Few are as comfortable with serial entrepreneurship as Jon McNeill.
McNeill launched and sold five startups before joining Tesla as president of global sales and service in 2015. Shortly after, he hopped over to Lyft to scale the company as chief operating officer.
But McNeill was at Lyft for less than two years before jumping ship again. He was itching to get back to the world of startups.
"A lot of us entrepreneurs have an idea disease," McNeill told BostInno. "It's a little bit like a songwriter, or a writer. These things just come to you."
Upon leaving Lyft, though, McNeill didn't want to take those ideas and build them out individually. He wanted to systematize that process. Instead of creating startups one by one, he wanted to create a firm that would scale multiple startups at once. It would be "a company that created great companies," as McNeill described it.
Enter DeltaV. Co-headquartered in Boston and Palo Alto, Calif., DeltaV will be an incubator of sorts where a team will formulate startup ideas, scale them internally, seek outside funding when they're at the Series B stage and launch them. DeltaV will own about 80 percent of each company.
If that model sounds familiar, that's because DeltaV is modeled in part after a Cambridge firm that does the same thing for life sciences companies: Flagship Pioneering.
Last fall, when McNeill left Lyft, he met up with "every accelerator, venture studio, incubator, foundry, who were willing to spend time with me," he said. One name that came up repeatedly was Noubar Afeyan, Flagship's founder and CEO. McNeill cold called him, and Afeyan immediately agreed to meet.
"Biotech and life sciences are a different universe—rarely do the tech CEOs get in the room and mix and mingle with life sciences CEOs," McNeill said. "Noubar and I had this common bond. We both suffer from this idea disease. He had systematized a process to not only generate but rigorously research those ideas, have the engineers and scientists around him who could start to bring those ideas to life and, oftentimes, improve those ideas. His track record is phenomenal."
McNeill points out that Afeyan and his team have spun out 75 companies since Flagship's founding in 2000 and achieved 22 IPOs since 2013. (That includes Moderna Therapeutics, the Cambridge startup developing an mRNA vaccine against the coronavirus that is currently in clinical trials.)
To build out DeltaV, McNeill and his co-founding partners—Henry Vogel, Karim Bousta, Sami Shalabi and Michael Rossiter—are hiring teams to scale up ideas that are already in the books. Shalabi will lead an engineering team based in Boston as chief technology officer. Shalabi himself is a successful entrepreneur; in 2007, he built and sold the company that would become Google News.
DeltaV currently has four startups in the works and hopes to unveil one this summer and a second in the fall.
For McNeill, DeltaV's Boston office is a homecoming of sorts. He began his career as a consultant at Bain & Co. back in 1989, just out of college. McNeill has also spent time with Harvard Innovation Labs as a mentor and advisor.
Now, part of McNeill's mission with DeltaV is to bring some of the startup energy he's experienced in the San Francisco Bay Area back to Beantown.
"Boston has been near and dear to my heart," McNeill said. "In the Bay Area, at Tesla and Lyft, I would look the backgrounds of my teams, and a lot of people came from Boston and the region—MIT, Northeastern, Harvard. I'd ask, 'What brought you the Bay Area?' They'd say, 'There's just so many interesting companies here.' That's happening in Boston, too, but it's just not happening in the depth and the numbers that it is in the Bay Area. One of the things I was thinking about, as I was launching this platform, was, 'How can I return to and help accelerate the Boston ecosystem?'"
To that end, McNeill has also launched a monthly dinner party of those he calls "the scalers and the starters." Attendees are a mix of successful CEOs and first-time founders who have been meeting to discuss the art and science of scaling startups since December. (The dinner has gone virtual for the last couple of months.)
"It's a mindset," McNeill said. "They want to contribute back to the ecosystem."
