Joshua Mao
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley (37.8° N, 122.2° W)

conversation with Vivas Kumar,Tesla, San Francisco (37.7° N, 122.4° W)

Vivas Kumar is a member of Tesla’s Battery Team, where he leads negotiations for contracts for Tesla’s battery raw materials supply chain. He graduated from Rice University in 2014 with Electrical and Computer Engineering degree. Upon graduation, he first joined McKinsey & Company in management consulting and later arrived at Tesla in 2016. While in college, Vivas joined Engineers Without Borders-USA and stayed active many years. His dedication to the organization led him to serve as a member of the board of directors and as chief of staff to the executive director, where he was involved in decision-making and represented the organization in national and international public speaking engagements.

Highlights from the Interview

What led to your current position?

For my role right now, they wanted somebody with a good mix of both technical skills, aptitude for learning highly technical content, as well as somebody who has sort of seen the business world. Somebody who is pretty comfortable around negotiating contracts, putting together proposals for suppliers, conducting mostly business meetings with executives and suppliers. I filled both of those roles pretty well. One, because I have an engineering background, the second is, because of my experience as a management consultant, I did have some of this business background that was necessary to succeed in the role.

What does your position mostly entail of doing? What do you do during a normal day of your job?

I work at the battery supply chain team. My team is responsible for sourcing all of the materials and commodities that you would need to make batteries. If you think about Tesla as a company, the one element that is consistent across almost all of the products, it’s that batteries are used for energy storage. When I talk about materials, I’m talking about like lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite… literally just base earth metals that are used to make batteries. My job is to negotiate contracts with suppliers, mostly for lithium, but also help with the other commodities. In terms of my day-to-day, I’m only here at the office about 50% of the time. And I’m traveling basically all over the world for the other 50%. And when I am travelling, it’s mostly doing negotiations with suppliers or doing supplier visits. Whenever I’m in town, it’s usually all about progressing contracts with our lawyers, doing executive reviews, and making sure that I still stay plugged in with the company as a whole. Because there’s a lot more going on beyond our small battery team.

Do you find it difficult to adapt constantly to these changing cultures and the way you have to act? 

It’s a skill that you don’t learn in school in classrooms. It’s a skill that you have to learn solely through interactions and solely over time. I think that it’s actually one of the most fun parts of the job. I’ve always been very comfortable in many different geographies. I’ve lived in the US now for 10 years. And I was educated here, have done business here, I speak Spanish and Portuguese, so you could send me to South America and I would be able to fit in. I’m Asian. I’ve lived in Asia for most of my life. I can do business all over Asia and feel very comfortable. And if you think about the fact that we have a global supply chain for better materials, the fact that I have this background that’s very global, combined with my desire to want to travel extensively, combined with the fact that the job requires it, made me a good match for the job.

Do you use your engineering background? Because it seems like a lot of what you are doing is mainly business and management related. So does your engineering background help in any way?

I think the importance of the engineering background is not in any one formula that I use or not in any one thing that I can point to from when I was a junior in XYZ class. I think it’s just the mentality. Being able to break down a big problem into smaller problems, iteratively …Getting to a solution iteratively. Problem solving collectively, learning the ability to learn new skills and new concepts very fast… These are all skills that I learned through engineering, and I think that those are the lessons that matter most coming out of engineering school. Not necessarily things like “this is a formula that means that the heat transfer coefficient, etc.” You have Google to look up all of them for you.

Are there any misconceptions about your job?

I think that the misconception about a company like Tesla is that it’s a very engineering-heavy, engineering-focused, engineering-first type of company. The truth of the matter is that engineering is the easy part. We have enough technical talent to figure out how to make the most efficient car or the cheapest car or the lightest car. The tough part comes in convincing consumers to switch from internal combustion to electric vehicles, convincing governments that they should be changing their policies to an electric vehicle future. Convincing other businesses to work with us. Convincing people is always the really tough part and you need more than just engineering talent to be able to solve those types of problems.

What inspires you to work hard everyday?

I think the enormity of the problems that are being solved here, and the fact that we have a mission that is very tied to humanity’s success in the long-term, is what inspires me to get out of bed in the morning.

Knowing that not only me but everyone in the company is aligned around a big mission. A mission that is much larger than ourselves. That pulls you forward. That pulls you out of the rut.

You were very active with Engineers Without Borders and now you work at Tesla. What are some of the differences you’ve experienced while working at both for-profit and nonprofit environments?

I would say that in for-profit things happen faster. In nonprofits, usually you’re trying to solve problems that are much more long-term.

What is the culture at Engineers Without Borders and Tesla?

The nice thing is what unites both of these places is the fact that everybody is aligned around a mission to solve a problem that is much greater than themselves. And that results in culture where people value getting closer and closer to an answer or closer and closer to a resolution and it creates and environment as close to a meritocracy that you can get. It increases the collaborativeness of the workplace.

Is there anything that excites you about the future of these two organizations?

I’d say that generally in technology, technological improvements across all facets of our lives, the development cycle is becoming shorter and shorter. Even just in my lifetime, and I’m a pretty young person. Like I remember a time before the internet. I remember a time very vividly before the internet was something that everybody had access to, and now it’s like not even a question to have access to the internet. I think that there are more and more technologies like that that are up-and-coming. That’s what excites me. There’s no one individual thing that excites me. Just the general theme.

Throughout your career or your life, what were some of the most memorable experiences that helped you develop as who you are today?

I would say, going to my first Engineers Without Borders trips when I was in college completely changed the way I viewed the profession of engineering—how it’s a profession of service and it can be used to solve really pressing problems in humanity. Moving to America was a big deal, obviously, for any immigrant. I mean, I still remember very vividly my childhood in Singapore so moving to America was a big deal just because it showed me just how big the world is and just how different people are from around the world. I think given the opportunity to work at Tesla was a big deal because the fact that I’ve never been in an environment before where I’m surrounded by so many people that are so aligned around a mission. Where that energy just feeds off of everybody else.

Do you have any advice for college students?

I would say that college is a great time to explore.  I think unfortunately what’s happening nowadays is people are being forced to have to make decisions about what they want to do with their life earlier and earlier. It happens in very small ways, like internships recruit earlier or you have to pick graduate schools earlier, you have to pick research earlier. The thing about college is it is like a boot camp that shepherds you through its one path, going about it in a way that limits your ability to fully take from the experience what you should take. Use college as an opportunity to try out many different things; after college, you will be shocked at how few opportunities you have for exploration. Most of the world is people who show up to their desk and go to work on their specific job. And go home and rinse and repeat every single day. They don’t have the liberty to explore different ideas and different passions that you do now as a college student.

If you were to hire someone, what kind of qualities would you look for?

I think the one thing that matters above everything else is having a good attitude. You could have the smartest person but if they’re going to show up and they’re going to be disrespectful, they’re not going to get anything accomplished. But if you have somebody who is willing to learn, and admits that even … even if they admit that they may not know everything, they’re willing to learn… That person is more likely to succeed in the longer term in life. The second one is somebody who wants to solve problems actively. Who enjoys the idea of solving problems and who doesn’t get overwhelmed by the idea of solving problems. And the third is somebody who appreciates diversity of thought and diversity of culture. We’re increasingly living in a globalized world, increasingly businesses—they are much more international, much more global phenomenon. Someone who is just focused on a specific segment for a specific sector and is unwilling to think outside of that segment or sector is unlikely to succeed in the long term in our increasingly globalized world.

How do you define success in college and also after college?

In terms of success in college, I think that there’s a lot of myopia in people who think that “I will succeed in college if I get to this graduate school,” or “I will succeed in college if I get this job,” or “I will succeed in college if I check these boxes and get this GPA.” Because nobody really cares about that stuff after you graduate. What they do care about, what I do care about, is the fact that coming out of college I had a strong network of mentors, a huge group of friends who are all over the world now, and I truly feel like I had the chance to explore multiple opportunities in an academic environment that I would not have had the chance to do so outside of that environment.

And the answer for outside of college is, as you grow older, you start to realize pretty quickly that there are a lot of things that are more personal that matter a lot more to you. So, for example, when you’re not in an environment where you’re measured by grades anymore, it is up to you to develop your own scorecard for your life because nobody else is going to come and say, “if you do XYZ you’re going to get an A at life.” You have to, so, the hard part that people struggle with is they’ve gone from optimizing to somebody else’s scorecard to having to optimize toward your own scorecard, and people go a really long time in life before they realize that they didn’t spend enough time developing the scorecard themselves. So the precursor to being successful in life outside of college is to develop the scorecard for success, and the only way that you do that is if you know what your values are.

(Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee.)