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JM Jon McNeill On The Knowledge Project (Shane Parrish)

“He came to me one day and he said, 'What CRM do we use?' And I said, 'Salesforce.' He said, 'Well, it's a tax on growth. Every time we add a seat in this company, we pay a subscription. That's a tax on growth. Do we really need Salesforce?'”

The Knowledge Project (Shane Parrish) · Ideas & Essays · November 2026

“He came to me one day and he said, 'What CRM do we use?' And I said, 'Salesforce.' He said, 'Well, it's a tax on growth. Every time we add a seat in this company, we pay a subscription. That's a tax on growth. Do we really need Salesforce?'” — Jon McNeill, The Knowledge Project (Shane Parrish)

Context

Asked how often requirements turn out to be leftovers nobody remembers the reason for, Jon McNeill says Elon Musk wanted the 'weed whacker' out constantly on existing processes. The CRM question was his example of what he'd get asked weekly.

Transcript

The Knowledge Project (Shane Parrish) Around 1:07:18 into the episode
Jon McNeill

…a problem: I start to take it apart, like my grandpa taught me to do. And then, and then once I'm now into it and see what the critical parts are, then you can start to say, does this really need to exist? Could this work differently? And you just start to pull the string on what could work.

Shane Parrish

What percentage of the time do you think when you dive into requirements that maybe they once were needed, but they're not needed, but nobody even knows why they're there anymore? You know,

Jon McNeill

I used to talk about this. Like we used to compare it to a garden. You plant a garden. And in business, like nobody goes out to weed these gardens. And so weeds just grow. It's a garden being a process. And so weeds just grow up and nobody's back there with the weed whacker whacking them out. And every once in a while, an executive will say, Well, this is totally broken. Let's go back there with the weed walker and whack it out. But that happens like once every five years, 10 years. And so he wanted to, and he wanted to build a culture where we had the weed whacker out a lot. Like we were looking at the current process and questioning why we're doing it. And so like he, an example of that is he came to me one day and he said, What CRM do we use? And I said, Salesforce. He said, Well, it's a tax on growth. Every time we add a seat in this company, we pay a subscription. That's a tax on growth. Do we really need Salesforce? And that was a typical question. The kind of question I would get from him on a weekly basis, where…

Shane Parrish

How did you know it was time to leave Tesla?

Jon McNeill

My family. They had a bit of an intervention with me. To his credit, Elon gave Walter permission to write about his mental health struggles in Isaacson's book on Elon. And I was right in the thick of that. And I'm okay in terms of my skill set of handling technical problems and handling…

Shane Parrish

Oh, like you're moody. You're.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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