Jay Vijayan's bad experience at a dealership in Silicon Valley years ago planted the seed for him to co-found startup DMS provider Tekion in 2016.
Vijayan knew the vehicle he wanted, including the price he was willing to pay, but still spent nearly eight hours in a dealership before taking possession. At the time, Vijayan was leading the product development teams at software company Oracle. He later became chief information officer at Tesla, a position he held from 2012 to 2016.
At Tesla, he saw how the company was disrupting traditional norms in the auto industry with its vehicles, its method of connecting with the customer and its over-the-air vehicle software updates.
"The thought process I had, the seed of the original idea of a cloud-native SaaS (Software as a Service) started at Oracle but expanded and validated at Tesla where I could build a platform for Tesla," said Vijayan, Tekion CEO. "I found an opportunity to solve the [DMS] problem comprehensively for the auto industry which, in my view, needed this technology platform."