Elon Musk only noted very briefly that there had been “progress” on the matter of the immigration order made during his meeting with Donald Trump’s economics advisory council on Friday, but on Saturday the Tesla CEO shared a bit more about what happened at the event.
Musk said that he specifically requested inclusion of discussion of the travel ban at the closed meeting, as the issue had not been included on the agenda originally. In fact, the Tesla CEO said that because of his intervention, it became the “first and foremost” topic of discussion despite not having been on the list of things for the group to talk about.
In addition to the immigration order, Musk says he also raised the issue of climate concerns, by way of explaining his continued participation in the council. The CEO said he would indeed remain a member, reaffirming a commitment to stay part of the group he made prior to the meeting, following the resignation from the council of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick in response to both employee and public reaction.
One observer pointed out that a federal judge’s ruling has actually overturned the order for now, which she suggested is doing more than Musk’s chosen tactics for voicing his concern. He replied that he believes it should be “addressed on all fronts,” including via judicial, legislative and executive channels. Musk also admitted that he’s not thrilled about participating in politics , since it’s separate from his primary agenda of helping to “invent and develop technologies that improve lives.”
The natural question then is exactly why Musk insists on continuing to work with Trump’s administration when many of his customers seem to vehemently disagree with the CEO’s actions. In fact, some Model 3 pre-order customers are cancelling their reservations as a direct result of Musk’s work with the White House.
It’s hard to say how much Musk’s role in this group is actually “doing good,” as he suggests, given the closed-door nature of the assemblies. This lack of transparency could actually also be grounds for yet more legal action against Trump, in fact, since it looks very likely that it’s a violation of the Federal Advisory Committee Act to not hold these advisory meetings from business leaders open to the public, though the administration denies any of its actions have contravened this order.
Based on the accounts of some other council participants, however, it does seem like climate at least has been a noteworthy part of the agenda. GM CEO and strategic and policy forum member Mary Barra provided TechCrunch with the following statement about her participation in Friday’s meeting via email from a GM spokesperson:
While GM has addressed the immigration order issued by Trump last week in an internal memo shared with media from the company’s HR lead John Quattrone, Barra herself has not addressed the executive measure publicly. Of the major U. S. automakers, only Ford CEO Mark Fields has made a statement regarding the order, noting on January 30 in a statement co-authored with Ford Chairman Bill Ford that they “do not support this policy or any other that goes against ours values as a company.”

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It is critically important for the founders of a company to intimately understand the company’s key performance indicators (KPIs). Founders cannot hope to grow a company in any meaningful way without an almost obsessive focus on its KPIs.
Why? Because KPIs, if constructed correctly, give management and potential investors a cold, analytical snapshot of the state of the company, untainted by emotion or rhetoric. This focus must not be limited to the KPIs themselves, for they are merely measurements of outcomes. We look for founders to have an understanding of what levers can be pulled and what tweaks can be made to improve the business, which will then be reflected in its KPIs.
The focus should not be on the KPIs themselves, but the meaning behind them and knowing what impacts each one.
Let’s review some of the KPIs that are important for founders to thoroughly understand and for which they should have a strategy, or set of strategies, for optimizing. Please note that some KPIs are not relevant to some types of businesses. Finally, I am not going to go into very much detail on each metric and how to calculate it as (a) that is beyond the scope of this article, and (b) that information is readily available from other sources.
Customer acquisition cost (CAC). CAC is the amount of money you need to spend on sales, marketing and related expenses, on average, to acquire a new customer. This tells us about the efficiency of your marketing efforts, although it’s much more meaningful when combined with some of the other metrics below, and when compared to competitors’ CAC.
Acquiring new customers is one thing, but retaining them is even more important. Your customer retention rate indicates the percentage of paying customers who remain paying customers during a given period of time. The converse to retention rate is churn (or attrition), the percentage of customers you lose in a given period of time. When we see high retention rates over an indicative time period, we know the company has a sticky product and that it is keeping its customers happy. This is also an indicator of capital efficiency.
Lifetime value (LTV) is the measurement of the net value of an average customer to your business over the estimated life of the relationship with your company. Understanding this number, especially in its relation to CAC, is critical to building a sustainable company.
We consider the ratio of CAC to LTV to be the golden metric. This is a true indicator of the sustainability of a company. If a company can predictably and repeatedly turn x into 10x (note: 10x is just an illustration and not meant to imply any sort of minimum or standard), then it’s sustainable.
CAC recovery time (or months to recover CAC). This KPI measures how long it takes for a customer to generate enough net revenue to cover the CAC. CAC recovery time has a direct impact on cash flow and, consequentially, runway.
Whereas CAC measures the variable expenses attributable to acquiring customers, overhead measures the company’s fixed expenses incurred irrespective of the number of customers acquired. Overhead relative to revenue is a reflection of the capital efficiency of a company (i.e. all things being equal, a company that generates $1 million in revenue on $200,000 in overhead is twice as efficient as one that generates $1 million in revenue on $400,000 in overhead).
Understanding your revenue and monthly expenses (fixed and variable) enables you to calculate the company’s monthly burn. This is simply the net amount of cash flow for a month when net cash flow is negative. If the company starts the month with $100,000 in cash and ends the month with $90,000 in cash, its burn rate is $10,000. If a company’s monthly net cash flow is positive, it is not burning cash.
A keen focus on runway is critical to the survival of any startup. Runway is the measure of the amount of time until the company runs out of cash, expressed in terms of months. Runway is computed by dividing remaining cash by monthly burn. We prefer to view a conservative estimate of runway that calculates the monthly burn utilizing current revenue and projected expenses (after accounting for the increased expenses to be incurred post-investment). We require an absolute minimum of 12 months of runway, but have a strong preference for 18 months or more. Short runways cause entrepreneurs to by myopic and not to have the liberty to tweak and iterate when necessary. It also forces them to almost immediately focus on the next fundraising round instead of growing the company.
Expressed as a percentage, profit margin tells us how much your product sells for above the actual cost of the product itself. Put another way, it reveals how much of the selling price is “mark-up.” This invaluable metric allows us to consider the return on investment on the cost of the product and is significant in understanding the scalability and sustainability of the company.
We consider conversion rate to be a very telling KPI in that it reveals a combination of the company’s ability to sell its products to its customers and customers’ desire for the product. It is particularly instructive to track and review conversion rate over time and regularly run experiments to improve it.
Certain businesses find that revenue may not be the most informative indicator of their financial performance. This is especially true for marketplaces for which revenue (i.e. their take rate) represents a small portion of overall transactions. Gross merchandise volume (GMV) can be a useful KPI in these cases. GMV is the overall dollar value of sales of goods or services purchased through a marketplace.
For companies that have apps, online games or social networking sites, monthly active users (MAU) is an important KPI. MAU is the number of unique users who engage with the site or app in a 30-day period. Understanding MAU is helpful in determining the revenue potential of a company or how well it is currently monetizing.
When we speak to founders to learn more about their companies, we ask them for these KPIs, along with their narrative and other information. It is a quick way for us to understand the current state of the business and we have serious concerns about founders who do not know their KPIs. We find that the most successful founders tend to be those who have an obsessive focus on their KPIs and the drive to constantly experiment and optimize them.

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The Gillmor Gang — Michael Arrington, Dan Farber, Doc Searls, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, February 3, 2017. Celebrity CEOs, does the Startup Valley have a path for big ideas, the Social Media Administration, and the politics of 5G.
@stevegillmor, @arrington, @dsearls, @dbfarber, @kteare
Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
Liner Notes
Live chat stream
The Gillmor Gang on Facebook

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A U. S. judge has ordered Google to hand over emails stored outside the country in order to comply with an FBI search warrant. The warrant in question pertains to a domestic fraud probe.
The ruling is notable because it goes against an appeals court judgement last year — recently upheld — pertaining to Microsoft customer data held in servers outside the US. In that instance a federal court ruled the company did not have to hand over data stored on its servers in Ireland to the US government, declining to “disregard the presumption against extraterritoriality,” as the judge put it.
However in the Google case, U. S. Magistrate Judge Thomas Rueter ruled on Friday that the act of transferring emails from a foreign server did not qualify as a seizure. According to Reuters , the judge ruled there is no “meaningful interference” with the account holder’s “possessory interest”, going on to assert that any privacy infringement occurs “at the time of disclosure in the United States”, rather than when the data itself is transferred.
Google’s legal team had sought to use the Microsoft ruling as precedent to challenge the warrant’s scope. The company had turned over data that was stored in the US only. In a statement it said it will be appealing the judgement. “The magistrate in this case departed from precedent, and we plan to appeal the decision. We will continue to push back on overbroad warrants,” it said.
Both cases involve warrants issued under a 1986 federal law called the Stored Communications Act, which — as you can imagine, given its date-stamp — has long been described as a “ woefully outdated ” piece of legislation vs the technology it is now being used to regulate.
The judge in the recent Microsoft appeals case wrote that the Act is “overdue for a congressional revision that would continue to protect privacy but would more effectively balance concerns of international comity with law enforcement needs and service provider obligations in the global context in which this case arose”.
The Department of Justice certainly appears intent on applying pressure on Congress via multiple cases in the courts — pressing the question of where the line should be drawn on extraterritoriality applications to access stored data.
And with the confusion of conflicting legal judgements being issued in circuit courts, there will be growing pressure for clarity — either by Congress revising the legislation, or by cases being pushed to the Supreme Court for a definitive ruling.
For privacy advocates this data access tug-of-war remains one to watch. Not least given that any concrete moves to expand the scope of domestic warrants outside the US could undermine international treaties by conflicting with data protection laws elsewhere. While, on the flip side, any legal clarity limiting the jurisdiction of search warrants to data stored domestically could push US legislators towards data localization rules.
In one related development late last year , Congress approved a controversial Supreme Court rule change expanding FBI search powers by enabling a judge to sign off a warrant for searches outside their own district — which could in theory be used to issue remote access warrants for the FBI to hack devices that are physically located out of their jurisdiction or even overseas.
Critics argued a procedural change was being used to push through hugely expanded powers for state agents.

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