Crypto-Bull, A Dark Horse In the Website Race, Toyota Takes Cues From Tesla

Paul Daly  0:23  

acres Yo, I don't know what's going on with Thursday. But it's just getting started. Like it's already getting out of control. We got some amazing news to talk about saying cluding froze. I just froze. I didn't really phrase. But that's what you do when you don't can't finish the sentence you just fake freeze.

Kyle Mountsier  0:43  

You're like, you're like us internet.

Paul Daly  0:51  

I've never tried that on a call. But like next time you like get in a tough spot, right? If you don't know how to talk your way, and just be like,

Kyle Mountsier  0:57  

Was everyone else lagging? There was everyone else lagging

Paul Daly  1:02  

Oh, that'll be the new tactic. That'll be the new tactic. Like, oh, my internet's not working, and you just have your camera goes off. But what I was gonna say is that we had a really amazing announcement this morning. I say amazing. Like, I don't know if it's good or bad. But it's a big announcement of CDK getting acquired. Yes, the whole company CDK global is now owned by somebody else or another group of people. We'll talk about that in a minute. We're going to talk about that today. Um, some crazy crypto conference in Miami. And we also have a really amazing announcement to talk about, which we are really excited about. Had a few show notes this morning. Just just just come we got a lot of pages. And if you don't know, if you're listening to the audio version of the podcast, you can click into the show notes, we usually include links to what we talked about. So you can dive a little bit deeper. And also if you're on the live stream, right, all these all this stuff is already in the notes that you're watching. Good morning, it's good to see you on the live stream yesterday, we had quite a quite a good live stream crowd going so. Alright, so the principle it's funny, the CDK acquisition news came out, and I had already typed some things in the shownotes. And one is a quote from Simon Sinek says play it safe and you'll always end up with mediocrity.

Kyle Mountsier  2:11  

Oh, like that hit that landed for all for all of this morning. Absolutely. Man that that quote is so strong. It is. Like literally, what are you going after? What are you going toward? It's pretty bad. It's almost like you can't even comment on the quote, because it just says everything. So I don't want to I don't want to get too far out of that.

Paul Daly  2:36  

It works. And look, sometimes mediocrity isn't a bad thing. Like a lot of baseball players make really great careers off singles and doubles. Yep. Nobody remembers them. Yeah, it's like, right.

Kyle Mountsier  2:47  

He met 260 every year. Yeah, 300. But he back to 60. That's a valuable

Paul Daly  2:53  

way to go. Yeah, but we haven't to think the troublemakers aren't okay with that, right. And then a fast moving environment, you can't be okay with that or mediocrity, all of a sudden get overtaken, I'm going to read the opening line from our email today. And if you don't get the email, we hope that you will, because it's got stuff like this and these articles banning all of us together, it's this. For the last few years, we've been faced with decisions that are almost impossible to fully consider because of the velocity of change. The uncertainty didn't help either. This is why we're big believers in movement. In warfare movement is life. Even if even in uncertainty, if you stay put, you're much less likely to see a good result, you aren't going to know what is going to happen fully ever, you might actually have a very low level of certainty, but what you need to know is that we must keep pushing back because the barbarians at the gate certainly aren't sitting still.

Kyle Mountsier  3:47  

There's so much in you know, I love the relationship of sitting still and moving and what and what that means. I'm a runner, I'm an athlete, right? And especially, you know, from a soccer perspective, when, when, when a soccer player there's, there's 11 soccer players on the field, right? And, and you get a max of five subs. And there's there's another 12 people on the bench. Well, throughout the game, those 12 People don't just sit on the bench and wait, they actually get up move around in times, because what happens is their movement allows them to be ready when the game is ready for them. Right? So whether or not they're going to get in the game or not. Their movement actually allows them to be ready when the game is ready. So it's it's almost and I say this all the time activity breeds activity. When you when you keep yourself moving when you are constantly trying and working out what's happening. You're going to be ready for when the thing hits when when things happen. All right. Yeah,

Paul Daly  4:59  

that's so true. Have a question came in popped up on the screen isn't consistency different than mediocrity? I think it can be. It can be. I mean, I understand the question though, right? Like a consistent 260 hitter is a solid hitter. Right. But so like when people say he's a mediocre hitter? No, probably not. They say he's a consistent. He's a good hitter. Like, I don't know, maybe they would say he's a mediocre hitter? I don't know. That's a good question. Very good question posed by Nate. Thank you for asking that. Because that's going to spur on some more thinking. So yeah, so want to get it rolling. today. We have three stories to talk about today. But the first one Kyle is like major news.

Kyle Mountsier  5:39  

Hey, you know what, before before we do that, we totally missed this earlier in the week and it won't take long. But I just want to note this a few months back, we talked about a good friend of ours and investor Patrick Abad and his dealership family coming around, a man that was hit by COVID. Very, very hard was in the hospital, was given like days to live. And we did a ventilator forever on a ventilator for like almost a month bad. And this guy that the dealership banded around this person and went to outside the hospital to

Paul Daly  6:14  

pray and be around family all night, 45 minutes away from the store

Kyle Mountsier  6:18  

is nuts. That man walked into work on on Tuesday, I think it was

Paul Daly  6:23  

he's back that social post hippie when I heard his voice because I had heard so much about him, right. And I saw so many people loving on him, like from a distance. And so when when I heard him say the first words, I was like, oh, that's him. Got me. We'll meet him at some point. Those

Kyle Mountsier  6:38  

of you that had John who was the man in your thoughts and your prayers, we just want to kind of, you know, put that on the story. And

Paul Daly  6:48  

we'll get that video we'll get that video

Kyle Mountsier  6:49  

to share it. So I that just like popped in my mind. This one. I was like, have we not talked about that? So let's get to news.

Paul Daly  6:56  

Yeah, no news. Hey, man, like the news affects all the people and all the stories not about him, which is why we like it so much. Big news today. CDK. Yes, CDK global, the entire corporation, publicly owned, has been acquired or was about to be acquired by the private equity group, Brookfield reading from the press release, Brookfield will commence a tender offer to acquire all the outstanding shares of CDK shareholders will receive 5487 per share in cash. Upon completion, that transaction, which is a 30% premium, over the share price at the end, as of February 18. So if you own some CDK, share, congratulations, you just made 30% on whatever, you won't do that. But this is a major, major deal. Like even taking CDK from public to private, I think changes the dynamic of any organization.

Kyle Mountsier  7:46  

It does change it, I'm hopeful for it, I think, you know, the reality is is CDK was a needed, like needed some shake up, right? They were bringing in companies from automotive to try and like bring the innovation to the table. But there's still so much red tape. And when you're when you're when you're a public company, there's just shareholders to be beholden to Yeah. And so I think moving private, potentially, you know, shifting focus to innovation and like startup mode, essentially, again, yeah, could be good for CDK and for the industry, and they, they they know what's happened in Tachyon and other DMS n and you know they've got roadster other other Dr. Platforms are KNOCK KNOCK knocking at the door at that, that MRR?

Paul Daly  8:32  

So we started to look into Brookfield a little bit like who is Brookfield? Um, you know, there are a company that invests in kind of essential businesses. And I don't know if they call it I didn't call it a niche industry, because it's definitely not a niche industry. Oh, what does it say? What does it say? I'll find it, I find it but basically, they, they invest in businesses that have a functional, like a very strong functional business. They're not the kind of company that's looking to buy and flip companies for 234 5x. Their goal is a 15 to 20% return for their shareholders. So I mean, it's it's a, it's a consistent, you know, like, let's hands in the dirt. Let's provide good function, kind of investment firm. And so we dug a little bit deeper, we're like, Well, who else do they have? And then we found like, oh, the next most recent acquired acquisition, so CDK just now but was a little company you may have heard of, called Nielsen.

Kyle Mountsier  9:25  

So let's, let's just talk about the data that that that energy company has now purchased over the last week and a half between Nielsen and CDK. The data in the US that they now have access to connect report off of silicates

Paul Daly  9:41  

all of it. Like, I think they have all the data now I just said data. I said data. Yes, Kyle's converting me. We keep saying we're gonna make a t shirt that for Kyle where's it says data like da H hyphen ta my says da y hyphen. Ta. So we have data and data, that's gonna be good. So either way, big news, we'll see what happens. We reached out to a few people for comment. I don't think anyone's really ready to comment on this just yet. But I think, you know, from a corporate dynamic standpoint, we talked about when you're a publicly traded company, and there's a stock price, there's an element of a weighing machine weighing the profitability of the company to assess the shareholder value. And then there's the voting machine, which is just basically popular culture and what people think it's worth, when you take the voting machine out of the equation. I think that's going to lead to a much more stable business. And it'll be exciting to see kind of like an outside influence in automotive and see what their take is. Yeah,

Kyle Mountsier  10:40  

yeah. It's gonna be interesting. We'll see. We'll see if it increases or decreases the amount of red tape that CDK has to go through to innovate. Speaking of red tape, segue. As the best segue, the week, I'm calling it

Paul Daly  10:57  

I was working on it. I was working, I was like, Oh, how are we going to segue this one? So something that has a lot of red tape these days is cryptocurrency, right? Everybody's in it, or a lot of people, a vast majority of people are in it. But there's a lot of lack of regulation and people in certain what's going to happen making it kind of like a legal tender and available. And Miami, the city Miami really is vying to be seen as kind of crypto central for the country. And so they just had their 2020 Bitcoin 2022 festival. And were you know, it was like the who's who in the crypto industry. And they did something that I think from a brand perspective is superduper. Cool. They, you know, like the bowl on Wall Street that iconic, you know, built while they released a roll like a robotic looking one with laser eyes. As the symbolism of like, this is the new financial center, it's like a let you have to click on the link and see this thing. It's like 11 feet high. And you're like, oh, 11 feet isn't tall, like think about yourself and then standing on your shoulders. It's a 3000 pound like steel robotic laser. I

Kyle Mountsier  11:58  

normally it is awesome. It is a centerpiece. Yeah. And I do think, you know, sometimes brand has to have a stamp on it before it's realized. And they've already been, you know, the, the, the the intentionality around bringing crypto companies over the last couple of years to headquarter in Miami has been has been a real focus of the mayor there and of the public, you know, the the public sector. So I think, you know, doing that doing that leading up to a big conference and then putting the stamp on it, and kind of like pointing at Wall Street going, Hey, look, we know you have your bowl, but here's ours.

Paul Daly  12:39  

Yeah. And they think it's the future. So more than 25,000 attendees showed up to you know, hear keynote talks, and probably there's a lot of meetups going on. And a lot of insider talk. millionaires. Just a couple two, three. And, and one of the other things so like, how is the mayor Miami pitching the city? Well, the majority of the pitch is pretty simple. It's, we have palm trees. Number one, and we don't have taxes. It's a pretty compelling pitch. To make Miami the center of Miami has got the vibe too. Right? It's got the progressive vibe, it's cool to be there. Crypto is kind of a cool thing. You know, all that being said, you know, Bitcoin is down 30% From what it wasn't November, down 6% on the week but if you own any bitcoin or cryptocurrency, you know that that's just how it goes. Yeah. All right. And if you don't have any cryptocurrency, Kyle and I, we encourage you to just buy some by little by 10 bucks, like 50 bucks, because as soon as you own it, you'll start to pay attention a little bit more, which means you'll start to learn a little more. And you will realize very soon that it's not as complicated as you think. Just the basics. And, you know, with consumers like Miami working right now to make it like kind of mandatorily illegal tender across the city, it's not going to be long before you're working with it in your, in your stores in the retail world in general. So the more you learn about it now, the more you'll be able to deploy and pivot in the future. I don't think I've another segue, but we have a special guest for this last announcement. I feel I feel a sense of pride on this one, even though I didn't do anything to build it. Because you know, when when your friends do something cool, you get really excited. And Ben, let's bring bring Ben into the show. So we surprise them. He was just checking emails. Yesterday, we had an announcement from what I would consider the dark horse in the website race and automotive Right. Like what was that shadowy figure? Well, they just came out of the shadows yesterday, an amazing announcement on some incredible website technology that I think is going to revolutionize the consumer experience. Because that's really what matters, right? I'm kind of ripping from Kyle's posts, right? It's not because speed matters. It's because Customer Experience matters. So I'm gonna let you Ben talk about what you all did yesterday. And we'll just go from there and we got to keep let me do gotta keep pet on a leash to

Kyle Mountsier  14:57  

just just so everyone knows, you know? Ben and I have also partnered in this and Ben and I have known each other for a little over a couple years. And just there's a really cool, I hope you kind of get the auto genius story in there just a little bit, and then we'll talk because I think that's the real impetus to what happened here. It's not just like we built a website. There's a community aspect that's so rich and deep to what our core is.

Paul Daly  15:23  

We're gonna put we're gonna put a timer

Ben Hadley  15:25  

on the mark get set. Okay, so what happened yesterday was the realization of a dream, which,

Paul Daly  15:32  

hold on, hold on, I'm gonna stop you right there. Yep, just just give give us like the 30 second introduction of yourself, because not everybody knows.

Ben Hadley  15:39  

Yeah, so So I've luckily been a part of like a couple pretty magical things in my life. I started my career@dealer.com. I was there for seven years. Exit Cox, were dealer, Jacqueline Cox. Then Claire voice worked on multitrack, multi touch attribution modeling. Then we went to prodigy and prodigy was like full transaction, digital retailing, and then started doing consulting. And started really helping

Paul Daly  16:09  

a lot of stuff. A lot of startups, a lot of tech, a lot of dealers. Yep. All right. You check him out on LinkedIn.

Ben Hadley  16:15  

Yeah, get the rest of the story. I'm really bad at Twitter, because I can't think keep keep things short. Okay, so. But Otto genius was a form formulation of of all those different things, which was like, you're constantly looking for product market fit, you're constantly trying to figure out how to iterate really fast. What Kyle and I sat down and figured out was, oftentimes we would get calls from, you know, whether it's me on the consulting side, him as a dealer said, Hey, what do you think about this new thing I'm inventing? Right? And that's the normal practice as you make something than you. And what we said was, what if you just made a community that already knew what the itch was? What if you just made a place that allowed people in private to actually say, I can't believe this doesn't exist in the market. And this is really market product fit, just reversing the two. So So really, the underlying piece here is is crazy technology. But it's sparked 100% from this community from auto genius.

Paul Daly  17:24  

So let me let me let me summarize it. autagenius started out as a community of leading marketers in automotive on a private slack group. Now all of a sudden, discussing what the real needs and the real issues are, right market product fit. Let's let's feel figure out what the real market need is first, and then let's go backwards.

Ben Hadley  17:44  

Yeah, we didn't even know it was going to be a website platform was the first thing, right? Like, there's enough of those, though, apparently, there isn't. Because none of them can can pass for web vitals. None of them are 100% accessible. And certainly none of them are completely tagless. And

Paul Daly  18:03  

enter auto genius lab. So this, this happens. There's a guy named Kevin, right, so auto genius labs are good. I'm helping you. I'm helping you. Yeah, I appreciate it. So

Ben Hadley  18:13  

Kevin zurvey. There are probably nine websites I've ever seen in my life that get perfect 100 scores on core web vitals and,

Paul Daly  18:23  

and give give, give the people that don't know why what core web vitals aren't why it's important. Sure, sure.

Ben Hadley  18:28  

Sure. So, so core web vitals is Google released a couple years ago, this idea that like, hey, websites, from a performance standpoint, need to master kind of these specific items. And what we're finding is if you do master those specific items, then your rankings actually will go

Paul Daly  18:51  

up. There you go. Those are all around it, make it really efficient and make it really fast.

Ben Hadley  18:56  

Yeah, and accessible. Accessibility is actually at the core of Kevin, just because he has family members on the spectrum. And it's a it's a near and dear portion of his kind of dedicated life's work is, is making sure the analogy always gives us like, when whoever made that button that opens the doors for the handicap physically, right? We all use that. We all take advantage of that. And so when you when you actually make something super accessible, the whole world wins. I love them. So, you know, at the core of auto genius is you get to see this amazing front end. If you go to www.coons.com You get to see like the live

Paul Daly  19:41  

so it's kons.com

Ben Hadley  19:41  

.com you get to see this live fun and what you don't get to see is the data lake actually technically data fabric that powers the whole thing. And what is so different is I was explaining to someone last night, every other website vendors Grand Theft Auto three, in Grand Theft Auto three, you would drive to a bridge. And then you pause and load the whole city. By Grand Theft Auto four, some developer out there figured out, wait a second, why are we loading trees that nobody can see? Why are we loading parts of

Paul Daly  20:20  

stopping stopping gameplay, right stopped the experience.

Ben Hadley  20:25  

Toyota did this with just in time manufacturing apps, right? Like, we have all this stuff in the warehouse that we're not even using, let's just get it,

Paul Daly  20:31  

I just need it right before they put it in the car. Bingo.

Ben Hadley  20:34  

So the whole website is operating under that exact mentality, which is like, you don't need, we don't need a tag unless, like, we need to load this specific data or migrate this specific part of the data lake to a vendor partner. We don't need to load these vehicles unless we see an event that scrolls and like causes those things too low.

Paul Daly  20:55  

It's saying like, Hey, you might need this thing. Yeah. In summary, when you go to koons.com, this, and this is my kind of, I'll be the layman in here, when you go to koons.com, what you see is a site that loads feels like instantly, all the vehicles are there. They it's an app like experience, it's that fast. And on the nerd side, if you happen to loaded into Google, you know, core vitals, right? It's going to be like, perfect. And here's the thing that's never ever happened or even close in automotive before,

Ben Hadley  21:25  

not even I mean, I think the next closest score is like a 46 and 95.

Paul Daly  21:30  

Right. And so and one of the reasons for this, you know, for the more new tech heads in there is it sits on top of a data fabric, meaning that there's just a direct pipeline from the data to the site, right? It's drawing, right? There's not a lot of integration or like pulling from this that pulls from that that transfers from this that shows up on my site. Exactly. What's the average load time for VDP? In the industry,

Ben Hadley  21:52  

desktop is like a second

Kyle Mountsier  21:55  

in the industry. And the industry is Yeah, and the industry of VDP is, you know, 35 to 45 seconds.

Paul Daly  22:01  

Yeah. And yours is origins laps. One second. Look, if I'm shopping for car COMM And I talked about this all the time, that there are 100 friction points that aren't even benchmarking that just give the the customer fatigue, right. Yep. And it's not only just fatigue, like, oh, you know, I don't know why I just clicked off something else I just did. Or if you're a parent, it might just be like an interruption. So like the interruption from the kid is coming. And it might be coming 15 seconds from now. And I can get a lot further. If my page load speeds are one second, then I can it's a 4040 Whatever seconds, do we see it all the time it so like just happened? I just got distracted. We've only transitioned, like 50% of the traffic, and we've tripled the leads.

Ben Hadley  22:48  

So but check this out. Like if you think about it physically in the showroom. We know when you speed up the sale, that you have more time in f&i. Right,

Paul Daly  22:58  

right, you could just have less capacity, like someone's emotional capacity, you didn't draw at all in the buying process, you left some on the table. So now they can invest that in the process. All right,

Ben Hadley  23:10  

I'll do that. Bingo. That's so

Paul Daly  23:13  

cool. Congratulations. First of all, I have a feeling we're gonna be talking about this for quite a while, I think it's gonna be quite the buzz. And Kyle, do you have anything to add? Because you're just in the scrub, I know you're kind of sitting back because because like, look, I don't want to promote the thing that I'm a part of, as far as this morning, I was like, Yo, we have to talk about this on the show. He's like, I'm just trying to we try to keep the lane straight. But this is like, so I'll be the one to do it. Like, yeah,

Kyle Mountsier  23:37  

it's talked about, I'll just say this is this is challenging everything that everyone has thought about what a website and automotive should be, which is the lowest cost, you know, cheapest item that you have to bolt things on just to make kind of work and it's going no, if you build a multimillion dollar showroom and you say you're a digital dealer and your showroom is online, then you might want to actually pay some attention to it. And the people that are going to pay attention to it are actually going to be able to to push back the barbarians at the door because it's the only way at this point in a web two and then potentially web three experience. Yeah,

Paul Daly  24:15  

I think on that note, we're going to end this show, because there's a lot of trouble being made from corners that you didn't even know it was coming from. And I think that's only going to continue so we talked about moving that's what we're talking about. Look to the corners for the dark horses because they're coming

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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