Dan Jemiolo SVP Engineering, CarNow
Previously
Vice President of Engineering, SalesforceSenior Director of Engineering, Salesforce
Director of Engineering, Salesforce
Company
CarNow is at the forefront of automotive retailing – hybridizing the car buying experience between the digital and real world. Customers enjoy an on-demand experience to sell, buy, lease, and finance cars with simple and seamless end-to-end service; Dealerships can engage with online buyers, sellers, and leasers in real-time, increase showroom appointments, and sell more cars.
CarNow is building software solutions to connect and power this $800B market. With 5,000+ dealerships as customers, 20+ manufacturer certifications, and north of $50M in ARR, CarNow is one of the fastest growing SaaS companies in the automotive industry. While others offer point solutions, CarNow provides a robust technology platform that accelerates the sale by giving dealers real-time visibility of customer journey and enabling action from a centralized hub.
Search Background
After raising another scaling round from Battery Ventures, they required the next stage of leadership in Engineering to accelerate their growth. A ‘town planner’ who would pick up a team of 100 and put in place the strategy to take a company from ‘product to platform’ by building a high performing international engineering organisation of potentially hundreds, reporting into the CEO.
Requirements
We sought an engineering executive who could pick up from a ‘settler’ CTO and take the business to the next order of scale. This person would leverage their tacit knowledge in setting vision and roadmap for engineering, assess and re-set organizational and technological health, and improve engineering culture and cadence with the right processes in place.
Most of the team is based in the East Coast with pockets dispersed across the US and India. Direct exposure to building vertical SaaS ecosystems was not a rigid requirement. However, we could not compromise the experience of building software in world-class engineering organizations from SaaS brands known for seamless B2B integrations and end-user experiences.
Finally, we needed that person to be a strong values-fit to CarNow – humble, with a growth mindset and passion to solve for ‘the complexity of simplicity’.
Result
Having mapped the leading B2B SaaS brands across the US with these contextual overlaps, we put together a very strong slate of candidates. Dan rose to the top based on values fit, stage commensurate scaling experience, and domain knowledge. Prior to CarNow, Dan built and led Salesforce’s Raleigh site and managed a globally dispersed team of close to 150 engineers as a divisional VP.
Andy Park
CEO & Founder
When we set out to choose a recruiting partner to help us find our new Engineering leader who would take our technology organization to the next level, we were in fact looking for an advisor who could help us navigate a competitive market and coach us on framing our opportunity to attract the best leader we could find. Given our focus on a single vertical SaaS market, we knew it would be difficult to compete with a horizontal market opportunity.
Sam and Karla set Erevena apart from larger firms from our first conversation with noticeable personalization and attention, and thoughtfulness at every turn. They were open to different approaches with each candidate while advising with strong opinions at critical moments, but always thoughtful and supported by experience and examples.
Most importantly, Sam and Karla helped us identify and guide a technical leader whose vision and emotional intelligence aligned with our existing executive team perfectly and beyond our expectations — an improbable and difficult outcome given the complexity and competitive nature of the search. We are thrilled to welcome Dan to our executive team, and we could not ask for a more convincing, patient, and thoughtful partnership as we have had with Sam and Karla. We are looking forward to their guidance and partnership as we continue to grow.
