Category: Announcements

By George Arison & Toby Russell 

Co-CEOs, Shift

We are excited to announce that Shift is now a public company, trading on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol SFT. This comes four months after we announced plans to become one of the first companies in Silicon Valley to pursue a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) transaction by combining with Insurance Acquisition Corporation, a SPAC sponsored by Cohen & Company. 

As founders, both of us believe that the best way to build a company is charting the path to take it public. Of course for most entrepreneurs, this never happens, since so few companies, including the very successful ones, ever get the chance to be in the public market. We are so very fortunate to be reaching this milestone less than seven years since being incorporated, and just 26 quarters since selling our “first” car. 

Getting the company to this stage is an incredible team effort and we wanted to recognize and congratulate everyone whose contribution has played a part in making this happen. We owe a tremendous thank you to Shift’s current and past employees who believed in the company’s vision to transform the auto industry for good and have worked so hard to pursue our mission to make car purchase and ownership simple and accessible to everyone. We are so very appreciative of everyone keeping the eye on the ball and executing. Without you, Shift could not be where it is and today would not have been possible. 

We also owe a deep appreciation to all of our customers. There is tremendous joy in delighting users and helping them improve their lives through a purchase of something that is so consequential. A car is, after all, a means to get around, to get to and from work and school, to take family trips, to make life happen. And a car is the largest single item most Americans will ever own outright. Finding and buying the right car should be a fun and fair experience. We are grateful to all the customers who have used the Shift way to buy or sell their cars. 

Lastly, Shift would not be possible without the trust and support of the many investors who have been with us on this journey. Thank you to everyone who has been willing to put the necessary capital investments behind our project, from our earliest investors in our seed round to investors who supported our SPAC transaction, and everyone in between.

Our road has not always been easy; it has come with many ups and downs. At our core, we’ve always believed that the seemingly impossible can be made possible — that we could achieve what most thought could not be done. To do this, we’ve been helped by a lot of grit and determination. This is a great time to take stock of what we’ve accomplished and celebrate this big win.

Being public, of course, is not the end of our journey, but rather, the beginning of a new chapter in our company’s growth. In the coming months, quarters, and years, we need to continue to be laser focused on execution, on delighting customers, on hitting numbers, and on creating shareholder value, like we have been as a private company. Through this transaction we raised capital that will allow us to invest in scaling our business and ensure that more and more customers have an opportunity to experience the Shift way of buying and selling their cars. As a company, we have always been judicious about our spend, and we will continue to be so in the future, even as we invest in building a stronger brand, expanding our operations, creating new technology, and launching new markets. 

For now — we wanted to congratulate everyone who has been part of our journey. We are deeply grateful and look forward to a great future as a public company!

As we make this transition, we’re reflecting too on our founding story — how Shift all got started. 

A little over nine years ago, the two of us were having one of our regular weekend conversations about company ideas when Toby told George about the challenges he was having buying a car. Toby wanted to go to a specific dealer (a huge company he had used a couple of times before) and finance the car using the bank where he worked, but the bank would not work with the dealer, so the transaction could not go through. As it turned out, George had just gone through a very similar experience trying to get a loan to buyout his leased vehicle — all the banks directed him to a dealer to get a loan, and the dealer eventually approved him for a loan with the very banks that said no to him earlier. 

These experiences got us wondering why dealers had so much control over the auto financing process. We started to investigate, and spent nearly two years talking to dealers, auto lenders, customers who bought cars at dealerships, and individuals who engaged in private party transactions. We realized that there was a huge opportunity to use technology to transform the car purchase experience. 

In mid-2013 George started to work on the idea full time, initially contacting car sellers on Craigslist, trying to get them to engage on the first product concept: to offer their prospective buyers a warranty. It was during these interactions that sellers would ask if we’d be willing to take their cars and sell them on their behalf. The whole concept seemed crazy since the team was working out of George’s apartment, was using Toby’s and George’s savings to fund the testing, had no insurance, and would need to park cars on the street. Yet, by end of the year we had about a dozen cars parked on the street in the Castro district of San Francisco that we were trying to sell. 

Shift has come a long way since then. It has been our continued determination to build a thriving company that outlasts us that has gotten us here, and we are excited to be listing on Nasdaq. And while it was a thrilling road to get to this point, the best is yet to come. To paraphrase the great Jeff Bezos, from whom we’ve learned so much, reset your clocks, Day One starts now. 

– George and Toby 

Today we are excited to announce three new members of Shift’s Board of Directors as we prepare to complete our de-SPAC process and become a public company: Adam Nash, Kellyn Kenny, Victoria McInnis. Adam has been formally on our board since May, when we started the SPAC conversations, and Victoria and Kellyn will be joining concurrently with our public listing. 

Over the years, we’ve been thinking about how we wanted the board configured as the company grows. As a soon-to-be-public company, there were several factors we deemed critical in choosing these members, including:  

• Technology and product experience: Shift is, at its core, a technology innovator, and we believe it is critical to maintain that DNA on the board as we scale. Adam has paved the way for groundbreaking consumer technology products, serving as CEO of Wealthfront, early Vice President of Product at LinkedIn, and Vice President of Product at Dropbox. Adam has been an angel investor in Shift from the earliest days, and he has been a valuable voice on the board throughout the period that we’ve been working on the SPAC transaction. We are excited to have a strong product and technology voice among our directors as we continue to create amazing products for our customers. 
• Brand marketing experience: A key part of Shift’s go-forward strategy is to use a variety of tactics to build our brand, both in our existing markets and new markets as we enter them. Because of this, having a board member  with a strong marketing background is valuable. This is why we are so excited about Kellyn, who as the most recent CMO of Hilton has extensive marketing leadership chops, and has over her career worked on building iconic consumer brands such as Capital One (one of the largest automotive lenders and stand out brand in a considered purchase category), Uber, and Microsoft.
• Audit and financial controls experience: As a public company, we will face a new level of requirements as related to our internal controls and audit. To this end, having an audit chair who has intimate experience with managing the audit process and can help us implement the right procedures for Sarbanes-Oxley is critical. Victoria has incredible experience in these areas, as Vice President for Internal Audit and Chief Tax Officer at General Motors. In addition to her audit experience in the automotive industry, she has been part of a SPAC transaction, so has experience with the type of transaction we are doing for Shift.  She will be a fantastic addition to our board on a strategic level and as Chair of our Audit Committee. 

We still have two board seat searches ongoing that we will aim to fill in the coming quarters. These are build around these key criteria: 

• Public company CEO and founder experience: We believe that Shift and our senior management would benefit greatly from a board member who has extensive experience as a CEO and company builder of a public company, who can help us think strategically about our long-term objectives and how to build a lasting company, and be a strong mentor and coach to us as we grow the business. 
• Public capital market experience: As a public company, Shift will be an active participant in public capital markets. We see great benefit in bringing on a director who has deep relationships in the financial markets and can help us navigate the many nuances and complexities that come with being a publicly traded company. This could be either an experienced and well respected CFO, an investment banking leader, or a former CEO who navigated capital markets extensively. 

In the coming quarters, we expect that certain of our existing pre-public board members will transition out, after many years of dedicated service to Shift, and we will look to replace them with directors who can further round-out the board by bringing a new set of backgrounds and experiences to the table. As we have previously, our goal is ensure that we have a diverse board and we are able to draw on candidates with varying backgrounds. 

We also want to express deep gratitude to Emily Melton and Manish Patel, who have served on Shift’s board for nearly six years, to Jason Krikorian, who has been an investor for six years and a board member for two, as well as to our previous board members who have served Shift over time, for all the hard work that they have put in over the years to help Shift succeed. We appreciate Emily, Manish, and Jason’s willingness to stay on the board for the next few quarters helping ensure continuity as we onboard new directors.

We couldn’t be more excited to welcome Kellyn, Victoria, and Adam to our team as we continue to build the platform for making car purchase and ownership simple and accessible to everyone. The added strength, diversity and leadership they bring will be invaluable as we become a public company.

Best, 

George and Toby