Where did PartsTrader come from?

So PartsTrader originally came out of this little consulting firm called Ecentric.  We were based on Featherston St in Wellington.  The original software was made for an insurance company as a consulting project and hosted solution.  Even back then those of us working on it saw it had potential in the industry way beyond what we’d built. 

Around this time one of those economic potholes we call a recession hit, and Ecentric was just not able to weather it.  So, a small boutique consulting firm got snapped up by a mid-sized consulting firm.  Intergen, owned and operated by Tony Stewart, was the mid-sized consulting firm to buy up Ecentric. 
 
Ecentric staff were made into Intergen staff.  Ecentric placards were replaced with Intergen yellow ones.  Ecentric would soon be fully subsumed as is the case in any buyout.  

Three of us wanted something else.  Rob Cooper, the general manager of Ecentric, Colin Bevan, the solutions architect, and Chris Smith (that’s me), the senior engineer on the PartsTrader product, all three of us wanted to get out of the consulting gig and into a product gig.  So that’s what we did.  Intergen’s Tony Stewart liked the idea a lot when we told him what we were thinking and decided to invest in our bourgeoning venture. 

The notion was simple: We bought the IP to the PartsTrader software, we set up our own product company, and we started turning it into a system which could be used by any repairer, supplier, and insurance carrier. 

Now, we didn’t have much in the way of working capital.  We had enough to scrape by, but that was exactly it.  We were scraping by.  Lots of enthusiasm, not a lot of coin, as the startup joke goes.   
 
Intergen were generous in offering us a corner of office space for free.  It was, admittedly, a very small corner. 

We had a desk and two chairs.  Rob had a laptop.  I had a desktop.  Colin only came in once or twice a month to keep us on our toes and keep us on point. 

Our desk was actually a folding table.  A rather…wobbly folding table.  If I typed for more than a couple sentences, it started to feel like I was in an earthquake.   Rob was out doing the sales guy thing back then, so he was out of the office most of the time.  When he did come in, we had to share that folding table.  Imagine two grown men with their elbows tucked at their sides so as not to elbow one another they were so close, both of them swaying along with the folding table. 
 
This didn’t carry on too long.  We got desks within a couple months.  And we got some first-rate assistance from the consultant Intergen assigned as part of Tony’s investment. 

Scott Mason came from Intergen to work for a couple months with us to get some features out the door, get PartsTrader ready to be rolled out wide.  Scott loved the work, and the rest of us loved how much Scott brought to the party. 

In short order, Scott resigned from Intergen to come work for PartsTrader as an employee and as one of the founders.   

PartsTrader would become the only major auto parts marketplace in NZ.  We would be working with almost all the major insurers, repairers, and suppliers.  We got up to seven staff, including some contractors for db work and infrastructure. 

We thought we’d made it. 

Then, on a total whim, Rob Cooper went to an auto conference in Europe.  We didn’t know exactly why, nor do I think Rob 100% knew why he went. 

There, Rob met someone from a big insurance carrier in the US.  They got to talking, Rob told them about what we’d built, and the person asked Rob and Colin to fly to their HQ in the US to share the PartsTrader model with folks there.  Apparently, they’d been looking for such a solution and were looking for someone to build it. 

One meeting led to another, and in the end, we made our pitch along with some other (read bigger) contenders.  We never thought we’d get it.   A tiny NZ startup landing a contract with one of the US’s largest insurance carriers seemed a long shot at best. 

And then we landed it. 

Rob and Scott flew to the US and moved into a hotel for a couple months, all the while compiling the required features of the new PartsTrader US product with our new insurance partner.  Meanwhile, Chris and co. would stay in NZ and start ramping up staffing, including many contractors from Intergen and other tech firms (a large number of whom would come to work for us full-time in short order), PCs, servers, desks, the works. 

We were cutting code even before Scott and Rob were back in NZ. 

Chris Smith (Employee 001)

Solutions Architect, PartsTrader