Vijayan: US car buyers spend four to eight hours at dealerships
Jay Vijayan · What made Elon Musk approach former Tesla CIO Jay Vijayan twice in 12 months? · Nov 17, 2020 · at 35:20
Jay Vijayan, founder and CEO of automotive software platform Tekion, critiques the friction and inefficiency of traditional dealership buying processes.
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“In this industry, if you think about, if you take a dealer, when you walk into a dealer in the US, even if you have done all your homework and know exactly which car you're going to buy, they will make you sit anywhere between four to six to eight hours in the dealership, and it is many times a very painful experience.”
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“And that's what we ended up acquiring two automotive dealerships. It was a very high risk, high stakes. We had to do because Tekyon is a small company. We didn't have a lot of money.”
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“So in fact, we slightly settled on, not too much, slightly, very small, in grand scheme of things, I felt it settled on a slightly lower valuation to make sure that we bring both of them.”
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“So personally, me and my co-founder, Guru, we took a loan to go buy the land of the dealership because I felt Techyan didn't have money to invest in the land. And then Techyan just invested in buying the dealership only because I felt if we buy the dealership …”
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“For companies which had failed, I had seen that one of the biggest thing is not getting the OEM connection and integration and support on time.”
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“There are dealerships that save anywhere between 15,000 to, you know, 65,000 dollars a month by moving to our platform, ok?”
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“I don't see that we can, it can reduce you know, the number of people needed because the end of the day, it will create more jobs in different areas because You know, today we are just adding friction. If you think about Amazon, people can say, you know, it ha…”