It’s a real litmus test of a CEOs ability to tell a narrative that creates an envelope of trust. It’s not dissimilar to how a CEO has to manage his or her employees at a company if you’re going to build a very successful company. You have to tell a story that is both inspirational but practical, and believable. When you can do that to your employees, what happens is you have high levels of retention, high levels of employee satisfaction, morale, and people execute.
That’s not dissimilar to working with Wall Street and telling a narrative that is relatively believable and backing it up with enough data points along the way.
When we talk about what’s happening right now, there’s too many of these private companies or public companies, or small tech companies, that are frankly not very durable. I think we’re just not willing to have the hard conversation about that. There are some good businesses. Are they great businesses? No. Will they ever be great businesses? No. We just need to admit that.
But Google, Tesla, Workday, Amazon, are amazing. Tesla got battered in the press because Elon didn’t hit his 2016 ship goals. Except, he committed to shipping 80,000, and he shipped 72,000 or 73,000 cars. That’s just incredible. In the grand scheme of things, will those 6,000 or 7,000 units really matter? No!
By 2021, the guy’s basically going to drive the energy independence of the United States. He deserves some whitespace to operate. The quarterly perturbations don’t truly matter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nqy6CcU84Xs (38:40)