Goodness in Tesla

It has been more than 4 months that I turned in my badge at Tesla. By now, I have mostly gotten over the constant tick to check ercot.com for the latest market price spikes, upcoming scarcity days and check internal dashboards to track how VPP dispatched. Elasticity of brain to adapt to new work rhythms is amazing.. and so is its capacity to forget. So before I forget the lessons I learnt and cultural patterns that made Tesla hum, thought of writing those down, in order to preserve and grow them. I sincerely believe some aspects of Tesla's culture are worth emulating. This is an effort to list them without disclosing any non-public information, and capture the emotions and quiet integrity of engineers that used to run the small sliver of Tesla I had the honor to work within. I tried to organize the post below around cultural building blocks to make it easy to read.

Joining Tesla

I have been following Tesla since 2009, including listening in on most investor calls. The grit and sacrifices that Elon and early engineers made to make it successful through a series of near-death experiences, are the stuff for legends. Tesla seemed different from other companies.. the very fact that they were ready to open up their patents in order to attract engineers, and welcome competitors in order to grow the industry, convinced me that they truly put mission first and sustained profitability was one of the means to the mission. The way they truly embraced external constructive criticism (see Sandy Munro's first interview with Elon), and not just grudgingly acknowledge it, seemed refreshing. Along with Tesla, the sister company SpaceX, showed the same missionary zeal to work from first principals and healthy ignorance of notions of impossibility. I vividly remember the day the Falcons landed.. and how I was trying to contain my enthusiasm at work.. and thinking the world has changed forever.

When a recruiter reached out on LinkedIn in 2022, it was a dream come true. The interview process was rigorous and was my first window into Tesla's culture. Every interviewer, without exception, sincerely thanked me for my time at the end of their slot. A technology leader I met at the end said with full conviction that there is no politics in Tesla, which I simply could not accept at the face value. To my utter surprise, I found later that this was (mostly) true. More on this later... As Covid was ebbing in 2023, offices were mandating work from office, Tesla most famously so. With kids in school in Davis, and office in Palo Alto, I agreed to come to office twice a week until school year end, and invested into a foldable Lectrek e-bike to manage connections between public transit within a 3.5hr commute to start work at Tesla. And yes, I did pinch myself first. This was rare opportunity to reinvent myself, make an impact and join the band of crazy misfits and idealists that make Tesla.

The drive of the Mission

"A good engineer can work arbitrarily hard for a problem he cares about". I remember overhearing this line from Colin Breck, a manager in Tesla who also writes a very thoughtful blog here. I remember thinking how true it is. All work is powered by human passion. Mission is what directs, pools and focusses these passions. Tesla's mission is simple, "Accelerating world's transition to sustainable energy". It is lived by everyone at Tesla. Many companies post their missions on websites, walls of boardrooms, pocket inserts which employees have to carry in their wallets. Not at Tesla. Once a leader joked that her husband has an annual retreat/offsite to renew their company's sense of mission, but no such offsites are needed at Tesla, because mission is lived everyday by your colleagues going above and beyond the scope of duty. Mission is the north star in Tesla. People don't subscribe to the mission because they work at Tesla. Many join Tesla because of mission.

This starts from the top. Despite all his shortcomings, Elon has been remarkable steward of this mission. Be it sleeping on factory floor to see Tesla through the production hell to opening up to competitors the patents and the supercharging network which was the crown jewel of Tesla. Many decisions did not make business sense and tanked stock price. But each was a beacon and undeniable proof to current and future employees that this places sees value in work beyond profits, and this was the true alpha for long-term growth that most analysts missed. Most companies after they grow to certain size, invest more in building moats than castles. In Tesla, survival or existence of the company itself was thought as being secondary to and a means to our mission. I saw this playing out in lunch table conversations. Praising a competitor, a colleague asked, do we have a reason to exist in certain market, if we can't add more value than them. There was no resting on existing laurels or taking success for granted due to market size and market power. There was a systemic belief that no moats can save us from dying if we do not out-innovate our competitors, so why waste energy in building motes and spend it on good value-accretive work instead.

Even in energy domain, I saw an acute awareness of market power Tesla has (as it operated some of the largest batteries in certain markets) and a very nuanced discussion on how use it responsibly for customers & broader ecosystem within ethical & regulatory limits so as to never become Enron (a textbook case of greedy use of monopoly power without ethical guardrails, that broke the public trust). I heard colleagues voicing very strongly worded objections to long term bad impacts of short term strategic choices. Sometimes this passion surfaced as questioning the statements of our CEO or even leaving Tesla, but this was still seen as the advancement of the mission. After all last I counted, there are at least 10 energy companies one on each continent, that are started or run by ex-Tesla folks (Span, Lunar, Amber, Octopus, onecommafive, Form ... ). 

Leaders in Tesla

A friend once said in jest.. people outside don't know. In Tesla your boss works for you. Their job is to remove all obstacles in your path and enable you to focus on the doing what you best. This enables extreme autonomy, extreme ownership and the boss works for you maxim goes all the way to the top. Managers in Tesla are a rare breed. Most are not traditional manager types (and hence great at it), prior senior engineers, so they know the work like the back of their hand. They put in same hours and hardwork, take on-call rotation to know and address anything that breaks in field and expected to both do and lead the work. Manager who only directs and cannot themselves do the work is an exception and a glaring outlier. One manager for example took on the daily toil of manual bidding in market every day for 4 months just so that her team could focus on automating the toil. All of this reinforces the sense of mission, community and breaks down the artificial hierarchy which comes in the way of work.

All leaders recruited or promoted by Elon showed the same trend. They all were hard-core engineers and optimists at heart and had honest to goodness fidelity to mission. A direct reportee of Elon once joined the group meeting and when asked a tough question, showed such curiosity and in-depth knowledge and appreciation of competitor's stengths and products and Tesla's weaknesses, it floored me. I thought leaders are supposed to keep up appearances of superiority, but here this leader won me over with his pursuit of truth and vulnerability. All leaders vouched by Elon's sincerity to mission, it all ringed true.

Similarly I had the good fortune of joining few meetings with Drew Bagliano. His infectious idealism, optimism, simplicity and demand for perfection will stay with me forever. His purity of intent would rub off on the whole team and would make everyone pumped up to rise up to his expectation of future and them. 

Information flow

Bad politics is when influence is used for personal advantage at expense of truth, trust or collective outcomes. Some ground rules laid by Elon helped avoid bad politics. For example, no leader could obstruct the peer-peer flow of information, bypassing organizational hierarchy rules. If a leader says to an engineer, that you can't talk to engineer in another team without going through me, they risk getting fired. Any kind of information hoarding, permission structure would be seen negatively. Everyone was empowered or in fact required to speak their minds directly to Elon if necessary. In any meeting, there was tremendous value and trust placed on the person actually doing the work (or the one closest to Genba in Kaizen-speak), even if it was the junior-most engineer or a contractor. Another deliberate information flow design that helped, was during an interview. Our team followed a strict rule of no sharing of ratings before the interview panel. This often led to awkward moments with two people having rated the same person at extreme ends of scale, and having to defend their ratings. But overall, it was an amazing bullwark against group-think and independence/fairness of evaluation. 

Engineers first 

The best role in Tesla was being an engineer. This is because engineers were seen as adding the true value to company. Please don't get me wrong.. Program managers, product managers, people managers, technology leaders all have their roles, but managers who have not or are unable to do the work they expect others to do, was discouraged. Elon famously protested MBA'ization of America. In my prior companies MBAs was seen as a way to ensure visibility, power, signal importance & value and capture a higher salary or profits. To Elon, this was a classic sticky spoon issue, where spoon used to stir the pot of value claims too much of it, by virtue of scarcity and expense of management education and demanding undue premium for it, to recoup the sunk costs. The work at Tesla was extremely visible to peers and anybody who claimed more value than they added, or took credit for others hardwork, slowly were on the way out.

Sometimes this did create other kind of problems, where managers had to tiptoe around the priority/idealism of engineering, and ensure that short-term goals were respected as much as long term. But overall, it gave engineers tremendous autonomy & visibility instead of what happens in many other organizations where engineers are often relegated to the second-class status being meek nerds that do all the work, but get no credit.

Autonomy 

Another aspect of Tesla culture I truly cherished was extreme autonomy. Engineering would create their own wishlist of OKRs (objective, key results) every quarter and then work crazy hours to make their wishes come true. This builds on a simple aspect of human psychology, that people often make half-hearted attempt to meet artificial deadlines others created for them, but full attempts to ones they put down for themselves. Especially for an engineer, the impact & quality of work are the only lasting sources of satisfaction. The cognitive dissonance that results from an artificial deadline, changing directions and blame for subpar quality later, ebbs the agency and happiness of an engineer, and stressed people rarely achieve much at work.

Managers would mostly stay out of the way of the engineer's state of flow, but would be aware of context by participating in sprint meetings and help with articulating tradeoffs, short & long term and ensuring alignment & focus and minimize external distractions.

Making Zero to One easy

Most organizations, once they grow to certain size, rest on their laurels, and refuse to climb down from the comfortable hillock they find themselves on. This ensures the status-quo but deprives the organization from exploration of larger peaks nearby, and diminishes the vitality. For many hard and worthy goals, the path goes through the valley and slippery descent before the ascent starts. But this requires deliberately pausing the instinct of incremental hill-climbing while looking down, and climbing down while looking up & around. This trait is essential for going from 0 to 1, the Thiel-speak for starting something where there is no precedent.

Tesla is very unique in encouraging the idealism and dreams of their engineers. Idealism is precisely the eternal search of the largest hill of value. Sometimes if the idealism tries to go too close to the edge of the cliff, the practicality and risk aversion preserves it and prevents it from self-destruction. But practicality alone, can keep a person, organization, society forever at the top of the smallest and the very first hill they encounter. For example, the "chalta hai" attribute and meek every-day acceptance of our lot has kept Indian society far from achieving its potential.
 
I often saw many colleagues in Tesla take on hugely difficult tasks as personal challenges, and got them done. Managers supported them once they worked out an MVP maybe on their own time, and showed the long term value. There was healthy respect for misfits, mavericks and moving fast & breaking things, and culture allowed taking big bets, even when they failed.

Pay

Almost everyone in Tesla owns some Tesla stock, and this sharing invariably aligned Tesla's and employee's incentives. This implicit alignment is an amazingly empowering. It underlines the organizational value of sharing the economic pie if we are growing it, and kicks off the virtuous cycle of compounding which cements further alignment. Many factory workers in Tesla have become millionaires owing to this, and created generational wealth. 
 
Sometimes the wild swings in stock price do cause nerve-racking jitters, especially when somebody is counting on it for non-discriminatory outlays like kid's education. Still the good work that is visible within the company and accepting that stock markets are weighing scales in long term, helps all keep the faith and agency.