Serial entrepreneur. The term is a catchy way to describe someone with an unstoppable compulsion to create successful businesses from the ground up. If the act were as sinister as the nickname makes it sound, Yuri Pikover would be locked up for life. After selling his first two businesses for over $2.2 billion combined, Pikover is out to revolutionize car buying across the country at the helm of his newest company, Westlake Village-based 5square Systems Corp. “As consumers, when we go to buy a car it’s still a very complicated process. Unfortunately, the trends in the industry have not really changed in the last 20 or 30 years,” said Pikover. The way people buy cars today is not very different from before, yet we live in an age of technological advancement.” Pikover started working with 5square in 2003 as chief executive officer and led the company in its creation of DealSnap, a new software technology that allows care dealers to complete a sale in about two hours, down from the standard four. The first version of DealSnap was shipped to a few stores in Los Angeles and a handful in the Bay Area, but the software wasn’t working as well as Pikover had hoped. Most dealership owners, he found, had no idea how their computer systems worked, which made 5square’s job that much harder. That is, until Pikover became the owner of Folsom Lake Nissan near Sacramento. “After a while it dawned on me that I needed to become a dealer myself, for a couple of reasons,” Pikover said. “First, it is a good investment when run properly. Second, it would give us the opportunity to try to implement all the latest and greatest innovations and allow us to be almost like a living lab.” Redesign finished The redesigned DealSnap is just now leaving the assembly line. Pikover said that about 25 dealerships have so far installed the new version he expects more dealers and dealer groups to follow soon and he’s also trying to sell the product to several auto makers. “The reason we were attracted to the company is that we think there is a real opportunity for software improvements in the front office operations of auto dealerships which will improve interaction with customers and the management of the sales process,” said Jeff Crowe, partner with Norwest Venture Capital, which participated in 5square’s latest round of funding. “There is something like 22,000 new car dealerships, that’s a big target customer set. Yuri’s track record attracted us as well, our company has invested in Yuri before.” Born in Kiev in Russia and educated at the Ort Institute of Technology in New York, Pikover moved to Los Angeles in 1982 and got a job as an electrical engineer at a Northridge company called Micom. He rose through the management ranks and after six years took a job at a company called Fibermux. When that business was sold in 1991, Pikover convinced former Fibermux president Steve Kim to come with him to start a networking technology company called Xylan. In 1996, Xylan went public, and in 1999 it was purchased by Alcatel for $2 billion. Pikover then became CEO of Access 360, an Orange County company that was eventually bought by IBM for $200 million. Pikover said he’s got no plans to position 5square for takeover anytime soon. “What excites me is the same thing that excited me at Xylan and Access 360, which is to transform the industry that we were in. I see the same opportunity here in the automotive retail space. It’s a huge market, the second largest industry after real estate,” Pikover said. “What’s really motivating me is the chance to develop and deliver the right innovative technology to transform the way people buy and sell cars.” Crowe would not discuss his financial expectations for 5square, but he said the response from the company’s initial customers is very encouraging. “The feedback the company has gotten constantly from dealers is that, when they show the software to them they say, ‘wow, I’ve never seen anything like this before,” said Crowe.
