Former Tesla president discloses the secret to scaling a company

Few companies have experienced hyper-growth quite like Tesla, particularly during the period leading up to and immediately following the launch of its groundbreaking Model 3, the company’s first widely accessible electric vehicle.

“We scaled Tesla in 30 months from $2 billion in revenue to $20 billion in revenue,” revealed Jon McNeil, former president of Tesla and now co-founder and CEO of DVx Ventures, during his address at TechCrunch’s All Stage event in Boston.

McNeil’s expertise in scaling businesses predates his tenure at Tesla and extends well beyond it. With a track record of founding six different companies, he went on to serve as COO at Lyft after his time at Tesla, before establishing his own venture firm where he has successfully launched a dozen startups.

Through these extensive experiences, McNeil has refined a precise playbook for identifying when a company is primed for significant growth. He generously shared these invaluable insights with the audience at TechCrunch All Stage 2025.

When evaluating a company’s potential to scale, McNeil emphasizes two critical metrics: product-market fit and go-to-market fit. While these concepts are common among investors, McNeil has distilled them into remarkably objective and measurable standards.

For assessing product-market fit, his definitive question to startups is, “Do 40% of your customers say they cannot live without your product?” He asserts that if a company doesn’t meet this threshold, it simply isn’t ready for aggressive scaling.

“We keep adding, adding, adding and tweaking the product until we get to 40% and then we say, okay, boom, now we’ve got product market fit,” McNeil explained. “It’s actually objective and measured. It’s not a feeling, it’s not a sense. It’s a metric.” He further supported this by stating, “We did a study of businesses that actually achieved breakout, and those businesses achieved breakout at roughly that 40% acceptance level.”

Secondly, McNeil scrutinizes a company’s go-to-market strategy for maturity. His primary focus is on the relationship between customer acquisition cost (CAC) and the total lifetime value (LTV) that a customer is expected to bring to the company. He deems a company ready to scale when its LTV to CAC ratio reaches four-to-one, meaning the company pulls in four times more money over the customer’s lifetime than it spent to acquire them.

“Then we pour in the cash. But before then, we’re doling out cash $100,000 at a time just to get to different stage gates,” McNeil concluded, outlining a cautious, metric-driven approach to investment and expansion.