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KEVIN COUPE FOUNDER, MORNINGNEWSBEAT.COM

Technology can change how business interacts with consumers, but there is an epiphany that must precede the tech choices that businesses must make.

Listening to the ruminations of a Tesla co- founder, who, it could be argued, is ideally positioned to talk about business disruption, was one of the real benefits of attending the recent GMDC Retail Tomorrow Conference in Silicon Valley. It was one of the most provoking such meetings that I can remember, and GMDC set a benchmark for what a technology conference should be. I always thought I was a reasonably enlightened and imaginative guy, until I spent time on the Google campus and at the Plug And Play “accelerator” that provides infrastructure for startup companies and plays matchmaker between them and major companies that serve as their partners. (Many years ago, we were told, one of the first companies to work with Plug And Play was a little entrepreneurial effort you might have heard of. It was called Google.) I was simultaneously humbled and energized because there were so many business lessons. Tracie Maffei, who runs the retail practice at Google, told us during our visit to the Google campus that there are certain basic realities that businesses have to understand and ignore at their own peril. “Millennials represent the most diverse, educated, socially conscious and tech-savvy group in history…they’ve never used a fax, never used a rotary phone, never listened to a cassette tape,” she said.

“That was just science,” he said, arguing they always knew they could work that part of it out. Unlike co-founder Elon Musk’s other business, Tarpenning said, “this wasn’t rocket science.” No, the bigger problem quite literally had to do with the nuts and bolts of the business. They could design the batteries and design the car…but then they actually had to find someone who could do things like make a door, and a rear-view mirror, and all the other stuff that goes into a physical car.

I recently had the opportunity to attend a presentation at which Marc Tarpenning, one of the co-founders of Tesla, talked about the company’s early development process… and there were two things he said that really grabbed my attention and struck me as relevant to pretty much any business facing 21st century competitive realities. First, there was his observation that in creating the Tesla there were far greater problems than developing the batteries that propel them.

That was a lot harder…until they discovered something about traditional car companies – they don’t make that stuff either. It ends up the only thing traditional car companies really make is the engine, and everything else is outsourced. So, all Tesla had to do was network, network and network some more until they could find outside companies that could meet their standards, and were willing to work on the small- production scale Tesla had in mind. Which they did.

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