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About CarEdge.com

CarEdge.com Logo

CarEdge.com came about in a very unique and unusual way. Two individuals with very different backgrounds, from separate parts of the country, and who had never met before, decided to team up to create CarEdge.com. The founders recognized that the average car shopper was being presented with an inferior online vehicle shopping experience, and that consumers were generally focused on the wrong thing - the purchase price - instead of the vehicle's current and future value.

The founders' goal in forming the company, was to create a website that served two primary purposes. Firstly, it would be an automotive site that did not specifically help dealers sell cars, but instead, one that focused on helping consumers buy cars. Although the difference seems subtle, most car shopping sites are created to serve the needs of the dealers (advertise their vehicles), and are not focused on finding consumers the right car for them. On most sites, consumers are simply asked for their zip code, and preferred make and model, and they are presented with vehicles that the paying dealers want you to see. They do so simply by competing on price, with little regard as to what happens to their customers after the sale.

This leads to the second primary purpose of CarEdge.com, which is having the consumer recognize that the purchase price of their new car or truck is but one piece of the cost of owning a vehicle. Knowing how much that car will depreciate, what it will cost to insure, as well as maintain and operate, are equally important, if not more so. With that, the founders of CarEdge.com want car shoppers to better understand the total cost of owning a vehicle over its lifetime, not just to focus on the best purchase price. CarEdge.com wants you to understand that buying a car or truck is like making an investment, and that you will want to maximize your investment, or at least minimize the downside of such.

Recognizing this customer-focused void in the marketplace, the founders have launched CarEdge.com to provide consumers with the tools and analytics that they need to make informed, educated vehicle purchasing decisions. They aspire to make CarEdge.com the advocate for car and truck shoppers, and hope that CarEdge.com becomes their ally as they venture out in search of their new set of wheels.

Our Founders

CarEdge.com Founders: Scott Baker and Jeremy Hepler

Scott Baker (pictured left)

Co-founder and President

LinkedIn.com/in/scotttbaker17

Scott became captivated by the auto industry at an early age, working as a parking valet at a local restaurant. Upon graduation from college, Scott pursued his interests, and began his career at Ford Motor Company, where he managed dealer territories across Texas and Oklahoma, learning the auto business at the ground level. After logging thousands of miles across the South and distributing millions in F-150s, Explorers and Mustangs, Scott earned his MBA from Dartmouth and began a new career in the investment management field with Goldman Sachs. Over the span of 25 years, Scott personally managed the financial affairs of some of the country's wealthiest families, and became well-known in the financial industry. In addition to Goldman Sachs, Scott has held senior positions at Morgan Stanley, Citi, and led a start-up trust company that grew to over $10 billion in assets, and was named the best trust company in the country. In his spare time, Scott also became a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA), a Certified Financial Planner (CFP), and writes e-commerce patent applications.

In the summer of 2010, while searching online for a used car, Scott realized that the ways in which auto listings sites presented their vehicles to online shoppers was not efficient or user-friendly, as the sites were designed to help dealers, not necessarily consumers. With that, Scott had some thoughts on how to fix the problem, and penned a 120-page patent application with over a 130 ideas on how to better display car shopping data in a more helpful and thoughtful manner.

Today, Scott's multiple patent applications have either been approved, or are pending, and Scott is hopeful that his patent ideas, as well as his financial management background, can help educate and inform auto buyers through CarEdge.com.


Jeremy Hepler (pictured right)

Co-founder and Automotive Data Scientist

LinkedIn.com/in/jeremy-hepler-48b399190

Jeremy has been working in technology for more than 20 years, spanning a broad variety of positions, from web developer at a local media company, to a systems administrator for the federal government in a secure underground facility. For the last decade, Jeremy has focused on the oil and gas sector, developing software and business analytic tools for energy-related management teams. Jeremy also launched his own MapAdmin.com platform for use by energy companies that provides a unique spatial-first approach to managing their data and assets efficiently.

While building reports that analyzed and forecast well production, Jeremy recognized a similarity between the production decline of an oil or gas well, and the value of an automobile over time. Both wells and autos would lose value quickly initially, with much steeper rates of depreciation early on, but becoming less so with the passage of time. Being a self-described geek, Jeremy chatted with some of his math buddies, to see if he could turn his findings into something usable and practical in the automotive field. What Jeremy discovered, is that similar to oil and gas wells with varying diminishing productivity, vehicles generally lost value in a similar fashion, but at greatly varying rates.

With Jeremy's software development expertise, and his knowledge of how vehicle values decline, Jeremy began researching and analyzing the depreciation rates of over 200 vehicle makes and models. After much number-crunching, Jeremy launched the website UsedFirst.com in 2017, which provided users the ability to compare and contrast the depreciation rates of hundreds of vehicles on a relative timeline and efficient basis. Today, UsedFirst has been transformed into CarEdge.com, and Jeremy's work is at the foundation of today's site. His unique research enables him to regularly shop for family vehicles, attempting to find the best deal, so that he can sell them a year or two later for the same (or close to) the same price he paid.