My father patiently said, “Son, I’ve been speaking with Dr. Jamal, and he still says that you might be bipolar. I know you don’t want to hear it, but maybe it would help to talk to Dr. Parikh about it. I want you to go see him. Trust me.”
Dr. Parikh did a complete case history, and unlike with previous specialists, I gave the full details of the Nikean story. I thought that since he was a leading researcher, he would know that I wasn’t bipolar, and I’d be able to put to rest the previous manic-depressive commentary from Dr.
Jamal. Parikh’s diagnosis was immediate. “Sanjay, you’re bipolar. And in fact, Bipolar I, the most serious form of the disorder.” He added, “I know you don’t think you’re bipolar because there has only been the one incident, but from your history, I believe there are several others—just not as severe and not as recognizable. The diagnosis, though, is always based on the most severe incident, and there is no question in my mind that this is the correct diagnosis.”
I became morose and insistent. “But I can’t be bipolar. I’m not crazy.” He said, “No, you’re not crazy. Being manic-depressive is a chemical imbalance, like many mental disorders. It can be treated, and it can be managed. I can’t force you to take the medication; you have to make that decision.”
I tried to bargain. “I think the things in San Diego were just me getting excited about my business. Maybe I’m just hypo-manic.” I knew it was still bipolar, but maybe I could say I was “just barely manic-depressive” and avoid any medication. Parikh just stared at me and shook his head.
I stared at the ground. “Okay. I’m bipolar. Can you help me?” He swiveled his chair, scribbled on a prescription pad, and handed me the sheet.
He said, “I know from your case history that you were briefly on Lithium and reacted poorly to it. This is a prescription for Lamotragine. It’s an antiepileptic medication that’s been found to be effective in the treatment of bipolar disorder. Let’s try it. This is a minimum dosage. We’ll have to work you up to a proper level, but let’s see how you react to it first.” No other doctor I’d see in five years had ever mentioned Lamotragine.
I took the medicine for two weeks. No side effects, but no effects either. On the fifteenth day, I woke up and suddenly felt a heck of a lot better. I saw Parikh again, and he just said, “Okay, let me know if you encounter any side effects, and good luck.” I hoped I never had to speak to him again.
---
I had bought a used BMW years ago, and after driving it around for a few weeks, I noticed a loud humming noise anytime I got above fifty kilometers per hour. I took it to the mechanic who had done the service inspection when I bought it. He took it for a drive around the block, came back, and said, “Yup, there’s a humming noise, but it’s nothing serious.” Since he’d be liable if he had missed a mechanical flaw, I wasn’t surprised. I asked him what I should do, and he said, “If you play the radio loud, you won’t hear it.” Then he grinned.
I took the car to another mechanic, who told me it was a damaged axle and would cost $1,500 to replace. I took it to BMW, who told me it was the suspension and the axle, and it would cost $3,000. One day a friend suggested I take it to his mechanic, who specialized in BMWs and had a shop in King City, an hour outside Toronto. I drove out there, playing the radio loudly the whole way.
The mechanic, Gunther, took my car for a sixty-second drive, came back, and told me, “It’s a ball bearing in your left rear wheel. I’ll charge twenty-five dollars. I only accept cash.” I gave him the money, and thirty minutes later the noise was gone.
For my mental issues, I didn’t need a yogi, I didn’t need a cocktail of antidepressants, and I didn’t just “snap out of it.” Calling my father to thank him for his role in my cure, I said, “Dad, I didn’t think it was going to lead anywhere, but wow was I wrong. Thanks so much for finding that specialist in Boston and following that trail to Dr. Parikh.”
My father said, “Son, sometimes all you need is to know what’s really wrong. Then the cure is simple.”
TRY IT JUST ONE MORE TIME
While I continued to try to find my next full-time project, I also started networking and letting it be known that I had a little money to invest. I started doing some public speaking at university conferences, ending my speeches with some version of, “I’ve got money. If you’ve got ideas, we should talk!”
One day in early April 2003, I was at a conference of South Asian professionals, listening to a new-age speaker leading the audience through an experiential exercise involving peeling a grape. We didn’t have actual grapes, but we were supposed to be thinking about a grape, imagining peeling it, imagining taking a bite—it was all a bit much for me. After eating my fictional grape, I dozed off, wondering how it was that, if this was the kind of crap I had to put up with, I hadn’t been asked to speak instead.
I woke up because I could have sworn I heard one of the speakers mention Cornell University. I opened my eyes, and the only white guy in the room had the microphone and was talking about how his career as a figure skater ended when he blew out his knee; but he went to Cornell, got an MBA, and was now looking for a business to get involved with. Justin* was an entertaining speaker and brought the audience to life.
Afterward, I introduced myself, and a few days later Justin and I were sitting at Bombay Bhel, my favorite Indian restaurant in Mississauga. I started out with, “I’ve got some money I can invest. Do you have any ideas?” Justin flashed me a charming grin. “Have you ever listened to an audiobook?” I said that I used to listen to them regularly when I was driving back and forth from Toronto to Cornell, and he continued. “Well, there’s a company called Netflix in the United States that mails out DVDs to customers for a monthly fee, and people can get unlimited DVDs each month.”
I commented immediately, “That’s stupid. Nobody would sign up for that.” Justin slid a press release across the table to me and replied, “They already have a million subscribers. I think the same thing could work for audiobooks on CD.”
A few weeks later, we chose the name “Simply Audiobooks,” and I agreed to invest, while Justin agreed to be the full-time CEO. Simply Audiobooks was born on July 1, 2003. We soon brought on an operations and logistics specialist, Sergio*, as a third partner. He was a fiery Italian with a serious attitude, and he balanced Justin and me, who were both nonconfrontational. I thought Sergio would come in handy dealing with staff and suppliers.
We soon hired our first employee, Vitaly, emphasizing adventure, not salary, in an ad reading, “We pay close to starvation wages. However, if our employees actually starve, we’ll be upset. Free cookies at the office. Put off buying that new car, and come find out what it’s like to climb a brand new mountain.”
I showed up at the office once in a while but had no actual responsibilities—I mostly harassed Justin and the others to get the website built and operational, which, remarkably, they did in only thirty days.
Initially we invited one hundred of our friends in Toronto to join the service for free, expecting that from that point, word of mouth would lift us to success. It didn’t. Two weeks after launching, we had twenty-five customers signed up. We had sent out reminder emails and issued some press releases, but we were getting no site visitors other than the friends we had signed up for free, and even most of them weren’t actively using it.
Scouring the web for any advice that might be helpful, I stumbled across an e-pamphlet called “Twenty-One Ways to Maximize Your Profits on Google Adwords,” and it was a revelation. Google was the hot new search engine, on par with Yahoo and displacing Alta Vista and Lycos, and Adwords was a novel advertising concept that Google was making popular. I spent $9.99 on the online version of the pamphlet and sent a copy to Justin.
Justin was a brilliant marketer and leaped onto Adwords, quickly creating ad campaigns targeting people searching for the term “audiobooks” on Google. We had remarkable success, going all the way from zero new users a day, to one new user every second day. At that rate, we were going to hit our breakeven p
oint of 5,000 customers in only twenty-five years.
“What are our options?” I asked Justin. He replied, “Well, we weren’t going to enter the US market for another six months, but that’s the only thing that makes sense.”
Sergio objected, saying, “We can’t move into the United States. We’ll run out of money first. We need a warehouse, staff, inventory…and we haven’t even thought about where to locate in the United States.”
“Look, if we knew for sure that launching in the US market would get us growing, we’d find money and do it, right?” I asked. Everyone agreed. So I said, “Why don’t we just start advertising there and see if anybody signs up?”
Both Justin and Sergio objected to the notion of advertising a service that didn’t exist. I was much more comfortable playing fast and loose with the truth, having just spent six years in sales, so I said, “Look, let’s just run some Google ads for a couple of days, we can always apologize to anybody who signs up and give them a free account later.” We added a US flag to our website, started the ad campaign, and on the first day got eight customers. On the second day, we got nine customers by 5:00 p.m., and we turned off the ads amid much high-fiving and chest bumping. It was time to move to the United States of America.
With success now visible on the horizon, I put in additional funds, and friends and family added more. We were well capitalized and began to grow rapidly. Like Netflix, we charged a recurring monthly fee for the unlimited memberships and counted on many people using the service less than they expected to give us high margins. The strategy worked, but success kept requiring us to invest more to build up the customer base and inventory. To continue our growth, we soon needed to raise another $500,000.
---
Finishing a ninety-second tour of our tiny office, Justin turned to a group of angel investors and asked, “That’s it folks. Who’s in?” One of the angels, Ken, raised his hand, coughed, and said, “Sorry, this is just too risky. You’re violating a Netflix patent, and you could get sued out of existence.”
“Netflix has much bigger things to worry about than a little Canadian audiobook company,” Justin countered. “They’re not going to sue us.” Ken bowed out anyway, but fortunately Dennis* and Robert*, the two other interested angels, said that they would move forward.
A day later, we had a term sheet. Despite many months of trying with Nikean, I had never seen a term sheet before, and I was giddy with excitement. The angels were offering a valuation of $3.5 million, and my shares were going to be worth over $1 million. I was going to be rich! Justin and I were ready to sign the term sheet right away. Sergio was the only one not excited. “Look, guys, if they’re willing to offer a $3.5 million valuation, then we should ask for more.”
With my previous experiences in mind, I was thinking, “No no no! Take the money now!” But I just looked at Justin, who said, “I’m not an idiot. I was going to come back with an offer of $4 million.”
Sergio said, “No, I think we should ask for $5 million.”
“No damn way, take the money now, and don’t piss them off,” I said.
Justin looked thoughtful and said, “Okay, but we’ll throw in some other terms so if they get annoyed, we can backpedal. I’ll let anyone dictate the price as long as I can dictate the terms.” I was upset, but I’d always been a bad negotiator, so I decided to just go with it.
The next day Sergio was saying, “Dammit, I knew we should have asked for $6 million!” The investors had agreed to our $5 million request, and Sergio thought they’d capitulated too easily. I was just thankful we hadn’t scared them off, and Justin was feeling smug, having successfully handled the actual negotiation. Now we had lots of capital, but we also had to create a board of directors and have formal oversight for the first time.
---
I walked into the newly rented, newly painted Simply Audiobooks office in the summer of 2004 and heard Austin Powers’s voice, “Yeah, baby!” coming from a back room. Jesus, they were supposed to be working long hard startup hours, and somebody was watching International Man of Mystery at the office? I was about to yell for Justin when he poked his head over the railing to the second floor and sang, “Yeah, baby!” adding “Hey, Sanjay, what do you think?”
“Love the new office, Justin,” I said. “But is some guy in the back…” He jumped down the stairs three at a time and pushed me toward the back room, where Bryan, our caustic South African IT manager resided. Justin pointed and said, “Check this out. Brandon wired up a speaker to our admin console, and every time we get an order the system says, “Yeah, baby!” I grinned and stared at the computer, whispering to myself, “Yeah, baby, this is really working out.”
The company starting hiring in earnest, and Justin and Sergio were finally making real salaries instead of the reduced amounts they had been taking while earning sweat equity.
After a strategy meeting a year after launching the company, I brought up the subject of my own role in the company. “Guys, I haven’t found something really exciting to work on myself, so I was thinking, how about me joining Simply Audiobooks?”
My suggestion was met with silence at first, then Justin said, “Noooo, that’s a bad idea. We can’t afford another high salary.”
Sergio, however, said, “I think this could be a good idea. As long as you agree to the same $60,000 salary that Justin and I took for the first year.” To me, $60,000 was better than the nothing I’d been making till then, so I agreed and joined the company on September 1, 2004.
Soon after I started full time, Justin pulled me aside and said, “I know I said hiring you was a bad idea, but I’m so glad you’re here. The past year has been a nightmare.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Sergio is an asshole!” Justin exclaimed. “He’s making my life miserable! The tension was making me not want to come into the office, but now that you’re here, at least I have someone to talk to.”
I asked him what he meant, and he said, “Let me tell you just one typical story. The other day he came in, our website was down, and when I asked him about it, all he said was, ‘Justin, don’t get your panties in a bunch. I’ve got it under control.’”
“That’s all?” I questioned.
“No. Later I saw him in the parking lot leaving early for the gym. I asked him why he was leaving early, and he threw down his gym bag, balled his hands into fists, and said, ‘You wanna go? You wanna go right now?’”
Surprised, I said, “He was challenging you to a fight in our parking lot?” I laughed. “Well, what did you do?”
“I just walked away. He’s crazy, man.”
Fortunately, Justin and I were becoming better and better friends. He was fun to hang out with and always full of stories and jokes. He also drank a lot, telling his favorite story many times. “You know the three stages of drunkenness? First, you think you’re incredibly attractive, and you hit on every woman you see. Then you think you’re incredibly strong,” and he would mime trying to lift and topple a car. He’d finish with, “Then you think you’re invisible!” And when people looked at him, puzzled, he’d turn to face the wall and exclaim, “Because you think you can pee anywhere!”
We’d also argue a lot over the littlest things. From “Justin, I think our desks should be angled instead of facing each other” to “Sanjay, why did you order colored staples?” Underneath the bickering, though, there was a mutual respect. I was the only person in the office that Justin ever treated as an equal.
We celebrated our office Christmas party that year at a local racetrack and casino. It was the first time we had enough staff to have a real party, and there was rowdiness aplenty. Our office IT guy was eventually thrown out of the casino for being overly drunk. Someone yelled at the security guard, “You idiot, he’s not drunk, he’s South African!” They had mistaken Bryan’s accent for slurred speech, while ignoring the two programmers trying to dry hump the giant statue of a moose on the front lawn. Bryan was indignant, “You don’t understand, mate,
we speak differently from you lot. It’s an accent, not the vodka talking.” Okay, maybe he was a little drunk.
Laughing, I went back into the casino and through the other side to the racetrack, where a group was standing on the racetrack. A few flakes of snow began to fall, making the night magical. I was thinking, “Could this night get any better? The company is doing great. My life is awesome.” Then a deep voice said, “Get off of the racetrack!”
Vitaly looked around and asked, “Is that God?” But it was a security guard on the speakers ordering us back over the fence into the grandstands. It didn’t take long for us all to get herded to the exit, where we found Bryan still standing there, arguing unsuccessfully with two guards as to why the inadequacy of his language skills shouldn’t be an excuse to not let him back into the casino.
Unfortunately, after the first ten thousand customers, our growth began to stall, and we resorted to spending more and more on advertising. Our belief, not unusual for Internet startups, was that demonstrating growth was more important than profitability, and we often spent more on customers than the actual value of those customers. We even resorted to outrageous advertising campaigns.
In one stunt, we dressed up as doctors and stopped traffic outside the Holland Tunnel in New York, handing out demo audiobook discs as “the cure for the common commute.” We were soon spotted by the Harbor Authority and ran off as they came to investigate us as potential terrorists.
In Ontario, it used to be legal for women to be topless in public, based on a court ruling in 1996. By the fall of 2005, I was running marketing and came up with the idea of having topless women driving around downtown Toronto, in topless cars (i.e., convertibles), with little pennants saying, “Blow your top off with audiobooks.” The women in the office were freaking out; two of them said, “If you run this campaign, I’ll quit!” I’m sure the rest of the women and several of the men were thinking the same thing.
While the internal controversy raged, I was doing my due diligence on the legal aspect and discovered that the law’s interpretation of the obscenity exemption was fairly narrow, and if our stunt caused traffic issues, or if it was done for commercial purposes, we’d still be breaking the law. After a brief consideration of whether the negative publicity would be worth it anyway, I dropped the idea. I never told the office staff that it was because of my legal research, preferring that they believe I was responding to their protests.
Zero to Tesla Page 13