Like any young Israeli, I joined the military when I was 18 years old. I had always dreamed of becoming a pilot, and was accepted into the military’s pilot training course. During the screening and training period, the air force realized I wasn’t the kind of guy who was going to follow all the rules and think inside the box like a trained pilot should. With a margin of error of just milliseconds, flying a plane is a rigid and rule-oriented craft. After it was decided that it was too risky to let me fly a plane, I was grounded for a year and told that I had to wait until I got a little bit older to resume my training. I left the military at age 22, graduating as an Officer. I’m 40 years old now, and I still think outside the box and challenge everything possible. I guess I had to give up my dream of being a pilot to be where I am today. Looking back at those days, one could have never guessed where I’d end up or the path I’d take to get there.

It’s actually a funny story how I got into the auto rental business. When we first moved from New York to Arizona, my wife and I purchased a Chevy Suburban for $7,500 and drove it across the country. We parked the suburban at our friend’s business in Tucson, and a week later it got stolen. The insurance company paid out $13,500 for the car. This is when I first realized there was a real difference in prices from East to West. I saw the market opportunity in this discrepancy and decided to capitalize on it. Cars in the West were worth more than cars in the East, so I started buying cars in the East and shipping them out West and selling them for more money.

I was shipping cars in one direction but realized that when the trailers used for transporting the vehicles out West headed back East, they were empty. I didn’t want the vehicles to go back empty so I opened a transportation subsection of my business, shipping cars across the country for those people who had been in Arizona for the winter looking to head back home in the spring. With my transport business, I was able to take advantage of a previously unexplored niche market.

In 1994 I went back to school; I was taking classes at Davis Mountain Air Force Base because I was a little bit older.  Living and going to school in an area with such a young demographic, I started to ask myself why soldiers under the age of 21 could fly 20 million dollar planes but not rent a 300 dollar rental car. Because I already had cars in my inventory, I expanded my business and began renting in the previously untapped under-21 market. My auto rental agency was called AAA Auto Rental, and allowed me to capitalize on any idle inventory I had and increase the scope of my business.

I learned a few lessons about how to make it or break it in the auto rental industry during my time operating AAA Auto Rental. I began to understand even more deeply the importance of providing a service or product that fills a need. After years spent familiarizing myself with the industry and gaining experience in the auto rental space, I came up with a new idea I believed had immense potential. Leaving behind a business that could only go so far, I sold AAA Auto Rental in 1997 and set off in pursuit of my idea.

A good friend of mine was getting an MBA at the University of Arizona. He came to me and told me about a competition at the business school for a start-up internet company and asked if I had any crazy ideas. As a matter of fact, I did. With the increasing popularity of the internet as a means of conducting transactions, I had been thinking about an innovative way to sell cars taking advantage of this advance in technology. I realized the best possible way to sell a car was when it was on rent. Using the internet, you could sell a car to a retail customer without having to take the vehicle off rent and without ever seeing the customer. We submitted our business plan and won the competition. And so, automoti was born.

EBay was growing at the time and looking for partners. I worked on developing automoti.com on eBay motors between 1999 and 2001; we became the largest seller on eBay in our early days. Automoti operated successfully for many years, but September 11^th brought with it a shock to the auto rental business. The rental business got beat up financially as a result of the attacks and all of my customers went out of business. I was in a difficult position, but decided that it was too early to get a big rental company on my radar because most of the rental car inventory was buy-back (guaranteed to be bought back from the factory). I shut down the operations at automoti and pursued another passion I never knew I had.

In 2003, I got into the movie business. My foray into the film world happened purely by chance. I was living in New York City at the time and had gone to see a movie that was opening a block from where I was working on the Upper West Side. The movie was called Dummy, and was about an ex-office worker who becomes a ventriloquist and communicates with the people around him using a dummy. Opening night, and the theater was empty. After the movie, the producer and some of the actors came out to answer questions from the audience (all two of us). I asked the producer why he decided to open a movie catered to a Jewish audience on the eve of Rosh Hashanah in one of the most Jewish neighborhoods in NYC. In reply, the producer asked me, “Can you help?” I went to the movies with a need to be entertained after a hard day’s work and left with a new job.

I worked in movie production between 2003 and 2006 as an executive producer, marketing movies and reveling in my new-found status as a member of the Hollywood elite (kidding! but I did actually have dinner with Clint Eastwood and many others). I helped produce and market movies with Quadrant Entertainment, working on the movies Dummy and How to Seduce Difficult Women.

After a few years’ hiatus, I found my way back into the automotive space.  In 2006, my friend Jeff Schneider opened a Thrifty Rental Car franchisee in Northern New Jersey and asked me if I could help him sell cars on the internet. At the time, the industry was shifting away from buy-back. We decided to raise a little bit of money and resume full-time operation of automoti.com, competing with eBay motors and selling rental cars on the automoti site. The business was very successful, and culminated in the sale of the platform to Hertz in 2009.

During the period of time when I was running automoti, I recognized that in order to have a higher conversion of cars sold you needed to have an original image of the vehicle. This is what was demanded by the customer and therefore required by any successful car rental business.  At the time, my brother was working at Fox Rental Car at LAX, one of my previous clients, and manually taking a picture every time a car came back from rent. Then another guy would do an inspection, marking everything down on a piece of paper. I decided to marry these two tasks and create a system that could do the exact same thing but more accurately and more efficiently.

In 2005 I began development of a patent-pending camera system that can read the odometer, log the amount of gas left in the car, and take photographs of each vehicle from every possible angle. The system’s design is meant to minimize overhead at the rental car company by conducting a fully-automated inspection of each vehicle and closing the rental car contract without using human capital or additional resources. A camera system that can read the odometer, log the amount of gas in the tank, and do a full inspection of a vehicle returning from rent makes the process of closing a rental contract infinitely more manageable.

Recognizing that the business model of the automoti platform sold to Hertz had great potential, I decided to begin working on a new platform. The new business was called Rent2Buy, and was based on the same premise on which I had built automoti: allowing people to try things before they buy them while using the internet as the intermediary eliminates transaction costs and maximizes customer satisfaction. The Rent2Buy e-commerce platform would be all-encompassing, dealing not just in the car rental space but moving into the housing industry and beyond to other smaller but promising markets. Rent2Buy is still in the works today, as we continue to expand all segments of the platform and increase the ease in which people can conduct transactions seamlessly over the internet. You can visit the Rent2Buy site to see what we have to offer or visit the Rent2Buy Blog to learn more about the business model and what’s in store for the future.

Fuel Recyclers LLC is my newest venture. Fuel Recyclers is an environmentally conscious fuel recycling business. We recycle fuel from vehicles being sold at auction, returning from rental, coming off of a lease, or being impounded after an accident. Instead of leaving gasoline sitting in these vehicles, we extract the fuel so that it can be used in a more efficient and productive way. I got involved in the business as an entrepreneur, seeing an opportunity and taking it. It is also in line with my desire to operate more socially conscious and environmentally sustainable businesses.

My entrepreneurial spirit is what keeps me going. I am a father, a husband, a son, a neighbor, a business owner, a consultant, a world traveler, a philanthropist, etc. But I am first, and foremost, an entrepreneur.  Being an entrepreneur is not a profession, it’s a personality. It translates into every aspect of my life, from the way I work, to the way I raise my family, to the way I vacation. I love what I do, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

The author of the piece, Carol Pucci, tells of how she and her husband lent a total of $50 to fund two Bulgarian businesses—one, a woman who sold socks, and a second, a couple that chops wood. When the businesses repaid the loans, Pucci and her husband re-invested the funds with entrepreneurs in Cambodia, Vietnam, Sudan, Afghanistan and Tajikistan. Pucci mentions that the average Kiva loan recipient’s payback rate is surprisingly high: a remarkable 98%.

If you’re not familiar with Kiva organization, I’d get acquainted by reading up on Kiva’s featured entrepreneurs. They’re really a remarkable group of people—and, with the help of just a few donors like you, can be the faces of a better world for developing nations.

I’m a Kiva donor and participant because I really believe small, short-term relationships have lasting effects, and that the Internet is a great facilitator for making those relationships happen. I’ve built my entire business around that idea—rent a product online now, and you may just buy it down the road; offer a small online loan, and you can change the world.

Hi, I know I haven’t been around and posting lately. I’ve been busy with my crazy industry. The minute GM announced they’re potentially going out of business, followed by the auto rental industry, the government jumped in and, with our tax money, bailed them out. But us, the small businesses that create jobs (yes, we’re even hiring) –  We’re all going through a tough time, and I am very tired so I decided to run on 05/01/2009 Gumball.

Don’t pay for dealer overhead.

From the moment you walk through the door, all a dealer is thinking is ”what do I need to do to put you in a car today?” Just like a law firm, dealerships have all the perks of fancy offices with gold-plated doors, expensive furniture and high-end coffee machines for you to sip from. Anything to impress you into buying a new car from them.

However, a new car can lose up to $5000 in value once driven off the lot!

Smart consumers know better than to follow this old path in modern times and a rough economy.

Smart consumers research and buy their cars online with reputable companies like eBay, automoti, etc., saving money and time while not being wined-and-dined into opening their wallets wider than necessary.

Conclusion:

Let dealers pay for overhead. Shop online and pay only  for what you need – your next car.

The Car

Driving from New Jersey to Cape Cod was a 5-hour drive with my wife, 2
kids, the kids’ nanny Heidi and our schnoodle
hybrid dog. Being in the car business, it was easy to decide
on a US-made minivan to carry us all, a Dodge Grand Caravan SXT.

The Tech

Let me give you an idea of how loaded the minivan was on the
road:

• GPS navigation
• XM satellite radio
• 2 (!) DVD players. That’s right, 2. One for each kid.
• A Nintendo DS
• 2 BlackBerries- I have one and my wife has one.
• An iPhone- my kid’s nanny has one.
• 2 laptops with Verizon Wireless AirCards to make sure we
  had constant Internet connections while driving.

The Ride

Thursday afternoon around 3pm we left early for the Cape to beat the traffic. I put the address into the GPS, checked Google Traffic on my cell phone (I love doing that!) and hit the road.

The kids were fighting right away; “lower your volume,” they shouted at each other, even though they both have headphones of course…

In the old days, you had the open road. Now, if you live in the North East, the open road starts at your driveway before you even get to the street. An hour later, we were still stuck in traffic and it seemed like the whole northeast was heading back north.

While driving through Mystic (Connecticut), I got an email from my wife - the one sitting beside me in the passenger seat – saying “let’s stop for pizza.”

I forwarded the email to the nanny in the back seat:

“Heidi, pizza?”

Just another summer vacation drive in this high-tech world of ours.

Now with all the online booking, there is no need to make just one reservation with one specific company. Just go to kayak and with one click see every company’s rate. Book a few reservations and you are good to go. Life after Seinfeld. Thank you, Al Gore, for inventing the internet.

Look at this: