Most entrepreneurs won't fail because of the economy. They won't fail because of competitors, funding, or bad timing. They'll fail because they never asked themselves the questions that actually matter, and by the time reality forces the answer, it's too late. In Part 1 of this 5-part episode series, David Spisak opens with the foundation: five questions designed to expose the truth about your business before the market does it for you. One of them is the same question Kevin O'Leary uses to g...

Matt Leone didn't grow up dreaming about the car business. He grew up watching his Italian immigrant grandfather work three jobs and build houses by hand in Newton, Massachusetts. He watched his aerospace engineer father get laid off when Boeing scrapped a supersonic jet program. He grew up in San Diego, raised by parents who woke up at 4:30 AM to make breakfast and never missed a single sporting event, recital, or graduation. He wanted to be Michael J. Fox in Secret of My Success. He wanted ...

David Spisak walked into a dealership that had nearly 1,000 vehicles listed online. The lot was empty. No salespeople. No tower. No showroom buzz. Just a quiet operation that by every traditional measure shouldn't be working. It's working. In this episode, David takes you inside Carvana's CDJR store in Sacramento for an unscripted, unfiltered walkthrough that challenged assumptions he didn't even know he was carrying. What he found wasn't a gimmick. It wasn't smoke and mirrors. It was somethi...

Most people in automotive have never heard of Brian Ankeny. That's exactly the problem. Brian has spent 21 years inside the industry's most underestimated media company, watching every major shift before it happened. AI search. Autonomous vehicle charging. Tread depth data as a dealership revenue stream. He saw all of it coming, and he's been quietly helping the companies that pay attention build for what's next. This conversation goes places most automotive podcasts won't. We talk about why ...

The letters went out. 97 of them. And buried inside each one is a compliance framework so broad, so technically demanding, that a single sold car, still live on your website three hours later, could cost you half a million dollars. Jim Fitzpatrick sits down with David Spisak, CEO of Disruptive Growth Solutions, and they don't soften it. Sixteen categories of violations. Salespeople's Instagram posts counted as advertising. Third-party listings you don't control triggering fines you can't affo...

Most people never figure out what actually matters until it's too late. This episode is the keynote David delivered at ASOTUCON, and it's the most personal thing he's ever said on a stage. His father walking out. A counselor who told him not to bother. A Navy enlistment at a stoplight that changed everything. The dealership that outsold Mercedes-Benz nationally by 38% with zero advertising. And the boardroom moment involving one single dollar that made him walk away from a seven-figure career...

Over half of the most powerful companies on earth in the year 2000 don't exist anymore. Not struggling. Gone. They had the customers, the capital, the brand. They had everything, except the willingness to question whether what made them great was becoming what would make them irrelevant. Paul Faletti has led NCM Associates, the company that invented the automotive 20 Group, for 17 years. Before that, executive roles at BMW, Maserati, and Jaguar. He came into NCM with an outsider's eye and an ...

Matt Ober helped manage $30 billion. He saw the AI wave coming years before anyone else. Now he's talking about what actually happened behind the scenes. Matt is the Managing Partner at Social Leverage, a seed-stage venture capital firm focused on fintech and vertical AI. Before that, he served as Chief Data Scientists at Third Point, one of the world's most elite hedge funds, and was part of the founding team at WorldQuant Ventures, where he spent six years traveling the globe acquiring data...

Danny Chaves didn't go to college. He didn't have a business plan. He didn't have investors, a mentor, or a safety net. What he had was $400, a couch in his mother's house, and a stubbornness that would quietly build one of the most remarkable service companies in the automotive industry. Today, Danny's Detailed Services processes 125,000 cars a month, employs over 800 people, and generates more than $50 million a year — numbers that would be impressive for any business. This is not an episod...

Frederick Grimm is the co-founder and COO of FIXD — the company behind America's most widely used vehicle diagnostic device with over 4 million units sold. After scanning millions of cars, his team discovered dealerships had a problem they didn't even know existed. He built Appraisal Pro to solve it. Now used by over 1,100 franchise dealerships, it tells any dealer in under 2 minutes the exact mechanical condition and true reconditioning cost of any trade-in. Tune in to find out more! Connect...