#112 Former President at Tesla / CEO of DVx Ventures, Jon McNeill: First-Principles

When DVx Ventures co-founder Jon McNeill joined Tesla in 2015, he told his new boss Elon Musk: “You won’t see me at least a day a week.” That’s because Jon believes the job of any leader is to make time to talk to front-line workers who know things executives don’t. While he was at Tesla he spent 20% of his time in service centers, support centers, or in retail stores, asking the people who worked there the same question: “If you had had my job for a day, what are the two things you would do to make this place better?”

In this episode, Jon and Joubin discuss serial entrepreneurship, growing up without money, road trips, horizontal and vertical mentors, “our generation’s Da Vinci,” first-principles thinking, sleeping in the factory, solving problems together, accelerometers, sharing bad news, the similarities between Lululemon and Tesla, “perfect product,” cash-incinerating businesses, transitioning legacy companies, and the Sutter Hill method.

In this episode, we cover:

• Why Elon Musk bought Twitter and how he’s running it, two weeks in (03:46)
• How Jon’s father nudged him into an entrepreneurial mindset (06:12)
• Building an intentional, present relationship with your family (10:15)
• What Jon learned from Intuit co-founder Scott Cook (15:55)
• How he got to Tesla, and learned how to work with Elon (18:55)
• The east Asia trip that birthed Neuralink and The Boring Company (24:56)
• Ramping up demand for the Tesla Model S and the “manufacturing hell” of the Model X (29:54)
• Solving problems under pressure and Jon’s hack for staying sane (35:57)
• Recruiting world-class talent (41:05)
• What Jon asked Elon before joining Tesla (45:37)
• “Make them talk about you at dinner” (50:47)
• Simplifying things is an unfair advantage (54:27)
• What frontline workers know, and Jon’s 20% rule (57:08)
• Lyft’s “arms race” with Uber and what DVx’s companies do differently (1:00:36)
• How Jon got to be on the board of GM (1:08:00)

Links:

• Connect with Jon
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
• Connect with Joubin
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com
• Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
• This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm