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Unicorn in the Making: Avi Steinlauf, CEO of Edmunds.com (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The Internet business model that you were settling on was CPA lead generation or was it just straight up advertising?

Avi Steinlauf: CPA lead generation would be a fair description using Internet lingo. That was just the beginning because we were also being approached during the later part of the ’90s by a number of the automotive manufacturers as well as their ad agencies. They said, “You’ve got this audience of several million people on your site monthly. We’d like to put our advertising messages in front of that audience. We’ll pay you for the ability to do that.” Candidly, in the early days, we weren’t comfortable with that. Advertising has not really evolved where we felt it was reputable or legitimate. For many years, we deferred. >>>

Building a Cool Technology Company from Chicago: Narrative Science CEO Stuart Frankel (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Then what?

Stuart Frankel: This was in the Fall of 2008.

Sramana Mitra: The financial crisis was coming up.

Stuart Frankel: Yes. I book-ended my time at DoubleClick. Just prior to closing the transaction with Google, I liked the idea of joining another PE-backed company. I wanted to join a company that was already in business with a good franchise and opportunity to grow. >>>

Unicorn in the Making: Avi Steinlauf, CEO of Edmunds.com (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What I’d like to do next is to track the major strategic moves that were responsible for that growth to the extent that you can remember them.

Avi Steinlauf: There are two major things that I would refer to. I sometimes refer to these as the business model and the evolution of the business model. Let me talk about those two. Essentially, I mentioned that from the earliest days on the web and the gopher site before that, we made our information available for free. We built up a fairly large audience. As a result of having the audience, we got a call from a gentleman by the name of Pete Ellis. Pete was an auto dealer here in Southern California who had sold off his dealerships and had started a business called Autobytel. The premise of the business was that he had dealers around the country who wanted to sell cars to people who were doing research on the web. >>>

Building a Cool Technology Company from Chicago: Narrative Science CEO Stuart Frankel (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Were you acting as an agency?

Stuart Frankel: We were. By 2005 or 2006, we were managing close to a billion dollars in media.

Sramana Mitra: Is this a regular agency business model with 10% fees?

Stuart Frankel: It was also based on performance. We took a piece of every transaction. Ultimately, that arbitrage went away. That’s a much lower margin business than it is today. During that time period, it was a terrific business. Because of our growth in the search business, we started to get noticed by other companies. We were contacted by DoubleClick in late 2003. They expressed an interest in buying the company. We sold the business in June 2014. DoubleClick acquired the business for our search technology. The plan was to integrate our search platform with the >>>

Unicorn in the Making: Avi Steinlauf, CEO of Edmunds.com (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: When all of this was happening, it was still under your father’s watch and you were doing this other stuff?

Avi Steinlauf: That’s correct. It was a small business back then. He was 100% responsible for it. There were a handful of employees who worked in a virtual way. There wasn’t even an office back then other than the back of his house. That’s the genesis of where things started.

Sramana Mitra: That’s the business that you decided to come and join in?

Avi Steinlauf: Full-time in 1998.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to that decision point. When you did that, what were the first few things that you did? What did you decide was going to be the strategy?
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Building a Cool Technology Company from Chicago: Narrative Science CEO Stuart Frankel (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Where is the position? This is not in Cincinnati, right?

Stuart Frankel: It was in Chicago. I had met a woman who I’m married to now. She was originally from New York. She was living in Cincinnati as well. We were also figuring out, from a life standpoint, where we wanted to be. In addition to presenting this career opportunity, Chicago was also a great place to live for us. We moved to Chicago and got married. I started my job at rollingstones.com. It was a fairly typical Web 1.0 experience. It was obviously a very exciting opportunity. We had brand name. It was a relatively high profile company. I had a really interesting job that pushed me professionally. I was doing a lot of things that I had never done before. >>>

Unicorn in the Making: Avi Steinlauf, CEO of Edmunds.com (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: So you’re not a founder of Edmunds?

Avi Steinlauf: I’ll tell you a little bit about the history of Edmunds. I think you’ll see it interwoven with some of the things that I’ve mentioned earlier. Edmunds is a majority-owned family business. It’s my family. My father, Peter Steinlauf, who is our active Chairman, was a serial entrepreneur. He built up outdoor advertising business in the ’70s. Then there was some industry consolidation in the 1980s. He sold his business and was looking to get into another business.

He came across this small print publisher called Edmunds that published quarterly pricing guides for new and used cars that were sold in bookstores and in news stands. He went ahead and bought the company. At that time, there were a handful of employees based in Long Island. >>>

Building a Cool Technology Company from Chicago: Narrative Science CEO Stuart Frankel (Part 1)

Some of what you’ll read in this interview will seem like science fiction. But please read on!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised, and in what kind of circumstances?

Stuart Frankel: I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. I was the middle kid with a sister on each side. I went to public high schools and ultimately to Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, which is about an hour from Cincinnati. I started as an Economics major but ended up being an accounting major. Then, I moved to Chicago and became a CPA and worked for PricewaterhouseCoopers for the first few years of my career.

Sramana Mitra: In terms of chronology, what years are we talking?
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