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
00:20:41 · Ty Morse, Eric Jorgenson
[00:20:41] S0: It's like a few weeks. Like, I I it might been... Maybe it [00:20:43] S1: was even shorter than that. It might have been, like, days. Like... Or some number... Some dozens of hours where they were like, this is not compelling what we have to show. So, like, this is our move. It's, like, we've gotta go straight to [00:20:52] S0: a zero to 60 in four seconds, you know, on this smart little smart car. [00:20:56] S1: But that that... That's so much of what gave Tesla traction in the early days, I think, is people just had never felt, like, silent and immediate acceleration from torque like that. Like, you... And it gave so many people the sense of, like, oh, shit. Like, electric cars are not these, like, kind of wimpy, like, things. Like, this can be cool and performant and, like, maybe the electric car era has some, like, has some sauce. Like, this is gonna be awesome, not terrible, that helped, you know, car people and engineers and nerds, like, get excited about the prospect of actually building one of these things.
00:20:56 · Eric Jorgenson, Ty Morse
[00:20:56] S1: But that that... That's so much of what gave Tesla traction in the early days, I think, is people just had never felt, like, silent and immediate acceleration from torque like that. Like, you... And it gave so many people the sense of, like, oh, shit. Like, electric cars are not these, like, kind of wimpy, like, things. Like, this can be cool and performant and, like, maybe the electric car era has some, like, has some sauce. Like, this is gonna be awesome, not terrible, that helped, you know, car people and engineers and nerds, like, get excited about the prospect of actually building one of these things. [00:21:27] S0: There's this idea of action produces information. There's also something slightly different, which is just action produces action, where if you take the first step, normally, it's easier to take much more, you know, more steps. And so I feel like when he has a situation where he wants, you know, when he comes into the environment like a factory or something and there's not enough action happening, he gets worried. I I think a lot of people see this as him being an asshole calling in people at midnight or 2AM, but I almost feel like this is part of the game and people don't understand how powerful this is.