17 Takeaways From Meeting Tesla’s Former CEO
Michael Marks was an interim CEO at Tesla and is now a founding managing partner of Celesta Capital.
At the Stanford ASES Summit 2024, I got to hear from Michael Marks, a former CEO of Tesla.
He was hired by Elon Musk when Tesla’s then-CEO, Martin Eberhard, was ousted from his position.
Here’s everything I learned from him:
1. Entrepreneurs tremendously overestimate their market size. If you’re building fall detection technology for seniors, your market size isn’t the ~$43B market size for all global senior care technologies. You need to be more specific about the exact market your ICP falls under. Don’t fool yourself.
2. Entrepreneurs also overestimate how much of the market they’ll get, and how much it’ll cost to get it.
3. It doesn’t matter where you work, it matters if you’re learning stuff.
4. You can have ten years of experience, or one year of experience ten times.
5. While reading your pitch deck, investors are asking themselves “how do I know this is going to work?”
6. At the beginning of your company, you should be pitching a smaller segment you can dominate VS a massive segment with huge…
