Ex-Tesla President: The Unconventional Ideas Behind Tesla's Hypergrowth

**Jon McNeill** (0:00)
Part of the secret to Elon's secret sauce is he sets these order of magnitude improvement goals. So 10x, 100x. He came to me and said, hey, look, we got to figure out how to sell cars online, because nobody was buying $120,000 things sight unseen online. And so he turns to me and says, this is your goal, improve digital sales by 20x. So now it's like, oh crap, I got to think way differently about this.

**Shaan Puri** (0:32)
All right, so I guess to start, I mean, I almost want to rename the podcast, How Lucky Are We? It's like, oh, we get to sit here with the guy who was the president of one of the most important companies of our time, Tesla, for years. You got to work with one of the greatest entrepreneurs ever, Elon. You yourself have this crazy entrepreneurial track record. You've built and sold five, six different startups. You're like the Forrest Gump of the tech industry, just going into different spaces and you go into auto repair and cyber insurance and all these different spaces. And so I'm pretty fascinated that we get to talk today. And I got a bunch of questions for you. But I want to start with less of a tactical question and more of a movie scene. So you go into a job interview with Elon Musk. It might not have even felt like it was a formal job interview, but your first conversation with him. What's that like?

**Jon McNeill** (1:20)
All right, so the setup to the scene is we're introduced by a mutual friend. And he is intense. And the niceties were about two sentences. And then he said, hey, I got this problem in manufacturing. Have you ever seen it before? And then we were right into it. And two hours flew by, because I had had that experience in manufacturing. I'd seen that problem. We started to break it down together. And then we started to move deeper and deeper and deeper into the problem. And we looked up in two hours, he was like, oh, man, like, I got a lot out of this. I got to go. I'm going to go down to the factory floor and do what we just talked about. So that's the first that's the first convo.

**Shaan Puri** (2:00)
He's so your problem solving together. He skips a small talk. And then is he testing you or he's just genuinely trying to solve the problem right now? Like, did you get any sense of he was poking around to see kind of where your capacity was or he was?

**Jon McNeill** (2:13)
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That's no, that's exactly what he was up to. So his hiring method is he wants to determine whether or not you can do world-class work. And his method is to interrogate a particular problem and go super deep on it. And it's better if he tries to skew it to a problem that he knows.

**Shaan Puri** (2:34)
Right.

**Jon McNeill** (2:34)
So that he can...

**Shaan Puri** (2:35)
So he can tell if you're bullshitting.

**Jon McNeill** (2:36)
Exactly. And he can take you to super deep because he's in it. And he just likes to know like almost like a video game, like how many layers can this player get through before they're stumped. And so that's exactly what was going on. We were getting to know each other, but 90% of it was he was evaluating.

**Shaan Puri** (2:54)
Later, when you worked there near the president, did he try to teach you kind of the method or say like, hey, here's what I'm doing when I'm interviewing? Because I'm assuming for the first ex-hires at Tesla, the key hires, I think I've read something before that he interviewed the first thousand people at SpaceX. I don't know if that's kind of like folklore or real, but the idea that he's basically figured out how he likes to hire. Did he try to implement that with you and others so that the whole team is hiring that way or he just does it in his own idiosyncratic way? You do whatever you want to do.

**Jon McNeill** (3:25)
I'm glad you raised this because this is a hack I don't get to in the book, but it's the thing that a lot of entrepreneurs think about, which is as your company scales, how do you protect the culture? And he and JB Straubel, the co-founder of Tesla, came up with this method to imprint the culture on every hire and to test for culture. And that was, they would be the last interviews. That's a hack that I've taken forward now from that Elon experience. And now I do that too. But the way that translated was that he would say, like he said to me, hey, look, we now, as fast as this thing is growing, we're going to split this up and you and I are going to interview everybody that's hired at a manager level and above. So we didn't interview everybody, but growing from four to 40,000 employees, there were a lot of interviews we were doing. In fact, 60 percent of my calendar was interviews.