Kavak strategically owns its used car warranties, a typically outsourced function. This choice provides direct access to data at the moment of vehicle failure—the most critical learning opportunity to improve its inspection, reconditioning, and pricing algorithms for future inventory.
In markets like Latin America, founders cannot rely on existing infrastructure. Success requires creating foundational systems like payments and logistics from scratch. This means building several parallel businesses just to enable the core consumer-facing product to function effectively.
Instead of a country-by-country rollout, Kavak expands city by city, targeting dense urban areas with multi-billion dollar markets and significant problems like high fraud and low financing. This allows them to master the playbook in one complex environment before replicating it.
Citing a powerful statistic, Kavak's CEO argues that true, generational value is created in the long run, after the 15-year mark. This mindset encourages founders to focus on compounding, incremental improvements and relentlessly removing user friction, rather than chasing short-term valuation spikes.
Kavak's CEO credits moving 14 times as a child for his ability to handle startup volatility. This experience taught him that fortunes can change overnight, both for better and worse, mirroring the entrepreneurial journey and preventing him from getting too attached to either highs or lows.
To combat founder stagnation, Kavak's CEO undertakes a rigorous annual exercise of "firing" himself. He defines the ideal CEO profile for the company's next phase and then objectively assesses if he can evolve by letting go of old habits and personas to fulfill that role.
Kavak replaced underutilized, employee-facing AI tools with autonomous agents now handling over 90% of customer interactions. This deliberate transition required a painful year of flat growth, as the company chose to absorb short-term performance dips to build a scalable, agent-first future.