In this episode, Sunny Ray sits down with longtime friend and former colleague Leor Grebler to trace his winding path from a struggling aerospace engineering student in Ottawa to a key figure at Quanser, a robotics and mechatronics company where the two first met and worked together for years. Leor recounts his rocky academic career at Carleton University, an unglamorous stint doing cold call sales at IBM, and a string of quirky side hustles including reselling used Sega Genesis games and a Virgin Mary grilled cheese sandwich maker. He credits mentors like Seth Godin and Tim Ferriss for shaping how he thinks about presentations, experimentation, and business. The conversation revisits early Quanser road trips to Silicon Valley, a formative call with Wired's Chris Anderson about open source hardware, and the mindset shifts that eventually pushed Leor toward building his own ventures. The episode offers a candid, humorous look at failure, mentorship, and the unconventional road that eventually led Leor into robotics and later Bitcoin.
Leor Grebler traces his path from failed aerospace dreams and cold calling to robotics and an unlikely Bitcoin journey.
What's your story, going back as far as you want?
I'm from Ottawa, the youngest of four, and took several victory laps to finish my aerospace engineering degree at Carleton. I moved to Toronto for my now wife, worked several startups doing sales, then IBM, and eventually landed at Quanser during a downturn. That job became a dream role, letting me visit cutting edge robotics labs worldwide and surround myself with brilliant people working on things years ahead of their time.
What made you switch from aerospace engineering to sales?
I was awful at engineering. I only chose aerospace for the impressed reactions people gave me, then I'd admit I took four years to do it in six and a half. I loved drawing airplanes and rockets in high school, but that was the extent of my technical ability. I doodled through class instead of learning, so business and sales made more sense afterward.
What was doing sales at IBM like?
It sounded impressive but wasn't. I did inside sales lead generation for small businesses in southern Ohio and northern Kentucky, cold calling pig farms to sell WebSphere servers costing six figures. It felt like being back in elementary school, working in a pod of dialers, dangling a 'reg ticket' as incentive to become a regular employee. It was a strange, almost Kafka like experience.
Can you explain what Quanser does for listeners who don't know?
Quanser is a robotics and mechatronics company that builds teaching and research equipment for engineering schools, like inverted pendulum and DC motor experiments used in control systems courses. Ironically, control systems was the class I struggled with most in school, needing five attempts across two courses, so working there felt like unexpected therapy for that old academic wound.
How did Seth Godin influence you?
A former coworker introduced me to Seth Godin, and his idea that good presentations use six words per slide or fewer changed how I pitched things at Quanser. He also emphasized building remarkable products people talk about instead of relying on marketing. I became a voracious reader of his work, including Purple Cow, during a slow period after first moving to Toronto.
What about Tim Ferriss, did he have a big impact too?
Huge impact. The Four Hour Work Week got me thinking about building businesses that didn't require constant personal engagement, and it introduced me to outsourcing platforms like Elance. Combined with ideas from A.J. Jacobs about living experimentally, it pushed me to constantly run side experiments, from real estate to reselling old video games to a Virgin Mary grilled cheese sandwich maker.
Tell me about the call with Chris Anderson and open source UAVs.
We set up a call while Quanser was doing UAV work, and Chris, who ran a side project in open source drones alongside his Wired job, basically told us his goal was to put companies like ours out of business. It stemmed from his long tail thesis, that free and open information would eventually outcompete traditional closed products, which was unsettling to hear at the time.
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