Ex-Tesla President: The Unconventional Ideas Behind Tesla's Hypergrowth
4/9/20261 hr 5 min
Get our CEO lessons in one guide: https://clickhubspot.com/rmfk Episode 813: Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talks to Jon McNeill about his time running Tesla and working side-by-side with Elon Musk. — Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (1:18) a job interview with Elon Musk (5:07) Being a sniper for talent (8:20) solve a real problem, right now. (11:23) solving Tesla's sales problem (23:41) One size fits all opportunities (26:50) the power of noticing (31:45) order of magnitude goals (38:34) 3 sentence emails (43:24) identifying $50B industry (49:05) AI — Links: • The Algorithm - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/799958/the-algorithm-by-jon-mcneill/ — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton (joinhampton.com): My community for founders. Average member does $25m/year. Many of the guests are members. Get after it...apply: http://joinhampton.com/mfm — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - Need a bank for your company? Go check out Mercury (mercury.com). Shaan uses it for all of his companies! Mercury is a financial technology company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC • I run all my newsletters on Beehiiv and you should too + we're giving away $10k to our favorite newsletter, check it out: beehiiv.com/mfm-challenge My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano /
Clips
Showing 10 of 12Transcript preview
First 90 secondsJon McNeill· Guest0:00
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 gotta figure out how to sell cars online," 'cause nobody was buying $120,000 things sight unseen online. And so he turns to me and he says, "This is your goal, improve digital sales by 20X." So now it's like, oh crap, I gotta think way differently about this.
Speaker 10:23
[singing] I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. Uh. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road less traveled, never looking back.
Shaan Puri· Host0:32
All right. So I guess to start, I mean, I almost wanna rename the podcast How Lucky Are We? It's like- [laughs] ... oh, we get to sit here with, with a guy who was the president of one of the most important companies of our time, Tesla, for years. You get to work with one of the greatest entrepreneurs ever, Elon. You yourself have this crazy entrepreneurial track record. You've built and sold, you know, five, six different- Six ... startups. You're like the Forrest Gump of the tech industry, just going into different spaces, and you go into, you know, uh, 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 wanna start with less of a tactical question and more of a, a movie scene. So, um, you go into a job interview with Elon Musk. It might not have even felt like it was a, a formal job interview, but your first conversation with him, uh, what's that like?
Jon McNeill· Guest1:20
All right. So, uh, the setup to the scene is we're introduced by a mutual friend, and he is intense, uh, and the niceties were about two sentences,