedan if we could figure out how to afford building it, which Tesla did, which is great. Self-driving didn't exist when we started Tesla. No, nobody could do that. And that really came out in what was it 2008, 2009. The self-driving thing was never in our plan because it just wasn't a thing. We just didn't have the compute power to even imagine it.

Most CEOs don't go on a political limb and they certainly don't endorse various radical political views. And I think it is because they have a fiduciary responsibility both to the shareholders but also to their...

employees to not threaten the existence of the company. And I think Elon's, you know, political, whatever his political views are, you know, which I think are malleable. I think they change over time. But also, you know, it has clearly not been to the benefit of the shareholders, at least as far as I can tell. And that I think is questionable. I would never do that. CEOs have always supported various political candidates, but, you know, it's quiet. They typically don't make any noise about it because they don't want their political leanings to impact their companies really. I think that's why that's the case and, you know, I think that's a responsible thing to do.

I mean on the political side I think it's like we're in a really weird, you know, place and so, you know, I do hope that there's change there. The thing that made the US extraordinary for all this time has been that we had great science institutions. We spent a lot of money on basic science. And we really need to keep that up, not cut it, not zero it out like the current administration is trying. That's silliness. It is self-destructive for our future. It's also that we were open to getting the best and brightest to come here. And anything that messes that up messes up the formula that's made American exceptionalism, you know, exceptional for all this time, right? So, I'm a big believer in sort of the free flow of ideas and talented people. You know, I'm not into, you know, open borders or anything, but we should attract the best and brightest always and it should be easy and clear how to do it. And then I've always been, you know, a free trader basically because being a citizen of the world, if you will, being able to work and play in different countries, I think is a huge power and it's incredibly useful. And when we try to close ourselves off, that's sort of a disaster, I think, long term. So those are all things politically that I'd like to see go back to an earlier, you know, sort of Reagan era, if you will. And but so those things are politically would have to get fixed, I think. On the, you know, what am I doing? Studying, you know, the past. I just became a board member of the Archaeological Institute of America, weirdly in archaeology, but also, you know, reforming education. I'm like big into that. And making government actually be able to do things again is also super important along with we have to reduce the carbon footprint of everybody and, you know, whether that's through investments that, you know, I make personally or through Sparrow, but, you know, we have to get our carbon footprint down so we can slow the climate change because, you know, climate change, you know, the train has left, right? We are deep into that, right? But we want to like not accelerate it. We want to buy ourselves a little bit more time.

Correct.

So, it's a really good question. So, in 2003 when we started, Martin had become convinced climate change was real. I was a little skeptical still although I was flipping over because we were getting new data that was suggesting it was, you know, we could really measure it and it was really happening. In fact it was like an article I read about getting signal from noise and like one of the world's experts in that and he said, you know, I don't know what's causing it. I have no idea. But if you look at all the temperature data for the last few hundred years, it's just noise until the 1950s. And starting in the 1950s, there's a signal there because I don't know what the signal means because I'm just the world expert on picking out signal from noise. He was big into the cellular. He was one of the architects of the cellular networks. But there's clearly a signal there and it's getting stronger and I don't know why, but something's happening. And that to me was like I read that I was like, okay, it's for real. But I'd also been in the Middle East for years and at that time we were importing like 10 million barrels a day of oil and that seeing being in Saudi Arabia for years, you know, working there, the oil industry and its impact on politics and stuff in the Middle East and wealth, just the enormous amount of wealth that was pouring in that just did not feel right. I mean it felt like we don't really want to be so dependent on countries that, you know, are just not aligned with our interests. I mean that's just dangerous. So I really wanted to... and in fact some of our original early customers were really motivated from this perspective of really wanting to not be as dependent on foreign oil in that case. So, but climate change was, you know, at the beginning we were thinking about it, but also the great thing about oil is it's so many problems wrapped into a single commodity that if you can reduce your dependency on it, you know, it's all good. Every dimension of it, whether it's environmental or national security or economic, you know, it's all good.

No. No, it's more like 7,000.

Yeah. 6,833 or something like that. Yeah. So at that time lithium-ion batteries there was only one standard form factor and it was called 18650s which are like fat double A's. It's actually measurements in millimeters of the sizes and they were in everything. They were in all the laptops and they were in camcorders, you know, things before cell phones. And so they made them like by the billions per year. So they were the best batteries that money could buy. They had the highest energy density. They had the lowest price because they had these giant factories that were cranking them out. If you were to try to say, 'Oh, I...' and this is where the automotive industry even when they even thought about it, they were like, 'Oh, it's going to be billions of dollars to make a new battery and they'll suck anyway and, you know, we can't do that. We don't know anything about batteries.' But there were these 18650s. And so Martin had the idea that we'll just combine thousands of them to make the Roadster go. And at first, you know, as sort of the more practical person, I was like, well, the manufacturing complexity and that's going to just suck. I mean, we're not going to be able to do it. But as we researched it more, we realized, you know, the manufacturing wasn't that hard. And the benefit of using these commodity cells was so great because when you have the single most important piece of your, single most expensive component in your car that just dominates the BOM cost of the car and you have that as a commodity that gets cheaper and better every year without you having to spend a dime on it. It just gets cheaper and better because there's so much competitive pressure to make them cheaper and better for all these other applications. And every car that you ship is buying so many of these cells that even as a low volume manufacturer, you could be actually a relatively big purchaser of these cells, which allows you to have those high volume numbers that the big guys, you know, when they're buying windshields or whatever get. We could get that on batteries because, you know, every car we sold would have so many. So each car we sold was about 1,200 laptops is the... but laptops had multiple cells in it which made us actually, you know, a relatively big buyer of those which really helped our cost structure. And then ultimately, you know, much later Tesla took control of that supply chain and built their own 18650s and now they build the fatter taller ones that are more appropriate for a car.

Those were things that we didn't consider. And so it wasn't like, 'Oh, we're the man for the job.' We're like, you know, like what? We can't buy that. Oh, no. Okay, God, we're going to have to, you know, spin up a couple people to go work on that because, you know, none of these things are that complicated. It's just yet another thing to go do and you're trying to get this very complicated project, you know, out the door and you keep running into these things that you expected to be off the shelf and they just weren't.

I'd say it's a blend of the two. I mean those are both astute observations. Yeah. But I mean first of all one of the roles of an entrepreneur founder of a company is to remember what the vision is when things are tough. And in both of the companies we've done together we've gone through some very dark periods and your job and mine was to keep the team motivated, keep them wanting to do it. You create the future by the things you do. And so if you don't actually create anything, you know, you're just going to kind of be living in the future. So as an entrepreneur, you're creating a future you want to live in by generating that new product. Hopefully the people working on the individual things are also on their own journey and trying to get better at what they're doing and hopefully the work is interesting and they're learning and they're happy with that. But the goal for, you know, the company has to be delight that customer at the end.

I am happy that I am not dealing with the day-to-day, you know, firestorm of, you know, various disasters. I mean when you, you know, any engineering project typically when you look back or when you are creating the narrative it's this like, you know, then we did this and then we did that and it's all these successes. The reality is that, you know, this doesn't work or, you know, this vendor flakes and you have to come up with something and it's this total like firefight all the time until you finally get the thing out and then it seems like it was pre-ordained. But...

I'm so glad that it's not... Yes. I'm so glad that I...

No, no, no. Those were great times. You know, it was super fun. It was a tremendous amount of work. It was exciting and interesting and depressing sometimes and, you know, scary and great and it was all good. But, you know, I'm just so glad that I am not, you know, waking up in the morning again and going, 'Oh no, what are we going to do about this,' you know, that just happened at 2 in the morning in, you know, China or whatever and now what are we going to do about that, you know.

Well, I get up in the morning and, you know, go through email. It's... and we look at a bunch of companies at Sparrow. So there's typically a couple of companies, you know, during the week especially, there's always three or four companies we see which are interesting typically. Those are fun. Sometimes they're physical, you know, we drive to the site or I, you know, show up. Generally, it's just by Zoom. And we then get, you know, a couple of internal meetings of, you know, like what are we going to do about this company or whatever. And then I'm also meeting with the CEOs of portfolio companies and also random, you know, students that come to me and all kinds of other people that I've, you know, met over the years, which is always fun to find out what's going on. Yeah. I like to be kind of plugged into, you know, stuff that's going on.

Not really. That's a really good question. I like to have some purpose. I mean, it's one of the reasons why, you know, I just joined this board of the Archaeological Institute is because I think the work they're doing is really interesting and I want to learn more about that. And I like to have leverage on, you know, like, you know, when I was a school board official, it was interesting because, you know, we could make a decision. I could, you know, volunteer for a class, you know, to help out in, you know, a kindergarten class or something, but if we decided or if the teacher and I, you know, whatever we did would only really affect that class. And it was great to be, you know, on the school board because then it would affect the whole school. In this case, you know, our district only had one school, so it would affect the whole school. And I like to have that kind of leverage on things that we do.

Oh, I mean, I think the kids came out really well. I mean, that's every parent hopefully is going to say that.

Oh, no. The family thing is great. One thing that was an inspiration. So in between Nuvo Media and Tesla, I worked for a friend of mine who was the CTO of Cisco and then she stepped out from Cisco in 2001 I think, so in 2001, and started a company which the company ended not doing super well because it was at a bad time I think for the industry. But, you know, she's terrific. And so I worked for her for a few years in between. And one of the things that she was really into, which I super appreciated, was she'd work super hard. She'd get to work and just, you know, crank through everything. But at, you know, 5:00 pm or whatever, she would be, you know, didn't matter what was going on unless it was like something really catastrophic, but I mean, she would be like, 'Oh, got to go, you know, got to go pick up my kid.' And she would go home and as did her husband and they would just be in family time, you know, and then she would show back up on email, you know, like at 11 or something, you know, just to make sure nothing had happened. But I really appreciated that, you know, that she put limits on what work was going to do. And so I thought that was a very good role model to have both kids and, you know, work being insane.

Oh, it's the people. It's always the people. And whether that's, you know, you can argue, you know, whether that's family or if it's connections because connections are not... you know, both, I mean social connections are really important. We know that from, you know, the impact of social media has, you know, decreased in-person social connections and it's causing all this grief. The way that connections work in my opinion is not only is it I think just fundamentally interesting what other people are doing but it also increases the probability of luck, of serendipity helping you out. So if you can imagine like you never leave your house and you just never interact with people the chances of you like randomly running into somebody that's doing something interesting that you end up, you know, helping out and being part of is zero. Right. Yeah. So if you are out in the world meeting people, doing things, it's just you have so much a higher chance of coming upon interesting things that you'll end up doing. Yeah. So it... and then people say, 'Oh, you got so lucky.' Yeah. I mean, it was luck. That in that exact moment was luck, but I have lots of those moments. So my chances of having luck are so much higher than someone that doesn't do that. Yeah. So, it's always about the people.

That is LA.

Yeah, the universe does tend to help people, I think, in some, you know, weird way. I don't think that it is... I think that it is probably an illusion based on, you know, confirmation bias but it does... and being open. So the more open you are to running into people and looking and seeing what's going on you just have so much higher chance of this. And then people are connected in all kinds of crazy ways. So, you know, like when my daughter decided to go get this research project in Indonesia, we discovered, you know, we mentioned it, we discovered all kinds of people we knew like had relatives that lived in Indonesia and or like were there now or, you know, and that of course then extends that network to her if she needs it, you know, whatever. But we have to be open to those kinds of serendipitous things. And so when you were, you know, your friends live in LA and they don't ever see these celebrities, part of it is that you notice them and you're not intimidated by them and you're willing to go up in a way that doesn't creep them out and cause them to hide, which is good. So, and you clearly have decided to put yourself in places where such things might happen. This is something that engineering kind of gets you over in some weird sense because when you're looking at a project and you kind of, you know, engineers, you know, take the project and they put it in little pieces. There's always going to be at least one piece that's super hard. You know, like you look at this and it's like, well, if it's all easy, then, you know, it's not a problem and you probably would... it's probably not worth doing. But you look at it and it's like, oh, that is going to be really hard, right? That's where you start. You never start on the easy stuff. You always start on the thing that is the most hard because if you did all the easy stuff and you can't do the hard thing well then the project fails but if you do the hard thing then the easy stuff you can clean up and it all works, right? So you get this mindset of you always go after the kind of difficult thing first and I think that that makes that philosophy or that strategy actually works relatively well in most things, you know. Sometimes you need to learn a lot more to really understand how hard a piece is, but once you kind of know that, oh, that's the hard thing, well, we'd better go solve that first. Even though it's the most uncomfortable, if you will.

Oh, yeah. I really believe we need to electrify transportation as quickly as possible. And given, you know, at the moment we have obviously complex political situations going on but, you know, ultimately the electric cars win and we want to get there as quickly as we can. It's already reduced global oil consumption by I think the International Energy Agency said about 1.2 million barrels a day. Not just Tesla but, you know, the sort of electrification.

Yeah. I mean they would have eventually happened but I think we certainly moved it forward a decade or so and that's, you know, that's a good thing. So I really do care about, you know, I care about Tesla but I also, you know, I want Ford to be successful. You know, they blew their... they had this great, the F-150 Lightning, you know, conceptually was so great and then they kind of blew it on the engineering and it was not successful, you know, price-wise and some of their engineering challenges which was just too bad because that could have been really, really awesome.

Well, you know, I've never had a direction, right? I've only just done things that were interesting. So, I would just do things that interest you. You know, obviously you want to do things that interest you that hopefully also, you know, get remunerated in some way that you can survive. But, you know, there's so many interesting things going on right now. To settle for a job that isn't interesting, I just think is a waste of time. Now there are times in any job that are just work. That's why we have that word work, you know, like it's not always fun, but you should always be doing something where the goal is at least interesting.

I mean, we got lucky a couple times.

Yeah. Well, it's been great fun. I messed up my back last...