Jon McNeill

Oh, yeah.

That's exactly what he was up to.

So his hiring method is he wants to determine whether or not you can do world-class work

And his method is to interrogate a particular problem and go super deep on it.

And it's better if he tries to skew it to a problem that he knows.

Right.

Exactly.

And he can take you super deep because he's in it.

And he just likes to know, almost like a video game, how many layers can this player get through before they're stumped?

And so that's exactly what was going on.

We were getting to know each other, but 90% of it was he was evaluating.

I'm glad you raised this because this is a hack I don't get to in the book, but it's the thing that a lot of entrepreneurs think about, which is as your company scales, how do you protect the culture?

Right.

And he and JB Straubel, the co-founder of Tesla, came up with this method

to imprint the culture on every hire and to test for culture.

And that was, they would be the last interviews.

That's a hack that I've taken forward now from that Elon experience.

And now I do that too.

But the way that translated was that he would say, like he said to me, hey, look, we now, as fast as this thing is growing, we're going to split this up and you and I are going to interview everybody that's hired at a manager level and above.

So we didn't interview everybody, but growing from four to 40,000 employees, there were a lot of interviews we were doing.