Few companies have grown as quickly as Tesla, especially shortly before and after company starts, its first affordable EV.
“We called Tesla in 30 months out of $ 2 billion in revenue in $ 20 billion in revenue,” said Jon McNeil, a former Tesla president, who is now co -founder and chief executive of DVX Ventures.
They were not McNeil’s first escalation companies, nor would it be his last. Previously, he founded six different companies, and after Tesla, joined Lyft as COO before starting his own business business, where a dozen started by newly established businesses.
Over the years, McNeil has developed a Playbook that helps him identify when a company is mature for escalation. He shared these ideas last week with the audience at TechCrunch All Stage 2025.
When assessing the ability of a company to escalate, McNeil mainly judges them in two different measures, the adjustment of the product market and the market adjustment. It is not uncommon for investors to focus on these concepts, but McNeil has been distilled to two objective measures.
To apply the product market, he asks every start, “40% of your customers say they can’t live without your product,” he said. If not, then the company is not ready.
“We continue to add, add, add and modify the product until we reach 40% and then say, okay, explosion, now we have the purchase of products,” McNeil said. “It’s really objective and measured. It’s not a feeling. It’s not a feeling. It’s a measurement.”
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McNeil added: “We did a study of businesses that really got out of the way and these businesses have achieved out of approximately 40%acceptance.”
Secondly, McNeil is considering whether the company has a mature market strategy. Specifically, it is interested in whether the amount a company spends to obtain customers, known as the cost of acquiring customers (CAC), is well below the total life value (LTV) that the customer will carry the company.
When a company begins to pull four times more money during the customer’s life than it went to get them-a LTV ratio to four-to-one CAC he knows that the company is ready.
“Then we pour the cash, but before then, we make cash $ 100,000 at a time to reach different stages gates,” he said.
