Former Tesla President Jon McNeill describes Elon Musk's interviewing methodology and how Musk tested him during their first conversation.
Insight
Microsoft retail staff make better sales hires than Apple order-takers
“You can work in an Apple store and you are an order taker. Go down the hall to the people at the Microsoft store who have to sell a slate two doors down from a Mac, MacBook Air. Those people know how to sell. The fact that they're not starving is unbelievable.…”
Opinion
AI hyperscalers are building a commodity tooling layer, not capturing ultimate value
“I think they're creating the tooling layer. That then a lot of us are now using to create real businesses on top of. So I kind of go back to the internet breakthrough and internet revolution and think about, okay, like the browsers, everybody was super excited…”
Insight
Hiring from matrixed organizations like Nike is risky due to narrow scopes
“Nike's a fully matrixed organization. You pull a marketer out of Nike. That marketer has never had full P&L responsibility, full creative responsibility, full distribution responsibility. They have a very niche job, and it's really hard to determine, did this …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
1,300 cloud cyber platforms launched in five years, while SMBs got zero
“We just happened to ask the question, how many cybersecurity platforms have been created for the cloud in the last five years? And the answer is like, 1300. And then we said, how many have been created for the SMB in the last five years? And the answer was zer…”
Assertion Supported
Musk slept at the factory while Tesla struggled with Model X doors
“When I started at Tesla, we were having a super big problem producing Model Xs and getting the Falcon wing doors to fit. And Elon and I had shared this favorite book, The Goal, which is all about manufacturing process. And he grabbed me one day. He said, okay,…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Tesla slashed 360,000 vehicle configurations after data revealed two main buyer archetypes
“That led to like, 360,000 different combinations of a car that you could choose, which is driving a lot of clicks, plus a lot of decision fatigue for people. And so we went and ran the data, my team ran the data, and we came back and figured out that people we…”