Elon Musk on how choosing the wrong VC almost killed Tesla

Well, I think one thing that's important is if you have a choice of a lower valuation with someone you really like or a higher valuation with someone, you have a question mark about. Take the lower valuation. It's better to have a higher quality bench capitalist who you think would be great to work with than to get a higher valuation with someone where there's even a question mark. Really, I think that's important. It's sort of like getting married. I don't know, maybe I haven't been that good at that. But tenure's okay. I mean, it's not too bad. Did you do that wrong? Did you maximize for valuation? I suppose in the case of the Tesla Series C, at some point. I think I'll tell the full story. But not tonight. But not tonight. They did wait an hour. I'll tell part of the story. So there were two competing bids. One was from Kleiner Perkins. The other one was from vantagepoint. Kleiner offered 50. A $50 million pre money. Vantage point offered 70. I actually said to John Doerr that if John joins the board, we'll do it at 50. But John felt that there was. That he had too many obligations and that there was another partner at Kleiner who really wanted the deal. And so he could not supplant that person. And I thought, well, we could do. I would be okay if John Doer would join. I mean, there's a 40% difference. That difference, that's pretty significant. I thought if John would be willing to join the board, then we could do that, but not if it was somebody else. Yeah, that was probably a mistake.