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?

Avi Steinlauf: To put it into perspective, when I was in business school from 1996 to 1998, I would say that was the early but material days of the Internet where companies like Netscape were going public. Some of the early Internet giants began to gain a tremendous amount of exposure in the general press and certainly in the business press. That began to get my attention. I remember having a friend who was a year ahead of me in business school. He went off to work at eBay and was one of the early team over at eBay.

Back then, it was very popular to think about going into finance and working for the big investment banks of the world. Few people were looking at the Internet other than those who were maybe a little bit ahead of the game. I knew that banking and consulting wasn’t for me. When I saw some of the potential career paths and trajectories of folks who were getting involved in the Internet, that interested me. Because it was a family business, I knew that Edmunds had gotten involved in the Internet and got some traction over the prior years. That was something that I wanted to get involved with. What I wasn’t sure at that time is would I want to go earn my stripes elsewhere and rejoin the business in the future or join directly out of business school. I spent a lot of time and spoke to a lot of people who I respected and came down to the decision that I didn’t want to miss what was happening in the early days for Edmunds. So, I joined full-time in June 1998.

I joined initially as the Director of Marketing and Business Development, which was a catch-all phrase for rolling up my sleeves and getting involved in various partnerships that we were exploring. We weren’t a big formal company that had well-defined roles. We were a scrappy bunch of folks who were figuring it out as we went. I joined the business working out of New York. We had a small satellite office where there were three of us. We shared the office with some other folks at a different company. I began to immerse myself into what was Edmunds back then.

It wasn’t until December 1999 that I decided to move out to Southern California where we had moved into some temporary office space and brought everybody together. We were out looking for real estate for more permanent space. In the fourth quarter of 1999, we moved into what was our first permanent office space here in Santa Monica. That was the time when things began to take off and the growth really occurred in our business.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Unicorn in the Making: Avi Steinlauf, CEO of Edmunds.com
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