The Representative

India's Youth News Tank

The Person who rejected an offer from Elon Musk

2 min read
Jay Vijayan tekion

Will you believe me if I tell you that Elon Musk went to a person and gave him the role of CIO of Tesla and that person rejected it? Sounds incredulous right? What if I say this person not only exists but is also from India? This person is Mr. Jay Vijayan, founder of a unicorn, Tekion.

Jay hails from Tamil Nadu and was the son of a politician. Unlike many politicians, Jay’s father asked him not to enter politics but get a salaried job instead. Jay studied geology from the hollowed Presidency College in Chennai. While doing a master’s in Applied geology, computers caught his interest. He started taking a few computer science diploma courses at NIIT. His father started a company that teaches computer courses. Jay worked there for a while in many roles but the company had to be wound up and he was left with a huge soon. He worked for a few days in Oman and then moved to Singapore.

While he was in Singapore, he did many advanced certifications in oracle. Soon enough, he was offered a role by Oracle in USA. He was promoted to senior manager and he was finally able to pay off his debt fully. While he was in Oracle, he gained expertise in ERP and felt that the solutions out there are not ideal. In 2007, Jay left Oracle and moved to VMware where he reached the level of Senior Director. This is when he got the first call from Tesla to join them. But Tesla was unable to match Jay’s pay at VMware, so he refused to join. One year later, he got another offer from Tesla. He had a chat with Elon Musk and liked his vision. He took a pay cut and joined Tesla. He rose to the position of CIO.

Working at Tesla has given Jay a lot of knowledge on problems in the automobile industry. He left Tesla in 2016 and set up his venture, Tekion Corp, a technology company integrating the experience of customers, manufacturers and dealers and is currently focused on transforming the automotive industry. In 2019, the company launched its flagship Automotive Retail Cloud platform, which is the first end-to-end dealer management system on the cloud. Tekion, raised $150 million as part of its Series C financing led by private equity firm Advent International round at over $1 billion valuation, becoming a unicorn in less than four years.

Will Tekion revolutionize the automotive industry? Let’s wait and watch

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