Growing up I was very technology oriented, but I didn't really know what I was going to do when I got older. People kept asking me, so eventually I thought the idea of inventing stuff or creating things would be a cool thing to do. The reason I thought that was because I read a quote from Arthur C. Clark which said: “A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” and that’s really true. I'd say particularly engineering is the closest thing to magic that exists in the real world. Engineering is creating some new device that never existed before, that can do things today that would be considered magic hundreds of years ago. I think it actually goes beyond that, there's many things we take for granted today that weren't even imagined in times past, they weren’t even in the realm of magic, so it goes beyond that. If you go back say 300 years, the things that we take for granted today, you'd be burned at the stake for. Being able to fly that's crazy, being able to see over long distances, being able to communicate, having effectively with the internet a group mind of sorts, having access to all the world’s information instantly from almost anywhere on Earth. It's pretty amazing what we can do, we can create images, we can do holograms and things like that. This is the stuff that really would be considered magic in times past, and all of these things would've gotten you burned at the stake 300 years ago.
I thought, If I can do some of those things -- if I can advance technology that is like magic, that would be really cool. I wasn't really sure if that meant starting a company, or whether that meant working for a company that made cool stuff.
Whenever I would read about cool technology and great innovation it just seemed like interesting things happened in America almost all the time. Of course within the United States, Silicon Valley is where the heart of things is, although, at the time, I didn't know where Silicon Valley was. When I was growing up, Silicon Valley seemed like some mythical place, like Mount Olympus or something. That’s where I wanted to be, I just wanted to be where technology was being created. I just wanted to be involved with things that were on the cutting edge. That’s what got me excited and I knew I wanted to come to America. I remember thinking and saying that America is where great things are possible, more than any other country in the world. It is true, America is the land of opportunity.
I was trying to figure out how to get to the US, and I tried to convince my parents to move there. My parents were divorced, so if at least one of them could move there I could move there with them, but I wasn't successful in convincing them. At one point I convinced my father but then he reneged, unfortunately. He did say yes, and then he changed his mind. I guess he was fairly established, he was an engineer established in South Africa and didn't want to have to go through that again in another country.
Then I found out my mother was born in Canada. Her father was American, but my mother hadn't gotten her US citizenship before he died, and before certain age restrictions, so that broke the link and I couldn't get my American citizenship unfortunately directly. I walked her through the process of getting her Canadian citizenship which allowed me to get my Canadian citizenship. I applied for her Canadian passport and mine at the same time. I actually filled out the forms for her and got her Canadian passport and me too, and within three weeks of getting my Canadian passport I was in Canada. I couldn't convince my parents to move, so I had to move myself. They tried to convince me not to leave, but being conscripted in the South African army didn't seem like a great way to spend time. So I left by myself against my parents wishes, with almost no financial support. I wouldn't say they were unsupportive, but I can't say they were particularly supportive.
I arrived in North America when I was about 17. I had a relative in Canada and I send letters that I was coming. I didn't get any letter back, but I went anyway. I had a great uncle in Montreal, and when I got to Montreal my mom finally got a letter back that he was in Minnesota for the summer. I just stayed at a student hospital and bought a bus ticket across Canada. I bought a bus ticket from Montreal to Vancouver, and that allowed me to see Canada at least from the highway. Canada is a great country.
I wasn't quite sure how easy it would be to get a job or anything like that. I didn't have a real job as I was only 17, and only did like paper routes and stuff like that. I thought well just in case it takes me a long time to get a job I better make sure that tiny stash of money lasts a long time. I only had a few thousand dollars, so I thought let me see what it takes to live. See if I can live for under a dollar a day, which I was able to do. You can do it, just sort of buy food in bulk at the supermarket. You just buy like hotdogs in bulk and oranges in bulk. Scurvy is bad so you got to have an orange in there, an orange every couple of days will keep scurvy away. You get really tired of hotdogs and oranges after while. Of course stuff like pasta and a green pepper and a big thing of pasta sauce, that can go pretty far too. Just buy stuff in bulk and most of the time you can get under a buck a day. It does get a little monotonous after a while. I was like you know I can live for a dollar a day, at least from a food cost standpoint it's pretty easy to earn like $30 a month, so I'll probably be OK. I supported myself through various odd jobs for several months in various computer related roles, mostly in Toronto.
I wasn't sure if I wanted to go to college before I came. My college education wasn't actually super well planned out. I wasn't sure whether I should go or not. Then I decided that I wanted to go to college because otherwise it was a hard time getting girls, because everybody was much older than I was at the companies that I was working at. It seemed like that I would be missing out on an important social experience, so that was really the deciding factor. I managed to get a student loan and go to college. In Canada colleges are less expensive, it's kind of like maybe a state school or kind of like the university of California or CalState. The tuition is much less then it is in other places.
I was actually considering two possibilities, one was to study computer engineering at the University of Waterloo, and the other one was to go to Queen’s University. I went to Waterloo and I saw there were not many girls there, so I thought like OK that doesn't seem so much fun, so then I went to Queen’s. The big thrill of university was to date girls of my own age. I actually met my first wife there so that worked out.
I had kind of a broad range of subjects in commerce, engineering, and math. I rarely went to class, I just read the text book and show up for the exams.
The first really important person I met was this guy by the name of Peter Nicholson, when I had a summer job. I read this article in the newspaper about this guy and he seemed really smart. I couldn't get to him directly, but then I called the newspaper to talk to the writer, and then the writer connected me with Peter Nicholson. He was the head of strategy for the Bank of Scotia, which is the largest bank in Canada. He later became the chief economic adviser to the prime minister, so he was a really smart guy. I talked to him and I said: if there's any chance of a summer internship that would be great, and he actually ended up giving me a job that summer.
Some students I met at Queen’s got transferred to Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania, and they gave a very good report. I thought well I'll try to go there. I didn't have any money so in order to go there I needed a scholarship. One of the downsides of coming to a university in North America was that my parents said they would not pay for college - or, my father said he would not pay for college unless it was in South Africa. I could have free college in South Africa or find some way to pay it here. After my second year at Queen’s I applied to UPenn and fortunately I got a scholarship.
I came down to the US to go to college at the University of Pennsylvania and did a dual undergraduate in business and physics there the third year.
Actually the only reason I studied business at all was if I graduated, and I have to work for someone who has a business degree, if they knew special things that I didn't know then I would have a disadvantage. I was mostly afraid of having a boss that I didn't like. I figured if I don't learn the business stuff then somebody else is going to make me do things that I don't want to do, so I better learn the secrets of business.
I finished like my business courses in a year. Then I said well I like physics, I'll study physics for the second year. Then I went into the science and engineering. I’m more an engineer then anything else. Engineering and design is my interest, but you also need to be able to bring a lot of people together to create something. It’s very difficult to create something as an individual if it's a significant technology. I figured in order to do a lot of these things you need to know how the universe works, and you need to know how the economy works, that's why I did the physics degree as well as the Wharton finance degree. The finance that was easy by the way. All my business courses in the final year were not as hard as quantum mechanics.
Graduating from undergrad I had to make a decision. One path would have sort of led to Wall Street and I guess quite a big salary, and the other was to do grad studies and try to figure out a technical problem and I didn't much like the first one.