Few companies grew as fast as Tesla, especially before and after the company launched Model 3, its first accessible ev.
“We climbed Tesla in 30 months of $ 2 billion income up to $ 20 billion income,” Jon McNeil, the former president of Tesla, who is now co -founder and general manager of DVX Ventures, told the crowd at the entire Techcrunch stage event in Boston.
It was not the first time Skala companies of McNeil, nor would it be his last. Earlier, he founded six different companies, and after Tesla, he joined Lyft as a Coo before starting his own business company, where he launched a dozen startups.
Over the years, McNeil has developed a game book, which helps him identify when a company is ripe for climbing. He shared those insights last week with the audience at Techcrunch All Stage 2025.
When estimated the potential of a company to scale, McNeil mainly judges them about two different measures, suitability of products and markets. It is not uncommon for investors to focus on these concepts, but McNeil distilled them into two objective measures.
For a suitable market, he asks every start, “make 40% of your customers say they can’t live without your product,” he said. If not, then the company is not ready.
“We keep adding, adding, adding and tuning the product until we reach 40% and then we say, well, an explosion, now we have a suitable market market,” McNeil said. “It’s actually objective and measured. There’s no feeling, it’s not a sense. It’s a metric.”
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McNeil added, “We did a study of companies that actually reached disruption, and those companies reached disruption about that 40% acceptance level.”
Second, McNeil looks at if the company has mature marketed strategies. Specifically, he is interested in whether the amount that a company spends to get customers, known as customer acquisition cost (CAC), is under the entire lifetime (LTV) that the customer will bring to the company.
When a company starts pulling in four times more money during the customer’s life than it has spent to get them-LTV to a CAC ratio of four-to-one-this is when he knows the company is ready.
“Then we pour the money. But before then, we take money at $ 100,000 at a time to reach different gates,” he said.
