335: Building the Connected Car Before the iPhone with Allen Nejah

https://youtu.be/a3c1oxvhgMc Allen Nejah, CEO and System Solution Architect of SunMan Engineering, is driven by a lifelong passion for aerospace, invention, and solving complex engineering problems. From dreaming of becoming an astronaut as a child to working with major aerospace, defense, automotive, medical, robotics, IoT, and semiconductor organizations, Allen has built a career around turning ambitious technical ideas into real-world systems. We explore The Allen Nejah Engineering Framework — Live with Integrity, Be Intensely Curious, Get Organized, Plan Every Baby Step, and Learn from Mistakes — a practical mindset for building breakthrough technologies with discipline and resilience. Allen explains why integrity must exist not only in business relationships but also in the engineering itself, how complex projects must be broken into testable steps, and why curiosity, visualization, planning, and iteration are essential to solving problems across industries. He also shares the story behind InfiniGear, his AI-powered adaptive transmission system, and the healthcare technology inspired by his mother’s experience in assisted care. — Building the Connected Car Before the iPhone with Allen Nejah  Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Allen Nejah, the CEO and System Solution Architect of SunMan Engineering, dedicated to providing customers with high-quality, on-time engineering and on-budget solutions for their product development and prototyping needs. Allen, welcome to the show.  Yes, that is correct.  Great to have you on the show. And I’d like to ask you my favorite first question: What is your personal ‘Why,’ and how are you manifesting it in your business?  So Steve, first I want to thank you for having me on your podcast. I really appreciate your time and interest. Of course.  As a kid, for whatever reason, I always wanted to have an airplane manufacturing company, an aircraft manufacturing company—something I always wanted to have. And I always wanted to be an astronaut. As a matter of fact, I studied aerospace and mechanical engineering with the dream of being an astronaut, going to fly and all that. So that’s kind of something that’s still in my pocket and that I still want to do. From there, it kind of pushed me in this direction. And yeah, now I work with a number of different companies in the aerospace industry. I work with the Air Force. I’ve worked with Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and a number of others. And I work on both space and aviation projects that really kind of bring my dream to life. So I still haven’t gone to outer space yet, but I still have a little more time.  Yeah. Elon Musk is promising a million people, and his bonus is linked to putting a million people on Mars as the first colony. So there may still be room there.  They need a lot of us to go there, trust me. Well, actually, we’re going to do a lot of activities on the Moon first, and then from there, I’m sure they’re going to be looking for older people, older men, to do some tasks over there. And I’d volunteer to go.  You may be familiar with the Mars trilogy—Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars. It talks about people moving to Mars and how they terraform it. And then they figure out how to extend life to 150, 200 years. So if that works out, then maybe there’s another lifetime to be lived on Mars.  Yeah. I definitely believe that we will end up living on other planets, for sure. I see that very clearly. It could be 50 years or more before we actually become a space-based civilization. But the Moon has already started, right? We’re going to be there in the next 5 to 10 years, trust me. So anyway, I’m very excited about that. Yes.  Yeah, it is very exciting. What I’m looking for on this podcast—what makes it kind of unique—is that I am a junkie for frameworks and mental models. We are almost 400 episodes in, and every episode has a different mental model that our guest comes up with or shares. So think about something that helped you build your business, or maybe helped you develop your products, or how you work with your engineers, or how you work with clients. So think about something that has three to five steps or three to five aspects that create a result.  That’s very clear to me. Those are the key things for any successful person. First of all, honestly, you have to be interested. You have to be in “go” mode. You cannot push somebody to start building something, like a building or actual construction, if their mind is not into it. The very first thing is, it’s got to be you. That’s number one, right? And you know it. Definitely organization is a very key factor for me. Being organized, being detail-oriented—that’s something that is super, super important. Planning and organization make a huge difference in whatever you do, right? And most importantly, integrity. I mean, that’s number one. That’s number one, number two, number three, number four—all of it.  So integrity is all of it. No matter what you do, if there’s no integrity, people will walk away from you. At the beginning, every business makes mistakes, and they learn and so on. So don’t beat yourself up. It’s okay. You make a mistake, you learn from it, and then you don’t do it again, right? Learn from it. So yeah, I would say those are at least three. If anything else comes to mind, I definitely will share it with you. But the most important things are integrity, organization, and clear planning based on knowledge. Not just planning for the hell of it, but planning based on understanding what you’re doing. That’s important. Integrity comes into your personality. It comes into the quality of the work you do.  It comes into the engineering you do. It comes into all of that, right? Even in engineering, it’s not only on the personal level that integrity has to be there. On the engineering level, integrity has to be there too. Whatever you do, you’ve got to make sure it’s working. One of the things we learned the hard way after 35 or 36 years is that it’s very important to have the knowledge base and to do things in a very organized way. And that’s kind of part of my personality. If I’m not confident about the end result, I don’t even commit to it. I’ve got to see it in my mind. Whatever problem comes up, if I don’t see the solution in my mind, I won’t even commit to it. It comes back to quality, integrity, and all of that. And I guess what I was going to say earlier is that everything that we do—as part of, again, the quality and integrity I mentioned—is that we have a lot of baby steps built into the process.  That’s what I wanted to say earlier. So for every step, the whole plan is split into, I don’t know, tens, hundreds, or thousands of different steps and branches. Because technology is not one thing. It’s usually a combination of different sciences. So mechanical engineering, electronics, material science, firmware, AI—those are all different types of expertise. And you’ve got to bring them all together. And for all of those baby steps, you’ve got to have some sort of test at the end of each step before you move on to the next one. Iteration.  Yeah. So, okay, what I’m hearing is integrity is number one. And then curiosity, perhaps. So curiosity is this driving force. Visualization is important. I’m thinking about Einstein, who said that imagination is more important than knowledge because imagination is infinite, while knowledge encircles the world. I think it was something like that. So visualization is important. Get organized. Do thorough planning. And learn from mistakes.  Yes. Absolutely. Okay.  That’s great. So what do you call this? Is this the Allen Nejah Framework, or what’s it called?  One more thing. One more thing. Again, that’s kind of under the umbrella of integrity. So I have two families. It’s one family. I have a family at home, and I have a family at work. And believe it or not—and you already know this—we all spend more time with our family at work than with our family at home. That’s true. It’s true for me. It’s true for a lot of people. You go to work, I don’t know, from 8:00, 9:00, or 10:00 in the morning until 5:00, 6:00, 7:00, 8:00, or 9:00 at night. That’s almost 12 hours. And by the time you go home at 5:00, 6:00, or 7:00, what? You spend two hours with your family, maybe three hours at most, and then it’s back to work. So the team is part of my family, and truly it is part of my family. Those are the first group of people, the first group of associates, that you have to take care of.  You have to be a brother to them, be a friend to them, be a father to them, be a mother to them. Seriously, it’s all about human interaction. It’s all about, “I like you, I don’t like you,” and it goes from there. “I feel good about you. I don’t feel good about you.” And so it’s very important to have those relationships in your business, or whatever it is you do. For me, all our people, all our employees—even from 35 years ago—are still in touch with us. I have kids who came through as junior-high interns, then high-school interns, then university students, even master’s degree students. Now they’re 40 years old. And we’re still in touch. So I’m in touch with hundreds of engineers and people that I’ve worked with over the past 35 years. And that’s a lot of value. That’s the biggest asset.  Yeah. Basically, they call it a school. You create a school, right? Your own professional school. That’s wonderful. So tell me about this special gear called InfiniGear. How is it special? How did you come up with it, and how is it being used? It’s an interesting question. First of all, let me explain to you very quickly what I-Gear is. So I-Gear is an AI robotic adaptive gearbox, or transmission, and that’s a mechanical transmission. It’s not an electronic transmission. It’s an actual mechanical gearbox that goes into any machinery or equipment. I mean, obviously, the one that everybody can relate to immediately is cars. Every car—not EV cars, but every car—has a transmission. A transmission usually is bigger than the engine. It’s heavier than the engine. It’s the guy that goes through all the center of the car, takes all that center, okay?  That’s it—a transmission. It’s big, it’s heavy. By the way, it’s amazing how it works. It’s absolutely amazing how it works if anybody gets into a transmission and sees all of it. There are about 300 to 400 gear sets in there. There are about six or seven clutches. There’s about 3,000 to 4,000 parts in a standard transmission. So that’s why it’s so big and so heavy. The efficiency is so low because all these gears have to be interacting with each other. As a matter of fact, believe it or not, the transmission efficiency is only 50%. So it’s actually as low as you can get. But you have to have a transmission in the car. If you have no transmission in the car—I’m talking about ICE cars with an engine—they’re not even able to drive because the engine has no initial power and no initial RPM.  The AI transmission, the robotic transmission that I have invented, and that we have developed over five to seven years— Since 2017 or ’18 we’ve been working on it. It’s a gearbox that has only two gears versus 200 to 300 gears, and it’s one-fourth or one-fifth of the size. And also, while your standard transmission has five or six or seven or eight gears in your car, this has unlimited gears, okay? And it’s AI, so it can see what’s going on with the road, what the weather is, and all combinations of conditions. If you’re going onto a hillside, it’s already going to shift for you, so it saves energy. So that’s what we have developed. It’s a robotic transmission.  Right now, we’re actually talking to the U.S. Army, and they have some interest. We are at a very initial stage with them. And it’s kind of difficult to bring it into the market because it’s a safety factor, and there are a lot of requirements and tests that have to go into it before we can actually get it into trucks and cars. To summarize the benefit, if you put that transmission into an EV, we can increase the range by 40%, which is huge. A company that can improve a battery by 1% gets millions of dollars thrown at it. Once we can prove that this is working and pass some tests and so on, it’s going to be very huge. Wow. When do you expect this to happen?  I’m hoping within the next two years. Hopefully, by the end of those two years, we make it home and get it into cars and trucks and commercialize it.  Then you will turn into a unicorn—a big unicorn, right?  Yeah. Again, EVs are only one application. There are wind turbines, tanks, boats, some aircraft, and helicopters. A helicopter’s transmission is half the size of the helicopter itself, so the weight and everything else become very significant. So if we can eliminate that weight and size, we can gain a lot. Especially in vehicles, it makes a huge difference and all that.  Wow. That’s probably something that drones would benefit from too. Yeah. It’s mind-boggling. So what drives growth in your business other than your inventions?  So at SunMan Engineering, we have two arms. One arm is that we provide engineering services, product architecture, and product development to other companies—small companies, mid-size companies, and bigger companies like IBM, Sony, Samsung, and Apple. We have about 300 or 400 of those clients. And we also work with government agencies and contractors like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Kaiser Electronics, just to name a few. We have also had contracts directly with the Army and the Navy in the past. And that’s what we’re trying to do now—to gain some of those projects again. And InfiniGear, the I-Gear, could be a project that, fingers crossed, we’d be working on with the U.S. Army. So that’s one arm of what we do. The other arm is that we develop new technologies. We develop them, work on them, and then license them, or let our clients utilize them in some of their projects through partnerships and so on.  So you’re a service company as well as a product company?  Yes. We are a systems and product company. We’re considered a systems and product company, yes.  Now, do you call this systems integration? In the IT world, they used to call it systems integration when you had different systems and—  We are more than systems integrators. Systems integrators buy different technologies and put them together. It’s still engineering, don’t get me wrong. Yeah. You still have to engineer everything and put it together. But what we do is actually customize things from the ground up. Sometimes we do integration because it’s faster, easier, and sometimes cheaper. Some of the components and some of the functionality can be integrated. But generally, we customize every project from the ground up. And generally, for your information, we cater to aerospace, robotics, and IoT. IoT is communication—all sorts of wireless and different types of communication: Wi-Fi, 5G, Bluetooth, all sorts of stuff, right? And also medical. So medical, robotics, aerospace, IoT, and also semiconductors, which also serve these different industries.  So how is it possible? I mean, you have a relatively small team, right? Fifteen people or so?  Twenty-seven, twenty-eight people.  Twenty-seven. Okay, sorry.  Yeah. With a small team.That’s exactly the very first question you asked me. That’s exactly how it affects and how it comes into the picture. Being organized—I mean, we’ve done this so many times. It’s like we make things so efficient because we already have a plan. Every project we do, in concept, is the same thing. The process is the same. The application is different, but the process is the same. So going through that process and having a very reliable process in place that we follow very religiously makes us super, super efficient. And also, being small, we don’t have to go through a number of different layers. Everything comes to one or two people, gets approved, and we get it going. Everything happens the same day. Nothing waits until the next day here.  Are you involved in every project?  Fortunately and unfortunately, I’m involved in every project. And one of my goals is to eventually focus on fewer projects so I’d be more effective and efficient. So that’s one of my goals for the next few years. I-Gear is one of them, and we’re also working on another project. It’s for healthcare, it’s for the elderly and infants. Eventually it’s going to be a robot, but right now we’re making the device that is the brain of the robot. So it gets to know the person, it gets to know their habits, it gets to know everything about the person, about their family, about their health, about how they behave. We can remind them of different things. We can assist them with different things. We can watch them. We can emotionally work with them. There are so many different applications that we’re working on now. We can even do preventive diagnostics.  What “preventive diagnostics” means is that before the patient or the person gets sick or develops some sort of disease, we can actually identify it before that happens. That’s great. And that’s the most important part of this device. It has so many different applications and different ways it can help and assist an elderly person. And within the next two or three years, my goal is to integrate this into a robot. So we’re going to have a robot that physically helps you as well. My mother ended up in one of those care centers, and I saw how much she was declining on a daily basis—not weekly, not monthly, but daily.  And there was nothing, unfortunately, that I or any member of our family could do. I mean, we were there every day, don’t get me wrong, but that’s all we could do for her. We’re all busy. We all have lives. I mean, we were there almost every day, but really, she did not get the care that she needed. And that’s what kind of put me in that frame of mind—how can I help someone like my mom? And that’s how it started about two years ago. And as a matter of fact, now it’s one of the biggest markets. Yeah. It’s one of the biggest. So that’s fascinating. So how can you have so mental bandwidth that you can cover different industries, go deep into different industries, and innovate and invent stuff? How does that even happen?  Honestly, I personally work pretty much 12 hours a day. Even on my vacations, I work. Don’t get me wrong, I have a very good life. I work hard and I play hard. I am a very active person. I played as a semi-professional soccer player until I was 58 years old, believe it or not. Actually, next week I’m going to be 65. I still can play. I still can go and compete with 25- and 30-year-old kids, and I still do good, I think. So I keep myself in very good shape. I do mountain biking. I do about 10 to 15 hours of heavy-duty exercise on a weekly basis, and that kind of balances what I’m doing. To answer your question, yes, it’s too much, but yeah, we have to spend more time. There is no magic to it. Sometimes it gets to be too much, but I like what I’m doing, so I enjoy it.  Yeah, it shows. Elon Musk is also an example of being able to run six big companies in different areas and be a groundbreaker. But you’re doing something very similar. You are breaking ground in different industries.  Yeah. Actually, as I mentioned, I have established different startups and sold them. I have worked on a number of different companies and technologies. As a matter of fact, back in 2005, I brought a whole bunch of different technologies to cars. Any type of car you drive—I don’t care what it is—almost everything in the dash belongs to technologies that we developed from 2005 to 2008. There are some videos and some information on my LinkedIn. I invite people, including yourself, to look into it. The stuff we did back then was in 2005. The iPhone only came out in 2007. We came out with these technologies between 2005 and 2008. Back then, we had Genie. Today they have Alexa and I don’t know what everybody else calls theirs.  Yeah. We had Genie. Genie would talk to you. I mean, I’m not just saying it. Please go watch the videos. We have them. So you would just talk to the car, and the car would do everything for you. We came up with a device that initially you could install as an aftermarket stereo in the car. Basically, it would connect all the sensors in the car to the outside world. This was the very first time. As a matter of fact, internet connectivity in the car is my technology. Every single car in the world since 2014 has been connected to the internet, and that’s my technology, my patent, and my license. Of course, I’m not getting much money from it. Unfortunately, I’ve kind of been robbed on that. But at least I can brag about it—that’s our technology. So yeah, we brought a whole bunch of technologies to market. My vision back then was to make the car robust enough to drive without a driver.  That’s happening now.  It’s happening now. As a matter of fact, we had a car that we put our system into, and we were demonstrating it. And again, there are hundreds of videos about that technology that you can find on the internet. As a matter of fact, we were on PBS for nine months in 27 countries talking about future cars, and that video is also out there. So that was in 2010. They had a half-hour program with my company and with me about future cars. And everything we said, we had the basis for it, and it happened.  So, Allen, if you had a magic wand and you could wish for anything to happen in your business, what would that be? So as I said earlier, I like to be more focused now. I’m very spread out with the business—not only with the technical side of things, but also with the business side of things. I really want to get away from the business side and just focus on the technology. That’s what I enjoy more. I do the business side because I have no choice. That’s part of the work, right? But I would like to get to the point where I can focus only on technology, and other people can worry about the other things. So that’s my goal.  Okay. So if someone is listening to this and they would like to be like you, what would you advise them? Let’s say they are 20 years old and they want to grow up and be an inventor, come up with solutions, work in different industries, and solve big problems. What’s the path? What would you tell them?  So first of all, don’t be like me, that’s for sure. Honestly, you’ve got to enjoy life more than I do. And I do enjoy life. Again, I have different hobbies. I do different sports. I ski, I bike, and those are my hobbies, right? Most importantly, again, we talked about this at the beginning. You’ve got to like what you do. And doing business is not easy. Don’t expect to get into it and have everything work out. Usually, by default, everything goes wrong. So that’s normal. It used to bother me. It used to make me upset, nervous, and all that. But over the last seven to ten years, I learned that things happen, and you just have to resolve them and go through them. Bad things can happen. Good things can happen. It’s all part of the mix. You’ve got to have a very strong personality. Generally, a good percentage of people go paycheck to paycheck, and it’s mental—it’s in their mind. They make a lot of money. They make $100,000 every paycheck. But if you get a paycheck, your mind is like, “Okay, my next paycheck is coming two weeks from now, then another one two weeks after that,” right? And if those two weeks come and you don’t get your paycheck, they go nuts. They go crazy. So if you’re like that, you cannot go into business. In business, it’s all about failure and success. If you’re lucky, that’s a different story. I can go buy a lottery ticket, and only one person out of millions wins. That’s luck. That’s different.  But then they lose it all. Lottery winners tend to lose it. Within a year, they’re broke.  Yeah, that’s a different story, of course. What I’m saying is that, yeah, some people get lucky. That’s the exception. Don’t compare yourself to that. Don’t go after that.  Don’t count on it.  Doing business is usually a challenge, no matter what. So you’ve got to have a very strong personality.  So yeah, resilience is everything. Well, that’s wonderful. So if someone would like to learn more about SunMan Engineering, or they want to connect with you, what should they do and where should they go? Yeah, the best thing is to please visit the website, which is sunmantechnology.com. There is a contact form there, and you can contact us. We’d be happy to get in touch with you and see how we can help.  Okay, fantastic. Well, Allen Nejah, the CEO and chief engineer of SunMan Engineering, and the inventor of many products in different industries, including InfiniGear, which is going to revolutionize transmissions. Thank you for coming on the show and sharing your insights and wisdom. And those of you who are listening, if you enjoyed this, make sure you subscribe and follow us because every week I bring on an amazing entrepreneur to talk with you. Thanks for coming, Allen, and thanks for listening. Important Links: Allen’s LinkedIn Allen’s website