Name: How a former Tesla and Lyft executive is trying to reinvent venture capital
Uploaded: 2024-07-11
Duration: 18 min 36 s
Description: From selling six of his own companies to serving as president of Tesla and COO of Lyft, Jon McNeill, now CEO of DVx Ventures, shares his journey as an entrepreneur and reveals the secrets to his success.

From selling six of his own companies to serving as president of Tesla and COO of Lyft, Jon McNeill, now CEO of DVx Ventures, shares his journey as an entrepreneur and reveals the secrets to his success.

How a former Tesla and Lyft executive is trying to reinvent venture capital

Leadership

Came from a uh a family without much means. Uh And so that meant that we had to buy our own clothes and shoes, uh Even early on. And so in, in first grade, second grade, I was hustling uh trying to earn money so I could buy clothes and shoes for school. And so I started a little lawn mowing business that grew into a big landscaping business. By the time I was in high school, I paid for my first car and I had employees that I had to pay and marketing. I had to do and billing I had to do. And I actually, I fell in love with business as a kid because it gave me independence. I kept that up. When I was in college. I worked at the trading Exchanges in Chicago. Started a few businesses in college. I fell deeper in love with business. I went to school in Chicago and was one of the first kids hired out of the big 10 to join Bain and company as a consultant and spent two years there. And then they were starting bain capital. They started just a few years before I got there. But they were really starting to ramp it up. So I spent a bunch of time with what is today being ventures and then was encouraged that I was an entrepreneur actually. And so I found a company to start and jumped out and started my first company and we started it literally from our kitchen table and it was a software business. We grew it to, to 40 million in a RR in 18 months. It was a crazy ride and we sold it to a public company. And then I did that five more times in a row. I guess I qualify as a serial entrepreneur. And uh then through a crazy series of events, met Elon Musk and um decided to join the be best practitioner of my craft on the planet uh as an entrepreneur, he's kind of unmatched. Um And so helped grow Tesla from 2 billion in revenue to or 20 billion in revenue and then helped take left public as coo and then jumped out to do something I've been planning on doing or planning for for years. And that is starting a platform to create companies. My granddad had a auto repair shop uh attached to his farming land uh in, in Iowa. And I spent summers there and uh and I learned to fix cars and I loved it actually and I loved it. I loved how tangible it was. Uh And so then as I started to build skills and business. I started to see all the opportunities especially for software in the automotive industry. And so a number of my companies have that be running through it. And I think it comes back to my grandpa's auto shop. So Elon had been talking with a, a dear friend of mine, Sheryl Sandberg about becoming uh president Tesla. And uh she called me one day and said, I'm not the right person for this, but I think you might be. So uh she introduced me to Elon, uh Elon and I uh immediately dove into a couple of challenges he was facing in manufacturing and then sales and as we started to get to know each other, both of us really enjoyed being around each other. I was certainly energized by him. And so I joined Tesla and it was about 1.8 billion in sales. And the biggest challenge was the demand challenge. Actually, they were learning how to produce cars at higher volume but didn't have nearly the demand that they needed to have. And so I dove in and went to stores uh so I could try to figure out what might be happening. I went to eight different stores took eight different test drives and nobody called me back. And so I called the head of uh sales ops. I said, can you tell me why I'm not being called back? I've used a different email addresses and I somehow have they caught up with me. And he said, he said, no, I can't see in the system why you wouldn't be called back. And I said, well, can you just run a report for me real fast? It tells me how many people we've done a test drive for that haven't been called back. And he said, sure, call me back in two hours. And he said, um, I can't believe this. Like, we've done 10,000 test drives in the last month and a half and 10,000 people haven't been called back. And I said, how many cars do you need to sell this quarter? And he said 12,000. And I said, I have a feeling why you think you have a demand problem. So let's shut off any new leads that people get until they call back all their test drives. And we did that within a few hours and sales went up. Uh, and this was before I even worked at Tesla. So I had to call Elon and say, hey, look, I may have overstepped my boundaries here. I don't even work for you yet, but here's what I found and here's what I did. And there was this long silence on the end of the phone, the long silence that Elon is kind of famous for, and I didn't know how to interpret it because I didn't know it very well yet. And after a long silence, he broke in and said, I think you're gonna fit in here just fine. I I didn't have any examples to draw on where you're taking a company from roughly 2 billion in revenue to 20 billion in revenue in 36 months. There wasn't any case studies for that. And so we all had to be super creative and scrappy uh which is what we did together as a team, but it was crazy times too. Uh especially as we got closer and closer to model three production. The balance sheet was super stressed. We were running out of cash and we had to get model three out to replenish the balance sheet and we were operating the company on less than a quarter of cash. It was a balance of absolute euphoria as you're growing a company, but absolute stress too as, as things are highly pressurized, we would fit in the of cars together a lot because he had a, an approach that was kind of a Vulcan mind meld he wanted in his words, if we had the same inputs, he wanted the same decision to come out of both of us. We would riff on business ideas. And uh and so I started to get a little jealous because he was able to go do things like Neuralink and the boring company and said to him, hey, like I'd like to scratch the stitch too. And he said, what do you have in mind? And I said, well, there's a lot of things we could do to change the car business from an episodic sale. We sell to a customer once every four or 5 to 6 years, we could turn that into a recurring run rate or revenue business. So an A RR business and he said, how would you do that? And I said, well, I'd sell insurance embedded in the car. I'd sell infotainment subscriptions, uh uh autonomy subscriptions, et cetera. So he gave me the chance to be an entrepreneur inside of Tesla. We grew a pretty significant insurance business, a pretty significant subscription business in infotainment and autonomy as well. I learned a few things. One is setting really high bars and high goals. And Elon is famous for his super ambitious goals for people and then really holding folks accountable to those on a weekly basis, but also giving them the tools to be successful. So it wasn't just throwing people to the wolves, it was really supporting them. I think what I also learned was all the stuff I learned about putting scaffolding in companies that was helpful to growth, worked at scale. And so that gave me the confidence then to go help other companies at scale. After Tesla, I joined largely to help to be a part of the team would build the muscle to get them public. And it was an exciting process to go through for sure what all companies have to do is really internally start to build the kinds of processes and scaffolding that help them with certainty, make their quarters. Once you're public, it's very different from being private. There's no gimmes, no mulligans if you miss, uh, your stock value is gonna be decimated. So you have to be prepared not to miss. And that's most of the work in terms of getting a company ready to be public. And that can get down as simple as kind of the weekly sessions you're having on demand and supply balance to make sure that you're hitting your forecasts and then financial planning to make sure that you're getting a forecast is hittable. So all of those things go together to be able to, to, to prove to a company internally that it can win and it's ready to be public. I think autonomy is going to play out really in, in two ways. One is uh in Robo Taxi, but there has been this view that there's this panacea. If uh if you replace the driver with a with a computer, the cost change uh and the cost they change for the better and therefore profitability for people like Uber and Lyft will go up for companies like Uber and Lyft will increase. And the fact of the matter is is that the driver today brings the car, so the network doesn't pay for the car, the driver cleans the car, the driver maintains the car, the driver fuels the car, that's all going to be the responsibility of somebody. And So even though there's this panacea of, hey, the driver's cost drops out of the P and L and therefore the profitability soars. I think it's a panacea that gets replaced with fleet cost that somebody has to bear. And so I think there's an, there is a path in robo taxi. Uh but it may be not as attractive as it seemed at the beginning in parallel to that, we're kind of at a moment where cars of today may be compared to like flip phones. And so I think uh personal autonomous vehicles are every bit as interesting as uh as the Robo taxi story. But we've got to get to uh autonomous vehicles first and that's proved to be a, a climb with a lot of false summits in the US. We have roughly 50,000 traffic fatalities a year and 95% of those are caused by human error. So the whole goal of autonomy is eliminating those fatalities. It's 50,000 families that don't go through a tragedy, but it turns out our, our roads are some of the safest in the world. So if you expand out the traffic fatality count globally, it's 1.5 million people die annually in traffic accidents that are human, largely human cause. And so the reason to do autonomy is just that it's to eliminate fatalities. Number one, number two, it's to give mobility to people that don't have mobility options. Today, I have a friend who's blind. Uh And when we introduced uh autonomy at Tesla, he called me immediately and said, when am I going to be able to take my first drive by myself? When am I going to be able to drive a car? And that stuck with me? Uh And so he's been a motivation for my involvement in autonomy because there will be people that today don't have the mobility option to drive a car by themselves. He'll be able to hop in a car and go where he wants for the first time in his life. Safety has got to come first. And so what Cruz has done is really expand a safety first culture. There were a lot of voices within Cruz that were demanding safety be the primary consideration or expansion and growth. And we totally agree with that at GM. So we've taken the best of GM resources to help crews pivot that culture to be safety first because when you're doing breakthrough technology like this, it's important to make advancements. But you've absolutely got to do that with a framework that says we're going to keep people safe as we do this. The safety team has a seat at the senior management table and they've got, they've got a veto right on what gets released and what doesn't get released. And so that safety capability and talent has been elevated to the highest level of care. There's this concept in manufacturing that, that's now common it was taught to us by the Japanese. And that is that any individual worker, if they see something going wrong can stop the production line. Where's the big deal? Uh When you stop the production line at a car factory, you're talking about millions of dollars an hour uh uh results in that stoppage. So it's a big deal to hand that capability uh or that agency to a worker. And so that's at the heart of the cultural change. Uh at cruise is, is enabling people to pull the cord and essentially stop the line. I've got a lot of confidence in the cruise team. They're returning to the mission, they're returning to the roads with autonomous driving because they've got more data and really more experience than anyone else in the autonomy space now with the safety first mentality and framework. And I think it's going to be the best of both worlds in terms of a very bright future for the cruise team. DVX ventures is, is a little bit different. We're a company creation platform and we were formed because I had this vision of being able to systematically create companies from scratch. Like I'd done six times in a row before I'd done joined Tesla. So during that journey of starting and scaling and then getting liquidity on six companies. I slur it right down like how you take a company from zero to a million in sales, a million to 10 million, etc and, uh, and develop these playbooks. And so DVX really was burst out of those playbooks to say, uh, could we start companies from scratch, scale them and really have impact on the economy. Technology is we start with three things have to be true. First is you got to have a big market that's provable. The second is you have to have significant profit pools that makes it worth your while. And the third is we've got to have a moat or an angle that we think is super unique to us so that we can win. And if we've got those three, uh we're essentially an idea, generation factors. And when those ideas pop, then we start to put product out in the market and start to experiment with a feedback loop from the market really quickly. Uh and those that gain traction, then we eventually turn into companies uh and then hire teams and scale them. We describe ourselves as as venture capital 2.0 in the sense that we are not investors, we are hands on operators. Uh And so, uh when we launch a company, one of the partners is the first CEO. And so the companies I launch, I'm the first ce these companies, we're that hands on and then we build the team around us and eventually step out as CEO. And so we're able to spot what good product looks like, what good markets look like, what good people look like. What good tech looks like. We know that because we've been operators and we can help build that into the company from the very start. So what we try to do is really de risk an idea and get a company started and then can hand the baton to a really experienced entrepreneur or even an entrepreneur with potential that can grow that company into something really special. So there are two ways that uh that V CS make money. One is for the fees that they charge for the amount of dollars they have under management. And the second is, is the upside in the company. And what's evolved over the past five or 10 years is VC motivation has become more and more fee oriented in the sense that they want to raise more and more capital to generate fees. The problem is, is that, that's a kind of a risk free model. And at the core of venture, we want to take a risk, we want to take the appropriate risk. And so we feel like DVX, like uh there's a, there's an evolving trend towards uh putting our money where our mouth is and we call this VC 2.0. And so we don't charge our investors fees. We take like them a share of the upside. And so we are completely aligned with them uh in that the only way we make money is if they make money. And I think we're going to see more and more of that in the VC market as investors get wise to the need to have a, an investing partner who takes appropriate risk and is compensated by succeeding rather than merely collecting fees, I think. Well, there are, there are more than 1000 unicorns that are uh that are waiting to get public, but there are it, it today's pace, 30 to 50 companies to get public. And so that means that a year. So that means that uh out of those 1000 plus uni unicorns, uh a lot of those aren't going to get public or get bought. Uh And so the incentives have to be aligned in the future so that uh the venture investors are taking the same risk really as their, as their investors and are getting paid for successful outcomes versus getting paid for evaluation. We've got a cybersecurity company that has really innovative technology, unique technology where we can see in this inside the stack of a company of a company's software and that allows us to spot vulnerabilities for them. We score those vulnerabilities and hand them back a daily health scorecard about how they're doing with their cyber risk. And that company is our fastest growing company. It's hit the ground running and it is taken off. We've got a clean tech company where we asked ourselves the question, could we save 40 percent of the energy costs of buildings in the US and developed a really super simple firmware solution that stays on top of thermostats that really provides technology that helps that building save 40 percent of its energy cost. A company called Kirby that, that brings software to dealers. So dealers can do mobile service so any dealer can look like Tesla in the sense that they can come fix your car at your home, at your office, uh like uh like magic E and then disappear after your car is fixed. So you didn't have to take your car anywhere to get it fixed. The biggest impact on my experience in my career in leadership has been to have mentors. It is an unfair advantage and I didn't realize this when it was happening at the time. But I had a mentor in my first job uh in high school. I had a mentor in my uh in my first job out of college and a mentor in my first company. All of those mentors made me better. Uh And then I learned like to grab mentors both vertically and horizontally vertically. People that have uh that have seen the movie before they're ahead of you on the journey, maybe by 5, 1015 years. Uh and then horizontal member uh mentors uh fellow CEO S fellow leaders in your uh in your kind of market and maybe same age range and experience where you can bounce things off of each other. Uh You may not be able to bounce off of your colleagues, your peers, your boss. And for me, the biggest leadership hack is having mentors. The worst piece of advice I've gotten is to build a company for an outcome. In other words, build a company for a big valuation. What you need to do instead is build a great product that people love and the company will follow. Uh and you'll have a great big company at the end of the day. But if you end up pursuing the wrong goal first, which is just get big, you tend to cut corners on the product and the company doesn't tend to last. And so I think the worst piece of advice I've got is, is just build big. Uh, I'd rather build great.