Few companies have grown as fast as Tesla, special just before and after the company launched model 3, its first affordable EV.
“We climb to Tesla in 30 months of $ 2 billion in revenue at $ 20 billion in revenue,” said Jon McNeil, former president of Tesla, co -founder and CEO of DVX Ventures, told the crowd in the TechCrunch All Stage event in Boston.
They were the scaling companies for the first time of McNeil’s niece, nor would it be the last one. Previously, he found to found six different companies, and after Tesla, he joined Lyft as COO before starting his own risk company, where he launched a boxing startups.
At the years, McNeil has developed a play book that helps him identify when a company is mature to climb. Shared those ideas last week with the audience in Techcrunch All Stage 2025.
When evaluating the potential of a company to climb, McNeil judges them mainly in two different measures, the adjustment of the product market and the adjustment of the market. It is not unusual for investors to concentrate on these concepts, but McNeil has distilled them in two objective measures.
For product market adjustment, he asks each startup, “40% of their customers say they can’t live without their product,” he said. If not, then the company is not ready.
“We continue adding, adding, adding and adjusting the product until we reach 40% and then we say, okay, tree, now we have a product market adjustment,” McNeil said. “It is a real and measured objective. It is not a feeling, it is not a meaning. It is a metric.”
Techcrunch event
San Francisco
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October 27, 2025
McNeil added: “We did a study of the companies that reached the real break, and those companies achieved a break in approximately that level of acceptance of 40%.”
Secondly, McNeil analyzes whether the company has a mature market strategy. Specifically, you are interested in whether the amount spent a company to acquire customers, known as customer acquisition cost (CAC), is sufficiently below the total value for life (LTV) that the customer will bring to the company.
When a company begins to obtain four times more money during the life of the client than the spent to acquire them, an LTV relationship to CAC from four to one is when it knows that the company is ready.
“Then we invent the cash. But before that, we are distributing effective $ 100,000 at the same time only to reach different doors of stages,” he said.
