00:14:29 · Ty Morse, Eric Jorgenson
[00:14:29] S0: Yeah. I think the founders have a unique ability or, like, they're allowed to make decisions that other hired gun CEOs are just not allowed to make because they've seen... They've basically grown... You know, raised the baby. [00:14:43] S1: Brian Armstrong talks about that. I think in his... Your interview with him, he talked about, like, being totally unafraid to go back to zero because he knew he built this whole house brick by brick. And he's like, you know, that gives me this incredible, not just moral authority, but personal confidence to, you know, renovate the company at a moment's notice.
00:15:02 · Ty Morse
[00:15:02] S0: I would like to spend some time on basically how Elon starts companies. He's got this famous thing where he will basically try to get a mock up of whatever the thing is that he is wanting to do as quickly as possible, and then he wants to bring that into the real world so that he can actually show something again as quickly as possible. I was listening to the Walter Isaacson biography this morning and hearing him basically, you know, when he was thinking about boring company, he just calls up Steve j... Davis, and he's like, how is this currently done? And he's like, oh, you can just buy these things, you know, these boring machines for $5,000,000 each. He's like, cool. Buy two, and they go, you know, we're gonna dig a hole in this parking lot. And some guy comes back with, it's gonna be two weeks, and he's like, no. We're gonna have this done by, like, Sunday, which is two days from now. And then they have this big unveiling literally two days later, and it's like, we're creating a new company. A lot of people probably think that he moves incredibly fast on companies, but if you actually look at, like, how long these things take to incubate, it's, you know, it's decade on and a boring company. It's a decade on and a Neuralink, but he also has incredibly fast, like, startup timelines. How does he kind of, like, do those two things?
00:16:06 · Eric Jorgenson
[00:16:06] S1: Yeah. The demo is a really good thing, and we should come back to that. But even before that, I think sort of what you're hinting at is the feasibility study where... And he did this for SpaceX even before PayPal exited. He was just kind of interested in this problem of space launch costs, and he ran over a series of Saturdays at his house. He just gathered up engineers who'd worked on all the major launch vehicles over the last couple decades, and he's like, I have a hunch that we could make a massive improvement here, that this could be, you know, 10 x, a 100 x better. Let's just push on it. Let's, like, whiteboard and and do some math and just see, is there something here that we can push to that a fundamentally new kind of design is possible? And I I don't know if that went, you know, ten weeks or fifty weeks, but right around the time that they were sort of coming to the conclusion that, yes, a massive breakthrough is possible here, PayPal sold. And so he was like, Okay. Like, let's let's actually turn this into a company now and get to work. I think a lot of people sort of have the perception that you start the company to run the experiment, and that story is a good example of like, just take a while to do some some feasibility and some studies, and some of the best investments I've made have come from, you know, two years of conversation with the founder as they sort of map the maze and met the people and figure out the dependencies, and then they say, like, okay. I've got the game plan ready. Like, here we go. We're gonna flip the switch. That's not always how it works, but some of the ones that have been able to move fastest after they founded and brought in the capital and then, you know, delivered the highest ROI because they did as so much research and understanding ahead of time before they actually got started. And then SpaceX, of course, didn't leap straight to, alright. Great. We're gonna build, you know, Starship or even Falcon nine. They built, like, the grasshopper. They built one engine and tried to demonstrate that reusability with a small hop, with a relatively small amount of money in the scheme of things. And, you know, that was... It wasn't an all consuming thing for Elon at that time. He was just kind of like, I have a hunch that we can move this thing forward.
00:18:14 · Eric Jorgenson, Ty Morse
So I'm gonna hire, you know, Tom Mueller and these other incredible rocket engineers and just fund them to run these experiments and try to prove that this is possible with a small demo. But over and over and over again across, you know, both Tesla and SpaceX and even before that in in PayPal and Zip2, he has a sense of the kind of a theatrical demo or even just like a a basic kind of way to grok it that you just can't get from a slide deck or a memo that really catalyzes people. And it's it's a really powerful thing that I think gives Elon, advantage after advantage. It still seems pretty underused by a lot of founders, a lot of CEOs. You know? I see a lot of slide decks and not that many demos in the world. [00:18:54] S0: Yeah. I think Brian Armstrong even talked about this during the interview that we did where he basically said, if you want people to go, like, join a company or something or start a company, it's much easier to just get them to agree to a dinner than to like say, hey, let's go start a startup. Because sometimes I think this, I was listening to, how OpenAI was started too recently and they just got a bunch of the best people together on some like, I don't know, camping trip or something and just had them all talking and then they just enjoyed it. Yeah. They were like, oh, this is kinda cool. People kind of vastly underestimate how powerful having, like, a visual cue of, like, seriousness is for, I don't know, like, evangelizing action.
00:18:54 · Ty Morse, Eric Jorgenson
[00:18:54] S0: Yeah. I think Brian Armstrong even talked about this during the interview that we did where he basically said, if you want people to go, like, join a company or something or start a company, it's much easier to just get them to agree to a dinner than to like say, hey, let's go start a startup. Because sometimes I think this, I was listening to, how OpenAI was started too recently and they just got a bunch of the best people together on some like, I don't know, camping trip or something and just had them all talking and then they just enjoyed it. Yeah. They were like, oh, this is kinda cool. People kind of vastly underestimate how powerful having, like, a visual cue of, like, seriousness is for, I don't know, like, evangelizing action. [00:19:32] S1: And here's the thing, even shitty demos work. Like, there's a story in the book of him giving Larry and Sergei a demo of the early Roadster with, like, the, the very early, like, handmade kind of electric motors and basic batteries, and the car only went, like, 10 miles an hour or 15 miles an hour or something, it was, like, a terrible demo. But they still agreed to invest because they were like, you've covered a lot of ground. You're not telling me what you would do. You're showing me the progress you've already made, and that is just a world of difference.
00:19:32 · Eric Jorgenson, Ty Morse
[00:19:32] S1: And here's the thing, even shitty demos work. Like, there's a story in the book of him giving Larry and Sergei a demo of the early Roadster with, like, the, the very early, like, handmade kind of electric motors and basic batteries, and the car only went, like, 10 miles an hour or 15 miles an hour or something, it was, like, a terrible demo. But they still agreed to invest because they were like, you've covered a lot of ground. You're not telling me what you would do. You're showing me the progress you've already made, and that is just a world of difference. [00:19:58] S0: Yeah. I think at one point, it almost basically saved Tesla because they were gonna run out of cash. Daimler, obviously, basically made this, like, $50,000,000 investment, I believe, in in Tesla. And it was over the fact that he had just built a smart car using some... I think he, like, imported a little smart car gasoline from Mexico and then retrofitted it with EV batteries, and then the Daimler executives show up. And they're in the board meeting. He's very... They're they're very bored. And then he's like, alright. Do you wanna just go try it? And they were like, what do you mean? And they're like, we have a test in the parking lot, and they just zipped it around and then made the investment. [00:20:34] S1: Yeah. I think... And I think they built that, like, while the Daimler execs were on the flight over or something. It was on some insanely short timeline. [00:20:41] S0: It's like a few weeks. Like, I I it might been... Maybe it