Michia Rohrssen

Rohrssen has said he loves cars: he bought his first car at 14, before he could legally drive it, raced cars and ran the car club throughout college, and has owned about 15 cars. He said on the show that his original goal was simply financial independence; he first built a course business and a marketing agency, and moved to Silicon Valley at 24.⁠[1][2][2][2]

Rohrssen and his co-founders started Prodigy, developing dealership sales software that lets buyers complete the car-buying process both online and in store, with salespeople able to handle an entire deal on iPads; the company came out of the Alchemist Accelerator. In January 2018 Prodigy announced a $5.4 million seed round led by 8VC, Battery VenturesBattery VenturesBattery Ventures is a global venture capital and private equity firm focused on technology companies, investing from seed-stage startups through growth investments and buyouts.Open the full entry, SV AngelSV AngelSV Angel is a San Francisco venture capital firm cofounded in 2009 by angel investor Ron Conway and former Google executive David Lee. It typically writes small follow-on checks in seed rounds and has invested in companies such as Airbnb, Pinterest, and Dropbox; in 2018 it said it would no longer raise new funds from outside investors, and from 2022 it set up growth funds.Open the full entry, and CrunchFund, with Rohrssen as CEO.⁠[3][3][1][1][1]

He said at the time that car-buying habits had changed: customers visited an average of only 1.6 dealerships and did 18 to 20 hours of research before going in, while dealerships had changed little.⁠[3][3][3]

On March 17, 2021, the AI lending platform Upstart announced a definitive agreement to acquire Prodigy Software. By then Prodigy had powered more than $2 billion in vehicle sales at franchised dealers for brands such as Toyota, Honda, and Ford. Rohrssen said Prodigy’s mission had always been to build the world’s best car-buying experience, and that for most buyers this experience includes financing their vehicle.⁠[4][4][4]

The deal closed in April 2021, with Upstart providing total consideration of $89.0 million, including about $70.1 million in Upstart common stock and about $17.2 million in cash; about $10.1 million in restricted stock issued to certain Prodigy employees was excluded from the consideration. In October 2021 Upstart launched Upstart Auto Retail, combining Prodigy’s software with its own technology.⁠[5][5][5][5][5]

The Venture Room included a segment with Rohrssen in a compilation of street interviews. He said on the show that his team spent about three months studying almost a thousand markets, looking for an old industry that paid a lot for poor software and was undergoing change, before settling on car dealerships and building an online checkout for them; he said the company was sold for nine figures (about 110 million) in 2021 and that he then worked at Upstart.⁠[2][2][2][2][2][2][2]

He also described how the approach changes at each stage of a business: going from zero to one million relies on young founders’ time and energy; from one million to ten million is about finding patterns that work and doubling down; and beyond ten million is about turning those patterns into playbooks and hiring departments to run them.⁠[2][2][2]

Pick the market first: the order for a founder is to “start with markets. Market determines success,” then look for problems in the market, and finally build a solution; a good market with no problem means no business (at 07:10 in the video). He also argued that what separates a million-dollar company from a billion-dollar one is market selection, not day-to-day execution (at 09:12 in the video).⁠[2][2]

Borrow consulting firms’ research: large consulting firms such as PwC and Capgemini publish free white papers on their websites about markets being disrupted, which can be used to find problems worth solving (at 09:28 in the video).⁠[2][2]