Marc Tarpenning: Kako sam Musku prodao Teslu

Well, we were pretty sure that electric cars were going to be a big thing. I will say that Tesla's success has surprised me and I think my co-founder Martin as well. Partially because we thought that once we really show the world what was possible, the big guys, the existing giant automakers, would wake up and embrace electric cars and really cause a lot of competition before we could get established and get big. But they didn't, and that allowed us to get very large before they woke up. And they're still just barely waking up.

Well, in fantasy, I mean, you know, and Elon became the CEO, the fourth CEO in Tesla's history, and really has obviously expanded it amazingly. But yeah, I mean, we thought, wow, maybe we'll be this big car company, but it seemed so unlikely. Elon was also the first buyer. He owns the very first Roadster, serial number one.

So Martin Eberhard and I in 2003 were exploring different business opportunities, you know, what to do next kind of thing. And we hit upon, or really Martin hit upon, this idea of electric cars. We had a lot of experience with batteries from a past company we did, and batteries were getting better every year. And batteries are the enabling thing for electric cars, the enabling technology. And we realized that we could make a compelling electric car just barely, but that would be great because every year the batteries would get better. The batteries dominate the cost, they dominate the performance. And so every year it would get easier and cheaper and better and cheaper and better, and we would have this tailwind into the future that normally you don't see. And that was what was really exciting from a business perspective.

Well, the very first production car, okay, which isn't a prototype because we made thousands of them a year. It took us about five years from when we started to when we were delivering to our first customers.

So when you enter a market with a new technology, it tends to be expensive. And it's expensive for a whole variety of reasons, but largely the supply chains are not set up. You have to make a lot of things that later become commodities. So you can't enter the market at the bottom. You know, cell phones were very, very expensive when they first came out, and camcorders were super expensive. I mean, all the technology that we use starts off very, very expensive and then gets cheap. So we knew it was going to have to be an expensive car because there's no way we could compete with, you know, Toyota or Volkswagen in terms of making cheap cars without billions of Euros. So it had to be an expensive car. And then we looked for what was a competitive advantage that we would have. And electric cars are incredibly high acceleration. They're much faster, they're much quicker than a gasoline-powered car can be. Physics favors electric cars that way in a very large way. So we looked and we said, well, what part of the market would care about that? And it turns out sports car enthusiasts love acceleration, and instant acceleration is especially valuable. And that's something that electric cars deliver in a way that internal combustion engine cars can't. So that was great because it turned out that sports cars are a high-margin, high-value product, and we could compete there. In fact, even at our original price point of ultimately 100,000 euros, it was one of the least expensive cars of that performance range, which made it very compelling for a lot of people.

No, no, no. So we were looking for investment. So Martin and I spent, we started the company in July of 2003, and then we spent the next six months just seeing if it was possible. We did some technology tests, but we also worked on a business plan as to how we were going to make a car. We understood how we were going to make the electronics, make the thing that made the car go, but a car is a lot of other things. You know, it's a body and it's got wheels and there's a lot of car things around it. So we spent a lot of time figuring out how we were going to do that and then how we were going to sell it. Whether cars are complicated in a distribution way, so how we were going to sell it, and if it made sense. We penciled out the business case and we convinced ourselves it was possible. So in January of 2004, we went looking for money. So we went to the venture funds in Silicon Valley and we got two small funds to say yes. And then we were looking for the rest of the round, the lead investor in fact of the round. And you know, when you're looking for money, when you're going from venture capitalist to angel or whatever, you follow every lead. You always follow every lead. And someone suggested they had heard that Elon invests in things and he might be interested. So we flew down to Southern California where he was in the first year of SpaceX. So he was trying to build rocket ships, which turned out to be an amazing company, but at the time seemed a little far-fetched. So we went down and he liked the idea and he agreed to invest. So he was an investor in every series we've had, and he was always a very supportive investor. He was on the board, he took a board seat because he represented the Series A, and was very supportive along the way.

Yeah, I mean, we had to convince him that it was a good idea to write the check. But yeah, it took us about a week for him to, you know, from the time we first pitched, he did a bunch of due diligence and asked us a whole lot of questions. But we'd spent six months working on those answers, so it was pretty quick. And then he said, okay, you know, I mean, I'm in.

You know, we believed that that would have happened. But you know, when we had Elon, it was like perfect. You know, we had somebody who believed in the vision and could write a check. So we were thrilled.