Randy Nonnenberg: Founder of Bring a Trailer

Here's something remarkable and not in a good way. Disengaged employees cost US companies almost $1.9 trillion a year. That's a lot of zeros. Why? Because when teams lack the right skills, productivity declines, turnover increases, and strategies stagnate. But it doesn't have to be that way. At Project Management Institute, home of the PMP and globally recognized certifications, your people can learn to collaborate, deliver on time, and actually get things the cost of not upskilling way higher than the investment Project Management Institute. Find the answers@pmi.org.

I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable People. This episode's remarkable guest is Randy Nonenberg. He is responsible for thousands of hours of lost productivity because he is the co founder of Bring A Trailer. This is a website for buying and selling collectible cars. He's been at it for 10 years. Before that he worked for BMW. He has a BS degree in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford and an MBA from UC Berkeley. In 2019, Bring a Trailer had 100,000 registered bidders, 11,000 listings, and 2 million monthly visitors. It currently has 300 listings per week. Malcolm Gladwell is among the people that loses hours of productivity on the site. Bring a Trailer started as a hobby for Randy and has grown to be an existential threat to traditional car auctions. You may not be into cars, but Randy's story is still interesting because it is one data point that pursuing your passion can work. Also, listen to his ideas about catalyzing valuable public comments on a site, fostering trust so that someone would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a car without seeing it in person, and competing with traditional analog forms of businesses. There's a lot any business owner can learn from Randy. Remarkable People is now brought to you by Remarkable the Paper Tablet Company. Yes, you've got that right. The Remarkable People podcast is sponsored by the Remarkable Paper Tablet Company.

Here are seven reasons why I like.

My remarkable Paper tablet. First, the feeling and sound of writing are close to pencil on paper. Second, it lasts two weeks on a battery charge. Third, you don't have to charge the pencil. Fourth, the pencil has an eraser, just like in real life. Fifth, typing on a keyboard is usually interpreted as multitasking and rude, but writing notes means you're paying rapt attention. 6.

All my notes are immediately backed up.

And accessible from other devices. 7. I can drag PDFs to the remarkable Mac app and they will appear on the tablet. This is a remarkably well thought out production. It doesn't try to be all things to all people, but it takes Notes better than anything I've used. Check out the recent reviews of the latest version. I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is remarkable, people. And now here's Randy Nonenberg.

Are you at home right now or.

I am. No, I am at home. Our office in San Francisco is closed up, so I am at home.

Oh.

So the Malcolm Gladwell interview was prior to Pandemic?

Actually, I snuck up to the office for that one. I knew that one was gonna be video, and I wanted a cool background. We did that up there.

So you pulled a Nancy Pelosi and snuck out?

Yeah, well, it's our own office. I think it's a little less controversial than shutting down small business, but that may be the first time in my life I've ever been compared to Nancy Pelosi. That's interesting.

Well, there are a lot worse people to be compared to than Nancy Pelo.

That's probably true these days, for sure.

Why do you have a Mercedes 300SL in the COVID photo or your LinkedIn account?

Oh, good question. We sort of lucked out and actually got to play with that car a little bit. And then that car was listed on BAT as the first BAT premium listing, which was about a year ago now in, I think, May 2019, and it is still the record holder for the highest purchase transaction amount on bat auctions.

And how much is that?

1.2 million. Wow.

And the buyer pays 5% on top of that.

5%. But we cap it. We cap it at 5,000 bucks because it goes on your credit card. So if you tried to put 5% of a million dollar card in your credit card, Visa would give you a call, usually. So, no, he paid 5,000 bucks on a million $1.2 million car. So it's like, way less than 1% he paid.

But aren't you a BMW guy? I mean, you have a Mercedes on your cover photo. I'm.

I'm an everything guy. I mean, look at B. Right? So I am all over the map. I love Mercedes. I love BMW. I love, you know, Japanese trucks. I love cars from all over the place. Cars? Yeah. Toyota Land Cruisers, for sure. I love that. Yeah. Sounds like you've been looking me up a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, I. I like it all. So you. Yeah. Having a Mercedes on there is no problem.

So when you started your career, did you have this true passion for cars or it's just that you got a job at BMW? You could have gone to work for Intel. You could have gone to work for, I don't know, Apple Or Walmart. But you happen to get BMW?

No. I knew that I wanted to do cars ever since I was a little kid. My dad got me into doing car stuff and I spent all my time in the garage, whether it was RC cars, from a little young age to getting my first car and getting a wrench on it, to studying engineering in school. And then during college I went over to Europe and got to, you know, intern at Audi and BMW. I was on that track and knew that I wanted to do that sort of stuff. So it was, yeah, no surprise that I would end up working for that sort of thing after college.

Are you an example of pursuing your passion and the money will come a little bit?

You know, I don't know if the money was going to come in the big car world. It was more for passion and I just wanted to work on something where I had a little bit of expertise. But I also liked the product. I've always really identified with sort of hands on product and getting to go work for BMW was like a dream because you'd see all the cool BMWs running around on the street that you couldn't afford. And I got to work for that company. It was almost like a shortcut to getting my hands on one of those cars that I would never be able to afford myself. So that was my first gig out of school and those companies are at the top of their game and it was really invigorating to be in the car business in the early 2000s.

So let me just be Guy Raz for a few seconds here. So just explain the genesis of BMW.

To bat for me personally. Yeah, so I worked in the car business, worked at BMW, but that we were building cutting edge, interesting, high performance cars there. But what I always loved about that company was its heritage. It had a small vintage collection and mostly in Germany, a little bit in the us but there was like two people in the company of thousands that would ever actually get to deal with the old cars and the heritage component of the brand as their day job. So I didn't really see myself making it able to do that every day. So yeah, I've always been thumbing through car magazines and wrenching on old cars and driving old cars and playing around with that sort of thing on the side. So in order to make that my full time gig, I knew I was going to have to maybe find some other path. So I started this project called Bring a Trailer which really just started as a blog and me talking about cars I found for sale across the Internet and a Friend of mine and I, he was very tech minded and he said, we ought to start publishing this and you can write about it. And it was very rudimentary, to say the least, at the beginning. And we turned it on in 2007 and I tried to write one story every day. And that's where it started.

And the nature of those stories were what about a particular car for sale or a model or it was a.

Particular listing of a car for sale. So it's like a treasure hunting site, right? It was like, there's a million cars for sale all across the Internet. But Randy is a maniac and he spends too much time doing this and he finds his favorite one of the day and writes about it. And like we talked about a moment ago, my tastes were really diverse and resonated with people, whether they liked Toyotas or BMWs or pickups or hot rods or whatever it was. And I would just find an interesting one and I wasn't gonna buy it myself, so I said, why not post it here? And so gave people this steady drip of interesting things that were found online. There's many websites like that now. It honestly doesn't sound super innovative now, but in 07, there really weren't any sites like that at all.

And how did you make the transition from content to commerce?

So the first couple years we just started doing this and we built a following of an email list that would go out in the morning, right? You wanted to get your bat email every morning, and that still exists. And the audience grew around it and eventually started to say, hey, you featured my car. You found my car on Craigslist St. Louis. And when you did, all these people came looking. So, hey, I have another car for sale. Can I just list it with you directly instead of crossing my fingers that you find me? We said, oh, that's interesting. Okay, we'll do that. And we did that just kind of as a friendly thing to do for a little bit. And then we said, hey, maybe we ought to charge these guys 25 bucks to do that, or maybe we ought to charge them 100 bucks to do that or what's going to happen? So we came up with a very, again, handshake, uncomplicated way to do that. It started getting interesting. And then, you know, this is at my home. I was just doing this on the side. Like personal checks start to roll into the mailbox. And we started to say, wow, this could actually be a real marketplace.

But surely you knew at the time that ebay sold cars, so didn't Somebody say, how can you two guys in a garage compete against ebay?

Absolutely. Many of the hours that I spent and the links that I found were ebay. Many were Craigslist, many were dealer sites. The Internet became the great place to sell cars, but it was so fragmented and honestly, still is to some degree. Right? I mean, you want to go find a cool BMW motorcycle, or you want to go find an old Porsche, like, you got to look at 20 places and you got to do so much educating of yourself, it's almost daunting for most people. And so, yeah, so there were a couple big players. Ebay was a really meaningful player at the time. And auction, the auction dynamic on ebay was always really interesting to us in terms of setting the price. So we always knew once we started listing these cars and people would fight over them at a fixed price, we're like, that's not the name of the game. There's got to be a better way. And building a bidding model was always in our mind, but it took us some years before we did that.

Isn't there a unique aspect to your bidding in that each bid extends the open period that the car is for sale so that people don't wait till the last second?

Absolutely, yeah. A lot of people call that the anti sniping feature. Sniping is what you can do on a timed auction, like ebay, like you mentioned, where it's going to end at 2pm you get your bid in as late and as high as you can, and then you cross your fingers and pray that nobody else did the same. It's kind of a hollow feeling, frankly, because you really never know if you're going to have a fair shot. We really wanted to replicate if you've ever been to a tent auction or a Christie's auction, you know, art auction or watch auction or whatever. If somebody bids, then they say, will anybody else outbid that? Right. They don't shut off the bidding and send everybody home. They leave it open for a moment to talk about it and to make it available. Anybody going to bid higher? Right. That's how a real auction actually works. So a timed auction that ends at a particular time was always very frustrating for me. And so I said, there's got to be some cooler way to do that online. Thankfully, you can have this clock ticking down, but you can reset the clock. So, yeah, we extend it for two minutes to give everybody a chance to breathe, and the bidding tends to do two minutes plus two minutes plus two minutes. It tends to go on as there's drama and bids at the end.

Is there a record for it went on for 24 hours more or something like that?

I think, I think the record is we've extended one for almost an hour before and it. It's kind of like a baseball game, right. There are nine innings and technically there's no clock. So it could theoretically go for for five, six weeks, but it tends to eventually settle down and somehow it ends. So I think it's about an hour that we've extended them though, which does seem pretty long.

Yes. So that means at least 30 more bids came in or something like that, right?

Absolutely. Or more. Because people, some people wait the full two minutes and some people are just really trigger happy and bid quite a bit at the end. I don't know. Have you watched some of those auctions, how they end? It's fireworks.

The reason I found out about you, I love cars, but I had not heard about this site was that I was visiting chapman and the VP of admissions is this 2002 freak.

Yep.

And you know him, Mike Pelke.

Absolutely.

Mike Pelly.

Yeah. Pelly sold a beautiful BMW 2002 TII. And it. He probably told you the result maybe when you were there at. He's a, he's a longtime Chapman guy. Yeah, that's how you hooked up.

And the reason why I knew he was a car guy was we were visiting Chapman because my daughter was a rising senior in high school and there's this beautiful tangerine, if that's the right name for it, 2002 in the garage and it's like whose car is that? But back then, would you ever have predicted, not to be the extreme case, but would you have predicted that people would buy $100,000 cars more or less sight unseen without driving it?

I think people's perspective on that has really shifted substantially over the past few years. And yeah, honestly we in launching the auctions, we said, you know, is a seven day auction enough? Can people do their research? Does it need to be 14 days or 30 days so people can get on, get on a flight and go test drive it and do all that sort of stuff. But the main change of people's behavior, I believe is just the fact that the scary parts of buying on the Internet are both the seller if you can't get communication with them or you don't get good information and the thoroughness of the listing. So the problem would I buy a car on Craigslist that has two photos and a person that doesn't speak in complete sentences and won't get back to me and that, no way, I'm not gonna do that. And that's what honestly a lot of Internet listings looked like from 2000 to 2012 or 15, frankly. And so we showed up in 2014 and said, no, you gotta, we gotta have like hundreds of photos. And you have to not explain it with flowery language. You have to have very just the fact sort of language which is one of our calling cards. You get a lot of car dealers and such say, oh, it's the best BMW ever and it's wonderful. You know, it's just, it doesn't sound credible. And so ours, some people say it's a little dry, but it's very matter of fact. And so elevating the description and the thoroughness and the trustworthiness now makes it so people feel much more confident springing for bids. Yeah, people are buying every day on bat now people are buying six figure cars and people ask all the time how many of those people go test drive them before. And it's a small percentage because people have a much higher degree of confidence in the marketplace.

So would you say that today VAT is an auction site with a community or a community that buys cars?

It's a good question. They're both. I mean, the community is really the thing that sets bat apart. If it was an auction and all the community went away, it wouldn't function as well as it does. So I really do believe that the community is first and foremost. And the open microphone sort of culture that we have tried to cultivate over the years of people being able to openly talk both positively and negatively about a vehicle that's there, it's something you really don't find that many other places. And we didn't set out on day one trying to build that, but it felt right to encourage that sort of behavior because again, it gives you as a buyer or a bidder or even just spectator, more transparent and thorough view on what's actually being offered for sale. Which always really just bugged me about classified listings and car dealers and all the bad reputations that the car business has. Most of them are well earned by people who are liars and who shade the truth and who are sketchy. And so trying to build something that cut across that to make it clearer and more truthful was really a passion of mine. And I think we've gotten most of the way there. There's still work to do.

I would make the case that your community or your commenting system may be the only or certainly the best example of commenting that can work. What if Jack Dorsey or Mark Zuckerberg called you up and said, listen, how did you do this? Are there any lessons you can apply from BAT to Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, etc.

Man, some of those forums for comedy, you've seen them, right? I mean they're just like a bloodbath, right? It's just the human value on respect and constructive dialogue is like zero. There's not a lot that combine it with commerce, but you're not even talking about commerce. You're more just talking about communities online. And yeah, anonymity combined with charged top political topics on Facebook or whatever. I mean, it just goes down the tubes. We have done a lot of work over the years monitoring the comments and the discussion. I mean, we have a team and it sounds crazy. I don't know if you could do it for Twitter or Jack Dorsey, but we monitor every conversation and we watch them and we read them and we listen to them and we engage. You can see BAT will comment on different listings and that sort of thing. So we are present and we're there. Because it can't just be. YouTube is actually really famous for just a wild west, free for all of people saying whatever they want to say. Unfortunately, that tends to steer towards people being not what we call not constructive. So we try to keep it constructive. And some people think that means it should always be positive. And that's not the case. It can be constructive criticism, but it can't be disrespectful or in poor taste or self aggrandizing or whatever. All those sort of things are what really cause problems.

And do you ever encounter a case where let's say somebody lists 1968 9, 11 T& says waxes poetically about it, I mean not total Bullshit, Cherry Concords, 1968, 911t. And then somebody comes in and says, well, the air injectors in a 911T just sucked. And it really wasn't till there was fuel injection that that the engine got good. Is that up for grabs? Is that objective truth? I mean, how do you navigate something as specialized as that?

That's a very good question. And yeah, shows that you know a lot about the different years of 9, 11. There's a lot of technical details and you can get very deep into, you know, nuance. And I like this year better than this year and that sort of thing. And we are, we are thrust into the role of both librarian and fact checker, but also sort of policeman of what is allowed to and what isn't. And if somebody says that I had 911s instead of a 911t and here's the differences and here's why I like mine better, Honestly, that adds to the conversation. And that's. I think that's interesting. If somebody leaves 50 comments in a row about how their car's better than the car on offer or whatever, that starts to erode the constructive nature of what we're looking to talk about. So we love people's enthusiasm. We want people to share their experience and their thoughts. Again, positive and negative, within reason. But if it just becomes, again, a person's podium to talk about themselves instead of what's actually on topic, it can veer off. But, yeah, that's a gray area. So it's a great question that you ask, because gray areas, sometimes we have to make a judgment call and figure out, okay, should that be included or should we jump in and coach the discussion back on track? Which is another tactic, but it takes a lot of work. And it's encouraging to me that you find the discussion that positive on bet because we try to make it that way.

How many people do you have doing this?

Our team now. So our up to 300 auctions a week now, which. And each. Each auction that we do, as that scales up, we need to have more and more people. So, yeah, we're up to almost 50 employees now. Some of them are putting together listings. Some of them are customer support. Some of them are managing the community like what you're talking about. Some of them are experts on sort of the sales side and marketing side of things. Yeah.

Are you constrained by the supply of good cars or the supply of liquid buyers?

Good question. Honestly, we haven't hit the limit on either of those. We're most constrained by our own process at the moment. So we have like an operational challenge right now because it is a very human process. If you're selling a car, you get a human to talk to, you get assistance in putting your listing together. A lot of advising from our side, and we're working to make that process as smooth as possible so we have more sellers than we can handle. And somewhat shocking in Covid over the past six months is the fact that there are plenty of buyers. People are buying cars like crazy right now. You asked me a question before the podcast about that, right? Like, how's the demand side of things? And it has been going like gangbusters. So we are not really limited by either buyer or seller on the sort of econ supply demand chart. We are only Limited by ourselves right now, which is why we are hustling on the bat side.

How do you explain in the middle of a pandemic recession, depression, et cetera, that there are plenty of willing buyers? Don't they know that unemployment is at a high level, et cetera? Or is it Mark Zuckerberg buying gold cars?

I don't know that Mark's bidding, but there's a. There's plenty of interesting folks bidding that come out of the woodwork. But on the whole, yeah, our main concern, say March, right. When things got really unstable, March of this year, we were like, huh, I think there's going to be plenty of sellers. Because the neat part about a marketplace, the dynamics are inexplicably great. Market people are buying, money's moving around, everybody's really confident in a down market, some people need to liquidate, right? So there's always going to be. You get both sides, but on the buyer side, it's not necessarily that great on both sides. You certainly want a more robust economy on the buying side. But you know, we saw a dip there with some uncertainty, but then we saw it absolutely take off as all the inventory started coming online. Instead of all of the tent auction competition that we had all went away because nobody wants to sit in a tent next to a stranger and share their cocktail or whatever. So that whole business, or it was outlawed specifically based on the size of the groups that they would put in those. So those all went away. So those are. And still now they're really hardly coming back on and not getting the crowds that they were once getting. So online is really the way. So we saw this huge wave of all these buyers and sellers come on. And also there's the behavioral component and maybe you could speak to this a little bit. But I think people are shifted home, shelter in place. They're kind of looking around their house, right? You hear things like home improvement sales are way up and like fashion and wardrobe is way up because people are sitting here looking at their closet, looking at their house, looking at their yard, looking at their, in my case, my garage. And I got a couple car projects to work on and I'm always looking at cars for sale anyway. So I think car oriented people have been buying cars a fair amount and in an even stronger way than before. And then there's that online wave as well.

Someday you look back and you say, you'll say, I knew there would be a pandemic and there would be no more in person auctions. So we created BAT in anticipation of that and everybody will say, you were such a visionary, Randy.

I don't think that's the story, man. I don't think anybody could have predicted it. I can't take credit for that, honestly. And there's so many businesses, you know, that are not as fortunate. And so I try to take a thoughtful and humble approach to that. I mean, we really lucked out. Right place, right time, and we had built it before the pandemic. And the move online is benefiting many online businesses, but ourselves included. So, yeah, I don't think I can take credit for that one.

I'm not saying it's true. I'm just saying you can tell that story. So you said you had 300 auctions, but you obviously get more cars trying to be listed. So how do you pick?

That's a great question. Yeah, we curate the listings that are on the site and there's a few different dimensions there, right? I mean, you want a good vehicle, obviously you want a good seller, you want a good presentation and you want a fair reserve price. In auctions, you have what's called the reserve, where if it doesn't reach that, it's an asking price. So there's a few dimensions there, right? And we need to try to have the good cars and have the good sellers. And we've sussed that out through some communication with the seller and how they're presenting the car again, do they come in both guns blaze and say, this is. This is the best Acura NSX there's ever been? Right. You're like, this guy may be a little overconfident. I don't know if that means he's going to treat the buyer all that well, or do they come in with a nice approach and a transparent presentation, good photos, those sort of things. So, yeah, we vet on a number of factors and if you just have a standard car that there's 20 of on your local Craigslist, it's probably not really cut out for bat. We tend to try to get special stuff because in auctions what you want is that sort of scarcity factor. If you tend psychologically to want to bid really strong, if you don't think you're going to have a chance to buy this car tomorrow, if another one's just going to show up tomorrow, like, you can just wait. But if it's a really special one, you really got a bid. So that's what creates the good bidding environment.

What if somebody contacts you and says, I have an absolute one owner, cherry 2000 mile javelin?

Are you saying Javelin. Like it's a good thing or like a bad thing?

No, bad thing.

Or.

Or Gremlin. Pick a car. Javelin, Gremlin, Pacer, Any of the above.

Yeah.

Do you say that's a collector's car someday, you know, or do you say you'd be shocked?

I mean, that's why I asked you which way you think it is.

That's why I'm asking you.

We see some Javelins bring some good money and bidding interest, but yeah, Gremlins and Pintos and like, stuff that were absolutely cast off. If you have a really clean one of those. Yeah, we like a good mix and hopefully you've seen this on bat. What has always excited me about the car world is not like, oh, it's only about, you know, the more expensive it is, the better it is. Let's get all Ferraris and Lamborghinis and exotic type stuff. My fantasy is like my high school parking lot and what everybody drove. People drove Jeeps and Datsun 510s and Acura Integras and all this kind of stuff. And most of it you don't see on the road that much anymore. So if we get those submitted, some people may, you know, look down their nose at some of them and be like, oh, that's not. That Toyota truck isn't special. And for me, I'm like, oh, man, an 82 Toyota pickup truck, 4x4. That's like my favorite thing in the world. So thankfully we've tapped into audiences that appreciate all sorts of crazy cars. And so that variety and that price range meaning selling anything from $5,000 up to a million dollars. Right. That whole range is what makes bat sort of special.

Okay, have you sussed out any sort of algorithm or wisdom to predict what cars will be collectible? I'll give you an example. So I owned a first year nsx.

Okay, cool.

And I owned.

Past tense, not cool. That means it's gone. Oh, Exactly. Yeah.

And Dr. Crazy was after 5,000 miles, you had to buy new tires. Like, I just couldn't wrap my mind around that. And then my wife thought, A 911 has soul, but an NSX has no soul. It's neither a Ferrari. It's just. What is it? It's kind of ahead of its time. And yet an NSX today is a great collector's car. So how do you predict that? I don't know. Today if you bought a BMW M240. Right. Five speed, one of the last manuals. Can you predict that'll hot in 20 years? Or like I'm looking for some wisdom here, right?

Yeah, for sure. Well, I mean there's a lot of ways to skin this cat. This is a good one though. That's a good question. So the old way that you used to do that with collector car, really vintage cars, pre war cars and then cars in the 50s, 60s, 70s used to look at production numbers. So rarity used to look at options that were on it. Right. Like a 425 horsepower Corvette would always be worth more and would be more special than a 325 horse Corvette or different sorts of metrics like that. Or a famous designer, if it was a special Italian designer that did the body or something, there would always be some angle like that. But that has evolved because scarcity is being redefined and people are seeing. A lot of people didn't think 80s or 90s or 2000s cars could ever be collectible. Similar to what you're talking about with the nsx, right. Oh, does it have enough soul? Is it? Do people actually really just want a Ferrari and not an nsx? It actually turns out.

Exactly.

But it's not what it is. But that is a good case in point about why that's not true and what I just mentioned to you, the kind of cars that I'm nostalgic for and that have a bunch of draw are really like oftentimes nostalgia driven and what like you either missed out on or used to have when you were a kid. What did your parents drive you to the mountains or the lake and sitting in the back of back in the day. Right. And a lot of people have sort of, you know, these rose colored memories of what that was. These 70s Ford station wagons with wood paneling on the side and stuff. Anybody ever think those would be collectible or desirable? Of course.

Or any Bronco?

No. Yeah, we won't even go there. Yeah, that's a whole another topic in terms of the values. But Bronco at least had a kind of cool off road factor. But there's cars that are very pedestrian that you wouldn't think would be like desirable and then people are outraged at how much they bid to on bet. But I don't think it's a mystery. I think the fact that some sort of rare item that was produced by the millions back then, but they're all gone and rusted and crashed and dead and one special one comes up that has a whole bunch of desirability to it. So it, when you're asking what's the next thing going to be, you always look at like, okay, who's the next group that was nostalgic for a particular era and what cars did they like? And go find the best examples of all of those and those will have crazy value going forward. So it may be an M240, maybe the one M that preceded that. Everybody was always speculating on that car. Those values are going up and there's just sort of, you know, everybody asks, like, are Tesla's ever going to be collectible? And in some. I was coming to that in some way. And in some way, shape or form, one with a story or low miles, or it's the one that was in the first dealership ever in Palo Alto and was the test car, whatever. There will be stories like that which sound absurd a little bit right now, but those call back in and somebody sold the first whatever, Steve Jobs, like Apple IIC Computer, which everybody now thinks is a piece of junk for a million bucks or whatever those are, or the first Nintendo system. Right. Those sort of things end up way out on the edge of the bell curve eventually because people, people want them.

Okay, going to a business questionnaire, I'm so fascinated that your fee structure is that the listing is a flat rate, but the buyers pay a percentage of the price up to 5,000 bucks. So what other business is there where the buyers pay a fee? It's not real estate, that's for sure.

Good question. No, that's a good question. We really built it just because we knew both players needed to have skin in the game. And so I don't know how much we were looking at other business models, but we were looking at what was broken in the car buying model, particularly online. Because if only one person has skin in the game, the whole problem with many other sites online is that, that you get this sort of flake scenario, right? Somebody who says they'll buy the car and doesn't show up or who wins the auction online and doesn't show up. And that's because many of those don't charge the buyer a cent, right? So there's not a lot of intrinsic motivation. So we knew we needed to balance that and have that on both sides of the financial equation so that the seller does a lot of work to list their car to email with us, to, you know, make it through the vetting and to craft the listing and to pay a small fee and all that sort of thing. They're very invested and they want to sell their vehicle. But buyer, if they're not, if you win the car and we haven't charged you a dime. There's a very good chance you're just going to be like, how much am I actually tied to follow through here? So our fee structure leads to a very high rate of follow through, which is something that we wanted to fix with other venues. But you ask who else charges the buyer? The crazy part is tent auctions, traditional auctions charge the buyer like 10 to 12%. And with no cap. Right. So on that go wing we were talking about, really, they would charge the buyer 100 grand in a fee, which I used to go to Monterey to the car auctions. And I would just sit there and I was like, the fee's 100 grand. 100 grand ought to buy you a sports car. What are you doing? That's just the fee. So I was somewhat outraged at that and remain so. And so that's why we cap the fee at 5k, which sounds appropriate for a high dollar car. And we charge a little bit to both to make sure there's follow through.

I'm just curious, what percentage of buyers actually literally bring a triple trailer?

Good question. A lot of people harken back, oh, in the early days of bat, everything was on a trailer. And that's actually not the case. We came up with a name, and I was there in the early days, obviously. I think I. If anybody can speak to that, I think I can. I wrote all those stories and I like the name bring a trailer. Because when I was reading classified ads in the San Jose Mercury News, when I was a kid eating my cereal before school or whatever, I would read these listings for a Corvette in somebody's garage in Mountain View, and it would say, you know, doesn't run, hasn't run in 10 years. Bring a trailer. You'd actually put that in the text. It's actually an interesting search term online for classified sites when it says bring a trailer in the listing. And so that was sort of a buzzword, but for me, it has always meant could be a total piece of junk, bring a trailer. But honestly, they would say bring a trailer if it was a Shelby Cobra race car because it doesn't have any license plates on it. So you'd have to. You'd have to bring a trailer for somebody selling an Indy 500 race car. Like, you'd need it for that too. So I've always thought of the name as from running the entire gamut show car to piece of junk. And. But a lot of people are like, oh, bring a trailer. That must mean they're all rusty project cars. No, I actually think It's a more universal term. But to answer your question more directly, I think honestly, it's under 10%. Right. The vast majority on the car. Of the cars on the site run and are fine and there's driving videos of them. And I don't think you need to bring a trailer necessarily, but, but some people do.

It varies, but getting back to the pandemic, if you're in San Francisco and you buy a car in Miami, are people willing to get on a plane for six hours, shoulder to shoulder and drive it back?

Pandemic is a totally different environment. But even pre pandemic, would you do that? And thankfully, and we're looking to solve this more and more directly on the website, the ability to ship a car is actually really, really pretty simple. And there's reputable people out there that can do that. Figuring out how you can bid on cars far is, is, is something that's very doable. But some people will fly in and drive it. And we get these adventure stories of these, you know, a maniac who drives a convertible through a rainstorm for three days to drive it home and breaks down in Winslow, Arizona and all, all the great stuff. Or some people will put it on a truck, or some people will take a truck with a trailer on it and, and dragon.

So some quick questions now. So autonomous cars, good or bad?

I think very interesting. If they can be made safe. I would rather drive one of those than drive in stop and go traffic on the freeway.

Okay. Electric cars.

I think electric cars are cool. I think we should be responsible in terms of the future of the planet. But at the same time, I think there are very real limitations to those in terms of range. Right. If I'm driving from here to New York City, I don't know that I want an electric car and it sit in a park, a parking lot in the middle of Nevada in the middle of the night to charge it. There's technology will catch up and for 99% of daily use in your daily driver, they will be okay. What's missing from a lot of electric cars right now is they're not interesting. The Tesla Roadster I thought was cool looking and had some interesting dynamics. The Tesla sedans are tremendously boring to me. You know, they're great to drive and they make going to Costco practical, but I don't, I don't want to drive one on a windy road anywhere. And they are very fast. The new Porsche is like amazingly, like dangerously fast. Right? I mean, all these are. The technology is getting there, but Most of them. Them have not found a way to be interesting yet. And for me what's going to be interesting is the trucks. When trucks come and they're electric like the Rivian and some others, I'm excited to see what those look like.

Okay, how about the decline of the manual transmission? Is that the sign of an apocalypse?

I like the manual transmission and frankly my kids like sitting shotgun and rowing through the gears. There's some sort of tactile interest in doing that. But as we've seen, race cars are faster without them. Cars now get the same gas. Used to say, oh, automatics suck gas. Like it's a gas mileage thing. No, it's not really that anymore. It's mostly nostalgia based now. But one thing that I do like about manual transmissions is I would rather be shifting through the gears and have another hand on the steering wheel than have somebody playing texting on their phone while they're in their automatic car. Good point. That's a good point. I actually think it engages your mind mind more in driving in the vehicle than cruise in an automatic or a hands free with your latte and your cell phone crashing into people. And I don't, I don't love that. I would rather your NSX have that manual and you're paying attention to what you're doing. And so there's some trade offs and some things that need to be thought about and hopefully technology can solve some of it.

I'm gonna use that argument on my wife.

There you go.

Safety that I'm buying a stick. Just that alone made this episode for me. Just a questions. So if Ferdinand Porsche came back from the grave and said, Randy, you can have any 911 that you want, which one would you select?

Oh man, that's. There are many. I like Porsches and right now I would say this changes from time to time. But right now my favorite would be probably a 67 911S. Irish green, black interior, Fuchs. Pretty stock, but maybe lowered a little bit and maybe some CB lights on the hood. Good. I have my spec that I like. That's. That probably changes every month though.

Is, is 67 the first year or 66?

Actually they made them as early as 65 and produce them as late as late 64 maybe even. But the, that was the short wheelbase car. Yeah, it is that sort of early one before the, the wheelbase was extended in 69.

Do they still make Fuchs?

There's all sorts of companies that have copied them. I don't know if the Fuchs the Fuchs company is still in business or was acquired or whatever. I don't know if they make real ones anymore, but there, there's. We sell them on BET. It's actually one of the most popular items on BET. Is Fuchs wheels crazy? Yeah.

Like 99.9% of the people listening to this, you know, what the hell are they talking about? What's a few?

Well, I love how you geek out on car stuff. You're pretty into it. That sounds fun.

Wtf? What the fuke? So anyway, if you had a hundred thousand bucks to buy a car right now, planning for what's valuable and collectible etc, in 20 years, what car would you buy for 100 grand?

Oh man, Interesting. So I always say that I kind of dream 25,000 bucks at a time. So I would probably buy four cars for 100 grand and three of them wouldn't run and one of them would probably run at any given time. That's sort of my style for better or worse if you ask my family. But for 100k right now I think that the vintage truck market has more legs to run. It's really crazy what you're seeing in Toyota Land Cruisers and Broncos like you mentioned, right. All the Ford marketing around the new Bronco value values are like crazy right now. And when I ask all my buddies, so I'm 43 and all my buddies it's oh Randy, if only I could get a vintage Bronco. Like that's what they all say. And I don't even know why they just all want that. And I had buddies who drove those in high school and I get it, they're super cool. But man, are they a hundred grand and they're going for even more than that on bat and elsewhere. So I think there's plenty of years where those, that demographic is to going, going to have disposable income to spend on those. So I think that's interesting.

I, I just got a chrome notification about a listing on vat.

Oh good. That means your computer is set up right? We have, we have made our way into your day to day. That's perfect. That's perfect.

To alter the question slightly, you have 100 grand to buy a new car.

Hmm.

So it's something that's currently for sale.

I think that, man, that's actually a tricky one. What's sold right now that is going to be really desirable later on. And I think, you know, you can't really get a super low production Porsche for that sort of money these days, which is a shocking thing. To say. Well, I mean but it's true.

No, but you could get, you could get a whatchamacall, is it a 718 stick, whatever the six cylinder one.

You could, I mean you can't get a GT4 for that money but you could get a. What makes things valuable later on though is some weird factor and some preservation though, right? So if you could get like a special color in Porsches, those tend to bring money later on. But you know man, honestly if you're trying to speculate and make money later, I think it's smarter to buy a car that's already depreciated a little bit before it then turns around. So I think I would rather buy a 2 year old GT4 that's been babied and perfect than buy a brand new lesser spec car trying for that to be valuable. Because it's those special trims of any make, not just Porsche, BMW special M cars or Audis or Ford Shelby edition Mustangs. Different sorts of cool stuff, right? Are all these like crazy horsepower Hellcats and stuff that Mopar is producing, are those going to be valuable? They may be in some sense and figuring out what spec and what engine and what those are going to be like in ten years from now. Most of those are going to be beat up and there will be some that, you know, Corvettes, new C8s coming out, they're going to produce a whole bunch of those and they are going to depreciate but maybe there'll be some special editions or maybe you buy a few year old version that is ZR1 or something. Those sort of things could be more valuable.

And when you say Shelby do you mean shelby like Mustang GT500 or Shelby from Las Vegas factory?

No, I was talking there about Ford Mustangs that are GT500s and GT350s. Some of those are very impressive and they do limited runs of them. And so you know there's a, there's an argument to be made that those could be valuable later. Shelby in Las Vegas is you know, punching out continued replicas of the old 60s cars which those I don't believe will be on too much of an upswing in terms of value. If you want value on those, you have to buy the older ones.

You could see if Hertz is dumping tens of thousands of cars. And they used to have, have Shelby Mustangs, right? Wasn't there like a Hertz gold that had, I don't know, GTRS, they called.

It a GT350H for Herz it was a publicity stunt. In 1966 and they did a number of those cars and then they brought them back in the. What was it, 2012 or something like that. They had GT350H and those are rare and unusual. I don't know if people pay too much extra for the gold stripes and the horse package. Those always had a little bit of a mystique too around. Wow, this was rented. Did somebody just beat this thing all up until you got it? So those are a little tricky. But the early ones, the 66s are actually great and I would love to have one of those. So those are cool cards.

So I know everybody must ask you this in an interview, but of course I got to know what's in your garage.

Oh cool. Yeah, like I said, I dream at a pretty modest amount per car. But then I've collected and been fortunate to be able to grab a few interesting cars. But I like a lot of cars from my youth. My first car that I had was a Toyota Land Cruiser FJ40. And so my. What was it? Second paycheck out of college I bought a $3,000 Junker FJ40 and restored it in my dad's garage. And 20 years later I still have it. And that's parked at the bat office right now. I love those. Those are great. They've been like become collectible and stuff now. But those were just beater and jack junk trucks when I was in high school driving those around and they were fun. And then I like 80s BMWs so I have an 87 BMW 535 is sedan that I like a lot. It's called an E28 body style. Those are super cool. My sisters drove Volkswagens when I was in high. When junior high I guess they were in high school. And I always wish could have a 16 valve VW GTI. So I went and bought one of those a year ago at 92 mark 2 GTI 16 valve. And then I daily drive a 94 Toyota pickup truck which is what I would have loved to have had back then but was in all the advertising in the Ivan Stewart off road racing video game and everything else. So that's my daily and then I have the weirdest and then I'll stop the weird curveball is a. I bought a 1956 Chrysler 300V Hemi which is a 19ft long long and a cool old 50s cars with wide white wall tires that I always loved at car shows, going to car shows with my dad when I was a kid. So everybody asked me if it's like My grandpa's car because it's an old crazy American boat. But it is pretty quick and pretty fun to drive.

Does it have big wings and stuff like that?

Yeah, tail fins and all that? It's got fins and chrome and bench seat, electric bench seat that's like a sofa that moves fore and aft if you wanted to. And two big old carburetors. I think it gets about eight miles to the gallon. So it's a big old one. Okay.

I mean, as you can tell, I'm into cars. Usually it's somebody seeing serious in remarkable. I'm not saying you're not serious, but it's somebody about the vaccine or climate control, climate change or women's rights or whatever. Today we get to talk about cars the most.

You know, I love that. I didn't know. Tell me, can you share or tell me any of your sort of car story? It sounds like you've had some interesting ones and you're very into the technical details. So tell me about it.

Yeah, well, I don't know about that, but I just, it's funny. So. So whenever people are asked, fairly visible or successful people, you know, what motivated you? A lot of people say, well, I wanted to make the world a better place. I wanted to improve society and all that. And I gotta be honest, when I was in high school, I'm from Honolulu, Hawaii. When I was in high school, some family friend took me out in a like a 912 or a 911 T or something and it was freaking changed my life. And then in college, my roommate came from a wealthy coal mining family. And so one Thanksgiving, we went to his house for Thanksgiving. And I'm from a very poor part of Hawaii, so we go to Phoenix, Arizona and his backyard is the golf course of the Arizona Biltmore. His father picks us up in a Rolls Royce, so my head is exploding. We go out to dinner and his mom was tired so she asked me to drive her home in a Ferrari Daytona. And so all these people have these like really high end reasons for wanting to succeed and studying hard and all that, changing the world. And all I wanted to do was change the car. I've had a few 911s. I had an NSX, I was a Mercedes Benz brand Ambassador. So I got whatever I wanted from them, including a GTR. I mean, not GTR, the GT, the, the 911 killer that they have.

Yeah, yeah.

And I. It's insipid as this may sound to many people, but it's not like I had a midlife crisis or my company went public. So finally I went and, you know, bought bling. As long as I can remember, I have loved cars. It's just, I don't know, it's just the way it is. So I love.

We find that a lot. You're surprised? This common thread about, you know, cars. We can be at something totally unrelated to cars and somebody who's in some other segment of society will come out and be like, oh, I love BAT because I love looking at cars all the time. And I'm like, what are you talking about? What are you doing? Some people would think that BAT has an audience where it's like a bunch of people turning wrenches in their garage or whatever, right? But it has really been astonishing how far reaching the automotive sort of passion is throughout society. And it's kind of a fun thing to be able to connect on. So I love hearing your story. That's fun, fun for me to hear the man that. The Ferrari Arizona story sounds like it would have impacted me as well.

You know what, what would make your life and my life totally complete if someday we found out that Anthony Fauci is into classic car?

That would be it, right?

That would be it. We could die happy after that. All right, Randy, thank you so much. It's been such a blast. And if I can ever do something for you, just let me know. Cuz I love what you guys are doing.

I hope I didn't geek out too much about cars in this episode, but as you can tell, I do love cars. Having said that, there is a lot to learn from Randy about creating a website, creating a market, creating a community, monetizing that community.

Community.

I think you can apply this to many other businesses. And if any of you have a 66, 911 sitting in your garage that you haven't touched for 40 years, be sure to reach out to Randy or I. My thanks to Mike Pelly for making this all happen. My thanks to Jeff C. And Pig Fitzpatrick, who are the collectibles of people working on a podcast. Having a great car doesn't matter if you don't wash your hands, maintain a social distance, stay out of crowded places, and listen to scientists and doctors, not politicians. This episode of Remarkable People is brought to you by Remarkable, the paper tablet company. This is remarkable people.