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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

There used to be a sort of tradition that you started with the inexperienced startup CEO. Then, when the business became large, the board got someone with experience running a big company. That's changed in recent years. Page and Brin are back running Google, Jobs came back to Apple, and Zuckerberg is still in charge at Facebook.

On the other hand, Uber got rid of their startup guy and got a manager type, who has been getting their losses under control, and something similar happened at Twitter. In both cases, the company had operational problems and cost problems, but plenty of users/customers.

That's the Tesla situation. Product is OK. Customers are enthusiastic. Production is in trouble. Cost and labor hours per car are way too high. The financial situation isn't good. That's usually when the board and stockholders put in an operations-oriented CEO.

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> Customers are enthusiastic

Right now, part of Tesla's selling point is that you are buying a car "made" by Elon Musk. The image of him being a visionary and you get to buy into his future is part of the brand.

If Elon leaves the company, especially if there is bad blood, a lot of that enthusiasm that customers have may drop off. Tesla with some faceless CEO starts to look a lot more like just another luxury car company.

Tesla without Elon may actually make a better product and may be a better company, but it becomes a lot less marketable.

> That's the Tesla situation. Product is OK. Customers are enthusiastic. Production is in trouble. Cost and labor hours per car are way too high. The financial situation isn't good. That's usually when the board and stockholders put in an operations-oriented CEO.

And in doing so risk that the company becomes another GE-like corporate which is no longer able to innovate and inspire people.

Things have changed. Markets have changed. Innovation cycles have become much shorter.

> Innovation cycles have become much shorter.

Yes, but you need to build up a world-wide customer support network that is willing to learn these new innovations that fast at a modest rate.

If Tesla would stay in the performance car segment, then the company doesn't need to scale the customer service that much. If you smash a bit your McLaren, you accept that only a handful of companies can fix it. But when you want to roll out and dominate the average joe market with the Model 3, you need to be able to sell it with a moderate maintenance cost. That can only happen if the local car mechanics are able to fix it, but this unlikely happen if every new model comes with radical changes.

You, nor your local mechanic, can work on teslas. While your mclaren dealer would freakout, and your value perhaps drop, you can poke into whatever guts you want. Until you can OWN a tesla, I think they will stay a cult minority.

> Innovation cycles have become much shorter.

This is constantly being repeated but I doubt it is true

Just one very popular example: the length of the Walkman lifecycle was about 30 years. How long was the lifecycle of the iPod?

Do you have any evidence to support your claim? I'd be honestly interested.

Let's say the speed of long distance travel.

I dropped dramatically when railways were invented and dropped again when commercial airliners became common.

In between these short bursts of innovation, not much has happened.

I just noticed though that I may be talking about a slightly different thing here, speed of innovation vs product life cycles.

If you're going to look as far back as the creation of the railway, I think a more accurate perspective is that it took a few thousand years from the dawn of civilization to the railway, a hundred years from rail to cars, a couple decades from cars to popular commercial aviation. Speed of innovation accelerating still applies.

And then slowly after years of being managed by an experienced operator, a company loses its ability to innovate until the manager is removed. See Microsoft with Ballmer -> Nadella

Except that part of Tesla's funding is the preorder cash.

If Musk goes and 50% of the preorders cancel and demand their money back, Tesla pretty much shuts down, no?

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