Survival First Growth Second

"To win over Panasonic, Straubel needed to convince Yamada that Tesla meant business. He had a plan. It harked back to how Tesla had cajoled early investors into taking a chance on a little startup. To stoke Daimler and Toyota for the Model S, years before it was ready, they had worked up mule cars—dummies that were close enough to the real thing to give their audience a taste of what was to come. Tesla needed something they could showcase, a mule factory. Blueprints for a factory, however, failed to capture the kind of excitement their prototype cars had. The Tesla team became convinced that they needed to demonstrate to Panasonic and other suppliers how serious they were about the project. Quietly, they forged a deal with landowners in Sparks and began preparing the site for construction. They called bulldozers and earth movers from around the state, erected massive lights, began moving tons of dirt. The bill was enormous, climbing to $2 million a day. Straubel wanted to have a site prepped for a demonstration to Tesla’s would-be partners. He had to make it convincing enough to suggest that Tesla was charging forward—with or without them."

""Growth is a mechanism of survival," Amancio once told me. And that conviction has been one of his driving forces."

"Growth is a mechanism of survival; if there is no growth, a company dies. A company has to be alive for the people who are committed to doing so."

""Ortega was eager to grow because he saw that the product was selling and, naturally, had an enormous, healthy, and logical ambition to succeed. He was not fond of endless meetings in which little was decided in the end. He knew he mastered the formula for success in the current time and did not hesitate to implement it at the rapid pace set by the market.""

"We have never been complacent, nor have we accepted easy success. Optimism can be very negative. You have to take risks! It was something I repeated tirelessly to all those who joined the company. And that meant following with determination what we had proposed."