What was the most important lesson you learned while developing the Tesla Roadster battery? originally appeared on Quora, the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.

I worked on building a solar-powered car during my undergrad at Stanford, and it was during that time that I fell in love with energy. At the end of my junior year at Stanford, one of the alums that I had worked with on the solar car project was looking for engineers to join a startup that no one had ever heard of at the time. I made a decision to drop out of Stanford and join Tesla as employee #7 and did that for 4 years.

At Tesla, we were essentially pioneering a product for the future, and in the beginning, there were a lot of challenges in developing the battery for the Roadster. We started by super gluing computer batteries together to make a battery pack for the car in JB Straubel’s garage. There were a lot of elements to think about: from safety to process to efficiency. One of the biggest technical challenges was to make sure that the cells were safe; we had to develop a system to ensure that random failures of a battery would not propagate into any neighboring cells or battery pack. It took more than a few iterations, but we finally got the battery pack to where it needed to be and launched the Roadster.

The lesson: both of those experiences – building the solar car without oversight and developing the Roadster battery – taught me that in order to do new-to-the-world things, you have to be extremely self-reliant and build a culture of self-reliance. When you’re working on an idea that is just beyond the edge of what people believe is solvable, the world isn’t going to be very helpful, but along the way, you’ll attract incredible talent who want to work on things that no one else in the world has done before.

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