Out of Office is a new GeekWire series spotlighting the passions and hobbies that members of the Seattle-area tech community pursue outside of work.

• Name: Peter Lee.
• Day job: President, Microsoft Research. Lee leads the organization’s global labs and drives the incubation of new research-powered products in artificial intelligence, computing foundations, health, and life sciences.
• Out-of-office passion: Converting classic cars to electric.

When Peter Lee first started his research for a project to convert his replica 1955 Porsche 550 Spyder to electric, he used the AI model Davinci-003 (OpenAI’s early Chat GPT-4) for help with the engineering design.

When he explained to the AI what he wanted to do, the first response Lee got back was, “Why on earth would you want to ruin a beautiful classic car like that?” 

The head of Microsoft Research doesn’t just hear it from artificial intelligence. Now in the midst of converting another classic — a 1968 Ford Mustang GT Fastback — Lee is used to plenty of human car fanatics expressing their displeasure with his hobby.

“Half the people I’ve told about this project think it’s the coolest thing, and the other half think it’s totally evil,” Lee said. “One guy actually told me I’m never going to heaven.”

Lee, who joined Microsoft in 2010 and previously spent 22 years at Carnegie Mellon University, was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in health and life sciences in 2024. Cars have been a passion since he was a kid. He raced karts and Formula Ford, and was even a licensed auto body technician for a time.

Frustrated by fuel system issues with the Porsche in 2020, Lee connected with Marc Davis, founder of Moment Motor Co. in Austin, Texas, a shop that “transforms vintage head-turners into modern electric cars.” Moment is dedicated to “preserving the art and beauty” of classics like those owned by Lee.

Some classic car lovers are quick to criticize EV conversions for messing with the original gas-powered intent of manufacturers, pointing out that the cost alone makes it irresponsible. Davis said Moment’s work generates “plenty of vomit emojis” from purists on the company’s social media posts.

“I personally believe what we’re doing is preservation,” he said, pointing to projects in which people bring new life to a car that was their all-time favorite or something that their dad drove. (This Bloomberg video shows how the conversion process works.)

The cost of such a conversion can depend on car condition, size, and performance and range requirements from the owner, but Davis puts the ballpark between $50,000 and $150,000. That’s on top of a classic car that might cost $200,000. The Mustang project entails 100-150 hours of engineering work and 400-500 hours of installation work.

Lee is drawn to many of the benefits of going electric — no gas or oil to worry about, modern components, and explosive torque.

In the wet Pacific Northwest, Lee’s Porsche is garaged for the winter at a 50% charge. On the first nice day in the spring, there’s little to fuss with.

“I’ll just check the air in the tires, turn it on, and it’ll just go. And it’ll go fast. It’s really a wonderful, wonderful thing,” Lee said, adding that speeds in the Porsche, which is a replica of the model in which Hollywood icon James Dean died, can be “a little scary.”

With the Mustang, Lee is involved in decisions big and small, from what type of shift knob he might like, to whether to retain the solid rear axle.

“I put thought into this, especially when I was driving the car to get to know it,” Lee said. “I ended up thinking that the car wouldn’t be a Mustang anymore if we got rid of the live rear axle, and it turned out that Marc’s design choice was exactly the same.”

When it’s done, the Mustang will be a unique build, and one that Lee says will demand plenty of attention on the car show circuit.

Asked whether he has a third vehicle in mind to convert next, Lee laughed before considering his growing collection and his desire to possibly change over an old pickup truck.

“My wife isn’t around is she?” he said.

Most rewarding aspect of this pursuit: Lee loves that there are serious technical and design aspects of what he’s pursuing. In the case of the current project, he grapples with decisions that impact what it means for the car to still be a Mustang, and feel like a Mustang.

“The thing I’ve always loved about cars, and why I love to work on cars, is you actually finish something,” he said. “That never happens in software. Software’s never done. You might ship it, but you’re still working on it forever.”

Lee is also a believer in the growing business potential of converting classic cars to EV and he thinks it would be a thrill to be involved on the side with a company that’s doing such work.

“The whole idea of beautiful, classic-looking cars that have all the modern conveniences of being EV — I think that’s going to be a bigger and bigger thing,” he said.

The lessons he brings back to work: Lee has wanted to combine his passion around cars with his day job forever. Today, car technology and auto racing have become so technical that he now has fellow researchers at Microsoft who are generally interested as well.

He called cars “a great laboratory” for trying to understand action models — the AI systems designed to predict and determine the next best action an agent (like a robot or software) should take to achieve a specific goal.

At Microsoft Research, advancements in car software provide interesting ways to think about the architecture of an action model or training paradigms, with learnings that could impact what’s happening on your own computer.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if five years from now the ’68 Mustang conversion has more intelligence, more self-drive, more action model, more robotic capabilities,” Lee said. “I think you’ll see those things pop up even in your plain old Windows desktop over time.”

Read more Out of Office profiles.

Do you have an out-of-office hobby or interesting side hustle that you’re passionate about that would make for a fun profile on GeekWire? Drop us a line: tips@geekwire.com.

Out of Office is a new GeekWire series spotlighting the passions and hobbies that members of the Seattle-area tech community pursue outside of work.

• Name: Vivek Ladsariya.
• Day job: General partner and managing director at Seattle’s Pioneer Square Labs, where he helps create and invest in startups as a venture capital investor.
• Out-of-office passion: Cooking.

Growing up in India, food was a big part of the culture and something that Vivek Ladsariya was immersed in at home.

His family had a flour mill and would buy wheat grain to grind it into flour. He watched his mother and grandmother cook, and he ate and enjoyed their food.

“When I moved to the U.S., I missed it tremendously, and there was no real way to get some of that home food except to learn how to cook it,” Ladsariya said. “That’s when I started to really learn how to cook all of those things, because I needed that food to consume. So, it was very much born out of necessity.”

His taste and skill goes beyond making the dishes he loved as a boy. He makes pastas and Taiwanese food. He likes to slow cook meat or use his fancy pizza oven. During a recent potluck lunch he made scallion pancakes.

Ladsariya and his wife cook every meal at home, and with a 7-week-old daughter, he finds himself “wearing” her around the kitchen while he’s cooking, encouraging her to taste what he’s making.

During the pandemic while living in San Francisco, Ladsariya got the chance to work in two restaurants — Merchant Roots and Sushi Hakko — to stay busy while his wife was working her healthcare job.

“I think that’s when my cooking game really elevated,” he said. “Up until then I enjoyed cooking, but I’d create a mess. Then I got really organized in the kitchen. I became really efficient.”

With a friend, Ladsariya also put together a pop-up restaurant in which they spent two months researching and prepping a menu and cooking for guests over three days. The proceeds went to charity, and Ladsariya called it one of the favorite times of his life. It’s a process he plans to repeat in Seattle.

But Ladsariya, who enjoys hosting smaller dinners for startup founders, has no plans to leave his day job for a life in the kitchen.

“You’re standing on your feet the entire day and you are unbelievably exhausted,” he said. “I think it’d get old really quickly, and I’d lose the love for this.”

Most rewarding aspect of this pursuit: Ladsariya said that his day job is so high level and “in the brain” that it can sometimes can be abstract and lacking in the real-time feedback that he gets from working with his hands.

“I just fell in love with that aspect of cooking,” he said. “Everything you do is right there, you get the evidence of whether you did it well or not right away. The effort, the reward — that loop is just so instant and real and gratifying to work with your hands.”

And it’s not about feeding himself. For Ladsariya, the joy of cooking comes from feeding others.

“It’s the bringing people together, the community and all of that that food enables,” he said. “I’m able to provide a great meal and bring together people with something that scratches my creative desires.”

The lessons he brings back to work: Ladsariya finds a connection between how he thinks about cooking and how he thinks about startups.

“Cooking is really about high quality ingredients and not messing it up,” he said. “More often than not, bad food comes from bad ingredients. And I think the same is true for startups. As long as you have a good group of people, they can do something good. People are the ingredients of startup building.”

Furthermore, whether it’s a dish he’s never made or a startup idea that’s especially daunting, it’s best not to overthink things and just do it.

“It’s easy to be intimidated and say, ‘Oh, I have no idea how to do that or where to even start,'” Ladsariya said. “But with a little bit of research and work and just committing to it, you can do pretty incredible things.”

Read more Out of Office profiles.

Do you have an out-of-office hobby or interesting side hustle that you’re passionate about that would make for a fun profile on GeekWire? Drop us a line: tips@geekwire.com.

Out of Office is a new GeekWire series spotlighting the passions and hobbies that members of the Seattle-area tech community pursue outside of work.

• Name: Maksim Surguy.

• Day job: Senior design technologist for Amazon Devices, working on concepts for new devices or new features on existing devices, such as Fire TV, Alexa, and Echo smart speakers.

• Out-of-office passion: Using machines to create art.

Before he pursued a bachelor’s degree in computer science, Maksim Surguy made an initial — and brief — run at a bachelor’s in art.

“Two weeks later, I realized that I suck at art and I switched to computer science,” he laughed.

Fourteen years after completing his education at California State University, Fullerton, Surguy has found happiness and success in marrying the two disciplines, as a technologist and an artist in Seattle.

“My sketching is not to the level that I want, so instead I use code to create artwork,” he said in describing the “robot art” that occupies his free time.

Surguy not only relies on machines to generate his artwork, he creates the software tools that facilitate such art, whether the finished pieces exist as digital NFTs or as physical works such as pen plotter drawings made via scalable vector graphics.

“I spend a lot more time making the tools than actually using them,” Surguy said. “But other people use them to actually make something. So I enjoy both sides of this.”

Surguy is a 2018 graduate of the University of Washington’s Master of Science in Technology Innovation (MSTI), a program at the UW’s Global Innovation Exchange (GIX) — a joint initiative of the College of Engineering and Foster School of Business.

For a hardware/software project, he created a 3D-printed drawing machine with his own electronics program. During the process, he couldn’t find a community for like-minded people who make such things. So he started DrawingBots, a website/Discord that’s attracted thousands of artists and engineers.

Surguy was born and raised in Ukraine and was an accomplished breakdancer who competed as a professional in Eastern Europe when he was younger. He moved to the U.S. in 2004.

He’s been at Amazon for six years and his artwork has been displayed in the company’s headquarters buildings, in public exhibitions — including at Seattle’s NFT Museum, and on his website and social media channels. He’s also written extensively about technology.

And in the blurring space between human and AI-created artwork, he’s leaning further into technology.

“I use AI for a lot of things, and especially now with code, it makes it easier to create tools that are custom and specific for whatever use case,” Surguy said. “I just open-sourced one last weekend. It’s a tool that allows artists to preview their artwork, how it’s going to look before they make it on paper. So it saves them time and money and art supplies.”

Most rewarding aspect of this pursuit: Surguy most enjoys the growing community he helped foster around the tools and art he makes.

“I got to know thousands of people that do this kind of stuff and are very interesting people,” he said. “Some of them were TED speakers. Some of them are PhDs, very well known researchers, scientists, artists. I had conversations with all of these people and consider some of them my friends. So that’s the most rewarding part.”

The lessons he brings back to work: “This kind of procedural and algorithmic art definitely has a place in making products that are digital experiences,” Surguy said of the connection between his hobby and his work at Amazon.

For example, his Devices team launched a dynamic art feature for Fire TV: a screen saver that created artwork on the fly based on data such as weather, time of day, and other inputs.

Surguy said the ideas he generates outside of work serve as inspiration for what he creates at work, whether it’s creative coding or simply expanding the boundaries of what he makes and how he makes it.

Read more Out of Office profiles.

Do you have an out-of-office hobby or interesting side hustle that you’re passionate about that would make for a fun profile on GeekWire? Drop us a line: tips@geekwire.com.