Scott Painter is Fair’s Founder and CEO, and a serial entrepreneur in the automotive and technology industries who has founded dozens of disruptive companies over the past 25 years. Prior to Fair, Scott founded TrueCar with the aim of eliminating negotiation from the car-buying process by providing data-driven pricing research to both dealers and consumers. Scott also founded Cars Direct, which took the pioneering step of introducing upfront pricing to auto retail. Scott regularly attends TED, All Things D, and is a member of the World Economic Forum, regularly attending and speaking at its annual meeting in Davos since 2011.
Entrepreneurial Role Models:
When business started difficulties overcame:
“I think the first thing you have to learn as an entrepreneur is that fund raising is essential as a skill set to being a successful entrepreneur because you cannot build a company with just a good idea, you need capital to do it. And so one of the things I learned early on is I had to be fluent in really the legal and accounting terminology that goes with being an entrepreneur. I had to be able to read an income statement, a pro forma, a balance sheet and a statement of cash flow very very fluently. And that was not something that I learned in school that was something that I decided to go out and pay my accountant to teach me as I was building these businesses for the first time. I did the same on the legal side. If I am going to pay an attorney to help me raise money I am going to become a student of that process”…[Listen for More]
Favourite Books:
Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail Book by Clayton M ChristensenFavourite Quote:
“making success inevitable”
Recommended Online Resources:
Google LLC is an American multinational technology company that specializes in Internet-related services and products, which include online advertising technologies, search engine, cloud computing, software, and hardware.
Best Advice to Other Entrepreneurs:
“reputation is everything”…[Listen for More]
More About Scott Painter:
- Fair
- Fair Financial Corp
- Fair Servicing, LLC
- Fair Rideshare Servicing, LLC
Neil’s Quote at the Beginning:
“Success seems to be connected with action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don’t quit.” Conrad Hilton, Founder of the Hilton Hotels
Other Quotes From the Chat with Scott Painter:
- “I think you have got to have a really good personal network of experts and people who have been in your particular business that can give you real good guidance and wisdom”
- “Prior to starting fair there is almost a year of just gathering the right people, the right resources to make sure that we could field the team that answer the questions and create the solutions that we have today. The first part of any journey involves packing your bags and making sure that you are prepared for the trip and that really starts with making sure you got the right humans around the table. And that’s not an overnight thing, that is a recruiting and a selling job before you have any money. And I think that any entrepreneur, it doesn’t matter whether you are at the beginning of your career or you are at the end of your career, must start with recruiting the best possible talent to your venture. And if you can’t recruit good talent that is a problem in terms of your fundraising and your fundability”
- “it doesn’t matter how much money you raise, whether you raise $100 million or you raise $1 million dollars you are going to spend the same amount of effort raising that money so you might as well ask for the right amount of money. You also want to make sure that you recognise that every time you raise money you are going to sell 10 to 20% of the business minimum”
- “being smart is actually I think important to being a successful entrepreneur”
- “you have to be so optimistic to be an entrepreneur. You have to almost be unwilling to look at the downside of everything. You have to see everything as a perfect thing and be able to look through what’s going on in order to get excited about it”
- “creativity, curiosity, optimism, passion, resourcefulness; those are all the building blocks of being a successful entrepreneur”
- “I think the key to being able to raise money is to not pitch, it’s really to make the investment and the likely success inevitable”
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