Pod Insights Habits and Hustle Episode 541: Jon McNeill: Why "Less" and "Simple" are the Smartest Growth Strategies About this episode Most leaders think complexity is a sign of sophistication. Jon McNeill, former president of Tesla and CEO of Lyft, thinks it's the number one reason businesses stall.
Every hour spent on complexity, unnecessary processes, and misallocated resources is an hour taken away from what actually drives growth. We tend to overcomplicate and add more (more products, more people, more strategy) over what the business really needs.
We dive deeper into this in the latest episode of Habits and Hustle with Jen Cohen. We also discuss why the most successful companies are built on radical simplicity, how to find where your real growth is hiding, and the repeatable framework Jon McNeill used to scale Tesla, Lyft, and six companies of his own.
Jon McNeill is the author of The Algorithm and founder of DBX Ventures. As former president of Tesla and CEO of Lyft, Jon has spent his career walking into complex, high-stakes businesses and finding the one move that unlocks everything else.
His framework is not just for founders but also a life skill for anyone who wants to think clearer and move faster.
What's Discussed:
(14:03) The Tesla sales crisis nobody talks about & the simple fix that saved an entire quarter.
(21:10) How Tesla went from 64 clicks to buy a car down to 10.
(23:44) Why the best leaders are the greatest simplifiers.
(31:40) Why the performance review is broken: The two questions that replace the whole thing.
(34:23) The Sam Walton habit to easily spot what's broken in a business.
(36:02) The culture that made Tesla unstoppable: humility and confidence.
(46:38) How Lyft doubled by asking one question.
(1:10:47) What's the iPod's two-sentence product definition that teaches you why most products fail.
(1:12:42) Why the best product does not always win and what actually does.
(1:17:46) The two habits behind every fast-scaling company.
(1:07:43) Why AI is not the job killer everyone thinks it is.
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Find more from Jen:
Website: https://jennifercohen.com
Instagram: @therealjencohen http://instagram.com/therealjencohen
Books: https://jennifercohen.com/books
Speaking: https://jennifercohen.com/speaking-engagement
Find more from Jon:
Website: https://www.dvx.ventures/fullbio/jon-mcneill
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonmcneill1/
Book: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/799958/the-algorithm-by-jon-mcneill/
Transcript 18,215 words · 3 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Speaker 00 Hi guys, this is Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle. Crush it.
0:07 Jen Cohen? Guys, this guy's name is John McNeill. He wrote a new book called The Algorithm, and this guy's resume will blow your mind. Okay, like you were the president of SpaceX.
0:17 Speaker 02 Tesla.
0:18 Jen Cohen? Tesla, a Tesla, but you were also at SpaceX.
0:22 Speaker 02 I was at SpaceX every Friday because that's where our design center is down in Hawthorne.
0:25 Jen Cohen? Oh, so you didn't work. Okay, so it says here, even on the title of the book, I'm gonna read your bio. Normally I don't. Normally I do a, I read the bio afterwards, and then I input it. But let's just do this together, shall we? Okay, let's see here. The CEO and co-founder of, well, your new company is called DVX Ventures, former president of Tesla and COO of Lyft, and current board member of GM, Lululemon, CrossFit, and Stash, and a company called, I can't read, Asurian, okay.
0:56 Speaker 02 Yeah.
0:57 Jen Cohen? But also, that's just like the little bit of it. You were also a consultant at Bain.
1:03 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:04 Jen Cohen? You exited your own six companies. You had six companies that you already exited.
1:08 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:09 Jen Cohen? This is just like icing on the cake. Like being Elon Musk's number two was just like, "Oh yeah, and by the way, that's also what I do." Like your resume, and I will give it better service, it will be in the intro better, is insanely impressive.
1:23 Speaker 02 Yeah, I feel like the Forrest Gump of business. Like I've been able to like cobble this together. It's been pretty fun.
1:28 Jen Cohen? Really though? I mean, okay, so let's start with the beginning because if you're at Bain, were you at McKinsey also, or just at Bain?
1:34 Speaker 02 No, just Bain.
1:35 Jen Cohen? Okay, just Bain. Like, they're not picking dummies. So like you obviously had like pretty, a great pedigree even to get chosen to be at Bain. So what was your like academic background?
1:45 Speaker 02 I had to bake my way into Bain because I was, I went to a Big Ten school.
1:49 Jen Cohen? You went Northwestern.
1:50 Speaker 02 Northwestern. They hadn't hired non-Ivy League kids before. And so I literally had to beg my way into Bain.
1:56 Jen Cohen? Really?
1:57 Speaker 02 Uh, myself and two other, two other guys, we were the first non-Ivy's hired at Bain.
2:01 Jen Cohen? Well, that even says something already. Like if they, if you had to beg your way or they took two, only two non-Ivy leagues, what would make you special enough that they picked you?
2:11 Speaker 02 I think it was I worked my way through college and I, I went to school in Chicago and I worked at the Board of Trade.
2:16 Jen Cohen? Okay.
2:17 Speaker 02 And, uh, and I was doing these crazy trading algorithms. I was coding, uh, in college. And I think that story got me in because they were like, ooh, this kid's been moving like 10 or 20 million dollars around per trade. He must not be a dummy.
2:29 Jen Cohen? Right. Definitely not a dummy.
2:30 Speaker 02 Yeah.
2:31 Jen Cohen? And so then you're at Bain.
2:32 Speaker 02 Yeah.
2:32 Jen Cohen? And then what I also found super interesting about your story was that usually people who are working at the consultancy, like as consultants, they're not entrepreneurs themselves, right? But they saw something in you that they thought, hey, you should be an entrepreneur. You should get the hell out of here, basically.
2:48 Speaker 02 I don't know what was in the water at Bain at that point, but they were hiring a bunch of entrepreneurs and they were kind of entrepreneurs themselves. So they started this venture capital firm.
2:56 Jen Cohen? Okay.
2:56 Speaker 02 Because they were so entrepreneurial. And you know, the name of like one of the people that founded the venture capital firm, Mitt Romney.
3:01 Jen Cohen? Right.
3:02 Speaker 02 Founded this thing. So out of the 72 kids I was hired with, 45 became CEOs of their own companies. So like more than half were entrepreneurs.
3:13 Jen Cohen? Really? Any that I would know?
3:14 Speaker 02 You would know SurveyMonkey?
3:16 Jen Cohen? Hmm.
3:17 Speaker 02 So this guy, Dave Goldberg was a founder. You would know StubHub, Chris Sokolakis was CEO of StubHub. So, uh, all across the valley, you'd find people that like, we all started together and we were all entrepreneurial. So it wasn't hard for them to say, hey kid, I think you're an entrepreneur and we want to back you. Uh, and that's what happened to me.
3:35 Jen Cohen? What did you show them though? Like what was the, what trait that they saw?
3:38 Speaker 02 When we met with entrepreneurs, rather than getting excited about the spreadsheets.
3:41 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
3:42 Speaker 02 I was excited to go back to the office with the entrepreneurs.
3:44 Jen Cohen? Really?
3:45 Speaker 02 And work on the problem with them. And so they saw that enough where they were like, hey, I think you're an entrepreneur and we've got this venture fund. We'd love to back you.
3:54 Jen Cohen? So then what happened?
3:55 Speaker 02 So then I looked for like three or four months for an idea and a business plan that made sense. And they backed it and it turned out the first company worked. Uh, so we went from zero to like 40 million in sales in 18 months. And a public company came out and bought it. And they said, do you have idea number two? And I was like, yeah, I kind of do.
4:11 Jen Cohen? What was the first idea, though?
4:13 Speaker 02 So the first idea was we were writing soft. I was writing software. We were writing software for big call centers. Nobody had written call center software before. And so we were writing software to run big call centers and it just took off. We were right place, right time and right team.
4:25 Jen Cohen? And then you did that five more times?
4:27 Speaker 02 Five more times. Yeah. Uh, not all at once, but in a row.
4:31 Jen Cohen? In a row. That's what I'm saying. Like, so the first company got, you, you, you sold the first company in 18 months, you said?
4:38 Speaker 02 Yeah, after 18 months. And, uh, and then started a second company. That company grew to about a quarter billion in sales in three years. Sold that to a public company and then just kept doing it because I loved it.
4:51 Jen Cohen? So what was the biggest exit that you had of the six companies?
4:54 Speaker 02 Oh, gosh. Uh, probably company number six. They got more valuable over time.
4:59 Jen Cohen? Wow.
5:00 Speaker 02 And so company number six, uh, is worth, uh, somewhere, somewhere north of a billion dollars today.
5:08 Jen Cohen? That's it? I'm joking.
5:09 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly.
5:10 Jen Cohen? How much did you sell it for at the time?
5:12 Speaker 02 So that, so I, I have rolled into that company. And so like I'm, uh, I've held stock in that company for 10 years. It's the company I started right before I worked at Tesla.
5:23 Jen Cohen? So it's interesting because in your, on your resume, you were the COO. You were, you were the president of this, but you were never the CEO. Why is that?
5:32 Speaker 02 I was, I'd been a CEO six times.
5:35 Jen Cohen? Right.
5:35 Speaker 02 And Elon and I met and he was looking for somebody that, uh, somebody to come help him and relieve him. So he could get back to his first love rockets.
5:43 Jen Cohen? Oh, well, so, oh, let's, let's start. So how did you even meet Elon in the first place?
5:47 Speaker 02 So a mutual friend of ours, Sheryl Sandberg, introduced us to each other. Uh, and, uh, and so. Elon and I
5:54 Jen Cohen? Oh, wait. Right. Hold on. Not to interrupt you.
5:57 Speaker 02 Yeah.
5:57 Jen Cohen? Because David Goldberg was her husband, who I was very friendly with.
6:02 Speaker 02 No kidding.
6:03 Jen Cohen? When he was at a company called, he started a company called Lunch.
6:06 Speaker 02 Right here in Santa Monica.
6:07 Jen Cohen? Yes, in Santa Monica. And I was, I was very friendly with him.
6:10 Speaker 02 You were?
6:11 Jen Cohen? Yeah. Like, yes. He was a very nice person. And I know his brother also.
6:17 Speaker 02 Yep.
6:17 Jen Cohen? And then he started Survey Monkey.
6:20 Speaker 02 Yeah.
6:21 Jen Cohen? That's when, that's right. That's when, so you knew David?
6:24 Speaker 02 Yeah.
6:24 Jen Cohen? From Survey Monkey, from Bain?
6:27 Speaker 02 Yeah, so.
6:27 Jen Cohen? I didn't know he was at Bain.
6:29 Speaker 02 He was. He was at Bain and we both got assigned this terrible project. Our first project out of college. We get assigned to meatpacking plants in Minnesota, Nebraska, and Iowa. And
6:41 Jen Cohen? Wasn't he from like Minneapolis?
6:42 Speaker 02 He's from Minnesota and I'm from Nebraska. So I think they looked at like where we were from. They're like, nobody's going to take these jobs. We'll just put these guys on it. And so we became lifelong friends because what else are you going to do in a meatpacking company?
6:53 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
6:54 Speaker 02 Yeah.
6:55 Jen Cohen? That's crazy. So when you said like, when you said Survey Monkey, didn't it click right away? And then when you said Sheryl Sandberg, you were friends with her. It kind of all made sense. So you met Sheryl, obviously, through David.
7:07 Speaker 02 She, she loved my friend Dave and I loved her, I loved her for that. She's just fantastic. And so Dave, as you know, passed.
7:15 Jen Cohen? Yeah, terrible, horrible.
7:17 Speaker 02 Horrific. And
7:18 Jen Cohen? Did they ever find out or figure out like the whole situation besides the treadmill? Like it's
7:23 Speaker 02 I, I don't know. Like, I don't know. But it was just, it was horrific. And so several months after he passed, then Sheryl introduced Elon and I.
7:33 Jen Cohen? Wow. Okay. So she met, you met Elon under what context? Was it like, hey, Elon's looking for a number two or hey, just meet him to talk about business?
7:42 Speaker 02 It was Elon's looking for a number two.
7:44 Jen Cohen? Right.
7:44 Speaker 02 And I sort of went into those conversations, said, I don't know if I'm your guy. I've been like my own boss. I haven't had a boss in like 20 years. And none of my companies were as big as Tesla was at that time.
7:55 Jen Cohen? What year are we talking now?
7:56 Speaker 02 We're talking 2015.
7:57 Jen Cohen? Okay.
7:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, and so we start to get to know each other and he's like, super intense, no surprise.
8:04 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
8:04 Speaker 02 And so, right as we start talking, he's like, I have this problem in my factory. And so he starts to describe the problem and we start to like, break down the problem and like, two hours go by. And we've, we've kind of worked our way to a solution because I'd seen that kind of problem before.
8:17 Jen Cohen? What was the problem?
8:18 Speaker 02 It was a production problem with the Model X. It couldn't get the doors to work, the Falcon wing doors. And so he called me like, two days later and he's like, I went to the factory and did what we like, worked on and it turns out it's helping. And he's like, you want to talk again? So, we talked again. He's like, I have the sales problem. Have you seen this before? I'm like, yeah, here's how I'd think about breaking that down. And so we get on these calls, we just problem solve and then eventually he's like, why don't you join the company?
8:44 Jen Cohen? So how long were you on the phone with him problem solving? For how long?
8:47 Speaker 02 We could be on for hours.
8:49 Jen Cohen? No, no, no. How long of a duration? It take two months?
8:51 Speaker 02 Couple of months. Yeah, a couple of months. We were getting to know each other. And I just really wanted to figure out if I could help him and, and be useful. And it turned out there were ways I could be useful. So, I decided to join the best practitioner of my craft on the planet. Because there weren't, really no entrepreneurs have created like, four or five companies. Each of them are worth multiple, multiple tens of billions of dollars.
9:12 Jen Cohen? No, I mean, and by the way, at that time, Elon, I mean, he's a genius.
9:17 Speaker 02 He is.
9:19 Jen Cohen? But he's like, like a crazy genius, right? But he, he didn't display that amount of crazy back then, as people would say he has now, right?
9:29 Speaker 02 Yeah.
9:30 Jen Cohen? But did he have like, elements? Did you see?
9:32 Speaker 02 Oh yeah. Like he's like, he'll tell you like, he's out on the spectrum and I think all geniuses are kind of out on the spectrum in some ways. And yeah, he's, he's fun and nuts and is the smartest person you'll ever meet.
9:43 Jen Cohen? Like literally the smartest person you'll ever meet?
9:46 Speaker 02 By a factor. Yeah.
9:47 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
9:48 Speaker 02 Like.
9:49 Jen Cohen? I, I, how was it like, was it even, how were you even able to work? Like, how long were you at Tesla for?
9:54 Speaker 02 Uh, close to four years.
9:55 Jen Cohen? Right. Were you working with him like side by side?
9:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah. At the beginning, we'd travel constantly together because we were trying to do this Vulcan mind meld where I could learn as much from him.
10:05 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
10:05 Speaker 02 As I could and, and he could get, he'd get a sense of me. And so, yeah, we were together a lot.
10:10 Jen Cohen? So what would be the dynamic? I mean, you being the COO, him being obviously the CEO and like brain, like basically the, the visionary, I guess, that would probably be a very, like, you, you'd have to have a lot of like social, social emotional IQ to know how to navigate that relationship.
10:30 Speaker 02 We actually asked Cheryl how she and Mark handled it. And we applied a few principles that they had, which is number one, they had really good, tight definitions around what each each other did. We called those sandboxes and we said, okay, this is your sandbox. So Elon, it was product and engineering and manufacturing. He's like, these are the three things I love. I'm like, all right, I'll take the rest. And so we would respect each other's sandboxes, which was really good. And we spent, we spent at least an hour a week together catching up on those two things. We were in sync. So it was clear what he was doing, pretty clear what I was doing, and we made it work.
11:06 Jen Cohen? Really? So he didn't micromanage you?
11:08 Speaker 02 No, he was like, I think the thing that people don't realize, one of the things that's really fun about working with him is he's, he's kind of figured out the two or three things that he has to work on that are existential for the company. And then he gives his team agency on everything else. So
11:23 Jen Cohen? Oh.
11:23 Speaker 02 literally, we had agency to go run the rest of the business. And that was, for me, super fulfilling and a lot of fun because we were taking the business from 1.8 billion in sales when I started. 30 months later, we were at 20 billion. So we 10x the thing. So it wasn't like there was a little bit to do. There was a lot to do.
11:41 Jen Cohen? There was a lot to do.
11:42 Speaker 02 All over the place. Yeah.
11:43 Jen Cohen? So what was your first, you know, your, your, your first piece of business to kind of get that company to 20 billion?
11:50 Speaker 02 The first thing, like when I was, when he and I were getting to know each other, I was trying to figure out, could I be helpful, useful? And so I went to like, I was traveling a lot for the business that I had just started. And I went to eight different Tesla stores and took a test drive. And each store gave them a different email address so they wouldn't like catch on who I was, what I was doing. But this super crazy thing happened, like I did eight test drives and that's supposed to be like the pinnacle of the sales process, but nobody called me back. Nobody followed up. So I called the head of sales ops and I said, hey, look, taking eight test drives, I've gotten all the way through your sales funnel. Nobody's calling me back. What's going on? And I'm like flagged in the system? He's like, no, you're not flagged in the system. I
12:33 Speaker 02 said, let me ask you a question. How many cars do you have to sell this quarter to meet your targets for Wall Street? He said 12,000. It was a month and a half into the quarter. I said, how many you sold? He's like, 3,000. I'm like, you're not going to make your number. You're not going to make your quarter. He's like, no. I said, tell me how many, go look in the system. Tell me how many people have done a test drive like me and haven't been called back. He's like, give me an hour. Calls back in an hour. He's like, would you believe it? Like 9,000. I'm like, are you kidding me?
13:01 Jen Cohen? Wow.
13:01 Speaker 02 You could make your quarter. All you have to do is follow up with these people. Why aren't you following up? He's like, I don't know. I said, okay, do this. Shut off all new leads to salespeople until they follow up with all their test drives. And once they've followed up with all their test drives, you can give them new leads. And he said, I can do that. I said, great, do it. Calls me back the next day. He's like, you wouldn't believe it. Like, we're selling cars. I'm like, yeah, no kidding. You're following up with people. And then dawned on me. I didn't work for Elon yet. I hadn't joined the company. So I called Elon and I say, look, I'm super sorry. I haven't had a boss in a long time. And I was acting like a CEO and here's like, here's the context. Here's what I did. And he's got, he's got this famous long
13:41 Speaker 02 silence that I didn't know about then. And the call just goes silent. I'm like, oh my God, what have I done? And he comes on after like a minute and he's like, you know what? I think you're going to fit in here just fine. So that was the first thing. And that's how we got like, it was dead simple, which I've found most of businesses dead simple. If you just follow your own, like go to your front lines and figure out what's going on, you usually see what's broken in your business pretty quickly.
14:10 Jen Cohen? Well, it's a couple of things I want to say. Number one is I want to know how many cars they ended up selling when they actually followed up.
14:17 Speaker 02 They made their quarter.
14:18 Jen Cohen? So they did they did they surpass it?
14:20 Speaker 02 They they exceeded it by just a little bit, but it was kind of a miracle because they were halfway through the quarter and and less than a quarter of the way to their goal.
14:28 Jen Cohen? So how did these people not even know to like fall like to me, that's like a no brainer, right? Like, you're gonna go in for a test drive like, how are they gonna make any like, as a salesperson? That's how you make your money is in commissions and percentages and all these things. What kind of salespeople were you guys even hiring that they didn't even know that?
14:49 Speaker 02 Non-salespeople. We were hiring people who were passionate about the environment. And therefore, they were passionate about explaining the car.
14:55 Jen Cohen? Hmm.
14:56 Speaker 02 But they weren't salespeople, they weren't trained to ask for the order, and they weren't paid a commission. So they had none of the like the mechanics lined up for success. But what we started to do was say, we didn't pay commissions, but we started to pay bonuses to the stores based on how many cars that they sold that month.
15:13 Jen Cohen? Right, right.
15:14 Speaker 02 And so we were able to get a team effort going, which was non-commission based and a little bit softer. But we were able to get the incentives lined up with what we wanted to have happen.
15:22 Jen Cohen? And so you went into these eight stores without a job. So what was the position with him? You were just like, you were just in the midst of like, talking about potentially working?
15:30 Speaker 02 Like figuring out, yeah, could I could I be an effective number two to him?
15:34 Jen Cohen? So you just were like, kind of like going around, so this was on your own?
15:37 Speaker 02 Yeah.
15:37 Jen Cohen? Oh, like you're kind of on your own accord, hey, I'm gonna go to eight stores and just do all this. Okay, so then when you called him, of course, he's gonna hire you because you went above and beyond. You probably sold thousands of cars for free. And like, you showed your value, like, which by the way, should be like, business 101, like, everybody should be doing that.
15:55 Speaker 02 Everybody should show value, right?
15:57 Jen Cohen? Right.
15:57 Speaker 02 If you can, like, the doors swing open for you.
16:00 Jen Cohen? A hundred percent, and like, you stand out, right? In a competitive environment, like, it wasn't like you were applying to like, work at like McDonald's as like, the nighttime supervisor.
16:08 Speaker 02 Right.
16:09 Jen Cohen? You know, you were like, applying to be like Elon's number two. I would imagine there would be stiff competition. Was he was he like, higher, or sorry, was he like, interviewing and talking to a lot of people?
16:18 Speaker 02 He had, he had talked to a bunch of people. I don't know how many people he he was talking to, a bunch of people, for sure.
16:23 Jen Cohen? So if you were to, when you asked him, or did you ever ask him like, why he hi- made the decision to hire you?
16:29 Speaker 02 I never asked him that, yeah.
16:31 Jen Cohen? You never asked him that question?
16:32 Speaker 02 But we did talk about it because I I kept saying to him, like, I'm not your guy. Like, I think, I think you need a big company car guy. Because you've become in a big car company.
16:41 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
16:41 Speaker 02 And he said, that's exactly what I don't need. I need the opposite of that. I need a fellow entrepreneur. I said, why do you need an entrepreneur? He's like, because you understand how to handle enormous risk. Like, you understand what it's like to not be able to make payroll potentially and what that feels like. And he's like, you know how to kick capital. And I need somebody that knows how to do those two things. I'm not going to find somebody in a big company who knows how to do that. And so I think that's what he saw was just somebody who was wired like him as an entrepreneur.
17:10 Jen Cohen? So can you just tell everybody, like, what is it? What's the role usually of a COO versus the CEO?
17:16 Speaker 02 CEO sets the vision, hires the team, raises the capital. That's kind of the three jobs of the CEO. Set the vision, hire the team, raise the capital. And then the COO or the president has, it sort of makes the trains run on time. You achieve the vision along with the team.
17:35 Jen Cohen? So if he's typical, that's what, the reason why I was asking you is because in my experiences, the CEO or the, that, the person who was like the founder, like, would be the one raising the capital. The COO typically doesn't have that position.
17:47 Speaker 02 No.
17:48 Jen Cohen? But yet he wanted you to have that position to like, be able to raise capital, you said.
17:52 Speaker 02 Well, to be able to allocate capital. So once the capital is raised, like, now what do you do with it?
17:56 Jen Cohen? Now you do with it, yeah.
17:57 Speaker 02 And where does it get the best return? Because you can put a dollar over here, a dollar over here, a dollar over here. Where's it going to get the best return?
18:03 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
18:03 Speaker 02 And that's typically what, what a president's pretty good at trying to figure out. Okay, now I can make the trains run on time and I can actually allocate capital to create a money machine.
18:12 Jen Cohen? What I love, okay, so when I was going through this book and reading the book, what I really love is how you create these framework, like, these frameworks of how to actually build a thriving and successful business, how to scale, how to do all these things. And there's like a lot of like great little actionable things that people should really listen to that can really make a difference between a company being good to great. You know, not to, not to talk about a different book.
18:36 Speaker 02 Jim Collins' book, yeah, which is a great book.
18:38 Jen Cohen? Exactly, it is a good book. And the first thing you talk about is basically to question all the different requirements, right?
18:46 Speaker 02 Yeah.
18:47 Jen Cohen? Can we talk about that? What do you mean when you say question the requirements?
18:50 Speaker 02 So literally you start to question the requirements like so to give you an example like we we started to say could we sell cars online this is 2015 nobody's bought a hundred thousand dollar thing online and we said if we could our cost of sale goes way down and we were competing against big, big car companies to spend two to five thousand dollars per car that they sell. We didn't have that money. So we had to figure out, okay, how do we do this? We can't put a store everywhere.
19:18 Jen Cohen? Right.
19:18 Speaker 02 And so we said, how would we sell cars online? Well, you got to remove friction. Today it takes us 64 clicks to sell a car. Could we get that down to 10? Well, the big source of the clicks is all the loan documents that people have to go through. It's like dozens and dozens of pages. So we started to question the requirements like are all of these paragraphs legally required?
19:41 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
19:42 Speaker 02 Are they regulatorily required? And the answer was actually no, they're not. They were designed by lawyers over time to protect the banks that they work for. So then we we said, okay, what what are you really agreeing to in an auto loan?
19:55 Jen Cohen? Right.
19:55 Speaker 02 Super simply, you're saying this is the price. This is the interest rate. This is the payment and this is the amount of time I'm going to make that payment. And we said, we can put those four things in four sentences in one paragraph. We could have a one click loan. And nobody had ever done this before, but we just thought let's first question the requirements, figure out all this stuff is fluff. It's not necessary. So how could we get a one click loan? We went and talked to dozens of banks. They told us we were nuts and basically threw us out. And then we finally got to this bank in Minneapolis, US Bank, and they said, we'll do it. And all of a sudden, we had taken a 64 click process to buy a car down to 10. And now you can buy a car at Tesla in about the same number of clicks you could buy a pizza at Domino's. It's amazing.
20:35 Jen Cohen? That is incredible. That also is another principle that I read in the book, which is simplicity over complexity.
20:41 Speaker 02 Totally.
20:42 Jen Cohen? Right?
20:42 Speaker 02 Totally.
20:43 Jen Cohen? People make the most simple things much more difficult than it ever has to be in every area of life.
20:49 Speaker 02 Right.
20:49 Jen Cohen? Right?
20:50 Speaker 02 Right.
20:50 Jen Cohen? And so does that like, is that part of like how you kind of grew like all the businesses, all six of the business like exits that you had? Tesla and also Lyft and is that basically the whole like who's, whose principles that is that your principle? Was that Elon's?
21:06 Speaker 02 No, it's a guy, I learned this in my second company. I was super lucky to have a board member.
21:10 Jen Cohen? Okay.
21:11 Speaker 02 Who's a mentor to me to this day. His name's Fred Missoni.
21:14 Jen Cohen? Okay.
21:14 Speaker 02 Fred was the first person taught by the Japanese, their production system, which is all based on simplicity. And Fred told, Fred told me like, the best leaders are the greatest simplifiers. And like, we've all heard the line, like Mark Twain's line, like I would have written you a shorter letter if I would have taken the time.
21:31 Jen Cohen? Yes.
21:32 Speaker 02 Simplifying super duper hard, really hard. And, uh, and so he taught me how to be a simplifier. And then when I learned the power of that, it's a complete hack as a leader. And to your point, it's a life skill too. Because if you can simplify different aspects of your life, it just gets a whole lot easier to execute than complexity.
21:49 Jen Cohen? A hundred. And also like the time that you save, the efficiency that you save, the stress, the amount of stress that you save.
21:56 Speaker 02 Yeah.
21:57 Jen Cohen? All the things.
21:58 Speaker 02 Yeah.
21:58 Jen Cohen? So give us an example, give me a few examples of how that would play out in like the, in like becoming like, you know, growing a company or in your own life, basically like.
22:08 Speaker 02 We, so in growing a company, like I think product is at the core of every company. And if you have amazing product, people will beat a path to your door, they'll rave about it.
22:18 Jen Cohen? Right.
22:18 Speaker 02 Spend on marketing, et cetera. And you think about some really successful companies, so take Apple, take Tesla. They don't have like a hundred varieties of, of their product.
22:28 Jen Cohen? Mm hmm.
22:29 Speaker 02 They've got like three. And the reason is it's really, really much simpler to get a supply chain producing those three, to get factories producing those, to market them, to sell them, to distribute them, et cetera. And so simplicity like really, really, really pays in product businesses.
22:45 Jen Cohen? Totally.
22:46 Speaker 02 If you have the discipline around it. Uh, and so like Tesla has one car, the Model Y that sells 1.4 million units a year. And it's the best selling car in the world. They don't have 10 or 15 different models.
22:59 Jen Cohen? How many does it sell?
23:00 Speaker 02 1.4 million units.
23:02 Jen Cohen? Still?
23:03 Speaker 02 Still.
23:03 Jen Cohen? Now, even with all the
23:05 Speaker 02 Even with all the stuff going on.
23:06 Jen Cohen? The craziness of Elon, it's still selling that many?
23:09 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's still the number one single selling car in the world.
23:12 Jen Cohen? Wow, why do you think that is?
23:14 Speaker 02 Because rather than producing like 10 different SUVs, we produced, we figured out the one that would work for the biggest chunk of the market. So we simplified and then we simplified the production and the parts and the manufacturing process, all that sort of stuff.
23:28 Jen Cohen? It's so true. Like, you know, I always notice that the companies, I always say start with one SKU, be your hero product.
23:34 Speaker 02 Yeah.
23:35 Jen Cohen? And then like, let that be really successful before you branch out and have a million SKUs.
23:39 Speaker 02 Exactly.
23:40 Jen Cohen? Right?
23:40 Speaker 02 Yeah.
23:41 Jen Cohen? Because then like, you're always gonna be like, you're basically competing and cannibalizing your own business.
23:46 Speaker 02 Your own business, yeah. And we see this like in the athletic market.
23:49 Jen Cohen? All the time.
23:50 Speaker 02 The athleisure market where you've got gazillion SKUs coming out of places like Nike and Adidas, et cetera.
23:55 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
23:55 Speaker 02 And then they go to compete against ON and ON's got like 10 SKUs.
23:59 Jen Cohen? Right.
24:00 Speaker 02 And ON's got a simpler business to run and it's faster to grow and it takes less capital, et cetera. So yeah, I'm a huge believer in simplicity and that's kind of the second, the second step of the algorithm was once you, once you sort of question all the requirements, then you've got to like super simplify the process to deliver against those requirements.
24:19 Jen Cohen? So, but so like if you learned this from your mentor or, so did you implement this at Tesla? Cause or did Tesla already have this vision?
24:28 Speaker 02 I think Tesla had this in the culture because Elon, he talks about this, like he's, he's a physicist at his core. Physics is all about simplifying the complex down to the utterly simple, right? And it's called first principles. And so there are first principles in physics. And so he kind of already had this mentality of simplify, simplify, simplify. And I plugged into that because I did too. I like, that was, that was completely natural to me.
24:52 Jen Cohen? Right. So part of probably why you got along with each other.
24:54 Speaker 02 Yeah. And it's, I think of why the, why I fit in that culture.
24:58 Jen Cohen? Right.
24:58 Speaker 02 Yeah.
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26:39 Jen Cohen? Did you get along with all the other people at the company? Did he get along with all the other people? Does he get along?
26:46 Speaker 02 I really loved that team. It was one of the best teams I've ever worked on. We were doing the best work of our lives together. We're still in touch with each other. I still text back and forth years later with the core team that I was on.
26:59 Jen Cohen? Really?
26:59 Speaker 02 And two of my partners in my venture firm now were members of that team.
27:05 Jen Cohen? By the way, speaking of your venture firm, then we're going to go back. How big is your venture firm? And what are you doing at the end?
27:10 Speaker 02 We do this really unique thing. We invent companies from scratch. So rather than funding entrepreneurs, we actually fund our own ideas. And we get those companies growing and then we bring a team in to run them. So it's a, it's a new model in venture.
27:26 Jen Cohen? It's a reverse engineering.
27:27 Speaker 02 It is. You start with a market and you say, I want to attack this market with this product. We're going to build the product, get our first sales, and then we're going to find a world-class team to come in and run it. So it's really, it's a, it's a venture model that I had thought a lot about as an entrepreneur and decided to implement. And there's a handful of us doing this in the world, but not many. It's a pretty unique form of venture.
27:48 Jen Cohen? That's amazing. Name a company that you're working on now that you've done.
27:52 Speaker 02 So we've, we've got a cyber company called Cork. We've got a, we've got the number one AI infrastructure ETF on the, trading on the market. That's called Vista Shares. We've got a, it's a supply chain company called Atomic, payment company called Zumie. Like we've got a bunch of, we've started, we've got a portfolio of 17 companies.
28:12 Jen Cohen? Wow.
28:12 Speaker 02 That we started the last five years or had a hand in starting.
28:15 Jen Cohen? How big is this fund?
28:16 Speaker 02 Uh, it's now it's going to be close to a couple hundred million dollars.
28:21 Jen Cohen? Interesting. Wow. Okay. So I, I just wanted to ask you because I was curious.
28:25 Speaker 02 Yeah.
28:25 Jen Cohen? But it sounds like a lot of your background is kind of manufacturing, software.
28:31 Speaker 02 Software for sure.
28:32 Jen Cohen? Software, obviously. Like it's kind of like in that wheelhouse. Like what else? Cause all the companies you had before, cars, I guess now, like,
28:40 Speaker 02 Yep.
28:40 Jen Cohen? Like was, was car, before you did Tesla, did you have a car company?
28:45 Speaker 02 I did. I had a couple that were in the auto.
28:47 Jen Cohen? A couple of car companies?
28:48 Speaker 02 Couple, a couple of software companies in the automotive space. And it's, I think it came from, my granddad owned an auto repair shop and that was my first job. And I think it just got in my blood somehow. I love cars. So, so I've had, I've had some touch with the car business my whole career.
29:04 Jen Cohen? Do you drive, do you drive a Tesla now?
29:06 Speaker 02 I, I have a Tesla because I want to always, I sit on the board of General Motors. And I primarily drive their cars, but I have a Tesla because I always want to be driving the best of the competition. And Tesla is the best competitor to GM right now.
29:19 Jen Cohen? What other, what kind of GM car are you driving?
29:21 Speaker 02 I'm driving a, two, I've got a Cadillac Escalade IQ,
29:25 Jen Cohen? Uh huh.
29:25 Speaker 02 Which is this beautiful SUV that goes 500 miles. And then I've got a Chevy Silverado EV pickup that also goes close to 500 miles.
29:36 Jen Cohen? Wow.
29:36 Speaker 02 I think the pickup might be my favorite right now.
29:38 Jen Cohen? Really?
29:38 Speaker 02 Yeah.
29:39 Jen Cohen? Wait, where do you live? You live in Nebraska?
29:40 Speaker 02 I live in Colorado.
29:41 Jen Cohen? Oh, Colorado. Okay. So, okay, so let's go back to the Tesla thing. So basically, the phrase, so you, you're right. So then you, you guys were getting along on the fact that you guys had the same type of like mindset or framework ideas about simplicity over complexity. And then, then you also had something that I heard you talk about, which I thought was fantastic. And I like wrote that down.
30:03 Speaker 02 Okay.
30:03 Jen Cohen? Which was how you kind of weed out the bloat of a company and the people who are underperforming.
30:11 Speaker 02 Yeah.
30:12 Jen Cohen? It was, it reminded me a lot of like Animal Farm. Or you know what I mean? Because you make the people make the decision on their own in a very kind of, kind of like, not sneaky, but slick way. Can you?
30:27 Speaker 02 Simple way, like, yeah.
30:28 Jen Cohen? I, I.
30:29 Speaker 02 We tried to simplify like.
30:30 Jen Cohen? Brilliant.
30:30 Speaker 02 This crazy, crazy thing that happens in companies every year that nobody really likes. It's called performance review season, right? And so like, as a boss, you gotta sit down, you gotta write a bunch of performance reviews. And there's a bunch of recency bias because you don't remember what that person did all year. You remember what they kind of did in the last few months. So it's not even fair.
30:46 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
30:46 Speaker 02 And everybody kind of hates it. The employees hate it, the bosses hate it, everybody hates it. So we debated like, how could we like make this actually useful? And not a chore for everybody? And what we evolved to was just asking people like, who have, first question, who have you worked with this year? Write it out. And then just put a check mark next to the people that you would want on your team. And that was it. Didn't ask them why. So that was it. So like, super simple. I write all the people I've worked with. I put a check mark next to the people that I would want on my team. And that creates a list of people that are really useful. Because you see their name mentioned again and again and again. Those are the people that are up for promotion. You see a bunch of people that are not ever mentioned by anybody.
31:29 Speaker 02 Like, they clearly are dead weight on teams because nobody wants them on the team. Those are the people that you can then kind of clean out and reload the talent system. And so it was a really simple way to just identify talent and reward that talent. And then also identify kind of the bottom 10 or 15% that probably needed to move on.
31:47 Jen Cohen? That's a great. And then how would you get rid of them?
31:50 Speaker 02 We would just tell them, hey, like, this doesn't look like it's the place for you. So, thanks, but, uh, but this isn't going to be a place for your future.
31:59 Jen Cohen? And did you do that every single year?
32:01 Speaker 02 Did that constantly.
32:02 Jen Cohen? How often?
32:03 Speaker 02 Uh, sometimes a couple of times a year.
32:05 Jen Cohen? Wow. So you're constantly just weeding out like dead weight.
32:09 Speaker 02 Underperformers. Yeah.
32:10 Jen Cohen? Yeah. Dead weight.
32:11 Speaker 02 These are super smart people. Like, to get an engineering job at Tesla, they get like probably 40,000 or 50,000 applications for every job now. And so these are super smart people, but for whatever reason, they just didn't, they didn't work on the teams.
32:26 Jen Cohen? But by the way, that's not only at Tesla. You could do that with any place.
32:29 Speaker 02 You can do that with any place. Exactly.
32:31 Jen Cohen? You could do it with people like on my team. You know what I mean? Like with A people. You know what I mean? Like, it doesn't matter.
32:35 Speaker 02 Right.
32:36 Jen Cohen? I just think that when you put the onus on someone else to tell you.
32:40 Speaker 02 Yeah.
32:40 Jen Cohen? Because they're telling you based on their own experiences. You can't be everywhere. You don't know everything, right? But the best way to know is to ask the people on the front lines and you talk about that.
32:50 Speaker 02 Yeah.
32:51 Jen Cohen? You know, like the fact that if you really want to know what's going on in a company and what's really what's bad in a company, you go to the people who are in the front lines who are, who are like doing the work.
33:00 Speaker 02 Exactly.
33:01 Jen Cohen? You know?
33:01 Speaker 02 Exactly. It's the best hack ever. I learned this from Sam Walton because I read his book, Made in America, and it's basically a book about how he travels from store to store. And the first thing he does when he visits one of his stores, he goes in the back. And he talks to the warehouse guy because the warehouse guy knows everything about the store. Knows what product is moving, what product isn't moving, knows who's like, who really works up front, who doesn't work. And he got all the information he needed about the store. And then he'd go talk to the store manager and say, hey, look, I know exactly what's going on in your store. The guy'd be like, how? Uh, and then they finally figured out, oh, he's talking to the frontline people who actually know. So I just borrowed that. And I said, like, this is the best hack in the world. Like, I go to the frontline. They're dealing face to face with customers. So they know what the customers love. They know what the customers hate because they're getting the first brunt of that.
33:46 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
33:47 Speaker 02 And you just ask them like, what do we need to fix about our product? And they're like, oh, this, this, and this. If it sees three things, I don't have any more complaints. It's like, okay, I can make that happen. And I would have the standard question when I went out to the front lines, which is, okay, you have my job. You have all the keys to the company. What's one thing you do today? And I wouldn't get 500 answers. I'd get like five to 10, like just do this. And so literally my teams got used to, I would be out on Fridays typically on the front lines. And I'd send emails and say, here are the three things we got to work on. And they just got used to it.
34:18 Jen Cohen? Right.
34:18 Speaker 02 And then they started to do it because they wanted to be out ahead of me, which is the right motivation.
34:23 Jen Cohen? What was the, the most common trait of all the top performers?
34:27 Speaker 02 A couple of things. One is in that culture, believe it or not, there's this really cool combination of humility and confidence, which kind of sounds weird. But the goals were so high, like Elon's awesome at setting aspirational goals. So the goals are so high. And you had a choice, like when you put a goal in front of you, it was like, you're crazy? No. Or most often this humble confidence would come out where you would say, I have no idea how to do that. They came to me and he said, we need to double this company every eight months. And there's no marketing budget. You can't spend a dollar on marketing. And my first reaction was, that's insane. But then I kind of zip my lip and I said, you know what? I don't know how to do that.
35:09 Speaker 02 But then the confidence comes in a bit like a, we're going to figure it out, like challenge accepted. And that was core to that culture. And so when you saw people who were really effective there, they had this kind of combination of, I don't know how to do that, but I'm game for the challenge. Let's go figure it out.
35:26 Jen Cohen? Right.
35:27 Speaker 02 And then they would work like crazy to figure it out. And what I learned was when you set super ambitious goals for people, then they will work to achieve those.
35:35 Jen Cohen? Right.
35:35 Speaker 02 Those challenges. And if you never asked, then they never worked to achieve them.
35:39 Jen Cohen? Absolutely. So, because people never know how much they're actually capable of.
35:42 Speaker 02 And that's what I kept saying about, yeah, like I kept saying, man, I didn't know I had this inside of me. And he was pulling stuff out of me that I didn't know I had. And I saw it in the people around me and the teams that work for me too. That people were given what, they were able to accomplish much more than they think. They thought they could.
35:58 Jen Cohen? Right.
35:59 Speaker 02 Yeah.
35:59 Jen Cohen? Because you're constantly challenging them to
36:01 Speaker 02 Yeah.
36:01 Jen Cohen? push themselves.
36:02 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly.
36:03 Jen Cohen? Because people like sometimes people don't see you and they don't, they don't know unless they know, unless they do it.
36:08 Speaker 02 Unless they've been challenged, yeah.
36:10 Jen Cohen? And then the more they do it, they have more confidence in doing a harder thing and more and more and more.
36:15 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly.
36:15 Jen Cohen? How are you able to like manage Elon's expectations? Like, because he's like-
36:20 Speaker 02 I don't think you can manage his expectations. We just had to like really work hard to deliver against those expectations because the expectations are reasonable. Like I used to be a founder too, so I, I had been on the other side of this and was, it was really setting high goals for people and, and, and holding them accountable to achieve them. And so I felt like now that I'm on the other side in the receiving end, I had to be doing the same thing.
36:42 Jen Cohen? Right. So I was gonna say like, because you know, if you're gonna ask other people to like do exceptionally hard work.
36:48 Speaker 02 Right.
36:49 Jen Cohen? You have to, you have, it comes, it basically it falls from the top first, right? So, because I, I, I heard that he like sleeps in the office for like days on end. Is that true?
36:58 Speaker 02 He does. Like, we would have problems in the factory and we would be sleeping on the factory floor for weeks trying to figure out like how to solve the problem. So it wasn't like he was dumping the problem in our laps and, and
37:08 Jen Cohen? He was doing it.
37:09 Speaker 02 taking off. He was in the trenches with us. And that, that then brings a lot of conviction that you, we ought to
37:15 Jen Cohen? A hundred percent. Did you do that too?
37:17 Speaker 02 Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah.
37:18 Jen Cohen? You slept at the office?
37:19 Speaker 02 Yeah, oh yeah.
37:19 Jen Cohen? For how, like, it's like, didn't go home for how long? Days?
37:22 Speaker 02 Couple of weeks. Well, I, I mean, I would go home. Yeah. But it might be two or three nights in a row and I'd go home. Uh, and then
37:29 Jen Cohen? So wait, wait, you go home for, you, you stay at the office for a couple nights? Two, three nights? And then you go home after a few nights?
37:35 Speaker 02 Yeah.
37:36 Jen Cohen? And then what? Like just come home and come back to the office and then sleep again for a few nights?
37:40 Speaker 02 Basically because the company was like in survival mode. And so if we didn't solve these problems, we're going bankrupt. Uh, and so like it was, it was dire straits. And I don't know if that happens now as much, but in that era, like we were almost bankrupt a lot and the press was talking about it.
37:55 Jen Cohen? I totally remember.
37:56 Speaker 02 And they weren't wrong. That we were really fragile.
37:59 Jen Cohen? Wow. So then like, how do you like, if you don't mind me asking, you could tell me to shut up. But then how do you get compensated as a COO for something like that where you're like literally like sleeping on the floor of the of the plant day for days on end, for weeks on end, like, because you're not there anymore, right? Like, I know you have stock probably. But like, you you must have felt like you were like a part like, there must have been a feeling even of like, being on a team and you know, like not letting, I mean, at the end of it, how are people being compensated for that? Like, are you nice?
38:30 Speaker 02 I think the way the the compensation comes as a leader, the compensation comes from looking around at the team and the people that are involved. So there are literally like 7,000 people working in that factory on a per shift. And if we didn't get this right, they'd be out of work. And that was my motivation. My motivation was I would, I'm working beside these people. I'm looking in their eyes. And that was motivation and compensation enough for me. Like, we're not going out of business. Uh, you're gonna have be able to buy groceries, fund your kids' education, buy a house, etc. If we get this right, and that's compensation enough for me.
39:01 Jen Cohen? Because you were only, you were there for four years. That wasn't, that's not a lifetime. It's a long time, but it's not a lifetime.
39:06 Speaker 02 Exactly.
39:07 Jen Cohen? And then you went, you moved on to Lyft.
39:09 Speaker 02 Yeah.
39:10 Jen Cohen? Did, so were you still working at Tesla when Lyft poached you? Or how did that whole thing happen?
39:16 Speaker 02 So I had, like Elon and I had this conversation and I told him I was gonna leave and give him months of time to do a transition. And during that, somehow the investors in Lyft found out about that and uh, and so they reached out to me and said, hey, look, we want to talk to you about taking Lyft public. Which normally I just wouldn't have returned the call. But I'd never taken one of my companies public before. I had sold all six of mine to public companies.
39:42 Jen Cohen? Got it. Okay.
39:43 Speaker 02 And it was something that I really wanted to like, it's a box I wanted to check. I wanted to have that experience of taking a company public.
39:48 Jen Cohen? But wait, hold on. Why were you talking to Elon about Elon, about leaving?
39:53 Speaker 02 I had like Walter Isaacson talks about this in his book a bit where in this chapter at Tesla, there was a chapter where Elon was really, really struggling with mental health issues. And my job went from helping to run Tesla to really helping him with mental health issues for which I am not equipped. I just am not trained. I don't have the skills. And it was burying me because I just was trying to help, but I didn't have the skill set to help.
40:20 Jen Cohen? Help in what way, though?
40:22 Speaker 02 Just help get him through a really tough time. And
40:27 Jen Cohen? Like as a friend?
40:28 Speaker 02 Yeah, almost as a friend, rather than a business colleague, just as a friend. And so Walter has this scene in his book where I'm laying on the floor underneath the conference room table with beside Elon, trying to, trying to help get him on an earnings call. And at that point, I just realized, man, this is, this is not what I'm equipped to do. And so Elon and I had that conversation. I said, I love you and I love this business, but I'm not equipped to do this. And it's burying me. I'm gonna go do, I'm gonna go do something else. And that was really the core of that, that conversation.
40:58 Jen Cohen? Wow. So are you guys friends anymore?
41:00 Speaker 02 We, we're friendly, I would say, and we're like in touch every once in a while now. And, and I'm glad he's in a much healthier place now.
41:08 Jen Cohen? He is?
41:08 Speaker 02 Yeah, he is.
41:09 Jen Cohen? Wow.
41:10 Speaker 02 Yeah.
41:11 Jen Cohen? Okay. So then you wanted to, so basically you wanted to leave the place?
41:14 Speaker 02 I did.
41:14 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
41:15 Speaker 02 I did.
41:15 Jen Cohen? So, cause you had a, did you have a family?
41:18 Speaker 02 I did. Yeah.
41:19 Jen Cohen? And so what did they think of your, you probably were working, it sounds to me like 20?
41:24 Speaker 02 I was working like a, like a madman.
41:25 Jen Cohen? 24 hours a day?
41:26 Speaker 02 They were relieved. Yeah.
41:28 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
41:28 Speaker 02 Yeah.
41:29 Jen Cohen? And so that, okay, so you wanted to leave. So then they, people kind of, kind of heard about it a little bit.
41:34 Speaker 02 Yeah, somehow like it leaked out and I don't know how it leaked out, but it somehow leaked out.
41:38 Jen Cohen? And so then what, okay, so now, so now walk me through what happens.
41:41 Speaker 02 So, so then I agreed to join Lyft.
41:44 Jen Cohen? No, no, no. No. So you said, how did that happen?
41:46 Speaker 02 So I got a call from Ben Horowitz, Ed Andreessen Horowitz, he's an investor, early investor in Lyft. Said, I want to talk to you.
41:53 Jen Cohen? Isn't he also an investor in Tesla?
41:55 Speaker 02 I don't, no, they weren't, the venture firm wasn't investors in Tesla. But it's a pretty small world and, and he said, hey, I want to talk to you because you, you, Tesla never made really a quarter until you got there. And then they've made a lot of quarters in a row. And, and so we sat down and he said, hey, look, I need your help getting Lyft public. And I said, you don't know this, but you're pressing a button that you probably didn't know you're pressing, but I haven't taken one of my companies public. I'd love to have that experience. So I joined Lyft as COO. They have two founders. So I came in as COO and we doubled the revenue, doubled the market share and got the company public.
42:28 Jen Cohen? And then? That was also around the time that Uber was being beaten up, right? With the sexual harassment and stuff?
42:35 Speaker 02 Yeah, I arrived at Lyft at just the right time because the delete Uber movement was like well underway.
42:40 Jen Cohen? Right.
42:41 Speaker 02 And so it made it like much easier than it would have been to double share and double sales. Because we had this opening where a competitor was really stumbling badly. And we were able to come in and scoop up a bunch of market share as a result.
42:56 Jen Cohen? What was the deal? What's really? Why is Lyft? I mean, I don't know if you know this now, maybe you do, but by the way, isn't Lyft and Uber now merged? Didn't they kind of?
43:04 Speaker 02 No, they're still competing.
43:05 Jen Cohen? They're still competing?
43:06 Speaker 02 Yeah.
43:06 Jen Cohen? Because I was-
43:07 Speaker 02 Still competing, still two separate public companies.
43:09 Jen Cohen? Because I'm going to tell you, I always use Lyft.
43:12 Speaker 02 Love it. Why?
43:13 Jen Cohen? Okay, I'm going to tell you why. Number one, it's always a little bit cheaper.
43:16 Speaker 02 Yep.
43:16 Jen Cohen? And like just a little bit.
43:18 Speaker 02 Yeah.
43:19 Jen Cohen? And because it's the underdog a little bit.
43:22 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly.
43:23 Jen Cohen? And I just, I find it to be people a little bit more friendly sometimes. They're a little more, it's more of like the quirky, like quirky young sister.
43:34 Speaker 02 Exactly. And that's the brand positioning. We wanted it to be like against the Darth Vader. We were going to be the quirky young sister.
43:40 Jen Cohen? Really?
43:41 Speaker 02 Yeah, totally. And position the brand that way. So it's more friendly, more quirky, more fun. And just a little bit less expensive. And so if that was enough-
43:49 Jen Cohen? It's a little bit.
43:50 Speaker 02 Exactly. That was enough to tip the scales our way.
43:53 Jen Cohen? But wait, but doesn't, but now Uber is like dominating though again.
43:56 Speaker 02 Yes.
43:57 Jen Cohen? So, so at the time, so how long were you at Lyft for?
44:00 Speaker 02 Just about two years, just a little under two years.
44:03 Jen Cohen? Okay. And then what happened? So then they, you said they wiped, they IPO, I was going to say YPO.
44:08 Speaker 02 They IPOed. They IPOed and I stayed, there's what's called a lockup after an IPO where all the insiders, including investors can't sell for like six months. So I stayed for the lockup and then once the lockup expired, I wanted to go start my own firm. Because I'd been dying to do this for like five years. So that's when I left to go do my own thing.
44:27 Jen Cohen? Tell me how you were able to then catapult Lyft's business, just how you did with Tesla.
44:33 Speaker 02 So this is another like simplification. So I sat down with my team, all who had been there for a long time.
44:40 Jen Cohen? Okay.
44:41 Speaker 02 And I said, like, there's a really simple question I have for you, which is where do we make our money? It can't be in like $5 rides that are two minutes long. And it was really, really smart savvy guy on my team. His name's David Baga. And David said, we make our money in two places. 80% of the cash flow comes from airport rides and rides to the doctor. And so we tested that. It was like, if that's where the, this is called a profit pool. If that's where the profit pool is, we gotta go hard after that. And it became apparent at this time that Uber didn't have that insight. So we went hard after airport rides, which are corporate, and hard after healthcare rides, which really, really mattered to people. Like there are people, there are people that really suffer from chronic disease, like kidney disease,
45:25 Speaker 02 that have to go get dialysis like several times a week. And they have to have a ride to and from because when you get dialysis, you can't like drive a car. So it turns out their health insurance pays for those rides. And so we were able to cut deals with health insurers, with healthcare providers and with businesses to give those two rides. And that helped us double revenue. And it was just that simplification, that simple insight, asking like, where do we make our money?
45:50 Jen Cohen? That's really smart.
45:52 Speaker 02 Well, it looks at it in retrospect. What I was dumbfounded by was nobody had asked that question before. I'm like, so there were a lot of people.
46:00 Jen Cohen? Nobody asked that question.
46:01 Speaker 02 There were a lot of people that didn't know that in the business, but luckily David Baggot did know that. And he pointed our team in the right direction.
46:10 Jen Cohen? So what did you, where did you add value?
46:12 Speaker 02 So it was then, well, it was asking that question and then pointing the business at those two things.
46:19 Jen Cohen? So that was your idea, though, to do that?
46:21 Speaker 02 Well, I would say that's the team's idea. That's me asking the question. They come up with the answer. And so now we're all gonna implement it together.
46:27 Jen Cohen? You ask the question, they're gonna be like, shit, I don't know. And then they went down a rabbit hole, hopefully to find it.
46:32 Speaker 02 Luckily, it wasn't shit, I don't know. It was like, no, here's where we make the money. Okay, if this is where we make the money, then this is where we're gonna, this is where we're gonna point all of our resources.
46:41 Jen Cohen? Do you know what I find so interesting? You know, my grandmother would always say common sense isn't so common.
46:47 Speaker 02 Right.
46:47 Jen Cohen? And what I've noticed is in both scenarios in Tesla with like, why is nobody getting follow-up calls when they're doing their
46:57 Speaker 02 Their test drives.
46:57 Jen Cohen? Their test drives.
46:58 Speaker 02 Yeah.
46:58 Jen Cohen? Duh.
46:59 Speaker 02 Duh.
46:59 Jen Cohen? That's how you're gonna sell a frickin' car. And then at Lyft, it's like, where are the most expensive rides? And like, who is giving the most expensive? Like, where are those rides? Like, we're not making money off $5 rides. We're making money off of these hospital rides.
47:14 Speaker 02 And the $100 trips to the airport. Yeah.
47:16 Jen Cohen? And the $100 trips to the airport. Like, focus our attention on the more expensive.
47:20 Speaker 02 Totally.
47:20 Jen Cohen? Right? Like, I always talk about the fact that also that like, you work just as hard as having a, you know, whatever. Like, when you have, like, when I, when you do a partnership that's a million dollars versus 20 bucks, you're still working, like, the amount of work is usually the same.
47:38 Speaker 02 That's a great example. Exactly.
47:40 Jen Cohen? You know?
47:40 Speaker 02 The amount of work is the same. And so why not apply that work to the profit pool? Super simple.
47:45 Jen Cohen? Exactly.
47:46 Speaker 02 Yeah.
47:46 Jen Cohen? It's like, this is like, literally like, things that people just are not focusing on.
47:50 Speaker 02 Right.
47:51 Jen Cohen? Give me another one.
47:53 Speaker 02 I think it happens in a lot of businesses, like, at Lululemon, when I asked the question, where do we make our money?
47:58 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
47:59 Speaker 02 Lululemon has historically made their money in bottoms, not tops. And so it's the pant wall. That's where they make their money.
48:07 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
48:07 Speaker 02 So then you'd ask the question, okay, why do we have all the rest of this extra stuff going on then? Because it's just diluting profitability, to your point. And it's like the $20 deal versus the, versus the $1,000 deal. So, like, this happens all over businesses because businesses get complex over time, and nobody comes along. It's like a garden that gets weeds, and nobody comes along to weed the garden. And I feel like my job is come weed the garden. Like, let's figure out which, which of these plants matter, and let's water the heck out of them, and let's whack the heck out of everything else.
48:37 Jen Cohen? You know what, though? This is such, this is so true. And like, I hope anybody who's like, doing business or interested in business is listening to this. Because you know, if you really think about it, right? Like, Lululemon's a great example, again, because at the beginning, when Lululemon started, they were like dominating, right? Because, yeah, they were known for their, like, pants, because they made girls' butts look better or whatever.
48:58 Speaker 02 Yeah.
48:58 Jen Cohen? Right?
48:58 Speaker 02 Yeah.
48:59 Jen Cohen? And like, that would be the first thing you see when you go into a Lululemon. It'd be, it would be, the stores would be a little, was smaller, and the pants would be on the sides, and whatever else. It'd be like the first focal place that your eyes look. You go into a Lululemon now. There is so much, like, you know, as I would say, drak, it's a Hebrew word. It's like, there's so much like, you know, noise and busyness in there with all the bags and the accessories and the bras and 97 different like levels of tank tops, like crops and then quarters and this. And then I'm like, where the hell are the pants? And the pants are in the back, back, back. You've got to walk through all this junk and it's like a small wall versus like make more pants.
49:43 Speaker 02 Well, hopefully you'll like walk into Lulu like I've been in two today so far.
49:47 Jen Cohen? Yeah, okay.
49:47 Speaker 02 This is part of my spending time on the front lines. I want to be a useful board member, so I go to stores.
49:51 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
49:52 Speaker 02 And we've got a new team running North America and in literally weeks, they have simplified the store, simplified the story, simplified the product lineup so that it's focusing on a few things versus a lot of things.
50:05 Jen Cohen? What are they focusing on now?
50:06 Speaker 02 So they're focusing on the three things that yoga or that Lulu is known for. Yoga, train and run. And so you should walk in and you should see train, run, yoga and the pants are highlighted. And there's not a bunch of drak.
50:20 Jen Cohen? Yeah, drak, thank you.
50:22 Speaker 02 Yeah.
50:22 Jen Cohen? I mean, that's the way I see it, right? Because what were they focusing on like for a bunch of years?
50:27 Speaker 02 Sometimes you like lose your way and you say like, ah, I've got to have casual clothes. Well, then you're competing with a lot of people that are not in your core. And you said it in the core, it was about workout clothes that made her look beautiful. And that was the mantra, like when I started at Lulu, the mantra was we exist to make her silhouette look beautiful.
50:48 Jen Cohen? I didn't say that, you said that, I said a butt looked good.
50:50 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, we had a little bit more dressed up way of saying it or have. And now they're getting back to that. They're like, we exist to make all shapes and sizes of her body look beautiful. That's what we do and we do that with a limited set of SKUs, not a gazillion SKUs.
51:04 Jen Cohen? But the other problems with the lemon is at the beginning, they had, they had much better quality. Their quality has went down over the years.
51:10 Speaker 02 It's now like, like it's, I have people say this to me all the time, like the quality is so good at Lulu. Like I'm wearing stuff that's like five years old or six years old. And I've tried aloe, I've tried Vori and the stuff wears out.
51:22 Jen Cohen? Oh, yeah, aloe is terrible.
51:23 Speaker 02 Exactly, like, so it's music to my ears because we really have put a big emphasis on quality too.
51:29 Jen Cohen? See, I don't know. I mean, I find that when Lululemon just start, like, right when they're just kind of
51:34 Speaker 02 Just starting, 20 years ago, yeah.
51:36 Jen Cohen? They had great, their quality was better. I found it to be better.
51:39 Speaker 02 Well, I think now, you like, give it a run.
51:42 Jen Cohen? Really? I know that I agree. The ALO stuff is junk. I mean, it's like, basically, like, it's basically like, the most, the cheapest.
51:49 Speaker 02 It's almost disposable.
51:50 Jen Cohen? It is. I was gonna say, it's like, what do you call it, fast fashion?
51:53 Speaker 02 Exactly.
51:53 Jen Cohen? And, but they're charging massive prices.
51:56 Speaker 02 Yeah.
51:56 Jen Cohen? And in fact, they want to be like, uh, an elevated brand now. They want to be like a luxury brand.
52:01 Speaker 02 Right.
52:01 Jen Cohen? Which I'm like, they have nice styles, but like, that stuff does not, it's not great cal, it's not great quality.
52:08 Speaker 02 Yeah.
52:09 Jen Cohen? So, how are Lululemon's members now? Are they still good?
52:12 Speaker 02 Now, we're, uh, we're really in the midst of a real turnaround in North America. They're great in China, great in Europe, but we've really had to renew our focus in North America, and the team's doing that. So it's, it's working so far.
52:23 Jen Cohen? What about styles? Are they gonna like, change the styles and kind of like, be a little bit more fashion forward?
52:30 Speaker 02 Hmm, I think, like-
52:31 Jen Cohen? Or that's not, it's not with the core. You want to stay with the core of what it is.
52:34 Speaker 02 I think the core of what they do is, is they stay focused on making a few products just absolutely killer. And that can mean it's more beautiful. And over time, they took out some piping and some zippers and things like that, that we want to add back in, because it adds to the beauty of the product.
52:49 Jen Cohen? Well, the other thing that Lululemon, just to kind of, not to like, I know you're not like Chip Wilson, but, um, is he still on the, is he still like, involved? They kicked him out, right, for all the other-
52:58 Speaker 02 Before I got on the board, yeah. So that was a chapter before I got there.
53:01 Jen Cohen? That was a chap, wouldn't they kick him out of there again?
53:03 Speaker 02 Uh, it was the, uh, it was, I think, the comments that he made about, there are certain people that shouldn't be wearing my clothes.
53:10 Jen Cohen? I know, I remember that, and they kicked him out. But how, was like, two years ago, three years?
53:14 Speaker 02 That was almost 10 years ago.
53:15 Jen Cohen? 10?
53:16 Speaker 02 Yeah.
53:16 Jen Cohen? My god.
53:17 Speaker 02 Yeah.
53:17 Jen Cohen? God, I, I'm like in a, I'm in like, a black hole of time.
53:21 Speaker 02 Good, make time go slow.
53:22 Jen Cohen? Yeah, right?
53:22 Speaker 02 Yeah.
53:23 Jen Cohen? But what I was gonna say about the Lululemon is, this is what you guys do all the time. Not you, because I know you're on the board, but- You guys like take things out that are really popular and then never to never be seen again. Like when things are like doing really well, you'll never find them again. Like so many of the the sports bras that I like, gone, completely gone. And they've been replaced by things that are much less adequate.
53:49 Speaker 02 I will take that feedback. I'll go find out for you.
53:51 Jen Cohen? No, would you let me know?
53:52 Speaker 02 I haven't been in the bra market, so I gotta go figure it out.
53:54 Jen Cohen? I'm gonna tell you why, okay? I'm gonna tell you this and then you can like do whatever with that, whatever you want with the information.
53:59 Speaker 02 This is good feedback. This is a feedback loop that we're doing right now. You're giving me feedback, then I then get to take back to the team.
54:04 Jen Cohen? Well, you can, and I want to get a free bra from it, but I'm gonna tell you what they have.
54:08 Speaker 02 It's good consulting fee.
54:09 Jen Cohen? I think so. It's very cheap for you.
54:12 Speaker 02 Yes.
54:12 Jen Cohen? Uh, very cost effective for Lululemon. They would make a bra that had pockets, like it would have like two layers. It would be like material and then room and then like the material. So I could put my my key, I could put my credit card, I could put like my dollar bill. I could put stuff in there. Everyone loved this bra. Everybody loved the bra and it was like really good support.
54:33 Speaker 02 Yeah.
54:33 Jen Cohen? Gone. Bra, totally gone.
54:34 Speaker 02 I'll find out what happened.
54:35 Jen Cohen? And now they have flimsy bras. Either they have the bras that like you can't like run in them because they're too like flimsy. Or they have these like matronly like granny bras that like are like from here to here. I'm like, I'm not wearing either one. Where is this other bra? And so, and they're like, and the people I would ask at the stores would be like, yeah, I know they always do this. It's like they keep on like discontinuing the most popular things.
55:01 Speaker 02 I will find out for you what happened.
55:02 Jen Cohen? Can you?
55:03 Speaker 02 I can. I know who to ask.
55:05 Jen Cohen? Okay, good. I know. I know you do. You do know who to ask. Who is the CEO now?
55:09 Speaker 02 Uh, so we have co-CEOs while we're we're doing a full search for a CEO.
55:13 Jen Cohen? Oh, okay. So you are doing a full search.
55:16 Speaker 02 We are.
55:16 Jen Cohen? When did you guys, who was the last CEO?
55:18 Speaker 02 Uh, Calvin McDonald was the last CEO.
55:20 Jen Cohen? Until when?
55:21 Speaker 02 Until the end of January.
55:23 Jen Cohen? Oh, like just now?
55:24 Speaker 02 Just now. Yeah.
55:26 Jen Cohen? How long was he there? Cause he?
55:27 Speaker 02 He was five years and he tripled the business and he did a fantastic job.
55:30 Jen Cohen? Then where did he go?
55:32 Speaker 02 Uh, he went to a a beauty, he was, he came from Sephora. He built up Sephora, came to Lulu, and then now he's at a beauty conglomerate called Wella.
55:42 Jen Cohen? Oh, I know. Well, of course.
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57:53 Jen Cohen? So now let's get back to the days of Lyft for a second and Uber, the whole thing. So then here you are, you like, kind of like, basically you made the business go from what to what at Lyft?
58:04 Speaker 02 So I forget what the revenues were, but it was it was somewhere in the order of going from 5 billion in gross revenue to 10, something like that, order of magnitude.
58:16 Jen Cohen? Okay, so then, so what happens now? Is that what you're, this is 2018-ish?
58:21 Speaker 02 2018, 2019.
58:23 Jen Cohen? Okay. So how did Uber then, again, catapult them? Like, if you did all these good things for Lyft, you made it more quirky, it was a little bit like less expensive.
58:36 Speaker 02 Yeah.
58:37 Jen Cohen? Then why are more people not using it and now everyone, like, everyone only uses Uber?
58:42 Speaker 02 Because Uber, I think, Uber also wasn't resting on their laurels and they have a really good CEO.
58:49 Jen Cohen? Now they do.
58:50 Speaker 02 Yeah, and Dara, and a really good president.
58:53 Jen Cohen? How long has he been there?
58:54 Speaker 02 He's been there, he got there about 2018-ish.
58:58 Jen Cohen? Oh, around when you were.
58:59 Speaker 02 2017, 2018, so he's been there eight years. And they didn't rest on their laurels, they saw this opportunity in food.
59:08 Jen Cohen? Yeah, Uber needs.
59:08 Speaker 02 And they said, okay, we've already recruited a driver. Driver's not busy all day long, especially in the middle of the day and after rush hour, and that sounds like lunch and dinner. So let's get in the food business. And the founders of Lyft were not, and still have to this day, they hated the food business. They didn't, they weren't attracted to it, and so Uber leapfrogged them because they could use their drivers twice rather than once, essentially. Or in two businesses rather than one, and that completely changes the economics of the business.
59:40 Jen Cohen? And Lyft just refused to do it?
59:41 Speaker 02 Yeah, the mantra was, we don't want our car smell like Chinese food. Well, that's not really how it works, but it was, it's kind of a tragedy because Lyft missed this window. And a lot of us on the team disagreed with the founders, which is why basically the whole management team left. And so Uber took advantage of that, too.
59:59 Jen Cohen? And so where are they now?
1:00:00 Speaker 02 Kind of spread all over the place, doing amazing stuff. In terms of the leaders, Lyft now is back to half the market share it used to have.
1:00:08 Jen Cohen? Half the market share?
1:00:09 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:00:10 Jen Cohen? What do you think they can do to kind of like, if you had to be back at Lyft, if they brought you back and said?
1:00:15 Speaker 02 I don't know now, because it'd be very hard to enter the food business because it's super crowded now. It's not just Uber Eats, it's DoorDash, Grub, et cetera.
1:00:23 Jen Cohen? Postmates is a million.
1:00:24 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly. So you've got a bunch of, so I haven't thought about that, but I think it'd be a tough job.
1:00:30 Jen Cohen? Would you take it?
1:00:30 Speaker 02 No, no. I'm much more excited about what's going on in AI and technology and other places of the business, but not that.
1:00:38 Jen Cohen? What do you think of AI, like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini?
1:00:41 Speaker 02 I think, well, in that, in that particular business, like the biggest AI problem, maybe the toughest AI problem is turning a car into a robot. And that's what I think is going to come eat the lunch of rideshare. Because you see it like even here in LA, Waymo is like, it's really superb experience.
1:00:57 Jen Cohen? Oh, yeah.
1:00:57 Speaker 02 Yeah. And I think that's the future of rideshare is it's going to be robotic.
1:01:01 Jen Cohen? So when do you think Waze is going to take over all rideshare, like Uber and Lyft?
1:01:06 Speaker 02 I do, I, I think they are systematically like just growing their fleet over time. And they don't have a demand problem because they have more demand than they know what to do with. And so they're, they're a safety first company and they're really focused around safety. And right now, the technology is good as long as it's not raining or snowing. And so you see them like going across this southern belt of the US, the southern smile. But eventually they'll figure that out and they'll be in the northern cities too. And so I think they're just being very careful, very systematic and making sure their cars are super safe. Because they know that as soon as there's a major accident, it's going to be a big blocker in the business. So they're just, I think, being very patient and playing the long game.
1:01:47 Jen Cohen? So what, what, like, do you think other companies are going to come on board pretty soon or that like?
1:01:52 Speaker 02 I think it's really hard, it's a really hard technical problem to solve. So I don't think there's going to be a lot of companies in this space. Like they kind of own it today and there's, there's really nobody that can challenge them. Because their technology is so much better than everybody else's.
1:02:05 Jen Cohen? How many Waymos are there even?
1:02:07 Speaker 02 There's like three thousand on the road today, so not that many.
1:02:09 Jen Cohen? Not that many.
1:02:10 Speaker 02 There are three hundred million cars in the US, so we're talking like right now a drop in the bucket.
1:02:14 Jen Cohen? I'm even surprised that there's not more Ubers and Lifts, like other companies that are competitive with them.
1:02:19 Speaker 02 Right, because that market, when you have to pay a driver, is relatively expensive, and so it's less expensive to drive your own car. So people choose nine, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, drive their own car. But once you don't have to pay a driver and the car's a robot, then you open up a much bigger market. And so that's what I think we're going to see.
1:02:38 Jen Cohen? How about other places with the AI, like just in terms of like Claude, chat, like I was saying, just like basic, basic, like which ones do you like the best?
1:02:45 Speaker 02 I use Claude the most probably. And.
1:02:49 Jen Cohen? For what? What do you use it for?
1:02:50 Speaker 02 I use it for coding.
1:02:51 Jen Cohen? Really?
1:02:52 Speaker 02 Yeah, so like if we, if we have a company idea, you can literally prototype a company using Claude. You can predict the product, you can start to test the product. So I use Claude a lot and I use Gemini, I use ChatGPT, I kind of use them all because I like to compare them.
1:03:05 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
1:03:06 Speaker 02 But for tools that we use, actually use in business building, we're mostly using Claude.
1:03:11 Jen Cohen? Because it changes so quickly, so would you?
1:03:13 Speaker 02 It does change like every month, it's unbelievable.
1:03:15 Jen Cohen? It's really unbelievable. So is there, like, would you use Gemini for specifically, what would you use ChatGPT for? What would you use, I know for Claude, you said you would use it for prototyping.
1:03:25 Speaker 02 Yeah, so I use, Gemini has replaced search for me, so I use Gemini for search. Research, like if I want to research an industry, where before I would ask an analyst, hey, let's build, let's build a whole picture of this industry, how big is it, who are the competitors, what's the market share, what are the economics? For that kind of research, I use ChatGPT now, and it does an unbelievable job. And then, once we have those answers and want to build a company, then we use Claude. So I kind of have three different use cases for each of those, and they're all incredible tools. So it made us, it takes us half of the people and half the capital to start a company now than it did eighteen months ago.
1:04:06 Jen Cohen? It's crazy, right?
1:04:07 Speaker 02 Crazy.
1:04:07 Jen Cohen? How are these play, like, you know, people are sending me these things all the time with like, you know, this person's not real, that person's not real. This is like, how are they creating people? Like, there's like actual like accounts like who are growing their Instagram pages and like social media pages fast. They're like beautiful girls or really thoughtful men and they're like talking as like thought leaders. I think they're real. I'm like, okay, I'll follow them. I'm like, and then my friend's like, oh, that was not real. That was not real. I'm like, how are they doing this? Like, what are they using? Are they using Claude? Are they using ChatGPT?
1:04:42 Speaker 02 They're probably using a combo. Yeah, like there's.
1:04:43 Jen Cohen? How?
1:04:44 Speaker 02 Well, there basically, if you, if you go back to the origin of the AI that we have today, it's really, it's a prediction model and it predicts what words come next. And words can be turned into numbers and that's how the math works. And so you can get really predictive about words that turn next. And pictures are also numbers. Pictures are made up of these tiny little specks called pixels. And you can understand, the AI can understand which pixels ought to go together based on patterns it's seen. And so it can create images and it can create text. And you can bring those together and that's like, we had bots several years ago that would create fake accounts and create fake followers and, uh, and all this stuff.
1:05:26 Speaker 02 Now this is just a souped up version of bots that you're describing. Cause the AI can create the context, it can create the content and it can create the visuals. And so, uh, it's wild to see. And I think AI can spot other false AI. So like I have this little tool that I've created that it senses whether this was AI generated or whether this is real. But it's going to get better over time. It's going to be harder to do.
1:05:53 Jen Cohen? Wow.
1:05:54 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:05:54 Jen Cohen? So who's actually controlling it? Like who's creating like someone has, there has to be a human being who's actually directing the AI.
1:06:02 Speaker 02 Yeah, for sure. It doesn't create itself.
1:06:04 Jen Cohen? Right. Cause AI is only as good as your prompts. That's what I've noticed.
1:06:07 Speaker 02 Yep, that's right.
1:06:07 Jen Cohen? And if you're a shitty prompter like I am, I'm getting like very basic information. So then who is the expert like in the world that are able to create these?
1:06:16 Speaker 02 Experts like that are doing, they're doing really productive things and kind of just unproductive things too. But like there are marketers that really understand how to use these. Tools and they're doing incredible things and we're lucky to have some of them at Lulu and GM and some of the companies I'm involved with. And they've just made marketing so much more productive because you can get the right answer, the right message in front of the right person with high, high accuracy. And that then leads to product interest and potentially a purchase.
1:06:45 Jen Cohen? And it's amazing.
1:06:46 Speaker 02 It is amazing. It's a fun time to be alive.
1:06:48 Jen Cohen? It is.
1:06:48 Speaker 02 It's a really fun time to be alive.
1:06:49 Jen Cohen? I mean, but like, so jobs will be like kind of depleted, but then again.
1:06:53 Speaker 02 They'll be changed. Like I think humans are really good at seeing the job disruption.
1:06:58 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
1:06:58 Speaker 02 But we're not good at seeing the jobs that get created on the other side, largely because it's almost impossible to see that. But so if we were talking about, if we were talking to each other 120 years ago, it wasn't that long ago. Six out of eight people worked in agriculture and then this thing came along called the tractor. And there were a bunch of doomsayers saying, oh my God, like six out of eight people are going to be unemployed. The country's going to implode. Well, it turned out there were a bunch of jobs that got created in that industrial revolution, like car factories and other things that people went and did different jobs. We're not good at seeing that. We're good at the doom and gloom, but we're not good at seeing what's on the other side.
1:07:33 Jen Cohen? Exactly.
1:07:34 Speaker 02 Every technical revolution in history has led to an expansion in GDP. So do we believe this is going to be the first one? I don't. I think this is going to lead to expansion of jobs and expansion of wealth, but we just can't see the other side yet.
1:07:47 Jen Cohen? Right. We don't, we don't know what we don't know, right?
1:07:49 Speaker 02 We don't know what we don't know.
1:07:50 Jen Cohen? That's the other issue, right?
1:07:51 Speaker 02 Yeah. Yep.
1:07:52 Jen Cohen? I mean, so that's what you're really, you're focusing really on your venture fund, basically creating, you know, even like, like it's just you're creating real like.
1:08:01 Speaker 02 Real companies.
1:08:02 Jen Cohen? Real companies.
1:08:03 Speaker 02 Solving real problems in the real world.
1:08:04 Jen Cohen? And then actually, what are some other things that you're noticing like in the marketplace?
1:08:09 Speaker 02 I think that's, we want, we want to be solving like real problems in the, in the real world that have kind of a physical aspect to them. And make that, that physical process better because we, we know that's going to be protected in the end from an AI revolution.
1:08:26 Jen Cohen? Wow. So of course, okay, so let me ask you a couple of other questions about frameworks from your book, right?
1:08:31 Speaker 02 Okay.
1:08:31 Jen Cohen? I think that this is a very good book for anybody who's looking or who is an entrepreneur, who's growing a business. Also, what I find interesting, and we can talk about this actually, is that, you know, to get a company from zero to, let's say, a hundred million is very different than scaling it from a hundred to a billion.
1:08:48 Speaker 02 Exactly.
1:08:48 Jen Cohen? Right?
1:08:49 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:08:49 Jen Cohen? What are some of the things that people, like, what are some of the things that people get wrong when they're trying to scale a business?
1:08:55 Speaker 02 I think when you're scaling from zero, it's the hardest chapter of a business because...
1:08:59 Jen Cohen? Most hard, most difficult.
1:09:01 Speaker 02 Totally. It's, it's like terribly hard. Like, I teach in some business schools and students will come up and say, "I want to be an entrepreneur," and I'll say, "Why?" It's like the hardest thing ever to take something from zero to get your first million or five million in sales. And so, we, we do work a lot on what we call product market fit, and that is, do you, can you get a product that is so attractive that people rave about it? If they rave about it, then you don't have to spend marketing dollars. And that is, that's a signal that you're on to something. And so, we spend a ton of time on the product and like polishing it and making it, making it super attractive to our target. And so, that, that says you gotta know your target and you gotta know what they want and you gotta deliver against that. And that tends to take a lot of work.
1:09:43 Speaker 02 It's another form of simplification that's really, really important to get right. I was with Steve Jobs's chief of staff from Wayback, and I said, "Give me an example like how you guys simplified product." And he said, "Oh, all the work happens upfront." I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "Like, that's the hardest thing. You have to get in a room, you gotta figure out what you're gonna make and why you're gonna make it, and it's gotta be really simple." I said, "Give me an example." He said, "Okay, get in the Wayback machine. We made the iPod." I said, "Yeah." He said, "Steve and I got in a room." He said, "I was in charge of product for the iPod." We got in a room and said, "What has to be true about this product?" And at the time, all the music players didn't have many songs and they were really janky and clunky. So they said, "We emerged and said, 'We want our music player to have a thousand songs and it only takes four seconds to find a song.'"
1:10:27 Speaker 02 That was the total product definition. They came to the engineers and the engineers are like, "We don't know how to do that. There's no, there's no hard drive that'll hold a thousand songs and there's no software that can find it in four seconds." I said, "Exactly. That's what we're gonna invent." And we find the same thing in our products. If you're really, really, really simple about the two things that matter or the three things that matter, then you can focus yourself on building that and your first signal's gonna be people rave about it. And if they don't rave about it, then you haven't gotten those two or three things right. You gotta go back to the drawing board.
1:10:57 Jen Cohen? Right. So if people like, what if you've heard like, how about all those times that there's a really great product, but really terrible marketing?
1:11:03 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:11:03 Jen Cohen? That was all the time.
1:11:04 Speaker 02 It does happen all the time. You're absolutely right. Like I noticed this like, it's not always the best product that wins.
1:11:09 Jen Cohen? No, it's not. It's the people have the-
1:11:11 Speaker 02 Sales force that wins, the best marketing team that wins. And so we, we realized, okay, these two things have to be true. You have to have a killer product, but you also have a killer go to market because that wins.
1:11:21 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
1:11:21 Speaker 02 And there's a bunch of examples in tech. I won't name names, but I think everybody listening to this can name names of tech products that are not the best, but they won somehow. And usually that's because they had an unbelievable go to market.
1:11:32 Jen Cohen? Well, no, give us an example of something because this is what you do for a living.
1:11:35 Speaker 02 So let's take Microsoft.
1:11:36 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
1:11:36 Speaker 02 Microsoft did not have the best operating system, did not have the best spreadsheet.
1:11:40 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
1:11:40 Speaker 02 It used to be something called Lotus 123, did not have the best presentation platform, the best, the best word processor. But the amazing thing that Bill Gates had beside him was a guy named Steve Ballmer, who could sell I S T S K M O S. The guy's unbelievable. And he built a sales force of unbelievably talented and capable people. And so Microsoft's a great example of not having the best product, but winning market share like crazy. They didn't have, they don't have the best cloud. Amazon does, but Azure's doing just fine. They don't have the best office suite. You could argue Google does, but Microsoft's enterprise sales force crushes Google's enterprise sales force. And so oftentimes like you gotta have killer go to market to actually win.
1:12:21 Jen Cohen? Absolutely.
1:12:22 Speaker 02 And so we, we concentrate on both of those things.
1:12:24 Jen Cohen? So really what I'm gathering is that the most important skill to scale or, and to grow a business is sales.
1:12:32 Speaker 02 Is to be able to sell. You've eventually got to be able to sell your product.
1:12:34 Jen Cohen? At the end of the day, you can say anything you want about product being wonderful and this being great and this being wonderful. At the end, if you can't, if you don't have the sales team that can, that can sell, you're in big trouble.
1:12:44 Speaker 02 It's true. There really, it really is both and it's not either or. You gotta have both great product and a great, great go to market.
1:12:50 Jen Cohen? Or what you just said yourself is like, you could have a mediocre product and still win.
1:12:54 Speaker 02 You can win if they, if your customers, if your competitors stink at go to market, you can win.
1:12:58 Jen Cohen? I know a lot of things that I'm like, wow, that's like, I found this like, like nothing product. That's so much more like this dominating, but yet like they have no money to market. So nobody knows about it.
1:13:09 Speaker 02 Nobody knows about it.
1:13:10 Jen Cohen? Right.
1:13:10 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:13:11 Jen Cohen? And look, you could look at all the things on social media, TikTok shop. crap like stuff from China that costs four and a half cents that like you have a million people just like pushing this shit like all these like moms who are really good sale salespeople young girl whatever it is they're selling millions and millions of chats like nothing like tchotchkes whatever you you get it you're like what the hell is this but they so they're selling them because how about the supplement business like again it's about having a dominating sales force
1:13:40 Speaker 02 yeah yeah it makes up for a lot
1:13:42 Jen Cohen? it doesn't have you don't have to have anything else like you just but that's why when people say oh have you know really work on the product product product really
1:13:50 Speaker 02 I believe the product's gotta be good because eventually the your customer figures it out
1:13:53 Jen Cohen? no what I think that happens is people will buy it once and then I'll never buy it again
1:13:57 Speaker 02 exactly like you just said you just made that point about aloe and
1:14:01 Jen Cohen? well but no I made that point about aloe but aloe is dominating the market
1:14:04 Speaker 02 but they're really good at selling uh but if you don't have the product eventually like as you said people buy it once and then they don't come back and if they don't come back you don't have a business
1:14:13 Jen Cohen? true
1:14:14 Speaker 02 so that's why I say you gotta have both
1:14:16 Jen Cohen? but listen but that fashion's a different animal because aloe has not the greatest quality but this but their aesthetics are really nice like they've got great style aesthetics so it's like like you said fashion fast fashion like a yeah like a what do you call it a fashion nova or like Zara because people will keep on buying it because it looks good and it's like athletic leisure is super popular it's comfortable right so that's why but in anything else if the product like that's why you'll keep on buying that but in anything else you'll buy it once and if it's really shitty or not like a food or supplements is a hard one because you really don't taste the supplement
1:14:52 Speaker 02 no and you can't tell you can't like run a test on your body to figure out if it's really working
1:14:56 Jen Cohen? no but you can run a lab test you can take that stuff to a lab and you know what before you got here I was with uh Ken Wright out we were talking about all the uh supplement stuff and it's if you take some of this stuff to the to lap to the labs and you'll see whatever they're like like they're telling you oh it has this and that that and you'll take it and it's like zero of the of the ingredient that they tell you like you know how often that happens
1:15:19 Speaker 02 it must happen a lot because it's unregulated yeah
1:15:21 Jen Cohen? it's unregulated yeah right so those are bad examples but like other than that like maybe some technology stuff if it doesn't work it doesn't you'll never buy it again
1:15:29 Speaker 02 right
1:15:30 Jen Cohen? but you'll buy it once And you'll know, but like, the product should be good enough.
1:15:35 Speaker 02 Well, I think like, right now, we see it in AI because like, Microsoft has this product called Copilot, which doesn't hold a candle to Claude or to OpenAI's codecs. And so eventually engineers show up and they're like, I'm not using Copilot. I gotta use Cursor or I gotta use Claude code. And in those cases, the best product wins.
1:15:55 Jen Cohen? Yeah, that's true. Well, Claude is, I mean, also, that's true. Microsoft, I agree with you, like, they're, it's clunky.
1:16:02 Speaker 02 Yep.
1:16:03 Jen Cohen? You know?
1:16:03 Speaker 02 Yeah, but really good sales force.
1:16:05 Jen Cohen? Really good sales force, exactly.
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1:17:21 Jen Cohen? Okay, well, I don't know how long it's been, but thank you for coming on this podcast.
1:17:24 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's been fun.
1:17:25 Jen Cohen? Is there any, is there anything else that I forgot to ask you that's really important for like, you know, you talk about this hyper-growth formula. Is there any other piece of, like, Of material.
1:17:36 Speaker 02 Yeah, I'll give you two.
1:17:37 Jen Cohen? Thank you. Go ahead.
1:17:39 Speaker 02 So.
1:17:40 Jen Cohen? Two.
1:17:40 Speaker 02 Two. So one is, and I call these the secret ingredients around the algorithm. And one of these like will be written about in the future is people try to understand Elon's leadership style and how he actually gets stuff done inside these companies. But here are the two principles. The first is what we call eat your own dog food, which is use your own product. And I can't tell you how many entrepreneurs and CEOs don't use their own product. And if you don't, then you're foregoing a whole feedback loop. I was with a group of banking CEOs and I said, raise your hand if you use your app on a regular basis, like weekly, monthly. Almost no hands went up. And I said, I knew that was going to be the answer. You know why? Because I use your apps and they suck. And if you were using them, you couldn't live with that suck for one more day.
1:18:26 Speaker 02 But you don't use them and therefore they're not getting better because you're not in the feedback loop. And so we used to take, each of us used to take a car off of the end of the factory line every night to go home. And we would drive the car home, we'd drive it back to the factory and we'd give engineers notes on the car. And the principle was we have to eat our own dog food. We have to use our own product. And if we are, then we're going to be the first to spot flaws. And as an entrepreneur, as a leader, you can't live with those flaws. Like, why would you want to put your customer through that? So you fix them. It's a great feedback loop. So that's thing one. Thing two, and this is kind of the genius of Elon. He concentrates on the one or two things that really, really matter in the company. And he finds those one or two things and he manages them weekly.
1:19:12 Speaker 02 So let's say I'm on a team that is now the number one issue on Elon's mind at Tesla. I am meeting with him once a week. And two things happen. One is the teams that meet with the CEO don't tend to bring their B game, they bring their A game. And so they're on their A game almost constantly. And they show forward progress every week. And if you're making progress every week and your competitor's not doing that. You're compounding progress against your competitor that stacks. And it gets really hard over time to compete with somebody who's doing that. And I think what they'll write about in the future about Elon's leadership at Tesla and SpaceX and these other companies is this weekly cadence thing that the CEO is driving personally turns out to be a huge advantage builder.
1:19:56 Speaker 02 And so like 10 years on from SpaceX's first successful launch, they now own 90% of space launches. It gets really, really hard for a competitor to keep up with that or even catch up with that now because they every week are improving the way that that rocket gets built, the way that that rocket gets recovered and the way that that rocket gets designed. And it's almost impossible to catch people like that.
1:20:21 Jen Cohen? So what would you say the most important quality would be for a leader?
1:20:24 Speaker 02 I think drive a weekly cadence on the things that really matter in your business and use your own product so that you're making sure it meets your standards as a leader.
1:20:34 Jen Cohen? That's so true because people are not using, I see that a lot, actually.
1:20:38 Speaker 02 It's unbelievable. Like I just, it floors me that people don't use their own product. It's why I insist on driving GM cars even as a board member. And it's why I was in two Lululemon stores today because I feel like I have to go eat the dog food. I need to go.
1:20:52 Jen Cohen? But you're not wearing any Lululemon.
1:20:53 Speaker 02 I'm wearing Lululemon shoes. I got a Lululemon shirt on, another Lululemon shirt on, Lululemon socks. So I've got, yeah, I, I want to eat the dog. I want to eat the dog food.
1:21:04 Jen Cohen? How are those Lululemon shoes?
1:21:05 Speaker 02 These are unbelievable. These are like the most comfortable running shoes I've ever had.
1:21:09 Jen Cohen? What?
1:21:09 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah. And this is a newer product for us, but it's fantastic.
1:21:16 Jen Cohen? You just finished telling me like the core, the core pieces of, of clothing.
1:21:22 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:21:23 Jen Cohen? Should be the pants.
1:21:25 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:21:25 Jen Cohen? So why would they come up with shoes?
1:21:27 Speaker 02 Because our three core, our three core activities that we.
1:21:30 Jen Cohen? Running?
1:21:31 Speaker 02 Is run.
1:21:32 Jen Cohen? Yoga.
1:21:32 Speaker 02 Yoga and train. And so these, so these shoes, our customer actually looks to us for innovation in shoes. And what we found out was when we started to, this is a great example, like the algorithm in action. When we said, how are we going to design a shoe that anybody's going to care about? There's a lot of shoes on the market. We said, for women's shoes, how are they designed? So we started to question the requirements and what we found out was all women's shoes are designed around a men's foot. Men's feet have like determined the shape of women's running shoes. And so we went out and scanned tens of thousands of women's feet and created the first shoes. Like this base of the shoe is called a last. It's the first last that's created for a woman's foot.
1:22:16 Speaker 02 And then we launched that product as the first women's shoe designed around women's feet. It's amazing. It hadn't been done.
1:22:22 Jen Cohen? Really?
1:22:23 Speaker 02 We just asked the question, like, how do they get designed?
1:22:25 Jen Cohen? I should try on a pair of those shoes.
1:22:28 Speaker 02 You should try one. Let me know what you think.
1:22:29 Jen Cohen? What's the price point of those shoes?
1:22:31 Speaker 02 Uh, this is about a hundred and nine dollars, I think, something like that.
1:22:33 Jen Cohen? Oh, they're not, they're not as crazy expensive.
1:22:35 Speaker 02 They're not crazy expensive.
1:22:36 Jen Cohen? But what's your cost on them? Eight dollars?
1:22:39 Speaker 02 I didn't know. It's well north of that, but I don't know what the cost of the shoes is. Great question.
1:22:43 Jen Cohen? Do you get free clothing at Little Lemon?
1:22:45 Speaker 02 I buy it.
1:22:46 Jen Cohen? You do?
1:22:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, because I want to go through the process. Yeah.
1:22:48 Jen Cohen? You do? Okay. So what do you like? Do you like the process?
1:22:51 Speaker 02 I, I, there are things I do like about the process, like there are people that are passionate in the stores about educating people about yoga, run and train.
1:22:59 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
1:22:59 Speaker 02 And I love interacting with them and they're really passionate about the product. Are there things we can improve? Definitely. And we're working on some of those.
1:23:06 Jen Cohen? Would you go to Little Lemon? They're looking for a CEO, I heard.
1:23:09 Speaker 02 No, well, I'm done being a CEO. Now I'm like, now I'm investing in other CEOs.
1:23:13 Jen Cohen? Damn. Okay.
1:23:14 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:23:14 Jen Cohen? I just want to catch you to see if you'd ever like.
1:23:16 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly. If I'd slip up.
1:23:17 Jen Cohen? Yeah, exactly. So no, no lift again. No, no.
1:23:20 Speaker 02 No, no. I've got a bunch of investors that I've told I'm going to take good care of their money, so I gotta do that.
1:23:25 Jen Cohen? Okay, you gotta do that instead. Okay. Um, okay, I feel like I want to make sure there's like, I have my computer with all my, I didn't even open my computer to ask you the questions I wrote down. Do you know that? But, um, uh, but that's okay. I wanted to, I wanted to have a conversation with you. I don't like to usually like look at my questions.
1:23:41 Speaker 02 Conversations too. That was super, it flowed super well.
1:23:44 Jen Cohen? Like, I mean, I, do I, did I forget anything else that's important about company business? Are you sure?
1:23:49 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:23:50 Jen Cohen? Because I really like to eat your own dog food. I think that's really important stuff. Okay, I'm going to ask you this because this dawned on me as a paper that you guys, you know, wanted to ask me to ask.
1:23:58 Speaker 02 Okay.
1:23:58 Jen Cohen? I never ask these questions, but.
1:24:00 Speaker 02 All right.
1:24:00 Jen Cohen? If you were mentoring a recent college grad, how would you tell them to use the algorithm?
1:24:05 Speaker 02 Ooh.
1:24:06 Jen Cohen? Right? To stand out, to stand out early in their career.
1:24:10 Speaker 02 I think when you come in and you can do two things. You can question assumptions and be a simplifier. You're going to stand out. And if you can do those two things, you tend to be able to figure out where the value is and you can add value. So back to the early part of our conversation. That's essentially how I was able to join Tesla was demonstrate value through simplifying and questioning assumptions. If you do those two things, you can apply the algorithm. And I think as a recent college grad, you can become very valuable and stand out from all your peers.
1:24:43 Jen Cohen? So I'm going to ask you one more question about this because I know I've kind of asked you seven different ways, but what is your superpower then? Like you obviously can make the common sense seem calm, like, you know, like you're picking up on like things that are very obvious to some, but obviously not that obvious to most. You go above and beyond. You like, kind of like show your value, all those things. But what's that one thing that you're like, software we got? With all that being said, what is your superpower?
1:25:11 Speaker 02 It's being able to simplify. I think that's it. Like it's a skill. It wasn't something I was born with, but it's something I learned over time.
1:25:17 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
1:25:18 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:25:18 Jen Cohen? So, and you do such a good job at it.
1:25:20 Speaker 02 So important. Yeah. Because I think once you become a leader and people are looking to you, they need you to be very clear about what the goals are and what they, and what we're trying to accomplish. And to do that, you have to be a simplifier. Can't take a lot of words.
1:25:35 Jen Cohen? I love it. Okay. The book is called The Algorithm by John McNeill, who is just, like I said, super impressive. I mean, your, your background is insane.
1:25:46 Speaker 02 Been super lucky.
1:25:47 Jen Cohen? Yeah. Okay. Lucky and hard work. Luck, luck doesn't just happen. Usually luck is opportunity and hard work. The whole, that whole.
1:25:56 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:25:56 Jen Cohen? That whole, you know.
1:25:58 Speaker 02 Lucky favors the prepared. Yeah.
1:25:59 Jen Cohen? Exactly. So thank you for being on the podcast.
1:26:02 Speaker 02 Thanks for having me. It's been fun.
1:26:03 Jen Cohen? It's been so fun. And where else can we find more information about you if they were ever so curious?
1:26:08 Speaker 02 You can find the book on Amazon and, and the book or the auto, the, the audiobook. And you can find more about me on DBX ventures.
1:26:19 Jen Cohen? Amazing. Thank you so much.
1:26:20 Speaker 02 Thank you.
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