Max Brun co-founded ACV Auctions in November 2014 with Dan and Joe. They sold their first car in June 2015 and built trust through in-person inspections by W-2 employees, betting that deep vetting would de-risk the marketplace as mobile adoption grew.
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Going back to the very beginning though with ACV Auctions, so what was the founding story for it? Maybe what were some of those kind of first steps that you took to start it as a B2B marketplace?
Yeah, I'm 40 now and I was 30 at the time that ACV came into my life. So it's really been the last decade. At the time, there were 3 of us that were co-founders. Dan, my CTO, ran an incubator at the time. I was running around under the veil of some made-up, you know, some made-up entity that just allowed me to kind of function as a management consultant in startups. And so the two of us, I was in Rochester, Dan was in Buffalo. We were friends. We were two of the youngest guys on the tech scene at that time. Buffalo and Rochester had very nascent, non-deep tech startup ecosystems, right? Like, you know, what had happened on, you know, in terms of like deeper tech and chemistry and biology and stuff like that, that was its own world. But in terms of just software tech, it was really early. And in one day walked this guy who had just moved back to Buffalo. His wife was from there. And he said, hey, I need someone to build me a company. And he met Dan and he thought an incubator was the kind of place you just went and paid somebody and they built stuff for you. And that third guy was Joe, and Joe was a used car dealer. And Joe said, I think there's a better way to do this. I've been taking advantage of this arbitrage play of taking online, the offline world and bringing it online, you know, taking advantage of eBay Motors and stuff like that to sell stuff. I think we could build a full platform. You know, Dan knew how to build things and Dan knew, he knew me and he knew that there needed to be somebody to run kind of like operations and finance that understood auctions. From a different point of view, and the three of us came together. It was the same week that I found out I was having a kid. A couple days later, we kind of all had decided in November of 2014 that we were going to do ACV auctions. So, you know, one miracle we got another, maybe. And then, you know, over the next six months, seven months, we had built and launched the company. We sold our first car in June of 2015. So it was a little while ago. You know, it was obviously a lot of the story has been chronicled in different ways, but really, I mean, I think that the company ended up making it because we weren't revolutionary. I mean, this is a very evolutionary thing. Had we tried to do it 3 years earlier, 4 years earlier, I don't think it would've worked. I mean, those first 15, 16, 17, it was, You know, people saying they didn't know their Apple password to even download the app and use it. I mean, like, it was just at that point when, like, people just really started getting more and more comfortable with using the phone. You know, these weren't— the thing was, people were always like, people will buy a $20,000 car over the phone. And I go, these guys don't think about it like a $20,000 car. You know, I'm not saying it's as carefree as Amazon, just press a button and if I don't like it, I return it. They understand the inherent risks with it. But I think it was the first time that we were also, you know, I think marketplaces are a lot of being able to make things better than what exists, not just 'cause you can buy it with a click of a button. I mean, ACV, I truly believe, worked not because you could buy stuff with your phone. That's what made it easier to work. It happened because we were the first one to really outline what the product was, what the used car was. So the fact we did such deep And we did it ourselves. I mean, ATV probably has close to 1,000, if not more, conditional inspectors today. But we had one of our employees, a W-2 employee, going and looking at every single car and saying, we represent what this is, you know? And I think it was that that started to build the trust in the system that allowed people to want to use it more and more. 'Cause they weren't just getting a car, they were getting a car with somebody's guarantee underneath it that represented some type of certainty that de-risked it, right? And the best marketplaces, I think, de-risk the transaction.
