SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1698 Shift Sells $200m Worth of Cars, Makes $30m, $225m Equity Raised, IPO Next?
18 Mar 2020
Chapter 1: What is Shift and how does it disrupt the used car industry?
shift, an easy, very easy way to buy and sell cars and a no touch model launched in 2014. First car sold last year, 2019, 11,500 cars sold average price, 15 to $17,000. That's over 200 million or around $200 million in car sales of with George has optimized to somewhere around a 15% margin there. So 30 million, uh, they make on that.
Then in addition to that, about one, uh, that's about two thirds of the revenue.
Chapter 2: How many cars has Shift sold and what revenue has it generated?
The other one third comes from warranties and loans for about $45 million there as he bunkers down and prepares for whatever's going to come over the next couple months, potentially an IPO maybe once this settles out. Hello, everyone. My guest today is George Arison. He's the co-founder of Shift, an online marketplace disrupting the used car industry.
An immigrant from Georgia and lifelong entrepreneur, he also co-founded the first on-demand mobile transportation booking technology called Taxi Magic, now known as Curb, as well as working for Google and BCG. George, you ready to take us to the top?
Happy to.
All right. So let's jump into the business model for people that haven't used shift. Explain exactly how they use it. Is this for renting cars or buying cars or all the above?
It's for both selling and buying cars. So there's two parts of the business. If you have a car to sell, you come to our website, we price the car for you, and then we'll buy it from you. We'll pick it up from you at your location. We can drop it off at our location, whichever one you want to do. That's available in all of California and all of Oregon.
And then if you want to buy a car, you have three ways to buy a car. You can either have a test drive brought to you at your house or your office, or you can come to our warehouse to look around, kind of like you would go to Costco. Or you can buy a car sight unseen online, and then it'll be shipped to you anywhere in the country.
And, you know, we sell a very broad range of cars, all used, but anywhere from one to, you know, 12 years in age.
buying a car if i want to go into the warehouse get a little test drive in i imagine that's restricted by location is that also only in california or oregon that that is yes so we ship anywhere but the delivery of the test drive to you um is available in about 80 percent of california and and in oregon uh and then coming to us is you know our locations in the same location same states
Okay. And let's role play here for a second so I can understand how you're building a business around this. I have a 2009 Prius, gray Prius. I submit it to you guys. You give me a price on the website, I assume?
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Chapter 3: What is the business model of Shift for buying and selling cars?
So roughly where the market kind of generally is and then make margins on the difference. Plus, we make money on financing, warranty, and other attached products that you can get when you buy a car.
So it's very similar to what a dealership would do, except sell it as a little bit better, and the buyer gets a way better experience because the test drive is brought to them rather than them having to go to a store.
You, I assume, in your assumption cells that drive the margins you want to make, ignoring the upsells of financing and warranties, you have an assumption cell to optimize for that. So if you were going to pay me, I'm going to make the math easy, $10,000 for my 2009 gray Prius, you know you can sell that for what on the other side?
Yeah, probably something like $11,500 is kind of what we try to target, meaning like a margin of $1,500. And then some portion of that goes to reconditioning the car, right? So that's not our full profit. But that's very rough because it all depends on the kind of car you're dealing with, right? And we have a segment in our business that we call value auto.
So these are cars that are below $12,000 in price and over 80,000 miles on them. They're actually very, very popular. You would be surprised, but twice as much demand happens for those cars as for everything else, even though they're older. And so for that car, we actually do less reconditioning, right?
So there we try to have a lot more margin on the car itself, less reconditioning, because we know that we're going to make less margin on the warranty and the loan because the price of the car is so low, there's not a lot of margin to be made there. On the other hand, for a more expensive vehicle, like a BMW that's only four years old,
you actually are okay making less margin on the car itself because you know that most likely somebody is going to get a loan when they buy that car and you'll make market there. So kind of our goal overall is to make money kind of in aggregate right on the full transaction, knowing that some cars will make more money on the metal and some cars will make more money on the finance.
In that value cohort, less than $12,000 price point, more than 80,000 miles on the car, you'll juice your margin there. What, you'll double it 30% or you stick to closer to 15?
No, we'll still stick to about 15 to 20%. but we'll do less reconditioning, right? So we might make $2,000 or $1,500 on that car, but we'll recondition only $400 or $500 because buyers of those cars don't care so much about appearance.
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Chapter 4: How does Shift handle car sales and customer interactions?
What's your target for 2020? What do you think you'll grow 11,500 to?
We were hoping to do, you know, something like 16 to 17,000 cars this year. Now we'll see what happens, right? Like some things are going to be positive and some things are going to be really negative. Really hard to tell, like literally I was in a meeting just now planning on like what happens if the state tells us, hey, business can't exist at all for a month, like shut everything down.
What do you do? So it's just like.
Lost your audio, George. now you're back you're back uh yeah yeah by the way look nobody knows right even wall street analysts are saying this is the hardest quarter we've ever had to predict because you just have no freaking clue so with i mean what did take me in that meeting to the extent you can i mean how do you think about our plan for this well i mean it's so i think for a lot of
tech companies, it's a lot easier to plan. And for us, because they just have like a very office-based workforce, right? That either is coding or is selling. And so when people start talking about work from home, that's a lot easier to arrange. We have a much harder time with that because we actually have to be in the retail business as well. So we have like a two-faceted workforce.
And what happens on the retail side is very different. And it's a different type of employee than typical Silicon Valley startup employee. And, you know, Unfortunately, they're the ones who are that type of an employee, the one that's hit the most in times like this in terms of wages, et cetera, et cetera. So we don't have any answers yet.
We're just trying to figure out what's going to happen and what our options are at this point. That's what we're working on. We were still in business this weekend. We actually had a reasonably good weekend, better than I had expected that we'd have. which is good. Now, again, like if a test drive is brought to you, you don't really actually come in contact with that many people, right?
So it's the same as if you're ordering delivery for food, et cetera. So I think that piece is really positive. And then of course, by now, you know, literally you buy a car,
sight unseen you pay for it online or you know through digital means and then the car is delivered to you that we're going to keep going no matter what because we might not be able to fulfill those orders right away if the you know things get shut down but we'll be able to fulfill those orders later and in a world where a lot of people are sitting at home and kind of have nothing to do right they're shopping for cars online right yeah well and that's the other we have noticed a jump in our traffic to the website
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Chapter 5: How has the pandemic affected Shift's business strategy?
Our unit economics generally have been a lot stronger than theirs were prior to IPO. So we've also kind of never really pushed for crazy, crazy growth because there's a balance between how fast you can grow and the unit economics story. You know, the industry as a whole is massive. 45 million used cars are going to be sold in the US this year.
Yeah, it's about $750 billion in used and another $600 billion in new.
Chapter 6: What are the financial metrics and margins for Shift's operations?
So the industry is really, really massive, but it's super fragmented. So the largest car seller that sells new and used sells about a million cars a year. Who's that? AutoNation. Okay, got it. So, so like, and then CarMax is a used car only seller, also does about 750,000 used, right? So, The largest players have like sub 1% of the market overall between used and new.
So it's a very, very fragmented industry unlike anything else in the U.S. And really kind of, you know, but in each kind of congressional district, dealerships are oftentimes some of the largest employers and some of the most profitable businesses. So it's this kind of give and take that there's a lot of political influence, obviously, that comes with it.
We have five minutes left. Let's shift to the other part of your business, which is very interesting. You sell the car. You're potentially putting a loan out. There's financing. There's warranties. Let's assume you sell me a $20,000 car. I have generally kind of okayed a good credit. What are those loan terms going to look like from you?
So we work with banks to provide financing. We don't do financing on our own. So we have almost a dozen banks on the back end, it's called, that are providing financing. And what we do is we have technology that's unique in the industry, does not exist anywhere else, that allows you to submit your information to us all digitally.
And then we're actually able to pre-qualify you for a loan to understand what kind of loan you will qualify for and give you a sense of what your monthly payment on that loan is going to be, what the interest rate will be, etc., And you can kind of change that. Well, actually, I'm happy to pay a high interest rate, but I want a lower down payment or I want a high down payment, low interest rate.
So you can kind of manage that yourself.
George, why give that right to the banks? Why don't you do that yourself? Raise more debt, do it yourself.
I'll come back to that in a second. Just let me finish. And then we then once we know that you want to buy, we'll go out to our banks and say, hey, which of these banks can finance this loan? And now we know enough about which banks finance what kind of loans to kind of go to the right banks.
And then they come back with the actual loan product, which will generally match what we told you in advance. That's called pre-qualification. Customers actually love it. Since we launched it about six months ago, people who go through it are twice as likely to buy a car as people who don't, which is really awesome.
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Chapter 7: What is the current state of financing and warranties at Shift?
um and so i've had to move my schedule forward i mean i get up much earlier than i used to because mornings have great time to spend time with them so it's been a big adjustment for me because i usually go to bed like one and wake up at like you know eight eight eight thirty but now like they're up at six and so you have to go to bed like earlier and be kind of you know up at six married two kids how old are you uh i'm 42 42 last question what's something you wish your 20 year old self knew
Oh, I wish I knew that software was going to be, like software development was going to be so important to my life. I probably should have studied at least like a little bit of CS kind of in college. That was a big kind of miss on my part that I didn't fully appreciate. I never thought I'd do anything in tech. It was like the last thing I ever thought about. I studied politics in college.
I thought I was going to be in politics my whole life. But yeah, like, I actually use a lot of what I learned in politics in building a business, having so much similarity. But, you know, it definitely is a detriment for me not to having some semblance of technical knowledge. Um, and that's a big mess. And I wish I had gained that earlier.
Guys, there you have it shift an easy, very easy way to buy and sell cars and a no touch model launched in 2014. First car sold last year, 2019, 11,500 cars sold average price, 15 to $17,000. That's over 200 million or around $200 million in car sales of with George has optimized to somewhere around a 15% margin there. So 30 million, uh, they make on that.
Then in addition to that, about, uh, that's about two thirds of the revenue. The other one third comes from warranties and loans for about $45 million there as he bunkers down and prepares for whatever's going to come over the next couple months, potentially an IPO maybe once this settles out. George, we're rooting for you, man. Thanks for taking us to the top.
Thank you, and I hope everybody stays safe.
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