Few companies have grown as fast as Tesla, especially just before and after the company launched Model 3, its first affordable EV.
“We scaled Tesla at 30 months from $ 2 billion in revenue to $ 20 billion in revenue,” Jon McNeil, former President of Tesla, now co -founder and CEO of DVX Ventures, told the audience at Techcrunch’s All Stage Event in Boston.
It wasn’t McNeil’s first time scaling companies, nor would it be his last. Previously, he founded six different companies, and after Tesla he joined Lyft as COO before starting his own venture company, where he launched a dozen startups.
Over the years, McNeil has developed a playbook that helps him identify when a company is ripe for scaling. He shared this insight last week with the audience at Techcrunch All Stage 2025.
When evaluating a company’s scalpotential, McNeil primarily assesses them according to two different goals, the product market’s fit and go-to-market pass form. It is not unusual for investors to focus on these concepts, but McNeil has distilled them to two objective measures.
For product marketing, he asks each start -up, ”40% of your customers say they can’t live without your product,” he said. If not, the company is not ready.
“We are adding, adding, adding and fine -tuning the product until we get to 40%, and then we say, okay, boom, now we have product marketing,” McNeil said. “It’s actually objective and measured. It’s not a feeling, it’s not a feeling. It’s a metric.”
TechCrunch -event
San Francisco
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27-29. October 2025
McNeil added, “We did a study of companies that actually achieved breakout, and these companies achieved breakout at about the 40% acceptance level.”
Secondly, McNeil looks at whether the company has a mature go-to-market strategy. Specifically, he is interested in whether the amount a company spends on acquiring customers known as customer purchase costs (CAC) is sufficient below the total lifetime value (LTV) for the customer to bring the company.
When a company starts to draw four times more money over the customer’s lifetime than it used to acquire them-one LTV for CAC ratio of four and one-one is as he knows the company is ready.
“Then we pour into the cash. But before then we threw cash $ 100,000 at a time just to get to different stage gates,” he said.