Nicholas Hinrichsen co-founded a company called Carlypso after graduating from Stanford Business School in 2013. They went through YCombinator (same startup accelerator as AirBnb, DoorDash, Stripe, Reddit etc) in 2014, raised a total of $10M in venture funding by 2015 and sold the business to Carvana.com in 2017. They joined Carvana pre-IPO, went public at a $2.5bn valuation and are now worth $40bn. Carvana is the most valuable used car retailer in the U.S. Nicholas and other the co-founder stayed with Carvana for 3 years and left in June 2020 to start a digital auto loan refinancing platform. Their new business is all around helping Americans save money on their auto expenses and insurance and is a great angle to realize savings.
Entrepreneurial Role Models:
Andy Rachleff co-founder of Benchmark Capital
When business started difficulties overcame:
“during business school there was two years I was desperately looking for the idea. I wanted to figure out what’s this idea and then build a business. What I didn’t know at the time was that is not how businesses are built. If you wait and look for the perfect idea you will never start a business. You just need to start with something. You just need to do something and then you learn. In our case Chris and I were looking into ways to potentially buy a used car dealership and grow it or maybe raise money and rollup a few dealerships and make them more efficient and potentially move things online. But the real genesis of the business was different”…[Listen for More]
Favourite Books:
- Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It Book by Chris Voss
- Click the following link to listen to the Chris Voss podcast episode on The Entrepreneur Way
Favourite Quote:
“The only time you must not fail is the last time you try” Phil Knight
Recommended Online Resources:
Y Combinator – created a new model for funding early stage startups Twice a year they invest in a large number of startups
Best Advice to Other Entrepreneurs:
“the most important thing in entrepreneurship is get started. It’s so easy to think about the business and an idea and how to provide value and find reasons not to do it. It’s so easy to talk yourself out of doing something versus into doing something. So, my advice would be to just get started, do something. The most important thing is to get to a no quickly. You need to find out quickly why the idea that you have in your mind doesn’t work. And when you do that you will experience surprises by talking to customers from which you can learn and develop new hypotheses until you find a business that works”…[Listen for More]
More About Nicholas Hinrichsen:
Neil’s Quote at the Beginning:
“Never stop doing your best just because someone doesn’t give you credit.” Kamari aka Lyrikal
Other Quotes From the Chat with Nicholas Hinrichsen:
- “hindsight 2020. If you know the things that you learned throughout the journey you would do everything differently. We would have done everything differently, we would have built a better company, we would have made much fewer mistakes. But you cannot assume that you know everything. You have to make these mistakes to then learn to then know what not to do the next time ”
- “persistence: if you look at all the start-ups that are successful with hindsight it all makes sense, the narrative makes sense and you are like I could have done that, I could have known that but in reality, none of the start-ups is as linear as they may seem with hindsight. Instead, they all started with one conviction and then proved that one wrong and then were persistent and kept learning and learning and learning until they found something that worked. And so just not, not, not or never giving up but continuously doubling down, there is more to learn and customers will ultimately tell me what to build for them. If you truly believe in that you will find something that will work”
- “I am really not strong at getting bored. I like change, I love the change of scenery, I love moving around, I love travelling, I love the fact that whatever I am working on today is different than what I am working on tomorrow”
- “founders just live a different life, they don’t take weekends very seriously, they tend to work seven days a week”
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