Greg Tepas is the Founder and CEO of CarAdvise, a startup that makes car maintenance easy and transparent. CarAdvise acts as a personal auto repair concierge and advisor for car owners. They provide an unbiased opinion on proposed work and estimated cost to save car owners from the traditional mistrust and stress associated with car repairs. 

In This Episode You Will Learn:

• Why Greg decided to build CarAdvise
• How commercial car fleets typically handle repairs
• How to begin building a two sided marketplace
• How CarAdvise makes money
• How the product has evolved
• Impact of self driving cars on the car repair industry
• Why you should be talking to everyone about your startup

Favorite Books:

• Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
• 41: A Portrait of My Father by George W. Bush

Sponsored By:

• Propllr: a Chicago public relations firm that helps startups and innovators build credibility and awareness for their companies, people, products and services.

Jeff Judge is the Founder and CEO of Bright, a startup that helps SaaS companies quickly understand their core metrics, and gives them the tools to grow faster. Bright just graduated from the 2016 Techstars class here in Chicago. Before founding Bright, Jeff cofounded and led Signal (acquired) and he was an early engineer at Orbitz. 

In This Episode You Will Learn:

• Why Jeff founded Bright after selling Signal
• What kind of optimizations Bright can deliver
• What setting up Bright entails
• Why he applied to Techstars as an experienced founder
• What he got out of the Techstars accelerator
• Why he is a big fan of having a distributed team
• The tools Jeff finds helpful to make a distributed team work
• Why he would have raised money earlier 
• Why he’d like to see Chicago tech be more collaborative
• The motivation behind starting the Bright conference
• How to plan a successful conference in just two weeks
• What goes into making the perfect pitch
• The importance of having the right support structure in enterprise selling
• The value of submitting imperfect creations

Selected Links From The Episode:

• Fredrik Olsen, CTO at Bright
• Brian Flanagan, CPO at Bright
• Troy Henikoff, Techstars Chicago Managing Director
• Brian Luerssen, Techstars Chicago Managing Director
• Dan Willoughby, Techstars Chicago Program Manager 
• SaaStr Annual Conference
• Bright Conference

Favorite Books:

• The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz
• Managing Oneself by Peter Ferdinand Drucker
• Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande

Rob Royer is the Founder and CEO of Interior Define, a startup that builds furniture on demand and will customize everything, including the size, shape, color, fabric, filling, and frame.

Rob was one of the early employees at Bonobos and took much of what he learned over to Interior Define, which he launched in 2014. Shopping for a big purchase like a couch online without sitting on it beforehand kind of seems crazy so we talk a lot about how they have gotten people over that hesitation. We actually recorded this episode sitting on one of their sofas in their Lincoln Park guideshop. 

In This Episode You Will Learn:

• How Rob got involved with Bonobos
• What he learned at Bonobos and brought to Interior Define
• How he got into the furniture industry
• The importance of partnerships in the lifestyle space
• Why they added customization options
• How they got PR in their early days
• How do they convince someone to spend thousands of dollars on a sofa they haven’t seen in person
• The importance of having a guide shop as an online brand
• What their most effective marketing channels are today
• How they picked the location of their guide shop
• The benefits of having the office directly above the guide shop
• How to sell a big potential hire from a larger company on working at a startup
• Future products that Rob’s excited about 

Selected Links From The Episode:

• Maxwell Ryan, Founder of Apartment Therapy
• The Everygirl
• Monica + Andy
• Trunk Club

Favorite Books:

• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
• Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling