The The I'm your host, Brian McCullough.

Mark Tarpening, along with Martin Eberhard, was the co-founder of Tesla Motors all the way back in 2003.

But before that, Tarpening and Eberhard were also the co-founders of Nouveau Media, which produced one of the world's

first ever e-book devices, the Rocket e-book.

So for the first part of this great episode, Mark recounts the story of

Nouveau Media and then about 25 minutes in we begin the founding of Tesla which is in my opinion perhaps the most amazing startup story of the last 20 years.

Very rarely have we spoken to an entrepreneur who has so completely disrupted two completely different analog industries as Mark has been

privileged to do in his career. So please enjoy this conversation with Mark Tarpening.

Mark Tarpening, thanks for coming on the Internet History Podcast.

My pleasure.

I want to, there's so much I want to cover with you today,

so I only want to dip briefly into the early

part of your career but I believe early on in your career you worked at a lot of

disc drive startups is that right? Yeah well actually you know when I I graduated Berkeley in

86 and and then they're 85 I guess and then I ended up going to Saudi Arabia

for years so I was I was orbiting the planet every six to 12 weeks.

I had round the world tickets, actually.

I really did orbit the planet doing work on computers in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia. And when I came back to Silicon Valley I ended

up in the way that Silicon Valley works I was at a party and one of the people there worked at a

this drive company, a startup, stealth, the drive company and they said, oh you know we

were looking for somebody you got to come and come just check us out and then I

ended up working there for a couple of years.

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