Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.

— Steve Jobs

In 2017, I joined Tesla as a Staff Engineer, walking away from a Senior Director position in the Analog Semiconductor space and starting all over again after 15 years. Why? Because I wanted to work in the emerging field of EVs and FSD. The next 9 years were definitely the most rewarding I have ever had in my career, both financially and for my own self-growth.

At that time, it wasn’t obvious that Tesla would experience so much success. This was before Model 3, Tesla’s first mass-produced car, was released. Elon wasn’t nearly as famous as he is today. To some of my friends, leaving my job for Tesla didn’t seem like the best decision. But I did it because I wanted to get onto Trajectory A.

In my last blog post, I talked about the two trajectories – Trajectory A and Trajectory B. If you find yourself on the saturating Trajectory B, you have no choice. You have to keep reinventing yourself and find new trajectories.

In my first 8 years at Tesla, I grew their sensors team from 4 people to over 40 people. We produced millions of EVs and we shipped FSD. It was amazing. But what was my new Trajectory A for many years was slowly saturating into Trajectory B once more. So I decided to move to the robotics team full-time. Going to a much smaller team and starting fresh gave me the mental space to learn new things.

Moving to Trajectory A is not easy. Recently, I was talking to my friend Anand Konanur , and he summed it up beautifully. Imagine you are a monkey in the forest swinging from one tree to another. At some point, you will have only so much range on the vine you are hanging from. You need to let go and take a leap to the next vine. It might be a bit scary, and the choice might not make sense at first, but eventually it will.

Stepping back, I can tell I had a lot of fun and experienced invaluable growth. I am excited for the future.