From entrepreneur at 13 to heading a unicorn start-up: What drives Carro co-founder Aaron Tan

The 36-year-old co-founder of the online car marketplace founded his first business at age 13. Then ditched junior college for polytechnic, landed a government scholarship for university after that and a stint at Carnegie Mellon University.

Carro has a regional footprint that covers Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand, employing more than 1,000 people across the four countries. “Otherwise the business may not survive because we do not know how long COVID will last,” said Mr Tan.“We tried not to remove anyone in the company across Southeast Asia and that basically meant that the management team had to take a pay cut.”

Around June or July last year, vehicle transactions started picking up and from then, it has been an upward trajectory that culminated in “record numbers” for the firm by the end of last year. He later earned an Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore scholarship to read computer science at the Singapore Management University and Carnegie Mellon, graduating summa cum laude.

And with Uber and Grab coming onto the scene then, he felt that transport was a vertical that would take off.“I personally like to trade things ... I like flipping properties for instance,” said Mr Tan. The cars are valued using a proprietary algorithm that crunches all the numbers before determining its price. AI software also scans images of cars to detect potential problems, in addition to checks by mechanics at Carro.

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