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Tekion bought two live auto dealerships as an early-stage startup for R&D
“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.”
Tekion accepted a lower valuation to syndicate rival automotive OEM venture arms
“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.”
Tekion co-founders took personal loans to buy dealership land for product R&D
“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 …”
Vijayan: Lack of OEM integrations causes automotive retail startup failures
“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.”
Vijayan: Dealerships save $15,000 to $65,000 per month moving to Tekion
“There are dealerships that save anywhere between 15,000 to, you know, 65,000 dollars a month by moving to our platform, ok?”
Vijayan: AI in auto retail will create more jobs than it eliminates
“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…”
Vijayan: Elon Musk asked me to return to Tesla, but I declined
“I told this to Elon as well. And I said, I told him when I met him, he said Jay, what about, you know, potentially he was kind of indicating, can you kind of come back? But when I told him it is a bit boring for me. I said, I did what you wanted me to deliver.…”
Vijayan: Tekion built remote car selling DMS feature in eight weeks
“My team developed literally in like, you know, somewhere around like six weeks, six to eight weeks. So they developed the product from the platform no other DMS had. From the platform you can sell car remotely.”
Vijayan: Vertical SaaS founders should offer equity to early design partners
“And then once you excite a few customers, ideally recruit them to be, you know, fully open up for your team. And that's what you need. I mean, of course, early days they would say, you know, they may need the software for free or they may need it in for a sign…”
Vijayan: Every single vehicle subscription program by dealers and manufacturers failed
“Not even one succeeded. Not even one. Every single company kind of didn't, they kind of shut it down or didn't do.”
Vijayan: Tekion's seed investors are currently sitting at a 400x return
“The good thing is my seed investors today are at 400 X, which is good, right? They're all happy investors and still early stages.”
Tekion is targeting at least $100M in net new ARR in 2025
“And the good news is just this year, we will be, one year, we'll be doing at least, we're targeting to do a hundred million net new.”
Vijayan: Disrupting automotive ERP takes decades due to immense technical complexity
“There are so many things that could go wrong. That's why you won't see too many startups coming and disrupting in this space. It takes decades to disrupt any space like this.”
Tekion reached unicorn valuation with $150 million Series C round
“We didn't share exactly what the valuation is, but it's, Significantly more than a billion. So we raised till a 150. So it's a very fantastic round in all, all aspects. We had all of our investors participate. We had some great new investors come in as well, l…”
Vijayan: Tekion will grow at least 200% in 2021
“From a growth point of view, I see us growing from year over year in twenty-twenty-one at least 200% or more.”
Vijayan's team built Tesla's core ERP system in just three months
“The first mission impossible for me was building an ERP in three months. And I took, you know, I've known in my past life and Oracle and others, ERP implementation took, even at VMware, took a year to two years. It's a massive project with hundreds of millions…”
Vijayan: Tekion's Investors Include GM, BMW, Nissan, FCA, and Advent
“Even the, our investors from General Motors to Nissan, Renault, Mitsubishi, to BMW, to FCA. I think it's been great. And dealers, multiple dealers in the country Joe Sarah from Capital. I think people who have trusted Advent us”
Jay Vijayan: Automotive represents almost 4% of US GDP
“Automotive is a big ecosystem. Second largest consumer industry in the world. From our, from a US GDP, it's almost four percent of US GDP.”
Tekion hired nearly 3,000 people to build its automotive software platform
“The reason we had to have such a big team, right, close to 3000 people is because amount of things we had to build.”
Tekion acquired its first R&D auto dealership from its very first customer
“The first dealership we acquired was the first customer. We bought it from the first customer because he was working on selling the dealership for other business reasons, and I'm glad he brought it up to us, and he's still a customer.”
Vijayan: Tekion raised roughly $30M across its first three rounds
“First round was three million, which was seed, friends and family, and my money as well. And then second round was ten million, I think. And then B was I'm forgetting. So it was not a lot of money. Collectively, we might have raised probably thirty million, I …”
Vijayan: Proprietary enterprise ERP data is inaccessible to public LLM crawlers
“Data information behind, I wouldn't say a firewall, but behind an ERP. Is not available for OpenAI or Cloud or anyone to go crawl and get information. It's not. And it's also quite contextual.”
Vijayan: Tekion raised investment from roughly 25 dealer groups
“Because we had like probably 25 different groups who are invested.”
Vijayan: Tesla built its initial scrappy internal ERP system in four months
“We didn't build the entire thing. Reality is in the four months we built the basic necessary version. It was definitely very scrappy. It was buggy, but made it work. And then from there we kept building”
Vijayan: VMware spent hundreds of millions of dollars on Oracle ERP
“They spent like hundreds of millions of dollars. It was a massive project. They had a failed project before, and after that I joined the second time to lead, to turn around the second time the same project was re-initiated and they named it as Project Phoenix.”
Vijayan: The US automotive ecosystem is a nearly $1 trillion annual market
“Automotive is four percent of US GDP. US GDP is 21 trillion dollars, and four percent is eight hundred and fifty billion dollars just in vehicle transactions, vehicle sales. And if you consider the entire ecosystem of automotive, it is almost a trillion dollar…”
Vijayan: Tekion raised $10M Series A at $48M post-money valuation
“Series you know A was to be raised, ten million at around forty-eight million dollars post value.”
Vijayan: Tekion raised $22M Series B at ~$98M post-money valuation
“So Series B, let me think was 20 yeah, 22, yeah, I think it's twenty two million, if I'm right. We raised twenty two million Series B at 90 I think it was ninety-eight million posts in terms of valuation.”
Vijayan: Tekion reached double-digit ARR in 2020
“Until then the revenue was small but in 20, 20, it immediately jumped to almost it started going towards, and then now we are more in double digit ARR.”
Vijayan: Tekion platform transaction volume has crossed $350 million
“The transaction volume already on our platform crossed three hundred and fifty million dollars and continuing to rapidly grow.”
Vijayan: US car buyers spend four to eight hours at dealerships
“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…”
Vijayan: Some US car dealerships pay almost $100,000 monthly in software costs
“Today, in dealerships in the US, they run 40, 50 different applications. They pay crazy amount of money. Some dealerships pay almost 100,000 dollars a month in software cost. Per, per dealership.”
Vijayan's wife lost sleep for six months after he resigned from Tesla
“My wife didn't sleep for six months when I left my job at Tesla, because how many, how much money I left, and people thought how much, you know, trust I established to deal on while it not, it was not working out that great for so many people I had in such a g…”
Vijayan: Left VMware for Tesla taking an almost $100,000 base pay cut
“Still, I had to take a pay cut purely in a salary and bonus, because VMware had been a really solid salary and great bonus. And that really stopped almost 100,000 dollars just purely from salary cut perspective. And then on top of it, I had to leave stocks bec…”