Tesla is Apple, Everything Else is Android with Jimmy Douglas

Paul J Daly: 0:00You know, sometimes we wonder why people actually take a step toward us.

‍Kyle Mountsier: 0:10

This is auto collapse Because the real smell sometimes intentionally.

Paul J Daly: 0:15

That's the problem, intentionally. And, and you know, I guess when you hear somebody else talk about the thing that made them take a step closer, it kind of reminds you of the fact that like, oh, it's not just what I think we're doing, that's what we're actually doing. And and today's guest is one of those reminders for me Jimmy Douglas, founder and CEO of plug. We can talk about it now because he announced it at a soda con and the first time we met with him, well, my first interaction with him was that he sent a LinkedIn DM and at that point it was just like he was the Tesla guy and he was like hey, I just wanted to reach out to the guy who said something about me on their show, to which case we scoured through our 700 page morning show prep document no what did we? and I was like I have to know before I answer this. But we said a nice thing and and he has been one of my the favorite new introductions of the last six months is definitely today's guest.

Michael Cirillo: 1:12

I'm having a Marvel Cinematic Universe moment right now because I just the storyline just came full circle. Oh, you didn't realize, I didn't know. You was the guy that months ago. You, yep, he was the guy. Here we are.

Kyle Mountsier: 1:26

And then we're hanging out at the Reuters conference and he was just like this, just smooth cat, that like everybody. There was this little like circle of conversation going on and you got like Brian Kramer and a couple other people and we're just chatting up like EVs and remarketing.

Paul J Daly: 1:43

Yeah, we found our people quickly.

Kyle Mountsier: 1:45

It was so good, yeah, so I I've thoroughly enjoyed getting to know him, getting to know him at a soda con just a little bit ago and and like this guy he's, he's young guy, like like ourselves.

Paul J Daly: 1:59

You know, I'm not young anymore, Just he's resolute and he's got a.

Kyle Mountsier: 2:04

He's just got a great way about him. So I can't wait to have this like longer form conversation in a podcast. So if you're here with us, we hope you enjoy the conversation today.

Paul J Daly: 2:17

I always get angry when people don't talk about their history in the car business and they just go right into like what they do in the industry, not like you would do that.

Michael Cirillo: 2:25

But I think well, he won't anymore.

Paul J Daly: 2:28

No, I'm not, I'm setting up like that.

Kyle Mountsier: 2:30

I'm about to make you angry.

Paul J Daly: 2:32

Watch this, check me out, so tell us about your first job in the auto industry. Yeah, I think technically it wasn't really a job, because it it wasn't really employment, but because I didn't actually get paid and they did see me off the lot with police escort.

Jimmy Douglas: 2:53

But aside from that part, Well, yeah, but like who hasn't had that experience?

Michael Cirillo: 3:00

You know, it's so.

Jimmy Douglas: 3:02

So what was it? The year 2001 and I'm in high school and I have recently moved out of my parents' house and 16. And I'm picking up income streams here and there. I was a land partier, though, so primarily like the easiest way was to find small businesses that needed help keeping their computers running, and my first job in auto was keeping the computers running inside of this Volkswagen dealer, which is what led to Dennis teach, the service manager at Armstrong Volkswagen during that time, and actually today too, asking if I wanted a real job, and the real job was to be a lot of tendon working the service drive For a new swing shift operation. He was spinning up where a new team of technicians and service advisor would come in at 5 pm and they would work until the cars were done. And they were there on Saturdays too. So that was my indoctrination into helping to keep that machine running. That's amazing. Wait a second.

Kyle Mountsier: 4:06

So what year was this? Yeah?

Jimmy Douglas: 4:09

Let me think about this. Maybe it was 2002 actually, because there's still people.

Kyle Mountsier: 4:15

This isn't totally about that. There's still people like how do we do this whole like two technician ship and then make sure it would cover in all the bases and stuff like that? And this cat's out here you, you just so happen to be on the innovative front lines of a service bay. What was it like? Because I mean there. I mean, there couldn't have been more than a handful of those people in the country doing it. That at that point, like, talk us through what, what the actual rhythms of the night and the and the days were, like you know, one of the benefits, or downfalls I had was having never worked in a shop before, so I just didn't know any better.

Jimmy Douglas: 4:52

I didn't know that we were doing something that was counterintuitive. And, yeah, I mean there were a lot of things about it that made it operationally difficult and, for example, all the bays were shared right. Like if you, if you, had your own bay as a technician during the day, but then you would have to get that car out of there if you could, so that the technician that used the same day at night could pull their car in, like Airbnb in your bay Pretty much yeah, which sometimes that led to some really fast collaborations for the end of that shift to get those things out of there, including people pushing them in and out, which was nobody's favorite part of the job. Two toolboxes For every bay to write. Everybody's got their own tools and every now and then there would be some crossover, because not every vehicle can actually be pushed out of there or driven out of there elegantly, and that was just in the shop. Then in the service drive you would have a bit of a changing of the guard Several service advisors who worked there during the day one, who ran the whole operation at night, who I was reporting to for the first time before I became that person. And yeah, there may be like an hour in between where everybody's there at the same time and then day shift people would disperse and then we would be there really until the work got done or until we were too tired.

Michael Cirillo: 6:21

Wow.

Paul J Daly: 6:21

Not the answer I was fully expecting right there it's so cool and you said it's the same service manager there. That was there when you started.

Jimmy Douglas: 6:29

You know he he's had a few career stops amongst various groups around that metro area in Portland Oregon, but today he's back and there are actually a few members of the leadership team who are still there today, who were there when I worked there 20 years ago and I think even like some frontline people too technicians it's great.

Michael Cirillo: 6:53

I'm always fascinated by the, the potential far reaching application, or implication rather, of you providing that service to a pocket community Back in the day, way ahead of its time. And now, 20, 21 years later, 22 years later, there's this concept kind of popping up here and there, but there's already customers that are so indoctrinated. They're like we've had this since the 2000s. Like what are you talking about? What was the initial, if you can recall back, what was the initial, I guess, acceptance of this concept in that amidst your consumer base, did they get it right away? Was there hesitancy? Like, how did you deepen the indoctrination for, for something that at that time was ahead of its time?

Jimmy Douglas: 7:44

It was mixed. For sure there's a certain crowd that absolutely loved it, right, Because it works better with their schedule. Like it can be a little bit frustrating to have to organize your life around the business hours of a business that operates the same time. When you're trying to do your job and at baseline, most people aren't bringing their vehicle into a service department because some sort of celebratory event, right. So if you can make that in any way in any way more convenient.

Kyle Mountsier: 8:12

The way you said. That is just so perfect.

Paul J Daly: 8:14

It took a minute for that one to land for me.

Jimmy Douglas: 8:17

Sorry, typically not. Yay, that was great, jimmy. I'm so glad to see you again. Just kidding, I got that one a lot.

Paul J Daly: 8:25

Yeah, just kidding.

Jimmy Douglas: 8:27

Yeah. So that was what was great about it. And then there would be you know the concept of maybe your vehicle was worked on during the day, but now you have until 9 or 10 pm to pick it up, and we also had a shuttle driver working into the evening too. So people really liked that. Where it would get really frustrating and counterintuitive is maybe you brought your vehicle in at night and maybe it wasn't finished, and when you called in the next day, the technician that worked on it is not there and I am not there, right. And we did what we could to sort of like work around that and be mindful of situations that are maybe more time sensitive, for example. But that was something that during my time we never really fully like ironed the kinks out of. The other piece was parts availability. It was perfect if you had everything on hand in your own inventory, but it's difficult to do parts runs amongst, like, the network of surrounding dealers If they're not open at the same time as you. So those are some of the interesting nuances of being a bit of a trailblazer, if you will, at that moment in time, but did you yell at your customers?

Michael Cirillo: 9:29

Because every time I go into a service department there is that service advice. Be right with you, sir. You're like I'm the only person here. What are you doing?

Kyle Mountsier: 9:40

So this is in your therapy session, bro. This is in your therapy session.

Jimmy Douglas: 9:45

Yeah, you know I'm not much of a yeller, but you know how I said that, the person I reported to. I reported to him for a few months. The customer satisfaction surveys rolled in and suddenly my career trajectory there escalated a lot faster than I had planned and I became the service advisor of that operation, I think about 90 days into my run there, and that was a crash course on the industry, to say the least. All right, so we've crushed the first 90 days I think he's got credibility.

Michael Cirillo: 10:21

He's got some credibility.

Paul J Daly: 10:23

He's a car person.

Kyle Mountsier: 10:25

He's a car dude. So, ok, give us the next. What is it? 21 years. Try and give us that in the next 90 seconds, because I want to get to the past six months pretty quickly.

Michael Cirillo: 10:37

Super report.

Kyle Mountsier: 10:38

So condense it as fast as you possibly can.

Jimmy Douglas: 10:41

That's OK, this is my specialty.

Kyle Mountsier: 10:46

Yeah, so, like so many people Put that on the teleprompter.

Jimmy Douglas: 10:49

Exactly, yeah, like so many people that I have worked with in the context of a dealership, this is a job that had career trajectory. You can make real money, you can pick up very valuable skills that are applicable everywhere and you get thrown into the fire very fast and things escalate. You end up doing a lot of jobs if you work hard and if you enjoy yourself. So that was my ticket to paying for school. I was working a swing ship, so I would go to college during the day, then I would show up at work at night, and I did that for a good few years, and 20 years ago you could do that on a service advisor of salary and not take on student loans. On the tail end of it, I was extended the opportunity to try out internet sales, which was a nascent idea at the time. Like there was a whole separate silo. I mean I was the silo, but it's like oh, this is a customer that came in from the internet, therefore it will go to the internet person, and I think they gave me a little too much credit. Like my conversion rate on people coming in was extremely high, like well north of 50%, but also these were high intended people who came inbound, knew what they wanted, but they were coming in and that was a whole different stack of experiences that I thoroughly enjoyed. I wasn't always the most popular person, because customers would walk in and they would walk right past the showroom directly to an office, but I'm sure that that process is much more ironed out now, 20 years later. Well, it might be. So I graduate in management information systems going back to the roots of having fixed computers to get into that door and I grew up in an entrepreneurial household and I was super interested in working at a technology startup. So I joined a software company located in downtown Portland as a salesperson and spent eight years there and did just about every non-technical job you can. As it grew from 30 people to nearly a thousand people and when it got so big that it felt more like a growth stage than an early stage, I kind of got the itch to try something earlier again, and I had one career stop in a really early stage FinTech company that ended up being acquired in under a year, which was super interesting in many different ways and a lot of fun, but that's when I found Tesla thereafter and that to me felt like an opportunity to throw my ego out the door and just join in whatever capacity I could, because the product seemed really interesting to me, the mission was super important to me and I thought I had a lot to learn from people who were operating at a scale that I never had access to. So that's what kicked off the five-year run.

Paul J Daly: 13:32

What part of the mission? Just, I think it's easy to forget what Tesla's mission was early on, because now it's who knows?

Kyle Mountsier: 13:40

Yeah, I know it's still very similar. I think that's the thing you know. Like it's.

Paul J Daly: 13:45

I go ahead. It's just, it takes on a person, it's just buried right, yeah, yeah, well.

Jimmy Douglas: 13:50

So the mission is to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy, and Initially that was done more explicitly through Road transportation, but now, as we all know, it's it's a business of many businesses there in around sustainability, both in the context of transportation, but then energy more broadly. But in 2018, the focal point of that mission was Model 3 production ramp. So that was our focus at that time, and I joined on the finance team. But when you're when, when you're in a stage of a company's life like that one, I Everything is everybody's job, so I had the opportunity to say that again. When you're at that stage of company like everything is your job, no matter who you are Like.

Paul J Daly: 14:38

I think that was just put that on the a so-do job application when Millions in funding that makes me feel so good Okay.

Jimmy Douglas: 14:54

Well, I mean, you could, you could read about what what the financial outlook was in 2018, and you know it was the most shorted company in the world. But, yeah, I, I got to. I got to be on a finance team, I got to build cars, I got to talk to suppliers and help make decisions that manifested themselves physically on the exterior of the cars that I can Look at today and say, yeah, I know why that happened and where I that happened, I and that was a transformational Experience, to say the least, and that was before I found the used car team, which was Ultimately my home there for a good several years.

Kyle Mountsier: 15:33

We were going and to which David Longer rejoiced. He was like, yes, he found used cars. Congratulations, I love it. Like you and this is I think this is probably true. You know, I'm leaning on your Tesla side of stuff, right, like people just look at Tesla and they're like, ah, you know Big conglomerate EV company and it's like no, you were a part of the used car team of which, like, was selling and and repositioning and moving around vehicles and and remarketing them and and getting them into Customers driveways and you have a deep history in auto and I'm guessing you probably weren't the only one. That, yeah, like a deep, intimate knowledge of the real retail auto industry in those teams, right.

Jimmy Douglas: 16:24

Oh for sure. I think the most relatable thing about me when I joined that team was that I Like to call myself a 30 under 30, not because Forbes had ever heard of me, because that's how many cars I had on before I turned 30 years old, uh, which is, which is probably the sign of a diagnosable problem. But I was in very good company and there were plenty on that team that could have absolutely like roasted that number by comparison, and I gotta get working on.

Paul J Daly: 16:50

I think my only chance now is 50 under 50. Hey man, that's six years, so choir, a lot of cars.

Jimmy Douglas: 16:57

That's great. Let's do it together. I'm just, I'm just working hard over here so I can have a house with a garage, let alone like that's that one you live in, that LA like for. One day.

Paul J Daly: 17:10

Yeah, one day.

Jimmy Douglas: 17:11

But yeah, so it's true, a lot of very experienced automotive operators on that team, far more than me.

Kyle Mountsier: 17:17

So, and I did, I don't want to miss out because we don't have a ton of time left but when you were at a company like that and then seeing the industry headed toward a clear path toward EVs, that it's coming Right. We were actually, paul and I were talking about this morning Just automotive news alone, talking about the new entrance into the market. Yeah, actually, the EV stack is higher than the ice stack on what's coming in the next two years. So it's just clear, like all the OEMs, it's coming. It's just how we handle it as as as a market and as a culture, and you're seeing that and you're going. There's gaps here. I need to fill a gap. Talk about how the gap that you're filling now with plug that it will give you a chance to plug in just a second, but talk about how the lead up to seeing that this particular gap happened.

Jimmy Douglas: 18:09

Yeah, absolutely I. We were keeping an eye on the market very broadly, outside of the context of our own walls, and it was both in terms of how our own vehicles were being sold to retail customers in their second life, but then other EVs that were on the road and the way that we wanted to see those assets being marketed, which is fundamentally different than what's true for normal cars, because EVs are fundamentally different and I don't want to fall into my typical talk track, but If you think about all of the EVs that are coming to the market and One's ability to be a subject matter expert on them, you're really asking people to be subject matter experts on computers that are on wheels. And just imagine, as a salesperson, trying to have enough first-hand experience with every Android phone that's ever been made and be able to speak about them confidently. Really, it's impossible about having information at your fingertips, but it's not enough to have information about them for when they were brand new several years ago, because things change right, like what software is installed, which which processor does this thing have? How much memory does it have, let alone battery, which is the focal point of many conversations. And, yeah, we saw this playing out first hand very, very slowly, right, because even to this day it's only it's barely 1% of the used car market. But what really took me back and gave me enough conviction to take the jump and build this business was just how fast the growth curve is going to hit us, and it's a 45x growth in under a decade. It's huge.

Paul J Daly: 19:46

Couple things.

Kyle Mountsier: 19:47

Yeah, I I think about this knowledge necessary to sell. I think okay and I love that you pinned it against like the Android phone, right, because you know if we can do some like slight apples and oranges, competitive comparison between phones and cars, we're like Tesla, apple, right, and then Android phones, kind of legacy automakers. That's shaping up in that general direction. There's a large owner, market share, clear lines. You know, like simple, simple structure of you know options. Right, you've got four or five options that are totally available with not a lot of package differences. That's very similar to the app but, like when you look over at Android, it's just like this hodgepodge of billions of different options and phones and different stuff like that. But it's not even. It doesn't even the phone comparison actually pales in comparison to how many options automakers create in their like not just body styles and interior features, but now the types of computers and the type of software that might be available and then the software upgrades. I never even thought like that deeply about the. It's not just the single computer technology or, like you know, like self-driving, like what is that technology? It's the deep level knowledge of what's actually in the guts of that computer on wheels that is going to be so hard for, like forget about a salesperson that's dedicating their entire life but just the technology for the buyer to be able to see what they're buying right.

Jimmy Douglas: 21:29

Absolutely yeah. One of the most popular proof of concepts that we came up with and we were socializing amongst dealers in our customer discovery was what we called the plug guide, and it's really. It's designed to be printed out, it's a piece of paper and it's a customer facing summary of the information that we're able to pull together from any specific vehicle, right Like what do we know about its hardware, what do we know about its options and its configuration, what do we know about its software, what do we know about its battery? But it's not enough to just throw all that data at somebody like present it in such a way so that it's like easy to navigate through the context of a sales conversation for both sides.

Michael Cirillo: 22:11

I mean asking for a friend.

Jimmy Douglas: 22:16

Your friends are my friends, some guy.

Michael Cirillo: 22:18

Now say, I know someone who was a close relative that may or may not sleep in the same bed as me.

Jimmy Douglas: 22:28

And she owns a piece.

Michael Cirillo: 22:30

And battery comes up once a week. Wow, when should they consider not owning that vehicle anymore?

Paul J Daly: 22:39

Like, oh, you mean like battery comes up once a week Like I'm going to get stranded?

Michael Cirillo: 22:45

Yeah, yeah, yeah, and I'm going to get stuck, or like because you know, from a whole sailing perspective.

Kyle Mountsier: 22:51

And we're back to our therapy session with Michael.

Michael Cirillo: 22:54

Michael Ceril. I said a close friend. I don't you know, I was not from me.

Paul J Daly: 22:58

Your wife's going to have questions because, as you through, Close relative. Yeah, you have more questions.

Michael Cirillo: 23:06

Okay, Cats out of the bag. She doesn't bring up the battery every week. I do so like but, is there a time limit? Like when you, when you look at that, because you brought a battery a couple of times, hardware this and that, but you know that seems to be the common thing that the market understands is like, oh, like after you know, everybody has their own number they're like after eight years, that battery is going to cost more to replace than the car itself. Like is that an actual thing?

Jimmy Douglas: 23:35

Not really. I mean, here's the truth. Like we don't know how long these vehicles will be able to survive on their initial powertrain end to end, but the data suggests that fears of high voltage battery pack failure are largely overblown. The, the only sizable data set that's ever been shared so far was shared by Tesla in their environmental report. It's published publicly. You can. You can Google it and look it up, and what they showed was the broader model SX uh fleet battery retention as they started crossing 200,000 miles, and the data showed that, on an average running basis, the capacity retention is looking like I believe it was 88%. So you're talking about 200 K miles and the car is practically the same car.

Michael Cirillo: 24:39

Honestly, it's almost a million Canadian kilometers.

Paul J Daly: 24:43

How about? That have you heard, so I was thinking about this as as after seeing your presentation at a Sotukan and I was like well, what are the other fail points? Right, like how? How do the motors do on the wheels? How do the electric?

Jimmy Douglas: 24:58

motors fair. It's a great question. Not a lot of data on that in aggregate, but in general you're talking about a very small number of moving parts and you're talking about an electric motor. It's a fairly stable piece of hardware and also like a relatively innocuous replacement cost if there is a failure.

Paul J Daly: 25:16

That's exactly it, right, it's not an engine, it's not a transmission Right, it's a motor which is right there by the wheel.

Jimmy Douglas: 25:24

Yeah, I mean, did you ever play with like RC cars and you were kidding you ever like put these things together?

Paul J Daly: 25:29

and have a little electric motor. Yeah right, the little motor in the back and pop the wheel in there and off you go.

Jimmy Douglas: 25:35

Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like that, only a lot bigger and a lot more powerful, and heavy, you know one of my cars has three of them. But yeah, that's pretty much it Wow.

Kyle Mountsier: 25:46

Well, hey, before we get off, I want to give you a chance, just real quick, if people are listening to this, to just share, like the couple, one liners about exactly what plug is doing, because I do think it is solving a problem for our industry that maybe a lot of people didn't even realize could be solved in the unique way that you figured out how to do it.

Jimmy Douglas: 26:03

Yeah, I appreciate that, kyle, but before I do that, I just want to say anybody who's thinking about attending a SOTY contact next year needs to come.

Michael Cirillo: 26:09

Hey.

Jimmy Douglas: 26:10

That was a game changer for me and for us. So thank you for posting such a wonderful event and enabling me to meet what I believe will be some lifelong friends. I love that so. So plug is addressing the gap in the market right now, where used electric vehicles are being Transacted in a wholesale context with incomplete information. So what we've built is a online marketplace that facilitates wholesale buying and selling of used electric vehicles amongst a network of dealers and fleet operators where there's there's three like core Premises differentiation here. And the first one is that we believe that information needs to be collected from every single vehicle before it's proposed for sale. The second is that we have seen in the market that About a third of use EV retail transactions are compressed into a very small Population of dealers across the country, so we're curating that population To serve up critical mass to anybody that is selling, so that they are selling to a pool of very High intention and very highly informed buyers who can act quickly because they have access to that information. And the third is the EVs are different and and leveraging the differences in terms of velocity, maximizing Transactions. So if you're selling a computer on wheels, one of the most important things to do is to sell it fast, because computers are more more vulnerable to volatility in pricing, because where we are in the Innovation curve right now, new technology comes out all the time. So optimizing everything about selling dealers ability to move a car very quickly, which means that we do everything Remotely. We do everything online. There's no physical brick-and-mortar location, nor are there any humans Involved in the inspection or evaluation process. Technology enables the whole thing. So the optimization point is velocity.

Kyle Mountsier: 28:12

That's awesome. Well, Jimmy, thanks for sharing that with us. Thanks for going a little bit on a history tour All the way back to your day as a lot of tendon. That was a super, a super fun tour and congratulations on everything that you're, that you're building. Can't wait to see the success.

Jimmy Douglas: 28:27

And thanks for joining us here on auto collapse appreciate you guys and feeling the mutual across the board.

Paul J Daly: 28:35

Hey, I didn't see the first 15 minutes of that Sation. It takes a lot to get us to go past the 18 minutes on this show.

Kyle Mountsier: 28:43

Yeah, I like we were the minute he said yeah, and you know, I just I was the part of like one of these overnight service things swing shift department Back in now we've got our whole podcast ahead.

Paul J Daly: 28:57

Of us 21 years ago.

Speaker 2: 28:59

Everybody still wondering how to get it done.

Michael Cirillo: 29:01

I told you guys, I'm a ferocious note taker and my note from today was I wish I was smart.

Kyle Mountsier: 29:10

Well, that's. It's cool because when you look back and you think about this service manager is now back with that same group. And you look back and this is, I think, key with anybody that has some level of success, in any industry they're in, you can normally point to Some person that was their leader, that gave them access to insights or knowledge or information or new or innovative thought that just broaden their horizon to say, oh, now I can just I see the world differently. Right, jimmy's a guy that now I, you know, I don't I don't know what his history was before that, but there's probably something about that that just allowed him to see the world differently and that Progresses through like I. I mean I can say that Aaron Hill, right, that that I worked with back in the day at Sandy Sensing Nissan, just open, not that I wasn't an innovative entrepreneurial, like like forward-thinking type personality, but he allowed me to see the world in a different way and I think that's that's true of Jimmy, obviously.

Michael Cirillo: 30:13

It's clear that he made the choice. Regardless of where he was at in his career, his environment, that he was in, he made the choice to use that and be inspired by it, and that's I'm inspired by that thought process. I mean, even you know, listening to Jesse Cole as the keynote. This is these are people that have not Created anything net new, but have innovated using or leveraging tools and resources at their disposal, and it's because they're making a choice to be inspired by their Environment, their circumstances or whatever, and I and I just love that that was a reminder listening to Jimmy today that Each of us, it's available to each of us we can make a choice to be inspired and then innovate.

Paul J Daly: 30:59

Got me. I actually have a t-shirt that says innovation is a choice on it.

Michael Cirillo: 31:02

I'm gonna get you guys.

Paul J Daly: 31:03

Oh, really Well. Regardless, we're glad you hung around with us for this kind of extended edition of AutoClabs, because it was great. On behalf of comm out here, michael Cirillo and myself, thanks for being with us today on AutoCollabs.

Speaker 2: 31:19

Sign up for our free and fun to read daily email for a free shot of relevant news and automotive Retail, media and pop culture. You can get it now at a so-to-dot-com. That's ASO tucom. If you love this podcast, please leave us a review and share it with a friend. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time.

Kyle Mountsier: 31:50

Welcome to AutoCollabs.

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