Get our CEO lessons in one guide: https://clickhubspot.com/rmfk Episode 813: Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talks to Jon McNeill about his time running Tesla and working side-by-side with Elon Musk. — Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (1:18) a job interview with Elon Musk (5:07) Being a sniper for talent (8:20) solve a real problem, right now. (11:23) solving Tesla&#x27;s sales problem (23:41) One size fits all opportunities (26:50) the power of noticing (31:45) order of magnitude goals (38:34) 3 sentence emails (43:24) identifying $50B industry (49:05) AI — Links: • The Algorithm - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/799958/the-algorithm-by-jon-mcneill/ — Check Out Sam&#x27;s Stuff: • Hampton (joinhampton.com): My community for founders. Average member does $25m/year. Many of the guests are members. Get after it...apply: http://joinhampton.com/mfm — Check Out Shaan&#x27;s Stuff: • Shaan&#x27;s weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - Need a bank for your company? Go check out Mercury (mercury.com). Shaan uses it for all of his companies! Mercury is a financial technology company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N.A., and Evolve Bank &amp; Trust, Members FDIC • I run all my newsletters on Beehiiv and you should too + we&#x27;re giving away $10k to our favorite newsletter, check it out: beehiiv.com/mfm-challenge My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano /

Ex-Tesla President reveals EVERYTHING Elon does to win

My First Million

# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** My First Million

## Participants

- **Shaan Puri** (HubSpot Media)
- **Jon McNeill** (None)

## Transcript

[SPEAKER_01] Part of the secret to Elon's secret sauce is he sets these order of magnitude improvement goals. So 10x, 100x. He came to me and said, hey look, we got to figure out how to sell cars online. Because nobody was buying $120,000 things sight unseen online. And so he turns to me and says, this is your goal, improve digital sales by 20x. So now it's like, oh crap, I gotta think way differently about this.

[SPEAKER_03] All right, so I guess to start, I mean, I almost want to rename the podcast How Lucky Are We? It's like, oh, we get to sit here with the guy who was the president of one of the most important companies of our time, Tesla for years. You got to work with one of the greatest entrepreneurs ever, Elon. You yourself have this crazy entrepreneurial track record you've built and sold, you know, five, six different startups. You're like the Forrest Gump of the tech industry, just going into different spaces. And you go into, you know, auto repair and cyber insurance and

[SPEAKER_03] all these different spaces. And so I'm pretty fascinated that we get to talk today. And I got a bunch of questions for you, but I want to start with less of a tactical question and more of a movie scene. So you go into a job interview with Elon Musk. It might not have even felt like it was a formal job interview, but your first conversation with him. What's that like?

[SPEAKER_01] All right. So the setup to the scene is we're introduced by a mutual friend and he is intense. Uh, and the niceties were about two sentences. And then he said, Hey, I got this problem in manufacturing. Have you ever seen it before? And then we were right into it. And two hours flew by because I had had that experience in manufacturing. I'd seen that problem. We started to break it down together. And then we started to move deeper and deeper and deeper into the problem. And, uh,

[SPEAKER_01] we looked up in two hours. He was like, Oh man, like I got a lot out of this. I got to go. Uh, I'm going to go down to the factory floor and do it. We just talked about.

[SPEAKER_03] So that's the first, that's the first combo. He's, uh, so you're problem solving together. He skips a small talk and then is he testing you or he's just genuinely trying to solve the problem right now? Like, did you get any sense of he was poking around to see kind of where your capacity was

[SPEAKER_01] or he was literally just problem solving? Oh yeah. That's a no, that's exactly what he was up to. So his hiring method is he wants to determine whether or not you can do world-class work. And his method is to interrogate a particular problem and go super deep on it. And, uh, it's better if he tries to skew it to a problem that he knows. Right. So that he can tell if you're bullshitting. Exactly. And he can take you do super deep because he's in it. And he, he just like...

Ex-Tesla President reveals EVERYTHING Elon does to win

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.

Ex-Tesla President reveals EVERYTHING Elon does to win

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.