#Background
Jon is a very well known entrepreneur and executive, but for those of you who don't know him, here is a bit of his background. He started his entrepreneurship journey early, in a small farming community in Nebraska. After college he joined Bain & Company, then went on to start six companies and sell five of them (the sixth is still quickly growing). In 2015 he joined Elon Musk at Tesla as the President of Global Sales, Marketing, Government Relations, Delivery & Service and and took them from a $2B to a $20B run rate. He then joined Lyft as their COO where he helped take them public, and grow from $800 to $2B. Most recently he returned back to his passion of entrepreneurship and founded DVx Ventures, a company who’s goal is to create successful companies and turn the venture model on its head. He’s also a board member for Lululemon, CrossFit, Tekion, and TrueMotion.
#Jon's Highlights
#Interview Highlights
#On Entrepreneurship
Source: Bloomberg Finance
Oh, gosh, I don't think I have a favorite business cause I've enjoyed them all. It's almost like choosing your favorite child.. I think, you know, the first six startups I did, it started to show me that there was definitely a method to starting and launching companies from an idea to scale. And then being at Tesla taught me a lot about operating at scale. And so I found that at scale, I was using a lot of the skills that I developed as an entrepreneur, just with a much more amplified impact. And that was a lot of fun.
#On Product Market Fit vs Go To Market Fit
At Lyft, it was amazing to see the product market fit. It is almost magical to open up an app and ask for a ride, and somebody shows up in a couple of minutes and takes you where he wants to go. Like it's magical... Being inside of a mobility business like that ride sharing, and then eventually scooters, I had P&L responsibility, so I saw the numbers and the numbers reflected the fact that there wasn't a go to market fit in two ways: one was what the acquisition costs was for either the customer and or the driver didn't make sense where the LTVs, the long-term value of the customer, the driver, and the unit economics per ride didn't make any sense either. And so that product market fit had pulled those businesses out into the market and into rapid growth. But the go to market fit problem hadn't been solved years into the business. And it's not as some of these businesses are worthless. I mean, they're worth a lot. But they could be worth a lot more if they're in much more durable if they had that figured out. And so we've made a commitment in our businesses to figure out not only product market fit, but really having a discipline around go-to market fit and making sure the go-to market economics make sense and the inner economics makes sense.
#On making people talk about you at their dinner table
The make them talk about your dinner tonight was a principle that we came up with at Tesla, because we had trained so many people in such a short time that we didn't have time to do standard training when we were launching the Model 3 at Tesla. So we had to come up with a principle that we could teach across 33 countries in 36 languages in less than a minute, so that people got the essence of Tesla and the essence of Tesla is these really crazy cool customer care stories where people just take care of Tesla owners or even Tesla non-owners, they just take care of people in a really cool way. And that kind of just permeated across the culture in a really special way. And so we wanted to capture it in a statement and that statement is like, if you're, if you're in front of a customer, who's going through a tough issue and you, and you're wondering what to do, start with, what could you do that would be so awesomely unbelievable that they would talk about you at dinner tonight and use that as your bar to figure it out.
#On career motivations
Source: TechCrunch
And as I got closer to thinking about joining Tesla, Elon called one day and said, "I have a question for you". I said, "What's that?" He said, "Tell me about the meaning of your work". And I started to talk about True Motion, actually, how we're saving lives. And he said," Imagine doing that at a big, a much bigger platform". And so that really got me focused on working on meaningful companies and problems. Cause he ended that conversation, he said, just "Think about this. What are you going to say to your grandchildren when you're sitting on a porch and you're explaining to them what impact you've had in your work life? On this world on the planet on humanity". And so that's like he introduced that bar to me. And so that's a bar now that I really think about. And so in terms of the way that my career is now shaping up, I want to work on meaningful things with people that I love and work on big problems and really apply first principles to the way we solve those problems and attack those problems. So that we're simplifying along the way and do that with world-class people who are committed to each day, getting up and making what we do better, and not taking any comfort in the status quo. But really trying to push ourselves every day to get better, better, better. And so I think those are the kind of kinds of things I think about now.
#On AI
I think, you know, a lot of people talk about artificial intelligence, which is actually the machine becoming much more intelligent without human input. And I think a lot of people misunderstand where we are today...I think a lot of people mistake where we are now, which is essentially in the machine learning age with artificial intelligence, and artificial intelligence is quite a few steps beyond machine learning. And I think there's obviously, you know this, there's a lot of loose use of the term AI. In my experience, 90 some percent of that now is to describe machine learning, not real AI. And so I think that's, that's one thing that I think it's important for people to understand as they start making investments in this area, whether it's in their company, for projects that are being done or for products that they are thinking about launching that they really understand the nuances between these different stages of learning and clearly machines and chips are super powerful today, and can do some really amazing things. But most of what we're seeing is the output of machine learning.
#On the impact of AI in the future
There's a couple of interesting areas that I'm personally investing in and excited about. So one is fraud. It's really hard for human beings to stay ahead of other human beings that are bad actors and AI is a wonderful tool in that arsenal. I think roads, a problem you and I have worked on, for the better part of a decade. I think, you know, when you think about a million people worldwide are killed in car accidents, in motor vehicle accidents annually; in 95% of those are the result of human error. And so that technology is going to be really important. Cause there are a million people that don't have to say bye to a loved one every year. That's just an amazing uptick in quality of life. And then I think health, like we're seeing the power of these models to do genomic, to gain genomic insight and then to bring drugs to market very, very quickly and to simulate the impact of those drugs before they even go into human trials. And so, the vaccine efforts that we're seeing now, are possible because of this technology. And that to me is like super duper exciting, cause I think we're going to have health advances, like we've never seen in humanity before and that's, that's just super awesome.