Want a better pitch? Watch Elon Musk’s presentation for the Tesla Powerwall | Hacker News Reader

Want a better pitch? Watch Elon Musk’s presentation for the Tesla Powerwall

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133 pointsscardine37 comments

This is a bit of a pet-peeve of mine, but I really dislike it when people focus on the aesthetic or the presentation style of Musk or Jobs.

Musk gives great presentations, but the reason he is widely respected is because he was actually able to deliver what he presented. In the most recent Musk biography, they discuss how he spent time at parties reading obscure russian textbooks on rocket physics while everyone else was having fun. He stresses the importance of estimating things from first principles, instead of relying on existing market estimates. However - these things are hard, take a lot of work, and are not as glamorous as making a fancy presentation.

Being able to communicate your ideas clearly and in a compelling way is a very important skill, especially for a leader. But I think it's very important to stress that it's a very small part of the reason certain people are highly successful - it just happens to be very glamourous, and kinda fun, so people like to focus on that.

Zuckerberg, Page, etc are all incredibly successful, yet they were not known (at least initially!) for their brilliant public speaking skills.

I don't think it's glamour though, is it? I mean, Musk is not the best public speaker, and yet his presentations are amazing in spite of this. And they're amazing because they're real: backed by logical thinking, real engineering, and an appeal to first principles. Anyone can make a flashy presentation, but I don't think that's what we're celebrating here.

I think he's just bad enough at public speaking that it adds to his charm - he comes off as sincere and eager rather than polished and professional.

Well put. As the adage goes "talk is cheap" or should I say "presentations are cheap".

This article completely misses the point.

Musk is not a great presenter. He stutters, mumbles, goes off topic, etc as others have pointed out.

Do you know what makes his presentations more worthwhile than pretty much anyone else in the Valley?

The substance. He works on hard problems, and he fucking delivers. Who's got time for style when you're revolutionizing multiple industries? We see that it doesn't matter, people will watch his presentations, buy his products, and back his companies regardless.

The real problem is that most people don't have anything worth pitching.

I've always been incredibly confused as to why everyone clamours over Elon Musk's presentations. IMO, he's actually pretty terrible at presenting.

But he delivers great products in a very straightforward kind of way, and he seems to have such a forward-thinking ambition. That's why people idolise him so much.

People are not enamored by his presentation skills; they are drawn in by the sincerity and the ingenuity in his manner/style.

I like everything about Musk, and this is the first time I'm actually sitting down and listening to him present. But I was slightly put off by his habit of punctuating significant statements with that characteristic half-hearted chuckle.

While the presentation succeeds at conveying an appealing vision, it dramatically lacks substance. What is "one pixel" supposed to mean? I'm not a child. Give me square kilometers. Or how does the price compare to competitors? Maybe I'm different than most, but I actually care more about the numbers and cold facts than nicely prepared hot air.

I understand, but here's why you can't do that..

Let's look at about a 30 seconds excerpt from his intervention in Norway[0]. From 8m7 to 8m38.

Now, he starts explaining the numbers at 8m7s. At 8m38, he's made his point and at that stage, you would be 'convinced'. The interviewer said "Uhuh" (you can hear the audience laugh when she says that). She didn't understand that he has already made his point. (1 kilometre² ==> 1GW).

She says "With you so far" and I smiled because she was completely lost and didn't even know it.

This is similar to Apple's "1,000 songs in your pocket". First time I heard that I thought "How many gigs?" and it frustrated me.

The point of these oversimplifications is to convey a point to the masses. Technical people can find out and understand this and make sense of KWh and what-not.. But you need to simplify to reach a large number of people so that at the very least, the idea of full solar power generation floats in the collective mind.

You tell a lambda citizen that the iPod has 2GB of storage capcity, it doesn't "speak" to him. You tell him "1,000 songs in your pocket" and everyone can understand that. From child to grand-mother.

You're not the target audience. Yes, it's frustrating, but you're an outlier because you can work out the numbers.

He's trying to make it mainstream. Or else the audience would've been as clueless as the journalist in Norway.

By the way, he goes into more details in that intervention. It's not "power-pointy" and the audience isn't the cheering and laughing for no reason type (they're in the Oil & Gas industry).

[0] https://youtu.be/0ZsVxSDB7NY?t=8m7s

> You tell a lambda citizen that the iPod has 2GB of storage capcity, it doesn't "speak" to him.

I don't really agree with this 'us vs. them' thinking. I'm a technical person, but 2GB doesn't really mean much to me. What bitrate are my songs encoded at on average? Do I use VBR? What bitrates can I get away with? etc. I'd have to do a rough sum in my head, and the only answer I'd get is 'in the 1000s' anyway, so it doesn't give me any extra information. The fact is, even for technical people, approximations and hand waving are great as starting points. They set expectations.

I feel like anything more complicated than that (hard numbers) only have the potential to be misleading anyway, because they let us think we have more information than we actually do. It's only when you actually start working things out that those numbers (so how many GW does a city need? a typical house? what's the variance in these numbers?) become more relevant, but that's not the sort of thing you can do in your head anyway.

The fact is, even for technical people, approximations and hand waving are great as starting points. They set expectations.

Good approximations do this. If you say a proposed wind farm is going to produce enough energy to power 100,000 homes that means something even if I don't know how much energy the average home uses you can still think ~small city worth of power. You can also say electric bill is ~100$ / month so that's 120million / year worth of electricity even if your units are off it's going to be in the right ballpark.

However, if you say it's enough to power 1,000,000 light bulbs that's both ambiguous and not really useful. Because you both wonder if it's 60w or 100w, is that 24/7 or a few hours a day, and you probably don't really know how many light bulbs are in your house or how much energy they use. (TV's and other devices are even more ambiguous.) So, you can't get how much energy that is directly or indirectly.

PS: I still want hard numbers, somewhere even if there not a major part of the presentation.

I don't know, 2GB seems much clearer than "1000 songs" to me. All the questions you ask are even more applicable to the "1000 songs" figure, but on top of that you also suspect that this amount was computed by marketing for some average-lenght low-quality music.

But then again, I'm a technical person, I have an overall feel of how much space my data takes, so I can do a quick estimate in my head.

Also, I believe that all this marketing for "technically clueless" tend to make them even more clueless. In this case, it promotes understanding of "mp3 player" as "a box to play music" instead of what it really is - a portable storage device that can also play music files. Yes, the less clueless people actually used their mp3 players to move files around, at least before pendrives were as disposable as ballpens.

> Also, I believe that all this marketing for "technically clueless" tend to make them even more clueless. In this case, it promotes understanding of "mp3 player" as "a box to play music" instead of what it really is

I think that's a really interesting point. What is an MP3 player really? There are probably good arguments to be made for more abstraction ("box to play music") or less abstraction ("portable storage device"). I'd err towards more abstraction in the long run, because that's the only way technology can progress to the truly magical stuff (eventually no one will be able to understand a piece of technology in its entirety, we're already almost there, so why run from abstraction?).

> I don't know, 2GB seems much clearer than "1000 songs" to me.

This is what I meant by "[hard numbers] let us think we have more information than we actually do." Perhaps in this particular instance that's not the case, but I think that stating a precise number might make us feel more knowledgable (or comfortable), without actually adding much actual information, e.g. see people who are focused on what GHz their phone has, or whatever. I agree that these numbers should be available though, but I don't think marketers (or presenters) are being dishonest or misleading for leaving them out; I think they're often actually helping.

Normally, one does not pitch to the masses. So OPs point of using this as an inspiration for your pitch to a VC is misguided.

But Musk did pitch to the masses. The OP's point of using the organization and structure (problem, state of the art, necessity to change, ideal solution, show a working prototype now, call for action) of the pitch as an inspiration, not the pitch itself, is what counts.

> She didn't understand that he has already made his point. (1 kilometre² ==> 1GW).

I always feel Musk is a little bit too one-sided in his presentations. I mean I'm obviously on his side, and it does make sense for certain audiences to present solar as this amazing solution that is a TOTAL no-brainer... because you have to fake it 'till you make it, and if you genuinely believe that solar is an awesome (part of the) solution at the end of the road (as many do, including myself and Musk) then these white lies can be warranted. But still it irks me a bit.

For example he'll say 1 km2 is 1 GW, because 1 m2 is 1000 watts of solar energy. Here's an excerpt from McKay's (free) book Without the Hot Air, a Cambridge physicist professor wrote it and I can recommend it.

> The power of raw sunshine at midday on a cloudless day is 1000W per square metre. That’s 1000 W per m2 of area oriented towards the sun, not per m2 of land area. To get the power per m2 of land area in Britain, we must make several corrections. We need to compensate for the tilt between the sun and the land, which reduces the intensity of midday sun to about 60% of its value at the equator (figure 6.1). We also lose out because it is not midday all the time. On a cloud-free day in March or September, the ratio of the average intensity to the midday intensity is about 32%. Finally, we lose power because of cloud cover. In a typical UK location the sun shines during just 34% of daylight hours. The combined effect of these three factors and the additional compli- cation of the wobble of the seasons is that the average raw power of sunshine per square metre of south-facing roof in Britain is roughly 110 W/m2, and the average raw power of sunshine per square metre of flat ground is roughly 100 W/m2.

So you get a raw power of 100 w/m2, already an order of magnitude less. Then you take that energy and hypothetically apply PV panels to it, say averaging 20% (20% panels obviously exist but they're a bit more expensive and therefore this is already a rate that's a bit higher than today's average, but doable in the long-term) and you end up with 2% of his 1 GW per km2 in practice. (at least this is for a typical UK square metre, can be higher in a sunny US area), and only 0.5 kwh per average day per square metre of panel.

If you then add to that installation / maintenance costs, and costs of new infrastructure (from transportation to storage) and look at the inefficiencies there, it's not quite true to say 200 km2 will simply do it, hell even if you ignore all that.

With the figures above you get 100 gwh per day of electricity from 200km2 of panels (before storage or transportation). Now he said 'power the US', not 'power cars' or 'power homes' or 'power businesses', but the US, unless I missed something.

Now the US uses about 100 quadrillion BTUs, which is, rounding quite a bit, very roughly 30 million gwh per year, or about say 80k gwh per day. We just established that based on typical UK land with nice panels you get about 100 gwh on 200km2 per day. Yet he says that these panels can power the entire US? It's off by a factor of 800x. Even if you say instead of powering the US, let's power only homes, or just transportation, so you're now off by say a factor of 200x, and then you say well let's put these panels in much better circumstances than the UK, and get 4x more sunhours on average, you're still off by a factor of 50x. I'm sure I've made a few mistakes here and there but I don't think any of this order of magnitude.

Another comparison is the Topaz farm, which has about 0.12 gwh per km2 of daily average generated power. To generate the 80 thousand gwh we use every day, we'd need 664 thousand km2, not '150 to 200 km2 to power the US'. It's insanely wrong to the extent I keep double checking my numbers cause the odds are far bigger than I'm wrong, not him, but I'm not seeing any real mistakes here. Agua Caliente solar project has about (very roughly) 0.18 gwh per km2 generated daily, similar story. Huanghe solar park in China has a 0.15 daily gwh per km2 rate, similar story. Even if you consider that yes, not every single metre is covered and a bunch of other factors etc (many offset by other factors by the way), you need orders of magnitude different results to get anywhere near Musk's figure so I'm not seeing how adjusting for slightly more accurate numbers gets anywhere close to his story.

Anyway I'm not a big energy guy so I'd love for others to enlighten me. Cheers.

tl;dr I really like Musk, I'm a big fan of solar, but I think he's doing a ton of hand waving in his 'we only need xyz and we could go fully solar' to the extent it's just completely false and I've seen it too many times now. Part of that is fine because I'm of the opinion we can at times be allowed to present things better than they are to get the ball rolling and I'd love to get the solar ball rolling (faster), but there are limits.

It was a mediocre presentation, thanks to Musk's Muskifying it to the max. Stammering, mumbling, nervous, rushing here and there, not connected with the pace of the audience, assuming the audience understands certain terminology... oh, and having the audience wait like 45 minutes, 50 minutes (or was it over an hour, I forget) for the event to start, and not apologizing at all for making the audience wait so long.

The media often like to say Musk is the next Steve Jobs. It's just the opposite. Musk is the anti-Jobs. He doesn't give a damn about his presentations, he doesn't rehearse for them, doesn't care whether the message gets through or not. If you are bright, and you grok what he's saying, fine. If you are new to EVs, or solar, or stationary storage, or battery technology, too bad.

It's part of a company-wide problem at Tesla: communications. It's really bad. Internal, and external. I believe it's because Musk doesn't value it. It could wind up hurting Tesla and I would argue it already is hurting the company.

"Musk is the anti-Jobs."

I find that very refreshing and exciting. I think we're all hung-over from the over polished, maniacally-focused presentations/shows and overall approach that Jobs was famous for. With Elon you feel like you're hearing from a really bright guy, who'd rather be engineering something in the back room. The fact that he actually delivers, AND seems to deliver on the design side as well - makes it all the more intriguing.

You could argue that Jobs did both - but I think Elon's quirkiness, and outspoken nature/transparency is a pleasant contrast.

Wait you think Musk doesn't value communications? I think it doesn't make sense to jump to that conclusion simply because he doesn't rehearse for PR events. I think any company that doesn't value communication as a top priority could not have made it as far as spacex or tesla. It's the reason he puts machines next to designers and programmers at both tesla and spacex. It's the reason he'll push people to work 80+ hours, because it's more efficient to have one person work 80 hours than two people at 40 due to communication/knowledge transfer efficiencies. It's the reason he has banned most acronyms at spacex. I mean I feel I could keep going on because you have to have to prioritize communications internally if any company, especially a startup, is to do well.

Tesla's communications are so screwed up and have been for so long that, yeah, I blame the CEO. The not-rehearsing-for-events is just a sideshow compared to the trainwreck of communications at Tesla. I've been a customer for two years, and a shareholder longer than that, and at Tesla the right thumb doesn't know what the right index finger is doing, let alone right hand not knowing what left hand is doing. Across the board, from the CEO to PR to IR to service centers to stores... nobody has information and it leads to a really inferior customer experience. Individuals here and there do herculean jobs trying to make up for the organizational weaknesses, but the problem is pervasive and widespread, and I blame Musk, however much he deserves credit for leading his companies to the great success they've achieved. It comes at a cost and I'd argue it's going to be a real nightmare over next two years as Tesla tries to cross the chasm from early adopters to early mainstream with the Model X and then the Model 3 vehicles.

To be honest, the two minutes I could stomach felt like a generic TEDx talk. Cringeworthy dramaticly colored photos, "lol so spontaneous" outbursts from the audience. Hmpf... Don't try to manipulate my emotions, or if you must, do it so well that I don't notice.

The only bit that really stood to me was when he started talking high level vision.

"This is actually within the power of humanity to do, we have done things like this before".

goosebumps

The rest was standard, average, decent fluff.

Present problem, measurable impact of problem.

Present solution, and measurable impact of solution.

Have done enough initially to show that is feasible.

Fantastic.

I see it more in storytelling terms: the existing hell, the seed of hope, the promised land, the hero's path, the hero made real. It's not so much about the consistency of the storyline itself but instead the emotions which develop in the audience as the story is told.

While I think the steps in the article make emotional sense, I didn't think Elon's powerwall presentation was all that well done. For example the "seed of hope" came across more as a "seed of desperation." He didn't really explain why we're now _able_ to make progress, in a way we haven't been able to in the past. (The audience at Elon's presentation also seemed rather irrationally exuberant, excited for some reason other than presentation itself.)

Not necessarily. I'm not being contrarian for the sake of it. This approach that takes the first third of the time presenting the problem to an audience that arrived to hear the solution to a known problem can sometimes be annoying. It could just as well be done this way:

1. State the problem in a short less than 1 minute summary. 2. Present the solution and sustainability etc (bulk of the presentation) 3. Then, lastly, present the problem that most already know - only this time in detail.

No time or break down was mentioned. That is your imagination.

> For the sake of it.

The part that impacted me in terms of presentation was the data:

- With 160 million packs the US transitions to renewable energy.

- With 900 million packs the world transitions to renewable energy.

- With 2 billion packs everything in the world, including transport and heating, may transition to renewable energy.

The general pitch is a classic fear mongering strategy used in sales for decades:

1. Beware, something very bad will happen to you.

2. But there is a solution.

3. I have that solution so you need to buy it from me.

In finance it is used to sell insurance, retirement, and trust products.

Mad Men's Kodak presentation in season one is one of the best pitches I've seen. If you haven't seen it, and even if you haven't watched the show, you should.

https://youtu.be/suRDUFpsHus

Want to really dive into this? Read Duarte's Resonate (available free from the author here: http://resonate.duarte.com/ )

Same concepts, just much more in depth, with great examples.

I was genuinely interested in the topic and clicked on the link. I was met with an interface that was alien to me, as if someone went out of their way to make it unusable and semi-broken. Browsers have an established UI with a scroll bar, yet people constantly find new ways to break it.

Check this page out: http://resonate.duarte.com/#!page226

Using a scroll bar to fix the decision to not use the scroll bar as the main navigation tool. ( And the page is torn unless the window has the correct width. )

Totally agreed and oh so ironic that a guide to presenting had me leave 15 seconds in due to the way the information was presented.

I think Steve Jobs 'one more thing' is an excellent counterpoint to point 3 -'Show the promised land before explaining how you’ll get there.'

I don't get the "power wall". Unlike a car, a house has space for lead acid batteries. They are cheap at Costco and recyclable.

Well don't forget to a large extent it's probably about economies of scale. Lead acid may be more economical when density/weight isn't as big a concern (such as in a home), but Tesla wants to produce cheap car batteries which can't be lead acid for the goals they set for their cars, and if they have a large extra market for the car batteries they produce, they can produce them cheaper, more efficiently, at larger scales.

If Tesla wasn't producing cars and somehow found itself wanting to build batteries for homes, still, it may not have gone lithium-ion.

Beyond that though there are still (some) issues with the amount of cycles/lifespan, charging speed, disposal and efficiency of lead acid, even if they're cheap and recyclable.

And even in houses, space is still a concern with lead acid being a few times more voluminous as lithium-ion, and it's not like the power wall is a tiny unit. Don't forget the standard version has a capacity of 7 kWh, while using a clothes washer and a clothes dryer just once uses up about 5 kwh+ according to Tesla itself. And the Tesla car batteries typically have 75 to 85 kwh of capacity or so, so you'd need 10 units fully charged to charge your car once. They've made it clear that you can buy and link multiple power walls, and I wouldn't be surprised if people ended up having more than 1 in their home. So space is definitely not completely irrelevant unless you're not in a very urban environment (which is a big use case for sure, but not always the case).

Two potential other things that Tesla might have up their sleeve:

Creating a product that gives car batteries a second life (and therefore a resale value when no longer suitable for use in cars). I don't think Tesla has officially commented on this but some of their competitors are explicit about this use case.

The battery in your car(s) acting like a powerwall when plugged in, so sharing software for demand management.

Yeah I've heard these things mentioned around.

Musk also explicitly said that 1/3rd of the new gigafactory's capacity will be dedicated to producing batteries for storage (e.g. the powerwall).

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