When you're starting out in college, during sort of freshman and sophomore year, you have these sort of philosophical wonderings. At Queens and then also at UPenn I was trying to think of what were the most important areas that could have a significant positive effect on the future of humanity. What are the problems we have to solve? You have these philosophical discussions on a sophomoric level I suppose. I actually talked a lot to friends and my housemates, and dates - which was probably not the best thing. The three areas that I came up with were, the Internet, sustainable energy, both in production and consumption, and space exploration, particularly if humanity becomes a multi-planet species. I thought about these things kind of in the abstract, not from the expectation that I would actually have careers in those arenas. Those were just the areas that I thought would most effect the future, and as it turned out I was fortunate enough to be involved in those areas. That’s the thread that connects them - it's kinda my best guess at what would most likely effect the future in the biggest way, and I wanted to be involved in at least one of them.
At first I thought the best bet was going to be helping with electrification of cars, that‘s how I would start out. Purely from the standpoint of us eventually running out of hydrocarbons to mine and burn. There is obviously a limited supply of oil in the ground, so eventually we would have to transition to something that is sustainable. When we are drawing oil from the ground, we are essentially taking the accumulated solar energy that was bound up in plants and animals that over hundreds of millions of years was turned into oil. That is obviously finite, and if we run out of that and we don't have a good solution then there would be economic collapse, independent of any environmental concern. That's actually what initiated my interest in electric vehicles, before global warming became an issue.
At Penn there was a professor who was chairman of a company in Silicon Valley that was working on advanced capacitors, potentially for use in electric cars. I asked if I could get a summer job, because it was in Silicon Valley and working on technology for electric cars. I thought, this is really awesome, I’ll come out to California to do energy physics at Stanford, that’s pretty much as good as it gets. I just want to go to where the exciting breakthroughs were occurring. Stanford is in Silicon Valley, it's sort of the epicenter, so that's where I wanted to come, near Stanford or Berkeley and Stanford is sort of sunnier, so I liked it.
I got a summer job in Los Gatos actually, doing electrolytic ultra-capacitors. Capacitors are a very common component in circuit boards, and are occasionally used to store limited amounts of energy. The problem is that their energy density does not compare to that of the battery. They have a very high power density, but a low energy density, and there’s the potential to do some very interesting things if you can drive the energy density of a capacitor up high enough. If you could make a capacitor that had anywhere near the energy density of a battery with this incredibly high power density and this quasi-infinite cycle and calendar life, and extremely high charge/discharge rate, really you'd be able to charge your car faster than you can fill it with gasoline. Charging could be done in minutes or seconds technically. You’d have an awesome solution for energy storage in mobile applications. It’s really the ideal solution for electric vehicles.
I actually met a woman I dated briefly in college, who works at Scientific American as a writer, and she related the anecdote that when we went on a date, all I was talking about was electric cars. That was not a winning conversation, she said the first question I asked her was: “do you ever think about electric cars?” she said no, she never did. That wasn't great, but recently it's been more effective.
I was actually working I think two jobs, one was a video company that was ironically called rocket science, and then working on electrolytic ultra capacitors during the day as an intern at a company called Pinnacle Research. They actually were pretty good, they had a pretty high energy density, roughly equivalent to a lead-acid battery, which for a capacitor is huge. As it turns out they're way too expensive. The problem was that they used ruthenium tantalum oxide. There was I think at the time maybe like one or two tons of ruthenium mined per year in the world, so not a very scalable solution, you know, they'd sell it to you by the sort of milligram, that’s a problem.
I thought there could be some solid-state solution, like just using chip-making equipment. That was going to be the basic idea when I came out to get a PhD at Stanford. The area I was going to be researching and was going to be doing my grad studies on was the material science and physics of high energy density capacitors. Very applied, almost really engineering, sort of the intersection between applied physics and material science. I was going to try to work on that and try to leverage the equipment that was developed for advanced chip making and photonics to create ultra-precise capacitors at sort of the molecular level. I think there's potential for a significant breakthrough in that area and to have an energy storage mechanism that's better than batteries.
I didn't really care about the degree actually. I just really needed their labs. I knew I could get sort of free labs if I was a student, so that was why I did the grad program.
Just towards the end of my undergrad I was thinking that the Internet would be a pretty huge thing. Once it became clear that the Internet was going to become widespread, that everyone would have access to it, that's when it occurred to me that this was going to fundamentally change the nature of humanity, that became clear around the 94 timeframe. I had been on the Internet a few years before that since I had been in the physics arena. In the sciences people were using the Internet as early as the 70s. It was difficult to use, it was text based, and it was very difficult to get access to it. You had to be either in the government or in some academic institution.
I just couldn't figure out how to make enough money to feed myself. If I couldn't make money then I'd run out of food and die. That was not good. If I was a student, then I could be a teaching assistant and do various things and do research on electric vehicle technologies - that was my default plan.
I wasn't entirely certain that the technology I'd be working on would actually succeed. And generally if you want to embark on something-- it's desirable to figure out if success is at least one of the possibilities. For sure failure is one of the possibilities, but, ideally, you want to try to bracket it and say success is in the envelope of outcomes. I wasn't sure what I was working on would actually be useful. I mean it could be academically useful but not practically useful. Like it could result in a PhD, and adding some leaf to the tree of knowledge, but then discovering that it's not really gonna matter. Is it going to be a good enough thing that is actually going to be used in an electric vehicle? you can get a doctorate on many things that ultimately do not have practical bearing on the world. I think success on an academic level would have been quite likely, because you can publish some useless paper-- and most papers are pretty useless-- I mean, how many PhD papers are actually used by someone ever? percentage wise it's not good, and so it could have been one of those outcomes where you add some leaves to the tree of knowledge, and that leaf is, nope, it's not possible.
That was one path, and I was prepared to do that, but then things like the superconducting supercollider got canceled. I thought well what if I am stuck in some situation like that, and then some act of government basically stops things, then all of it would be a waste. I could not actually bracket the uncertainty on that.
I also thought that if I did a PhD then I would spend several years watching the Internet go through this incredibly rapid growth phase, and that would be really difficult to handle, because there does seem to be a time for particular technologies when they're at a steep point in the inflection curve.
It was a tough decision actually, this was before Netscape even went public. I was like, OK, the Internet, I'm pretty sure success is one of the outcomes, and it seemed like I could either spend five years in a graduate program and discover that the answer is that there is no way to make a capacitor work and watch the Internet happen, or I can work on building elements of the Internet, participate and help build it in some fashion. This was in 1995, so nobody had actually made any money on the Internet.
It got to the start of the quarter for Stanford and I had to make a decision. I was just working on some Internet software that summer. In that summer it became clear that the Internet was going to become something very significant. It was one of those things that came along once in a very long while, and I wanted to be a part of it. I just couldn’t stand the idea of watching it happen, so I decided to drop out.
I thought 'I'm going to be involved in the internet, I can help build a few things there and than get back to electric cars later' which is what happened. I decided to go on deferment. I figured if it doesn't work then I can always go back to grad school. Since I already had my undergraduate I could then get the H1B visa, the H1B visa requires a degree. If your goal is to start a company there's no point in finishing college. In my case I had to otherwise I would get kicked out of the country.
I didn't even go to class I called the chairman of the department and said: “I would like to start this Internet company, it probably won't succeed and so when it fails I want to make sure I still can come back.” He let me go on deferment and I said I'd probably be back in 6 months, I thought I'd give it a couple of quarters. If it didn't workout, which I though it probably wouldn't, then I'd come back at this school. Actually, I talked to my professor and I told him this and he said, well, I don't think you'll be coming back, and that was the last conversation I had with him.