Was this just Ebay for cars?? Not really that clear. "The Mountain View, Calif.-based startup, founded in 2013, was operating an online marketplace for used cars."
The eBay of cars is eBay. eBay Motors is hugely popular.
Beepi Winding Down After Burning Through $150M
41–50 of 64 posts
Re: Beepi Winding Down After Burning Through $150M
#42I bought a car on Beepi, and it was a great experience, much better than buying a used car from a traditional dealership or a private party (e.g., Craigslist). One thing that struck me as particularly crazy, though, is that they allowed you to charge your entire purchase to a credit card! That was great for me, since I got a ton of credit card points out of it, but it didn't seem very sustainable, and I guess it wasn't.
Shift (one of their competitors) also seemed quite nice, but they didn't allow you to charge your car to a credit card, so that was one factor in my decision to choose Beepi instead.
Re: Beepi Winding Down After Burning Through $150M
#43There's an instructive lesson here in how both valuation and annual run-rate are meaningless numbers without a sound fundamental business underneath. Beepi was valued at $500MM and had an almost $200MM annual run-rate, yet evaporated and is now worth absolutely nothing. Who else out there has 9, 10, or even 11-figure valuations and high revenues but is actually a worthless business?
This $200MM surely had to be GMV rather than ARR right?
Re: Beepi Winding Down After Burning Through $150M
#44Their "we will buy your car if it doesn't sell in X months" guarantee was the most egregious unforced adverse selection I've seen.
That's a good point. Beepi seemed like they were just way too generous, in general. (See my comment elsewhere in this thread about them allowing you to charge your entire car purchase to a credit card.)
Re: Beepi Winding Down After Burning Through $150M
#45I hate seeing things like this. As an entrepreneur it's frustrating that I've built a business, in a growing space, $300k ARR, consistent growth, a few employees, no debt and a well defined path to 10x growth that's not built on any (bulshit) models that VC seems to love. And for some reason it's very hard to find funding that's not from Wall Street guys (who love models that earn). Hey VCs! I can burn less of your m…
The question in a VC's mind is: When you exit (Acquisition or IPO) will you return to me my entire fund size?
If you can't give a compelling "yes" then it's not a good fit for them.
Re: Beepi Winding Down After Burning Through $150M
#46That is too bad. I was strongly considering them for my next car purchase.
Re: Beepi Winding Down After Burning Through $150M
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
How the hell do you burn through $37.5M a year? It's a used car marketplace? How...?
A ton of ads on FM radio would be my guess, based on on how often I heard them.
I only knew of them from seeing TONS of cars in the area with Beepi licence plate frames. I thought this company was like 3-5 guys in a small office.
Re: Beepi Winding Down After Burning Through $150M
#48Paywall workaround https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/article...
Not sure why, but this paywall workaround goes through facebook. It does work, but it goes through facebook.
I should have given credit to ctrl_freak for showing us this a few days ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13621072
Re: Beepi Winding Down After Burning Through $150M
#49I hate seeing things like this. As an entrepreneur it's frustrating that I've built a business, in a growing space, $300k ARR, consistent growth, a few employees, no debt and a well defined path to 10x growth that's not built on any (bulshit) models that VC seems to love. And for some reason it's very hard to find funding that's not from Wall Street guys (who love models that earn). Hey VCs! I can burn less of your m…
VCs invest in people they know and people who know people they know. Need-ta fix that first, but those peeps might not be the type of peeps you wanna know. "The game is the game."
I think this is an underappreciated fact... SV (but not exclusively SV, it's worse in academic science, for example) runs a pretty insidious narrative of how the entrepreneurship game works, that I don't think is at all accurate.
Re: Beepi Winding Down After Burning Through $150M
#50There's an instructive lesson here in how both valuation and annual run-rate are meaningless numbers without a sound fundamental business underneath. Beepi was valued at $500MM and had an almost $200MM annual run-rate, yet evaporated and is now worth absolutely nothing. Who else out there has 9, 10, or even 11-figure valuations and high revenues but is actually a worthless business?
This $200MM surely had to be GMV rather than ARR right?
Yup. People sometimes use ARR to mean multiple things. Previous poster was referring to run-rate which likely was the run rate for GMV--versys ARR which I assume you mean as annual revenue