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John Collison on three things founders can learn from Elon Musk Stripe co-founder John Collison says he found the Walter Isaacson biography of Elon Musk to be a useful resource for studying “The Elon Method.” John came away with three important learnings from it: #1 Pick the right high-level... metric to optimize for John observes that Elon always picked a sensible metric to optimize for with every business he ran. With SpaceX, for example, Elon focused the company on “dollars per kilogram to orbit.” Tesla’s focus on “deliveries per week” is another non-obvious example: “You could’ve focused on revenue, profitability, or deliveries per year,” John observes. “The focus on the number of deliveries per week rolling off the factory line was itself an interesting choice for a high-level metric.” #2 Create a sense of urgency “People talk about this as ‘inventing crises,’” John explains. “But I think the generous version is shortening the time horizons. Elon was talking about (when he was sleeping on the gigafactory floor) how ‘Tesla will go bankrupt if we don’t do this and figure out Model 3 production.’ Tesla was a $200 billion company by market cap at that time . . . but he created a sense of urgency with sleeping on the factory floor, which clearly shortens the timeline.” #3 Be capital efficient “I think hardware companies can be really self-indulgent with capital, where they say, ‘Venture capitalists will fund my vision of exploration for five or ten years.’” John gives robotics as an example: “It’s like, ‘I’ll do my science project for ages and then I’ll maybe figure out a product and how to commercialize it,’ . . . but Elon’s companies have always been very capital efficient. They build a bad one and then build a good one. The Boring Company bought commercial tunnel-boring machines before they started developing their own. Tesla had the masterplan where they built the low-volume roadster before they got to the high-volume stuff. SpaceX, for what they do, has never actually burned that much capital.” Video source: Stripe (2025)show more

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ELON: THE SALE OF PAYPAL GAVE ME THE CAPITAL TO BUILD SPACEX AND TESLA Elon threw it back with Jon Stewart years ago on how selling PayPal made it possible to start both SpaceX and Tesla. He said those ventures required massive investment and nearly bankrupted him in the early days, calling it a close call for survival: “The advent of the internet and particularly the sale of PayPal gave me the capital to start a rocket company and a car company, because these are high-capital endeavors. But I actually almost ran out of money. It was a close call, and both SpaceX and Tesla almost died.” Source: KanekoaTheGreat Elon Musk

ELON: THE SALE OF PAYPAL GAVE ME THE CAPITAL TO BUILD SPACEX AND TESLA Elon threw it back with Jon Stewart years ago on how selling PayPal made it possible to start both SpaceX and Tesla. He said those ventures required massive investment and nearly bankrupted him in the early days, calling it a close call for survival: “The advent of the internet and particularly the sale of PayPal gave me the capital to start a rocket company and a car company, because these are high-capital endeavors. But I actually almost ran out of money. It was a close call, and both SpaceX and Tesla almost died.” Source: KanekoaTheGreat Elon Musk

Mario Nawfal

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Elon Musk on how he moves so fast: "I'm constantly addressing the limiting factor." "I generally try to aim for a deadline that I at least think is at the 50th percentile. So, it's not like an impossible deadline, but it's the most aggressive deadline I can think of that could be achieved with 50% probability. Which means that it'll be late half the time." "A maniacal sense of urgency is a very big deal. You want to have an aggressive schedule. And then you want to figure out what the limiting factor is at any point in time and, and help the team address that limiting factor." Source: Elon Musk with Stripe’s John Collison and Dwarkesh Patel

Elon Musk on how he moves so fast: "I'm constantly addressing the limiting factor." "I generally try to aim for a deadline that I at least think is at the 50th percentile. So, it's not like an impossible deadline, but it's the most aggressive deadline I can think of that could be achieved with 50% probability. Which means that it'll be late half the time." "A maniacal sense of urgency is a very big deal. You want to have an aggressive schedule. And then you want to figure out what the limiting factor is at any point in time and, and help the team address that limiting factor." Source: Elon Musk with Stripe’s John Collison and Dwarkesh Patel

a16z

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John Carmack on what he admires about Elon Musk Programming legend John Carmack is asked about his relationship with Elon Musk, to which he replies: “In some ways we have a similar background. We’re almost exactly the same age, have backgrounds programming personal computers, and have even read similar books that have turned us into the people we are today.” John first met Elon when he was building Armadillo Aerospace. Elon visited Armadillo with his right-hand propulsion guy, and the three of them talked about rockets. “I think in many corners [Elon] does not get the respect he should for being a wealthy person who could just retire,” John says. “He went all-in, and he could’ve gone bust. There’s plenty of athletes or entertainers who had all the money in the world and blew it. [Elon] could’ve been the business case example of that with the things he was doing: space exploration, electrification of transportation, and Solar City type things. These are big, world-level things. And I have a great deal of admiration that he was willing to throw himself so completely into that.” John contrasts this with the way he approached his own aerospace company: “I was doing Armadillo Aerospace in this tightly-bounded way. It was ‘John’s crazy money’ at the time that had a finite limit on it. It was never going to impact me or my family if it completely failed, and I was still hedging my bets working at id Software at a time when [Elon] had been really all-in. I have a huge amount of respect for that.” It also irritates John when people call Elon “just a business guy”: “Elon was deeply involved in a lot of the [technical] decisions. Not all of them were perfect, but he cared very much about engine material selection and propellant selection. For years he’d be telling me to ‘Get off that hydrogen peroxide stuff. Liquid oxygen is the only proper oxidizer for this.’ And the times that I’ve gone through the factories with him, we talked about very detailed things like how this weld is made or how this subassembly goes together. He’s really in there a very detailed level . . . I worry a lot that he’s stretched too thin. He’s got the Boring Company and Neuralink and Twitter too whereas I know I have limits on how much I can pay attention to.” John continues: “I look back at my aerospace side of things, and I’m like, ‘I did not go all-in on that.’ I did not commit myself at a level that it would’ve taken to be successful there. And it’s a weird thing having a discussion with him. He’s the richest man in the world right now, but he operates on a level that is still very much in my wheelhouse on the technical side of things.” Video source: Lex Fridman (2022)

John Carmack on what he admires about Elon Musk Programming legend John Carmack is asked about his relationship with Elon Musk, to which he replies: “In some ways we have a similar background. We’re almost exactly the same age, have backgrounds programming personal computers, and have even read similar books that have turned us into the people we are today.” John first met Elon when he was building Armadillo Aerospace. Elon visited Armadillo with his right-hand propulsion guy, and the three of them talked about rockets. “I think in many corners [Elon] does not get the respect he should for being a wealthy person who could just retire,” John says. “He went all-in, and he could’ve gone bust. There’s plenty of athletes or entertainers who had all the money in the world and blew it. [Elon] could’ve been the business case example of that with the things he was doing: space exploration, electrification of transportation, and Solar City type things. These are big, world-level things. And I have a great deal of admiration that he was willing to throw himself so completely into that.” John contrasts this with the way he approached his own aerospace company: “I was doing Armadillo Aerospace in this tightly-bounded way. It was ‘John’s crazy money’ at the time that had a finite limit on it. It was never going to impact me or my family if it completely failed, and I was still hedging my bets working at id Software at a time when [Elon] had been really all-in. I have a huge amount of respect for that.” It also irritates John when people call Elon “just a business guy”: “Elon was deeply involved in a lot of the [technical] decisions. Not all of them were perfect, but he cared very much about engine material selection and propellant selection. For years he’d be telling me to ‘Get off that hydrogen peroxide stuff. Liquid oxygen is the only proper oxidizer for this.’ And the times that I’ve gone through the factories with him, we talked about very detailed things like how this weld is made or how this subassembly goes together. He’s really in there a very detailed level . . . I worry a lot that he’s stretched too thin. He’s got the Boring Company and Neuralink and Twitter too whereas I know I have limits on how much I can pay attention to.” John continues: “I look back at my aerospace side of things, and I’m like, ‘I did not go all-in on that.’ I did not commit myself at a level that it would’ve taken to be successful there. And it’s a weird thing having a discussion with him. He’s the richest man in the world right now, but he operates on a level that is still very much in my wheelhouse on the technical side of things.” Video source: Lex Fridman (2022)

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5,630,321 Aufrufe • vor 7 Monaten

Elon Musk on why he slept on the Tesla factory floor for 3 years “I was living in the factory in Fremont and the one in Nevada for three years straight. That was my primary residence. I’m not kidding. Literally. I slept on a couch, and at one point a tent on the roof, but for a while there, I was just sleeping under my desk which was out in the open in the factory.” As Elon explains, he did this for an important reason: “I slept on the floor under my desk so that during shift change, the entire team could see me. This is important because if the team thinks their leader is off somewhere having a good time, drinking Mai Tais on a tropical island [it’s demoralizing]… Since the team could see me sleeping on the floor during shift change, they knew I was there. That made a huge difference, and they gave it their all.” This principle that leaders must be visible is something Elon emphasized in a memo to Tesla employees ending remote work and requiring a minimum of 40 hours per week in person: “The more senior you are, the more visible must be your presence. That is why I lived in the factory so much – so that those on the line could see me working alongside them. If I had not done that, Tesla would long ago have gone bankrupt.”

Elon Musk on why he slept on the Tesla factory floor for 3 years “I was living in the factory in Fremont and the one in Nevada for three years straight. That was my primary residence. I’m not kidding. Literally. I slept on a couch, and at one point a tent on the roof, but for a while there, I was just sleeping under my desk which was out in the open in the factory.” As Elon explains, he did this for an important reason: “I slept on the floor under my desk so that during shift change, the entire team could see me. This is important because if the team thinks their leader is off somewhere having a good time, drinking Mai Tais on a tropical island [it’s demoralizing]… Since the team could see me sleeping on the floor during shift change, they knew I was there. That made a huge difference, and they gave it their all.” This principle that leaders must be visible is something Elon emphasized in a memo to Tesla employees ending remote work and requiring a minimum of 40 hours per week in person: “The more senior you are, the more visible must be your presence. That is why I lived in the factory so much – so that those on the line could see me working alongside them. If I had not done that, Tesla would long ago have gone bankrupt.”

Startup Archive

198,971 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat

Elon Musk on the first thing to do when starting a company “The goal with Tesla was really to try to show what electric cars can do because people had the wrong impression. We had to change people’s perception of an electric vehicle because they used to think of it as something that was slow and ugly with low range, kind of like a golf cart. That’s why we created the Tesla Roadster — to show that it can be fast, attractive, and long range… Until you actually have the physical object and they can drive it, it doesn’t really sink in for people.” Elon believe this principle is something all startup founders should take note of: “If you’re going to create a company, the first thing you should try to do is create a working prototype. Everything looks great on PowerPoint… But if you have an actual demonstration — even if it’s in primitive form — that’s much more effective for convincing people.”

Elon Musk on the first thing to do when starting a company “The goal with Tesla was really to try to show what electric cars can do because people had the wrong impression. We had to change people’s perception of an electric vehicle because they used to think of it as something that was slow and ugly with low range, kind of like a golf cart. That’s why we created the Tesla Roadster — to show that it can be fast, attractive, and long range… Until you actually have the physical object and they can drive it, it doesn’t really sink in for people.” Elon believe this principle is something all startup founders should take note of: “If you’re going to create a company, the first thing you should try to do is create a working prototype. Everything looks great on PowerPoint… But if you have an actual demonstration — even if it’s in primitive form — that’s much more effective for convincing people.”

Startup Archive

34,567 Aufrufe • vor 7 Monaten

“If you talk about risk, let me tell you about why there’s really no risk at all.” Peter Thiel explains how Elon Musk convinced him to bet Founders Fund on SpaceX: “The internal version in Silicon Valley of both Tesla and SpaceX were that they could never succeed.” “I had a conversation with Elon about this in the summer of 2008.” “I asked him when the last successful new car company had been created in the US?” “The answer was Jeep in 1941.” “You could say, ‘There’s been no new car company in 67 years, therefore it must be very hard and you should not do it.’” “The alternate version that Elon gave was, ‘It’s been 67 years. So it’s about time for a new car company.’” “One of the tremendous advantages that Tesla and SpaceX had was that they were competing with really sclerotic businesses.” “It turned out that the fact that nobody thought it was doable, and nobody had done it in a long time, paradoxically created a big opening.”

“If you talk about risk, let me tell you about why there’s really no risk at all.” Peter Thiel explains how Elon Musk convinced him to bet Founders Fund on SpaceX: “The internal version in Silicon Valley of both Tesla and SpaceX were that they could never succeed.” “I had a conversation with Elon about this in the summer of 2008.” “I asked him when the last successful new car company had been created in the US?” “The answer was Jeep in 1941.” “You could say, ‘There’s been no new car company in 67 years, therefore it must be very hard and you should not do it.’” “The alternate version that Elon gave was, ‘It’s been 67 years. So it’s about time for a new car company.’” “One of the tremendous advantages that Tesla and SpaceX had was that they were competing with really sclerotic businesses.” “It turned out that the fact that nobody thought it was doable, and nobody had done it in a long time, paradoxically created a big opening.”

Jawwwn

129,091 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten

Elon Musk on Boring Company: "It did say for the longest time that people want to build tunnels, and then everyone thought I was joking, and then I was like, "Fine, we'll just create a company, the Boring Company, to build tunnels, because this is an obvious way to reduce traffic to zero by going 3d with your transport system, just as we go 3d with the buildings. I encourage other people to start tunneling companies, because Boring Company - the only one, as far as I can tell, that's taking this serious - boring to be the only boring company, right? Yeah, honestly, there's like a lot of opportunity in tunnels."

Elon Musk on Boring Company: "It did say for the longest time that people want to build tunnels, and then everyone thought I was joking, and then I was like, "Fine, we'll just create a company, the Boring Company, to build tunnels, because this is an obvious way to reduce traffic to zero by going 3d with your transport system, just as we go 3d with the buildings. I encourage other people to start tunneling companies, because Boring Company - the only one, as far as I can tell, that's taking this serious - boring to be the only boring company, right? Yeah, honestly, there's like a lot of opportunity in tunnels."

DogeDesigner

21,975 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten

“Elon always takes the high road. He will always do the hard things.” Nikita Bier explains what makes Elon Musk the greatest operator alive: “At an Elon company—it’s a very flat organization.” “A large number of people direct report to Elon. Everyone has an incredible amount of agency.” “We come up with an idea, build it in a week, and it’s out.” “I’ve never seen an executive with his amount of responsibility who is that deep in the weeds.” “He does weekly reviews with every engineer at the company. You present 1–2 slides: ‘What did you get done this week?’” “The amount of context switching he has to do between SpaceX, Tesla, xAI, X, Boring Company, and Neuralink— it’s incredible.” “When you’re a consumer product builder, you’re always looking for growth hacks. Quick wins. I’ll present those options—he’ll be like, ‘No. We’re going to do the hard thing.’” “A lot of these things seem impossible, but when he gives engineers the agency to do it, and says, ‘Let’s make it two weeks. Rebuild the algorithm in two weeks,’ amazing things happen. Miracles happen.” Via Lightspeed Michael Mignano

“Elon always takes the high road. He will always do the hard things.” Nikita Bier explains what makes Elon Musk the greatest operator alive: “At an Elon company—it’s a very flat organization.” “A large number of people direct report to Elon. Everyone has an incredible amount of agency.” “We come up with an idea, build it in a week, and it’s out.” “I’ve never seen an executive with his amount of responsibility who is that deep in the weeds.” “He does weekly reviews with every engineer at the company. You present 1–2 slides: ‘What did you get done this week?’” “The amount of context switching he has to do between SpaceX, Tesla, xAI, X, Boring Company, and Neuralink— it’s incredible.” “When you’re a consumer product builder, you’re always looking for growth hacks. Quick wins. I’ll present those options—he’ll be like, ‘No. We’re going to do the hard thing.’” “A lot of these things seem impossible, but when he gives engineers the agency to do it, and says, ‘Let’s make it two weeks. Rebuild the algorithm in two weeks,’ amazing things happen. Miracles happen.” Via Lightspeed Michael Mignano

Jawwwn

74,663 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat

Mark Zuckerberg on Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter Elon Musk famously reduced head count by 80% after acquiring Twitter. It was controversial at the time, but Mark is asked what he thinks Elon did well during it. Mark responds: “You can agree or disagree with the exact tactics and how he did that. Every leader has their own style… But a lot of the specific principles that he pushed on: making the organization more technical, decreasing distance between engineers at the company and him, fewer layers of management. I think that those were generally good changes.” Mark also believes this was good for the technology industry as a whole: “My sense is that there were a lot of other people who thought that those were good changes, but who may have been a little shy about doing them. Just in my conversations with other founders and how people have reacted to the things we’ve done… When people see what Elon is doing, I think that gives people the ability to think through how to shape their organizations in a way that can be good for the industry and make all these companies more productive over time.” He continues: “So I think that was one thing where he was quite ahead of a bunch of the other companies on… And from the outside, it’s very hard to know. Did he cut too much? Did he not cut enough? I don’t think it’s my place to opine on that… But certainly his actions led me and, I think, a lot of other folks in the industry to think about, ‘Hey, are we doing this as much as we should? Could we make our companies better by pushing on some of these same principles?’” Video source: Lex Fridman (2023)

Mark Zuckerberg on Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter Elon Musk famously reduced head count by 80% after acquiring Twitter. It was controversial at the time, but Mark is asked what he thinks Elon did well during it. Mark responds: “You can agree or disagree with the exact tactics and how he did that. Every leader has their own style… But a lot of the specific principles that he pushed on: making the organization more technical, decreasing distance between engineers at the company and him, fewer layers of management. I think that those were generally good changes.” Mark also believes this was good for the technology industry as a whole: “My sense is that there were a lot of other people who thought that those were good changes, but who may have been a little shy about doing them. Just in my conversations with other founders and how people have reacted to the things we’ve done… When people see what Elon is doing, I think that gives people the ability to think through how to shape their organizations in a way that can be good for the industry and make all these companies more productive over time.” He continues: “So I think that was one thing where he was quite ahead of a bunch of the other companies on… And from the outside, it’s very hard to know. Did he cut too much? Did he not cut enough? I don’t think it’s my place to opine on that… But certainly his actions led me and, I think, a lot of other folks in the industry to think about, ‘Hey, are we doing this as much as we should? Could we make our companies better by pushing on some of these same principles?’” Video source: Lex Fridman (2023)

Startup Archive

522,371 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten

Why Elon didn't want to be CEO: "[Elon] is at core, an engineer and a product guy. He has this great line where he said: "I realized you couldn't be fully in control of the product unless you were also in control of the company." He says he made a moral error, early in Tesla, where he was trying to have his cake and eat it too. He wanted to control the company without running the company. And that was the 2002 to 2008 era, where Tesla was just off to a really messy start. He was providing the funding. He was chairman of the board. But Martin Eberhard was CEO. Eventually, when Tesla was on the verge of death in 2008....Elon was pushed into the position of: "I have to be CEO. I don't want to be. It comes with a lot of chores. It comes with a lot of responsibilities. But if I want this company to be successful, I have to fully internalize and take responsibility for it." And that's what he did, even though he was also in the same position at SpaceX. The fact that these companies are improbable, iconic, and that he funded and led them both in parallel...it's like running a two minute mile twice at the same time. It is such a higher degree of difficulty than most people can conceive of, and the fact that it worked is still unbelievable."

Why Elon didn't want to be CEO: "[Elon] is at core, an engineer and a product guy. He has this great line where he said: "I realized you couldn't be fully in control of the product unless you were also in control of the company." He says he made a moral error, early in Tesla, where he was trying to have his cake and eat it too. He wanted to control the company without running the company. And that was the 2002 to 2008 era, where Tesla was just off to a really messy start. He was providing the funding. He was chairman of the board. But Martin Eberhard was CEO. Eventually, when Tesla was on the verge of death in 2008....Elon was pushed into the position of: "I have to be CEO. I don't want to be. It comes with a lot of chores. It comes with a lot of responsibilities. But if I want this company to be successful, I have to fully internalize and take responsibility for it." And that's what he did, even though he was also in the same position at SpaceX. The fact that these companies are improbable, iconic, and that he funded and led them both in parallel...it's like running a two minute mile twice at the same time. It is such a higher degree of difficulty than most people can conceive of, and the fact that it worked is still unbelievable."

Ti Morse

47,497 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten

Andrej Karpathy explains what makes Elon Musk unique “I don’t think people appreciate how unique [Elon’s style] is. You read about it, but you don’t understand it—it’s hard to describe.” The first principle Karpathy — who led the computer vision team of Tesla Autopilot — has observed is that Musk likes small, strong, highly-technical teams: “At companies by default, teams grow and get large. Elon was always a force against growth… I would have to basically plead to hire people. And then the other thing is that at big companies it’s hard to get rid of low performers. Elon is very friendly by default to getting rid of low performers. I actually had to fight to keep people on the team because he would by default want to remove people… So keep a small, strong, highly technical team. No middle management that is non-technical for sure. That’s number one.” Number two is that Elon wants the office to be a vibrant place where everyone is working on exciting stuff: “He doesn’t like stagnation… He doesn’t like large meetings. He always encourages people to leave meetings if they’re not being useful. You actually do see this where it’s a large meeting and if you’re not contributing or learning, just walk out. This is fully encouraged… I think a lot of big companies pamper employees, but there’s much less of that. The culture of it is that you’re there to do your best technical work and there’s intensity.” Elon is also unusual in terms of how closely connected he is to the team: “Usually the CEO of a company is a remote person, five layers up, who only talks to their VPs… Normally people spend 99% of the time talking to the VPs. [Elon] spends maybe 50% of the time. And he just wants to talk to the engineers. If the team is small and strong, then engineers and the code are the source of truth… not some manager. And he wants to talk to them to understand the actual state of things and what should be done to improve it.” And lastly, Karpathy believes the extent to which Musk is involved day-to-day operations and removing company bottlenecks is not appreciated. He gives an example of engineers telling Elon they don’t have enough GPUs. As Karpathy explains, if Elon hears this twice he’ll get the person in charge of the GPU cluster on the phone. If NVIDIA is the bottleneck, he’ll get Jensen Huang on the phone. Video source: Sequoia Capital (2024)

Andrej Karpathy explains what makes Elon Musk unique “I don’t think people appreciate how unique [Elon’s style] is. You read about it, but you don’t understand it—it’s hard to describe.” The first principle Karpathy — who led the computer vision team of Tesla Autopilot — has observed is that Musk likes small, strong, highly-technical teams: “At companies by default, teams grow and get large. Elon was always a force against growth… I would have to basically plead to hire people. And then the other thing is that at big companies it’s hard to get rid of low performers. Elon is very friendly by default to getting rid of low performers. I actually had to fight to keep people on the team because he would by default want to remove people… So keep a small, strong, highly technical team. No middle management that is non-technical for sure. That’s number one.” Number two is that Elon wants the office to be a vibrant place where everyone is working on exciting stuff: “He doesn’t like stagnation… He doesn’t like large meetings. He always encourages people to leave meetings if they’re not being useful. You actually do see this where it’s a large meeting and if you’re not contributing or learning, just walk out. This is fully encouraged… I think a lot of big companies pamper employees, but there’s much less of that. The culture of it is that you’re there to do your best technical work and there’s intensity.” Elon is also unusual in terms of how closely connected he is to the team: “Usually the CEO of a company is a remote person, five layers up, who only talks to their VPs… Normally people spend 99% of the time talking to the VPs. [Elon] spends maybe 50% of the time. And he just wants to talk to the engineers. If the team is small and strong, then engineers and the code are the source of truth… not some manager. And he wants to talk to them to understand the actual state of things and what should be done to improve it.” And lastly, Karpathy believes the extent to which Musk is involved day-to-day operations and removing company bottlenecks is not appreciated. He gives an example of engineers telling Elon they don’t have enough GPUs. As Karpathy explains, if Elon hears this twice he’ll get the person in charge of the GPU cluster on the phone. If NVIDIA is the bottleneck, he’ll get Jensen Huang on the phone. Video source: Sequoia Capital (2024)

Startup Archive

2,418,865 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

Elon Musk on how to get people to believe in your startup “If you think about a company, a company is a group of people that are organized to create a product or service. So in order to create such a thing, you have to convince others to join you in your effort.” But, as Elon explains, this is hard in the beginning: “In the beginning, there will be few people who believe in you or what you’re doing. But then over time — as you make progress — the evidence will build and more and more people will believe in what you’re doing.” So, Elon argues, the first thing you should do when starting a company is create a good demo or mock-up so that people can really envision what it’s about. “Try to get to that point as soon as possible, and then iterate to make it as real as possible, as fast as possible.” A good example of this is the Tesla Roadster. Tesla debuted the concept vehicle in 2006 with a famous photograph of co-founder J. B. Straubel driving California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Tesla was a long way from mass-producing the Roadster at any level of affordability, but the demo made their vision more real and helped Tesla secure additional funding. This funding bought the company more time and resources to deliver its first 500 vehicles between February 2008 and June 2009. Video source: Computer History Museum (2013)

Elon Musk on how to get people to believe in your startup “If you think about a company, a company is a group of people that are organized to create a product or service. So in order to create such a thing, you have to convince others to join you in your effort.” But, as Elon explains, this is hard in the beginning: “In the beginning, there will be few people who believe in you or what you’re doing. But then over time — as you make progress — the evidence will build and more and more people will believe in what you’re doing.” So, Elon argues, the first thing you should do when starting a company is create a good demo or mock-up so that people can really envision what it’s about. “Try to get to that point as soon as possible, and then iterate to make it as real as possible, as fast as possible.” A good example of this is the Tesla Roadster. Tesla debuted the concept vehicle in 2006 with a famous photograph of co-founder J. B. Straubel driving California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Tesla was a long way from mass-producing the Roadster at any level of affordability, but the demo made their vision more real and helped Tesla secure additional funding. This funding bought the company more time and resources to deliver its first 500 vehicles between February 2008 and June 2009. Video source: Computer History Museum (2013)

Startup Archive

27,436 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

𝕏 Head Of Product, Nikita Bier on working for Elon Musk: “I worked at META, I worked at Discord— I’ve basically done the roadshow around all the social networks— I’ve seen how they operate. I’ve never an executive with his amount of responsibility that is that deep in the weeds— he cares a lot— he does weekly reviews, basically with every engineer of the company. Elon always takes the high road, he will always do the hard things. That was such a profoundly different approach to what I have been used to working at other companies. A lot of those hard things seem impossible, but when he gives engineers agency to do it— amazing things happen.” Incredible insight.

𝕏 Head Of Product, Nikita Bier on working for Elon Musk: “I worked at META, I worked at Discord— I’ve basically done the roadshow around all the social networks— I’ve seen how they operate. I’ve never an executive with his amount of responsibility that is that deep in the weeds— he cares a lot— he does weekly reviews, basically with every engineer of the company. Elon always takes the high road, he will always do the hard things. That was such a profoundly different approach to what I have been used to working at other companies. A lot of those hard things seem impossible, but when he gives engineers agency to do it— amazing things happen.” Incredible insight.

Nic Cruz Patane

325,742 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten

David Sacks: The 2 CEOs I got to work for before starting my own company were Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and seeing how they operated in very different ways was tremendously beneficial — Elon is incredibly hands-on he’s involved in every important decision and certainly every product decision. Peter is kind of the opposite more high-level, more of a delegator. When it came to the product, I micromanaged the way Elon does but for the rest of the company I tried to hire the best people and give them the room to run.

David Sacks: The 2 CEOs I got to work for before starting my own company were Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and seeing how they operated in very different ways was tremendously beneficial — Elon is incredibly hands-on he’s involved in every important decision and certainly every product decision. Peter is kind of the opposite more high-level, more of a delegator. When it came to the product, I micromanaged the way Elon does but for the rest of the company I tried to hire the best people and give them the room to run.

Ian Miles Cheong

111,619 Aufrufe • vor 8 Monaten

Elon Musk on how choosing the wrong VC almost killed Tesla "If you have a choice of a lower valuation with someone you really like or a higher valuation with someone you have a question mark about, take the lower valuation." Elon tells part of the story of how he got this wrong when Tesla raised its Series C in 2006. He was choosing between two competing bids from Kleiner Perkins and VantagePoint. Kleiner offered a $50 million pre-money valuation. VantagePoint offered $70 million. Musk told Kleiner that if John Doerr joined the board, Tesla would do it at $50 million. However, John had too many other obligations at the time and couldn't commit to another board seat. Tesla ended up going with VantagePoint, which Musk says, "was probably a mistake". In November 2007, VantagePoint tried to lead a deal that would have seriously diluted Musk's control of the company. That attempt ended up failing. But a year later, VantagePoint almost blocked the deal that saved the company from bankruptcy. In December 2008, Musk needed to raise $40M. One week from running out of money and bouncing payroll, Musk managed to cobble together $20M and asked Tesla's other investors to match it. They agreed, but Musk noticed a problem while finalizing the paperwork. VantagePoint had signed all of the paperwork except for one crucial page. When Musk phoned up Alan Salzman, VantagePoint's cofounder and managing partner, Salzman informed Musk that the firm had a problem with the investment round because it undervalued Tesla. They then backed out of the deal. Musk believed that Salzman's tactics were part of a mission to bankrupt Tesla, oust him as CEO, recapitalize Tesla, and emerge as the major owner of the carmaker. This forced Musk to take another huge risk: Tesla recharacterized the funding as a debt round rather than an equity round, knowing that VantagePoint could not interfere with a debt deal. The deal ended up closing on Christmas Eve, hours before Tesla would have gone bankrupt. Musk had just a few hundred thousand dollars left and could not have made payroll the next day. Musk ultimately put in $12M personally, and the investment firms put up the rest. As for Salzman, Musk said, "He should be ashamed of himself." Musk compares choosing a VC to getting married. It's incredibly important to work with people you respect and trust. Valuation shouldn't be the only thing founders optimize for.

Elon Musk on how choosing the wrong VC almost killed Tesla "If you have a choice of a lower valuation with someone you really like or a higher valuation with someone you have a question mark about, take the lower valuation." Elon tells part of the story of how he got this wrong when Tesla raised its Series C in 2006. He was choosing between two competing bids from Kleiner Perkins and VantagePoint. Kleiner offered a $50 million pre-money valuation. VantagePoint offered $70 million. Musk told Kleiner that if John Doerr joined the board, Tesla would do it at $50 million. However, John had too many other obligations at the time and couldn't commit to another board seat. Tesla ended up going with VantagePoint, which Musk says, "was probably a mistake". In November 2007, VantagePoint tried to lead a deal that would have seriously diluted Musk's control of the company. That attempt ended up failing. But a year later, VantagePoint almost blocked the deal that saved the company from bankruptcy. In December 2008, Musk needed to raise $40M. One week from running out of money and bouncing payroll, Musk managed to cobble together $20M and asked Tesla's other investors to match it. They agreed, but Musk noticed a problem while finalizing the paperwork. VantagePoint had signed all of the paperwork except for one crucial page. When Musk phoned up Alan Salzman, VantagePoint's cofounder and managing partner, Salzman informed Musk that the firm had a problem with the investment round because it undervalued Tesla. They then backed out of the deal. Musk believed that Salzman's tactics were part of a mission to bankrupt Tesla, oust him as CEO, recapitalize Tesla, and emerge as the major owner of the carmaker. This forced Musk to take another huge risk: Tesla recharacterized the funding as a debt round rather than an equity round, knowing that VantagePoint could not interfere with a debt deal. The deal ended up closing on Christmas Eve, hours before Tesla would have gone bankrupt. Musk had just a few hundred thousand dollars left and could not have made payroll the next day. Musk ultimately put in $12M personally, and the investment firms put up the rest. As for Salzman, Musk said, "He should be ashamed of himself." Musk compares choosing a VC to getting married. It's incredibly important to work with people you respect and trust. Valuation shouldn't be the only thing founders optimize for.

Startup Archive

132,299 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

Elon Musk reveals what happens when a rocket launch needs approval from Fish and Wildlife Elon: "Nonetheless, we were forced to kidnap a seal, strap it to a board, put headphones on the seal and play sonic boom sounds to it to see if it would be distressed." Elon: "This is an actual thing that happened. This is actually real. I have pictures." Before the seal, there was a shark. Elon: "One of the things that was a bit of a challenge at one point is that they were worried about our rocket hitting a shark." He asked for the data to calculate the odds. They refused, in case shark hunters got hold of it. Elon: "Then they said, well, there's another part of Fish and Wildlife that can do this analysis. I'm like, well, why don't you give them the data? They don't, we don't trust them. Like, excuse me, but they're literally in your department." Then a second agency raised whales. Elon: "If our rocket does hit a whale, which is extremely unlikely beyond all belief, that whale has some seriously bad luck. It's the least lucky whale ever." The seal test was for launches out of Vandenberg, where the seal population has been rising for years. Elon: "So if anything, rocket booms are an aphrodisiac based on the evidence." Elon: "The amazing part is how calm the seal was. Because if I was a seal, I'd be like, this is the end. They're definitely gonna eat me." Elon: "Its seal buddies are never gonna believe him that he got strapped to a board and they put headphones on his ears." They did it twice. Elon: "I don't think the public is quite aware of the madness that goes on."

Elon Musk reveals what happens when a rocket launch needs approval from Fish and Wildlife Elon: "Nonetheless, we were forced to kidnap a seal, strap it to a board, put headphones on the seal and play sonic boom sounds to it to see if it would be distressed." Elon: "This is an actual thing that happened. This is actually real. I have pictures." Before the seal, there was a shark. Elon: "One of the things that was a bit of a challenge at one point is that they were worried about our rocket hitting a shark." He asked for the data to calculate the odds. They refused, in case shark hunters got hold of it. Elon: "Then they said, well, there's another part of Fish and Wildlife that can do this analysis. I'm like, well, why don't you give them the data? They don't, we don't trust them. Like, excuse me, but they're literally in your department." Then a second agency raised whales. Elon: "If our rocket does hit a whale, which is extremely unlikely beyond all belief, that whale has some seriously bad luck. It's the least lucky whale ever." The seal test was for launches out of Vandenberg, where the seal population has been rising for years. Elon: "So if anything, rocket booms are an aphrodisiac based on the evidence." Elon: "The amazing part is how calm the seal was. Because if I was a seal, I'd be like, this is the end. They're definitely gonna eat me." Elon: "Its seal buddies are never gonna believe him that he got strapped to a board and they put headphones on his ears." They did it twice. Elon: "I don't think the public is quite aware of the madness that goes on."

Naruto

7,896,145 Aufrufe • vor 9 Tagen