Zero to Tesla by Sanjay Singhal

Author:Sanjay Singhal [Singhal, Sanjay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: -
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2018-08-20T16:00:00+00:00

PAPER IS EXPENSIVE

Signal made voicemail software, mostly for cellular companies, many of which were expanding their networks and purchasing new system infrastructure. The company already had one major contract, and I was the sixth employee, running sales and marketing.

It was a departure from previous jobs for me for several reasons. It was the first time I was going to work for a non-brand-name company. It was the first time I was going to work for a friend and someone I knew well, and it was the first time I was going to be senior enough to participate in decision-making, able to avoid the sort of boneheaded corporate mistakes and mistreatment of employees that my previous employers perpetrated.

With just one major customer and only a few million in sales, it was a huge step down in status from Scientific Atlanta, but it offered an opportunity to get a small stake in the fledgling company, and if I was any good, I’d be able to make almost as much as I had previously. My new boss, Mac, didn’t want to put the equity in writing, because he didn’t have a formal shareholders agreement, but he shook my hand and said, “Hap, you know me. Trust me.” Over the years, Mac had taken to calling me by my childhood nickname, “Hap,” and it always made me feel a bit closer to him, so I decided to trust him.

After my previous disasters trying to run things myself, I needed a strong guiding influence, and Mac was the right person at the right time. I vowed that this time I wasn’t going to flame out in less than two years like with every other job I’d ever had.

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Mac and I had our first run-in literally over the office printer. “Hap, what is this?” he said, looking at the contract I was printing out for review. I wasn’t sure what he meant; he’d already seen the contract and shouldn’t have been surprised by it. He clarified. “You’re wasting paper. If nobody else is going to read this, you’re wasting half the paper you’re using.”

I thought to myself, “Uh-oh, I think my boss here is just as crazy as all my other bosses. I wonder how long I’m going to last?” But all I said was, “Okay, I’ll use both sides.”

Printing on both sides of each sheet of paper was only the first of many conflicts Mac and I had that could be traced back to both my high-flying lifestyle at Scientific Atlanta and the spendthrift approach I had taken to running Nikean.

With only eight people in the office, I wanted to hire a pretty receptionist instead of another field engineer. On a plane flying into a major customer presentation, I wanted to insert a video of a scene from the movie The Matrix into a PowerPoint deck we were going to give to a group of sixty-year-old men. When travelling, I usually paid the fuel surcharge when I returned rental cars. I was having to adjust to the more entrepreneurial, small-company nature of Signal.

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