Saket Vora

Yesterday wasn’t your typical sunshine and clear skies day in the Bay. It was raining hard and visibility poor, and on my way southbound on I-280 to work all of us were going 5 to 10 mph below the speed limit. About a mile from my exit, while in the 2nd-from-the-left lane, I see this Mercedes in front of me swerve left. All of a sudden, I see a black SUV perpendicular to me in my lane. Directly in front, moving to the right.

I slammed on the brakes and swerved to the left, trying to avoid the SUV. Next thing I know, I find myself stopped next to the concrete barrier dividing north and southbound traffic.

The airbag had deployed, I reached down and picked up my glasses. I grabbed my laptop bag and darted outside into the rain. Behind me I saw the SUV stopped. The man in the Mercedes had stopped and came up to me, asking if I was ok. I was. No sharp pains, no cuts. He said “the SUV came out of nowhere!” I thought the SUV probably spun out in front of us. The car looked pretty bad.

The wheel had completely separated from the axle. 911 was on its way, and soon the cops came and got my info. A tow truck arrived later and I waited inside of it. The couple in the SUV were walking around and didn’t appear hurt, but they were on the opposite side of the highway. I wanted to talk to them, but didn’t seem like a good time. The cops came up to me later with the more bizarre part of this all:

The SUV hadn’t spun out in front of us. It was going northbound on I-280, then apparently lost control, went up the embankment, hurdled the central concrete barrier, and into the southbound traffic. No wonder the Mercedes guy said the SUV came out of nowhere. Jeez.

Joseph came to pick me up at the tow truck’s place and took me to an urgent care center near work. I had been feeling some shakes, but Sachi said that was probably the adrenaline wearing off. Still, I didn’t have a scratch. The urgent care center wouldn’t see us because it was a vehicle collision, and my health insurance company’s offices were closed for MLK holiday. Go figure. In the parking lot back at work I ran into my colleagues and went straight to lunch with them, showing them pictures of my car. Even though I’m on a diet, I had a chocolate chip cookie. It was good.

I got a ride back home from a colleague at work who lives near me in Menlo Park. I made phone calls to my sisters and later in the evening told my parents, who are in India. My mind started to drift back to the accident. I started to feel pretty lucky, all things considering. I even had my rear brakes replaced last week, but now the car was likely totaled. But maybe those new brakes helped me walk away from this one. A few meters here or there, and it could have been a lot worse. I ran though some what-ifs….what if I had just left home a few minutes earlier, or if I hadn’t pushed to make a traffic light. But I quelled those pretty quick — we all make hundreds of decisions each day like those, and it’s just not worth the energy to ponder all the problematic outcomes that could arise from them. I guess I’ll be thinking about this when I start driving again too. We just need to control what we can control. The other thought that crossed my mind before going to bed? I’d like to find a girlfriend.

Last weekend, I went with a group of friends up to Tahoe for skiing at Squaw Valley, the site of the 1960 Winter Olympic Games. It was my first time skiing in over five years, but still I had a great time. Our group consisted mostly of Apple colleagues, and Chrissy did an awesome job of finding a great lodging in nearby Truckee. We drove up after work on Friday (Nader drove me, Dan, and Wendy in his new Rav4) and got in after 11pm that night.

We killed some time that night exploring the cabin. It was huge, with a sauna and hot tub. It had a big kitchen (with a pasta faucet over the six burner stove) and just about every kitchen gadget you could want. Nader got the fireplace going and jammed out on the guitar a bit. John brought his Nikon D200 with a 35mm f/1.8 lens and I had a blast using it (the photos are from it)

John and Rong are regaled by Nader.

Dan shows Brook and Georgina his snowboard

The next day we drove ~30 minutes to Squaw Valley. What a different setup than the Wintergreen ski resort I’ve been to in West Virginia! A group of us went to rent our skis then took the funiculare up to a point 2/3rds up the mountain. Several lifts were available from here, including a handful of green circles. I stayed on those for the morning, getting my ’snow legs’ back. Turning gracefully while keeping my skis parallel is still pretty hard, but I didn’t fall on the slopes or coming off the lift.

It’s so beautiful to just be up on the mountain in Tahoe. The lake was shrouded in a blanket of fog, while all the peaks of the surrounding mountains was covered in snow. It wasn’t that cold, and the sun shone through a thin layer of clouds. Feeling adventurous, Rong and I took a lift up to the top ridge to try a blue square. The lack of snowfall during the past week hurt this one, because the very beginning offered just a narrow path of good snow, with the edges being rocks and dirt. Not too good for a newbie like me! But we made it down, eventually. The group had split up to check out different runs, but we all met up around 1pm for lunch. We packed bagel sandwiches, and I kept a few Clif bars in my ski pants.

After lunch the newbies (John and I) went on another blue square, with Chrissy and J.Lo being great sports in staying with us. There’s a mental block for us — I’ll be feeling fine on blues but then comes this one hill which scares the heck out of me. I just have to man up and barrel down it. Falling a few times was good for me, cause it’s not that bad. Getting back up is harder than actually skiing.

We ended the day by taking a mile long “mountain run” to the very bottom of the mountain. This was the highlight of the day, because it was right at my skill level, long, and our group of five serendipitously started running into all the other members of our group on the way down. About 2/3rds of the way down, it started to rain a bit, and I could feel the snow start to get a little slushy. It wasn’t too much longer though until I was finally down.

We returned our gear and headed back to the cabin. We made some pizzas, broke out the drinks, and chilled for the rest of the evening. We also played ‘the Game’, a cross between Pictionary and Telephone. Everyone has a sheet of people, and you write a sentence or phrase at the top. Pass the paper to the right. That person has to draw something that represents that phrase. They then fold the first sentence over and pass it along, such that the next person just sees the drawing. That person has to write a sentence of what they think the drawing means. You keep going round with people translating between drawings and sentences, and in the end nearly always hilarity ensues as someone’s original intent gets completely transformed into something entirely different.

We all cleared out of the cabin by 11am and Nader’s car stopped in Berkeley for lunch. We went to an authentic ‘Berkeley experience’ organic co-op cafe on Telegraph Avenue. No Hare Krishnas today. Nader saw some hippies with signs saying “No to Dedicated Bus Lanes”, which made Nader say “A hippie who is against dedicated bus lanes? Just whose side are you on?!” Hah.

All in all, it was a great tip and I’m already looking forward to another trip sometime in mid to late February.

Posts have been light lately, but I’ll catch up after the weekend — heading up to Tahoe for some skiing. It’s my first winter visit to Tahoe and my first time skiing in maybe 5 years. Hopefully I won’t break any limbs :)

As we were getting ready to graduate from NC State, a classmate and close friend of mine (from out of state) pronounced “I will never come back to Raleigh.” Flash forward nearly three years later, and now it’s “I love Raleigh.”

A remarkable difference, to be sure. Raleigh — the “City of Oaks” — and the Research Triangle area in general seems to have begun a noticeable revival in the recent years. The change is most recognizable in downtown Raleigh, where there seems to be new bars, restaurants, and cafes popping up every few weeks.  I’ve heard my friends in Raleigh talk about new places they are finding, and I initially thought it was a function of transitioning to off-campus life, but it’s much more than that. The changes are even surprising to those who have grown up in Raleigh. Over winter break, I was downtown bar crawling for the birthday, then again to see Avatar in IMAX 3D, and again to a cafe one afternoon with friends.

This is really exciting to me. It seems that many of the re-development efforts undertaken by the local governments in the past 5 to 10 years are finally bearing fruit. Even though the recent recession has hit some of the stalwart Research Triangle Park companies (i.e., Nortel and SonyEricsson), new entrants like Fidelity and Credit Suisse are coming in. And as a whole, the Triangle area wasn’t hit as badly as other parts of the country. Consistently Raleigh and the Triangle are ranked top in the best places to live, best places to start a business, best places to start a family.

If this keeps up, I see no reason why Raleigh and the Triangle can’t be elevated further into the national discussion as great/unique metropolitan areas. One example I give is Portland, Oregon — a city smaller than the other landmark cities of New York, LA, Chicago, Austin, etc — yet has a well known character of being very progressive, green and yuppie friendly, and with its own unique music scene.

Keep it up Raleigh, keep it up.

Two years ago, I wrote a month-by-month recap of 2007, but so much happened that year it felt appropriate. While 2009 witnessed an important milestone for me, I’ll take a more casual approach.

Upon returning from winter break, the realization that my time at Stanford was just six months away truly hit. At this point, I was completely immersed in energy and greentech courses and market trends. Apart from fleshing out new venture ideas of my own, organizing the Social Entrepreneurship Business Plan competition was also kicking into high gear. I was also working part-time back at Apple, helping to get the new interns up to speed. In February — in the depths of the stumbling economy — I decided to turn down a job offer from Cypress Semiconductor, boldly stating “I didn’t come to Silicon Valley to take the safe way out,” (only to join Apple 7 months later…). That was a hard decision, but one that I’m glad I made. February also marked the end of my father’s 40 year working career; he visited India for the next couple of months. School was becoming a blur — all my energy related classes were projects based, I pushed and helped execute a really ambitious film project for Hindi class, I was attending more events off-campus like the ThinkGreen forum trying to figure out what to do after graduation, the Social E-Challenge eating up more time as we got closer to the competition date.

Visits by my friends helped kept me sane and recharged — in those last two quarters at Stanford, I saw Mike, Donny, Mark and Jennie, Greg and Kelly, my corridor-mate Eddy from Sweden, Jordan, and Laura! (Bonus points to Greg and Kelly for making a trip just to see me! hehe) I also got to see Melih, Brent, and Tim more often. On campus, I enjoyed getting to know a whole new group of people who were interested in energy issues that were in all my civil and environmental engineering courses.I also grew closer to the people I already knew on campus. The tick-tock-tick feeling that looms over an impending graduation can be dreadful.

Graduation came, with a piece of paper stating I (miraculously) had a diploma from the Leland Stanford Junior University, and my family came to the Farm. A little bittersweet though, for a last minute scare back in India saw my dad depart for India before the graduation ceremony. The four of us also went to Tahoe for some hiking — so pretty.

So what to do now? Brent and Abhi back at RTI were kind and let me do some part-time working on a project, so I worked on that while continuing the job search. For the past few months I (and tens of thousands of other soon-to-be-graduates) had been looking for job opportunities; startups, companies, or even new ventures. I eagerly sought out greentech companies, but the recurring line I got was “we think you’d be a good fit, but we want to wait 6/8/12 months before hiring because we’re not sure how our project load is going to be with the current recession.” Not very encouraging. The world was gray…I was between worlds. Still living in my on-campus apartment through the summer, but no longer a student. Not sure what or where I’d be in the next few months. In my heart I wanted to stay out in the Bay Area, but what if this application for a position at the renown National Renewable Energy Laboratory in the Boulder region of Colorado goes through?

Then, Joseph called me up and wanted to meet for dinner. Well, this was interesting. Over the next few weeks, I sought advice and perspective from everyone I spoke to. The advice that resonated with me the most: don’t undervalue the fact that you love working with the people there. That is actually a rare thing and appreciate it when you can.

A room for rent opened up in a Stanford friend’s house in Menlo Park, so I transitioned there for the fall while starting at Apple. I got consumed by work, and loved living with Troy, Michael, and (effectively) Karla. Troy was busy working on his iPhone app and writing his book, Mike converted to full-time as Box’s lead mobile developer, and our evenings routinely featured new recipes on the stove and hours of ping-pong. Talked hours of college football with Troy, Melih, and Matt. I got to see some of golf’s great players at the President’s Cup tournament with Melih and Matt too. My grandmother visited America and I visited home for Diwali. I decided that I would move up to the City, and started spending more weekends in the City. I was delighted by a day spent up in San Francisco with Peyton. In mid December, Dad got the call from India and was on a plane the next day for his hometown of Akola. A few days later, my grandmother passed away.

Finally, spent winter break back at home. Went out on the town with friends and had a terrific time for the 25th birthday, and got to see them more before the eventual return to California. It’s hard for me to describe the feeling of seeing and being with my friends back here; it’s like slipping on a favorite pair of well worn shoes after a long absence. They’ve been with you for countless miles, places, and situations, and will never let you down. It makes me feel like the luckiest person in the world.

So what’s next for 2010? I now feel good and confident about a few aspects of my life — I graduated from college (for real) and have a great job that I love. Now, while I love living with Mike and Troy, I’d like to find a place to live that I can feel more settled in. And finally, at the top of my goals for 2010, I want to finally start paying attention to my personal life. Although I’ve just hit the quarter-century milestone,  I know there is so much more I have yet to experience in life.

Now, let’s get to it.

Happy New Year and best wishes to everyone! Thanks for reading.