UNITED STATES

SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION

Washington, D.C. 20549

 

FORM 10-K

 

(Mark One)

For the fiscal year ended December 31, 2018

OR

Commission File Number 001-38233

 

CarGurus, Inc.

(Exact name of Registrant as specified in its Charter)

 

 

Registrant’s telephone number, including area code: (617) 354-0068

 

Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(b) of the Act:

 

Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(g) of the Act: None

 

Indicate by check mark if the Registrant is a well-known seasoned issuer, as defined in Rule 405 of the Securities Act. YES  ☒   NO  ☐ 

Indicate by check mark if the Registrant is not required to file reports pursuant to Section 13 or 15(d) of the Act. YES  ☐    NO  ☒

Indicate by check mark whether the Registrant: (1) has filed all reports required to be filed by Section 13 or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the Registrant was required to file such reports), and (2) has been subject to such filing requirements for the past 90 days. YES  ☒    NO  ☐

Indicate by check mark whether the Registrant has submitted electronically every Interactive Data File required to be submitted pursuant to Rule 405 of Regulation S-T (§232.405 of this chapter) during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the Registrant was required to submit such files). YES  ☒    NO  ☐

Indicate by check mark if disclosure of delinquent filers pursuant to Item 405 of Regulation S-K (§229.405) is not contained herein, and will not be contained, to the best of Registrant’s knowledge, in definitive proxy or information statements incorporated by reference in Part III of this Form 10-K or any amendment to this Form 10-K.  ☐

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a large accelerated filer, an accelerated filer, a non-accelerated filer, smaller reporting company, or an emerging growth company. See the definitions of “large accelerated filer,” “accelerated filer,” “smaller reporting company,” and “emerging growth company” in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act.

 

If an emerging growth company, indicate by check mark if the registrant has elected not to use the extended transition period for complying with any new or revised financial accounting standards provided pursuant to Section 13(a) of the Exchange Act.  ☐

Indicate by check mark whether the Registrant is a shell company (as defined in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act). YES  ☐    NO  ☒

The aggregate market value of the registrant’s Class A common stock par value $0.001 per share held by non-affiliates of the registrant based on the closing price of the registrant’s common stock as reported on the Nasdaq Global Market on June 30, 2018 was $1,590,103,543. Shares of voting and non-voting stock held by executive officers, directors and holders of more than 5% of the outstanding stock have been excluded from this calculation because such persons or institutions may be deemed affiliates. This determination of affiliate status is not a conclusive determination for other purposes.

As of February 22, 2019, the registrant had 90,087,775 shares of Class A common stock, and 20,702,084 shares of Class B common stock, par value $0.001 per share, outstanding.

DOCUMENTS INCORPORATED BY REFERENCE

Portions of the registrant’s definitive Proxy Statement for its 2019 Annual Meeting of Stockholders are incorporated by reference in Part III of this Annual Report on Form 10-K. Such Proxy Statement will be filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission within 120 days after the end of the fiscal year to which this report relates. Except with respect to information specifically incorporated by reference in this Form 10-K, the Proxy Statement is not deemed to be filed as part of this Form 10-K.

 

 

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Table of Contents

 

 

 

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SPECIAL NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

This Annual Report on Form 10-K contains forward‑looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws, which statements involve substantial risks and uncertainties. Forward‑looking statements generally relate to future events or our future financial or operating performance. In some cases, you can identify forward‑looking statements because they contain words such as “anticipates,” “believes,” “could,” “estimates,” “expects,” “intends,” “likely,” “may,” “might,” “plans,” “potential,” “predicts,” “projects,” “seeks,” “should,” “target,” “will,” “would,” or similar expressions and the negatives of those terms. Forward-looking statements contained in this report include, but are not limited to, statements about:

You should not rely upon forward‑looking statements as predictions of future events. We have based the forward‑looking statements contained in this report primarily on our current expectations and projections about future events and trends that we believe may affect our business, financial condition, operating results, and growth prospects. The outcome of the events described in these forward‑looking statements is subject to risks, uncertainties, and other factors described in the section titled “Risk Factors” and elsewhere in this report. Moreover, we operate in a very competitive and rapidly changing environment. New risks and uncertainties emerge from time to time, and it is not possible for us to predict all risks and uncertainties that could have an impact on the forward‑looking statements contained in this report. Further, our forward‑looking statements do not reflect the potential impact of any future acquisitions, mergers, dispositions, joint ventures, or investments we may make. We cannot assure you that the results, events, and circumstances reflected in the forward‑looking statements will be achieved or occur, and actual results, events, or circumstances could differ materially from those described in the forward‑looking statements.

The forward‑looking statements made in this report relate only to events as of the date on which the statements are made. We undertake no obligation to update any forward‑looking statements made in this report to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this report or to reflect new information or the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as required by law.

 

 

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PART I

Item 1. Business.

BUSINESS

Overview

CarGurus is a global, online automotive marketplace connecting buyers and sellers of new and used cars. Using proprietary technology, search algorithms, and innovative data analytics, we believe we are building the world’s most trusted and transparent automotive marketplace and creating a differentiated automotive search experience for consumers. Our trusted marketplace empowers users with unbiased third‑party validation on pricing and dealer reputation as well as other information that aids them in finding “Great Deals from Top-Rated Dealers.” Our selection of car listings provides the largest number of car listings available on any of the major U.S. online automotive marketplaces. In addition to the United States, we operate online marketplaces in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and Spain.

A core principle of our marketplace is transparency. For consumers considering used vehicles, we aggregate vehicle inventory from dealers and apply our proprietary analysis to generate a Deal Rating as one of: Great Deal, Good Deal, Fair Deal, High Priced, or Overpriced. Deal Rating illustrates how competitive a listing is compared to similar cars sold in the same region in recent history. We determine Deal Rating principally on the basis of both our proprietary Instant Market Value, or IMV, algorithm, which determines the market value of any given vehicle in a local market, and Dealer Rating, a measure of a dealer’s reputation as determined by reviews of that dealer from our user community. By sorting organic search results based on a used car’s Deal Rating, we enable consumers to find the most relevant car for their needs. For new cars, we help our users understand deal quality by providing price analysis and our Dealer Rating. We also provide our users information historically not widely available, such as Price History, Time on Site, and Vehicle History. We believe this approach brings greater transparency, trust, and efficiency to a consumer’s car research and buying process, leading to higher engagement and a more informed consumer who is better prepared to purchase at the dealership.

Our large, engaged, and predominantly mobile user base presents an attractive audience of in‑market consumers for our dealers. By connecting dealers with more informed consumers, we believe we provide dealers with an efficient customer acquisition channel and attractive returns on their marketing spend with us. Dealers can list their inventory in our marketplace for free with our Basic Listing product or with a paid subscription to our Enhanced and Featured Listing products. Dealers with our Basic Listing product receive anonymized email connections and access to a subset of the tools on our Dealer Dashboard at no cost. Dealers with a paid subscription receive connections with consumers that are not anonymous and can be made through a wider variety of methods, including phone calls, email, managed text and chat, links to the dealers’ website, and map directions to dealerships. Dealers with our Enhanced and Featured Listing products are able to display their dealer name, address, and dealership information on their listings to gain brand recognition, which promotes walk‑in traffic to the dealer. We also provide paying dealers with full access to our Dealer Dashboard, including inventory pricing tools informed by real‑time market conditions, which helps them more effectively price, merchandise, and sell their cars. Our success with dealers is evidenced by the number of paying dealers in our U.S. marketplace. Our U.S. marketplace had 27,534 paying dealers as of December 31, 2018 compared to 25,122 and 20,349 as of December 31, 2017 and December 31, 2016, respectively.

Our scaled online marketplace model drives powerful network effects. The industry‑leading inventory selection offered by our dealers attracts a large and engaged consumer audience. The value of robust connections to this audience incentivizes dealers to purchase our Enhanced or Featured Listing products. Having more paying dealers provides consumers with more dealer information and methods to contact them. More consumers and connections drive greater value to paying dealers on our platform. Driven by these network effects, we continue to amass more data, which we use to continuously improve our search algorithms, the accuracy of Deal Ratings, our user experience, and, ultimately, the quality of the connections between consumers and dealers.

We generate marketplace subscription revenue from dealers through subscriptions to our products including our Listing (which includes features and enhancements such as Delivery), Dealer Display, Dealer Search Engine Marketing, Social Media Advertising, and Retargeting products. We also generate advertising and other revenue from auto manufacturers and other auto‑related brand advertisers. Our rapid revenue growth and financial performance over the last several years exemplifies the strength of our marketplace. We generated revenue of $454.1 million in 2018, $316.9 million in 2017, and $198.1 million in 2016, representing year-over-year increases of 43% in 2018 and 60% in 2017. In 2018, we generated net income of $65.2 million and our Adjusted EBITDA, a non-GAAP financial measure, was $49.0 million, compared to net income of $13.2 million and Adjusted EBITDA of $24.1 million in 2017 and net income of $6.5 million and Adjusted EBITDA of $11.0 million in 2016. See “Selected Consolidated Financial Data — Adjusted EBITDA” for more information regarding our use of Adjusted EBITDA and a reconciliation of Adjusted EBITDA to our net income (loss).

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Consumer Challenges

Upon determining what type of car to purchase, consumers face many questions:

In answering these questions, consumers historically had limited access to unbiased information on specific vehicles, car pricing, and dealer reputation. Every used car is unique, and so for consumers searching for used cars, it is difficult to aggregate the relevant inventory of available cars across dealers, a difficulty exacerbated by the lack of consistency in the way that dealers characterize a car’s attributes. Generally, dealers had more information about car prices than consumers did, as consumers had limited resources and tools to determine an appropriate price. Selecting the right dealer was also challenging for consumers as dealer reputations were historically based primarily on word‑of‑mouth. The lack of clear, unbiased, transparent information made it difficult for consumers to effectively compare vehicles, find the vehicle that best suited their needs and transact with well-regarded dealers.

Dealer Challenges

The economics of dealerships depend largely on sales volume, gross margin, and customer acquisition efficiency. To achieve a high return on their marketing investments, dealers must find in‑market consumers; yet because car purchases are infrequent, only a small percentage of consumers are shopping for a car at any given point in time. Traditional marketing channels, including television, radio, and newspaper, can effectively target locally but are inefficient in reaching the small percentage of consumers who are actively in the market to buy a car. In addition, used car pricing is fluid because it is based on rapidly shifting supply and demand dynamics. Dealers need to find ways to manage constantly changing inventory and adjust pricing strategies to adapt to frequently changing market conditions.

Our Strengths

We believe that our competitive advantages are based on the following key strengths:

Trusted Marketplace for Consumers.  We provide consumers with unbiased information, intuitive search results, and other tools that empower them to find “Great Deals from Top-Rated Dealers.” We offer the largest online selection of new and used car listings of any major U.S. online automotive marketplace. We aggregate and analyze these listings using proprietary technology and data along with innovative data analytics to create a differentiated automotive search experience for consumers. We believe that providing a transparent consumer experience with unbiased information has instilled greater trust in us among our users, helping us become the most visited online automotive marketplace in the United States according to Comscore. In 2018, we experienced over 91.8 million average monthly sessions in the United States. See “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations — Key Business Metrics” for how we define average monthly sessions. We believe this user traffic, an indicator of consumer satisfaction and engagement, is critical to our marketplace success and will continue to strengthen our market position.

Proprietary Search Algorithms and Data‑Driven Approach.  We have built an extensive repository of data on cars, prices, dealers, and the interactions between consumers and dealers that is the result of over eight years of data aggregation and regression modeling. Our proprietary search algorithms and data analytics allow us to use this valuable data to bring greater transparency to our platform. The primary product of this analysis is our determination of a used car’s IMV, which, in addition to Dealer Rating, drives our Deal Rating. We calculate IMV by applying more than 20 ranking signals and more than 100 normalization rules to millions of data points, including the make, model, trim, features, condition, history, geographic location, and mileage of the car. The growing volume of connections between consumers and dealers on our platform allows us to continually improve the accuracy of our IMV, Dealer Ratings, and used car search results sorted by Deal Rating. We apply the knowledge gained from analyzing this ever‑growing data set to build new features for our consumers and products for our dealers and to more efficiently launch marketplaces in new countries.

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Strong Value Proposition to Dealers.  We believe that our marketplace offers an efficient customer acquisition channel for dealers, helping them achieve attractive returns on their marketing spend with us. We provide our dealer base with connections to prospective car buyers; most of these connections have historically been for used cars. We define connections as interactions between consumers and dealers in our marketplace through phone calls, email, managed text and chat, and clicks to access the dealer’s website or map directions to the dealership. We provide all dealers with tools that are informed by real‑time market conditions that help them merchandise and sell their cars, and our paying dealers get access to additional valuable information from our Pricing Tool and Market Analysis tool. Our strong value proposition to the dealer community is evidenced by our 23% growth in average annual revenue per subscribing dealer, or AARSD, in the United States in 2018 compared to 2017.

Network Effects Driven by Scale.  Having engaged with the majority of dealers and built one of the largest consumer audiences among automotive marketplaces in the United States, we believe that our scale creates powerful network effects that reinforce the competitive strength of our business model. Our large consumer audience increases our appeal to dealers and incentivizes more dealers to subscribe to our Enhanced or Featured Listing products to access the numerous benefits unavailable to non‑paying dealers. Having more paying dealers in our marketplace provides consumers with more dealer information and methods to contact those dealers. More consumers and connections drive greater value and a higher return to paying dealers’ marketing spend on our platform. Driven by these network effects, we continue to amass more data, which we use to further strengthen our search algorithms, the utility of analysis complementing each listing, the quality of our user experience, and the value of connections between consumers and dealers.

Attractive Financial Model.  We have a strong track record of revenue growth, profitability, and capital efficiency. We generated revenue of $454.1 million in 2018, $316.9 million in 2017, and $198.1 million in 2016, representing year-over-year increases of 43% in 2018 and 60% in 2017.  A significant portion of our revenue is recurring due to the subscription nature of our products. In 2018, 2017, and 2016, dealer marketplace Listing and Dealer Display advertising subscription revenue, and Search Engine Marketing, Social Media Advertising and Retargeting, which we consider to be recurring revenue, comprised 89%, 89% and 86% of total revenue, respectively. Furthermore, our revenue base is highly diversified due to the fragmented nature of the automotive dealer industry. We also have been able to grow and invest in our future growth while improving profitability due to the operating leverage in our business model. On a consolidated basis, while our revenue grew 43% in 2018 and 60% in 2017, our Adjusted EBITDA margin expanded to 11% in 2018 from 8% in 2017 and from 6% in 2016. In the United States, which is our most developed market, we grew our revenue by 42% in 2018 and 57% in 2017 while increasing our income from operations to $58.4 million in 2018 from $41.6 million in 2017 and $27.5 million in 2016.

Founder‑Led Management Team with Culture of Innovation.  Our founder, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman, Langley Steinert, co‑founded and was previously chairman of TripAdvisor, an online marketplace for travel‑related content based on the mission of using technology and a data‑driven approach to provide transparency for consumers’ travel planning. Led by Mr. Steinert and a management team with extensive experience guiding technology companies in evolving industries, we bring the same commitment to fostering a culture of innovation and delivering data-driven transparency to the automotive market.

Our Products

Consumer Marketplace

We provide consumers an online automotive marketplace where they can search for new and used car listings from our dealers, as well as sell their car in our U.S. marketplace. Through our marketplace, we provide consumers with information that helps them find the most relevant car for their needs. A user accesses our U.S. marketplace through our desktop or mobile‑optimized website at cargurus.com or by using our mobile applications. Most users specify whether they are searching for used, certified pre‑owned, or new cars and then provide their desired vehicle make and model and their zip code.

Used and Certified Pre‑Owned Cars

Using our proprietary search algorithms, we immediately display the search results, ranked by Deal Rating, on a search results page, or SRP. Nearly every used car listing in our marketplace is assigned one of five Deal Ratings: Great Deal, Good Deal, Fair Deal, High Priced, or Overpriced. Deal Rating illustrates how competitive a listing is compared to similar cars sold in the same region in recent history. A listing’s Deal Rating is based primarily upon the IMV of the vehicle and the Dealer Rating of the dealer.

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Instant Market Value.  IMV is a proprietary algorithm that determines the market value of a used vehicle in a local market and is a key input for determining a vehicle’s Deal Rating. The IMV algorithm is the product of over eight years of regression modeling utilizing more than seven million used car data points. IMV takes into account a number of factors, including comparable currently listed and previously sold used cars in the local market and vehicle details including make, model, trim, year, mileage, options, and vehicle history. Our algorithm uses more than 20 ranking signals and more than 100 normalization rules that distill unstructured data from hundreds of sources across thousands of dealers.

Dealer Ratings.  Dealer Ratings are derived from user‑generated content from our users’ experiences with dealers with whom they have connected. To promote high‑quality reviews, we require that a user have interacted with the dealer on our site to submit a review. We believe this requirement, together with additional qualification standards, results in a more valuable Dealer Rating. Dealer Rating is an important component of a listing’s Deal Rating and as a result can impact the organic search position of a listing.

Search Results Page.  In addition to each car’s Deal Rating, our SRP provides users with other useful information, including the difference between the listing price and the IMV that we have determined for the car, Time on Site, mileage, Dealer Rating, and, for paying dealers, dealer location. We provide in‑depth search filters, including price, mileage, trim, color, options, condition, body style, miles per gallon, seating capacity, vehicle ownership and usage history, seller type, and days on market, among others, which we believe deliver the most comprehensive search capability among major U.S. online automotive marketplaces. We also provide our users with additional features to aid their search, including similar vehicle recommendations, side‑by‑side vehicle comparisons, expert reviews, and user rankings. Our platform also gives users the ability to save searches and receive alerts that keep them informed of relevant developments in the market, including newly available inventory and price changes to cars they are monitoring.

Vehicle Detail Page.  If a user clicks on one of the listings on the SRP, the user is taken to that listing’s vehicle detail page, or VDP. VDPs are designed to provide extensive photos and a comprehensive description of the vehicle, dealer name, address, and dealership information for paying dealers, detailed dealer reviews, methods to contact the dealer for paying dealers, payment calculators, and helpful information about the vehicle, including:

New Cars

Search results for new car listings are sorted by price of inventory matching the user’s search, with the lowest priced listings sorted first. Our new car VDPs include our Dealer Rating and many of the other features of our used car listings, such as Price History and Time on Site. Deal Rating is not applicable to new car listings because it utilizes data not relevant to new cars. Instead, we analyze data on manufacturers’ suggested retail prices, or MSRPs, and recent sales of similar new vehicles, accounting for trade-ins, incentives, and other factors that can affect the price of a new car, to provide users with comparative price information.

Sell My Car

We also allow our consumer users to list their cars for free in our marketplace. Our Sell My Car offering enables individual car owners to easily merchandise their vehicles, determine an appropriate selling price with our proprietary price guidance, and manage their listings and communications with prospective buyers among our audience. We offer services to facilitate securing financing, processing payment, titling, and other aspects of the private-sale transaction. If a car is sold using these transaction-facilitation services, we collect a fee from the selling consumer.

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Dealer Marketplace

Our marketplace connects dealers to a large audience of informed and engaged consumers. We offer three types of marketplace Listing products to dealers: Basic Listing, which is free, and Enhanced or Featured Listing, each of which requires a paid subscription. We price our Enhanced and Featured Listing products as a monthly, quarterly, semiannual, or annual subscription based on the dealer’s inventory size, region, and our assessment of the return on investment, or ROI, our solution will provide them.

Dealer Dashboard

Basic, Enhanced, and Featured Listing dealers all have access to the following Dealer Dashboard features and tools:

Enhanced and Featured Listing dealers also have access to the following additional features and tools:

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Dealer Digital Marketing and Customer Acquisition Products

In addition to listing cars in our marketplace through our Listing products, we also provide all dealers with a web widget that allows them to place Deal Rating Badges, which show our Deal Rating for cars that have been rated as a Great Deal, Good Deal, or Fair Deal, on their own website. Our Deal Rating serves as trusted, third‑party validation on their website.

We offer Enhanced and Featured Listing dealers the following additional advertising and customer acquisition products and enhancements:

Auto Manufacturer and Other Advertiser Products

Our platform offers auto manufacturers and others the ability to purchase display advertising on our site to execute targeted marketing strategies:

Marketing

Our marketing initiatives aim to drive brand awareness and engagement among consumers and dealers and to position us as a trusted online automotive marketplace.

Consumer Marketing

We have built our audience on the strength of our user experience, and we remain focused on delivering an engaging consumer marketplace. The strength of the consumer experience that we offer is one of our most powerful marketing tools. By providing an intuitive search experience in our marketplace and relevant content, updates, and tools to consumers during their car search, we believe that the users who comprise our large and engaged audience provide informal endorsements to other consumers, more powerful than most marketing messages.

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Historically, our consumer marketing efforts have been focused primarily on algorithmic traffic acquisition. We employ a team of engineers and data scientists that optimizes our user acquisition through search engines, social media, and other digital marketing channels and has tested over 1 billion keywords on various search engines. We believe our expertise in this area constitutes a competitive advantage over less sophisticated competitors and those who outsource these capabilities.

We augment our marketing efforts with brand‑building investments in broadcast media, such as television and online video. Our brand awareness is currently lower than many other major U.S. online automotive marketplaces in the United States, despite our large monthly audience and high user engagement. We believe that as a result of our trusted product, audience engagement, and relatively low brand awareness, we are well‑positioned to strengthen our brand by continuing to invest in broadcast media.

Our vehicle listing data, on‑site user behavior, connections between consumers and dealers, and opinion data from our users create significant opportunities for us to develop and publish car shopping insights. We consistently gain earned media coverage in national, regional, and trade press outlets as well as social channels by leveraging our proprietary data to inform newsworthy content.

Dealer Marketing

The primary goals of our dealer marketing initiatives are to acquire dealers not yet in our marketplace, convert non‑paying dealers into paying dealers, retain our existing paying dealers, and expand annual subscription revenues from our paying dealers. Our dealer marketing efforts aim to:

Sales

Our sales team is responsible for bringing dealers onto our marketplace as paying or non‑paying dealers. We have built an efficient inside sales and account management team of over 300 employees worldwide who sell our marketplace products to franchise and independent dealers. We have built a field sales team that works with strategic franchise and national dealership groups in large metropolitan areas. In addition, we have advertising sales employees based in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Detroit, Michigan; Los Angeles, California; and certain foreign locations.

We have a comprehensive dealer account management process to assist dealers in becoming successful in our marketplace. We assign a Customer Success Associate to every new paying dealer to assist with onboarding and integration with any relevant software systems. The designated Customer Success Associate spends time educating dealers on a range of topics, including effectively using the Dealer Dashboard and tracking sales, and measuring ROI for their marketing spend. After the onboarding period, a Dealer Relations Account Manager is designated to assist the dealer in utilizing our tools and maximizing ROI from our offerings, including optimizing inventory acquisition, effectively pricing vehicles, vehicle merchandising, and keeping inventory up to date with complete vehicle information. We believe this active communication with our dealers fosters customer satisfaction and increases dealer and customer retention.

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Culture and Employees

Our company culture has developed out of our data‑driven and innovative approach to the automotive market. We leverage data to drive innovation across all facets of our business and continuously optimize our products and processes to serve our consumers, dealers, advertisers, and partners. Our approach emphasizes original thought, impact, and collaboration across our organization, and we recognize and award employees who drive positive impact across these constituencies. We encourage collaboration across our entire workforce and invest in creating a work environment that facilitates partnership among our employees. In that spirit, we have identified our core values as follows:

We have won a number of awards recognizing our strong culture, including Boston Business Journal’s “Best Places to Work” for four years in a row from 2015 to 2018, Boston Globe’s “Top Place to Work” for four of the past five years in 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2018 and the Mass TLC Company of the Year award in 2018.

As of December 31, 2018, we had 732 full‑time employees, 47 of whom were based outside the United States. None of our employees is represented by a labor union or covered by a collective bargaining agreement. We have not experienced any work stoppages, and we consider our relations with our employees to be good.

Technology and Product Development

We are a technology company focused on innovative, actionable data analysis. We design our mobile and web products to create an unbiased, transparent experience for both consumers and dealers. We believe in rapid development and frequent updates and have internal tools and automation that allow us to efficiently evolve our products. Our software is built using a combination of internally developed software, third‑party software and services, and open source software.

Our Search Technology

Our search and ranking technology is served by a proprietary in‑memory search index solution that is scalable, fast, and extensible, allowing us to expand more easily into new markets, as demonstrated by our international marketplace launches. We have highly flexible interfaces that allow dealers to add their inventory to our index without changing data or formats, enabling us to quickly integrate hundreds of inventory sources with minimal effort and easily support inventory growth.

Our Mobile Technology

We have designed our marketplace to appeal to mobile users by developing our products with a mobile‑first mindset. All of our search results pages use a single‑page application type approach to eliminate page reloads and improve responsiveness. We also use techniques, including predictive pre‑fetching and infinite scrolling, to load content onto a user’s mobile device more efficiently.

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Our Integrations

We make available several application program interfaces and web widgets that integrate with customer relationship management and inventory management solutions, among other platforms. These integrations allow dealers to incorporate designated data and tools into the fabric of their marketing and customer engagement strategies. For example, our Deal Rating Badges are used on over one thousand websites and allow our Deal Rating feature to be promoted across the internet.

Infrastructure

Our development servers and U.S. website are hosted at third-party data centers near Boston, Massachusetts. Our European websites are hosted on a third-party cloud computing service near London, England. We use third-party content distribution networks to cache and serve many portions of our sites at locations across the globe. We monitor and test at the application, host, network, and full site levels to maintain availability and promote performance. We use third-party cloud computing services for many data processing jobs and backup/recovery services.

Competition

We face competition to attract consumers and paying dealers to our marketplace and to attract advertisers to purchase our advertising products and services. Our competitors offer various marketplaces, products, and services that compete with us. Some of these competitors include:

Competition for Consumers and Dealers

We compete for consumer visits with other online automotive marketplaces, free listing services, general search engines, and dealers’ websites. We compete for consumers primarily on the basis of the quality of the consumer experience. We believe we compete favorably on user experience due to the number of our vehicle listings, the unbiased transparency of the information we provide on cars, prices, and dealers, the intuitive nature of our user interface, and our leading mobile user experience, among other factors.

We compete for dealers’ marketing spend with offline customer acquisition channels, other online automotive marketplaces, dealers’ own customer acquisition efforts on search engines, and other internet sites that attract consumers searching for vehicles. We compete primarily on the basis of the ROI that our marketplace provides. We believe we compete favorably due to our large user audience, high user engagement, and the volume and quality of connections we provide to well‑informed consumers, which results in an attractive ROI for dealers.

Competition for Advertisers

We compete for a share of advertisers’ total marketing budgets against media sites, websites dedicated to helping consumers shop for cars, major internet portals, search engines, and social media sites, among others. We also compete for a share of advertisers’ overall marketing budgets with traditional media, such as television, radio, magazines, newspapers, automotive guide publications, billboards, and other offline advertising channels. We compete for advertising spend based on the marketing ROI that our marketplace provides. We believe we compete favorably due to our large user audience size, high user engagement, and the effectiveness and relevance of our advertising products.

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Intellectual Property

We protect our intellectual property through a combination of patents, copyrights, trademarks, service marks, domain names, trade secret protections, confidentiality procedures, and contractual restrictions.

We have three pending U.S. patent applications. These applications cover proprietary technology that relates to various functionalities on our platform, generally in connection with pricing, ranking and detecting fraud in online listings. We intend to pursue additional patent protection to the extent we believe it would be beneficial to our competitive position.

We have a number of registered and unregistered trademarks. We registered “CarGurus,” the CarGurus logo, the CG logo, and related marks, as trademarks in the United States and certain other jurisdictions. We pursue additional trademark registrations to the extent we believe doing so would be beneficial to our competitive position.

We are the registered holder of several domestic and international domain names that include “CarGurus” and variations of our name.

In addition to the protection provided by our intellectual property rights, we enter into confidentiality and proprietary rights agreements with our employees and relevant consultants, contractors, and business partners. We control the use of our proprietary technology and intellectual property through provisions in contracts with our customers and partners and our general and product-specific terms of use on our websites.

Regulatory

Various aspects of our business are, may become, or may be viewed by regulators from time to time as subject, directly or indirectly, to U.S. federal, state, local and foreign laws and regulations. In particular, the advertising and sale of new or used motor vehicles is highly regulated by the states and jurisdictions in which we do business. Although we do not sell motor vehicles and we believe that vehicle listings on our site are not themselves advertisements, state regulatory authorities or third parties could take the position that some of the laws or regulations applicable to dealers or to the manner in which motor vehicles are advertised and sold generally are directly applicable to our business. These advertising laws and regulations, which often originated decades before the emergence of the internet, are frequently subject to multiple interpretations, are not uniform across jurisdictions, sometimes impose inconsistent requirements with respect to new or used motor vehicles, and the manner in which they should be applied to our business model is not always clear. Regulators or other third parties could take, and on some occasions have taken, the position that our marketplace or related products violate applicable brokering, bird‑dog, consumer protection, or advertising laws or regulations.

In order to operate in this regulated environment, we develop our products and services with a view toward appropriately managing the risk that our regulatory compliance, or the regulatory compliance of the dealers whose inventory is listed on our websites, could be challenged.

We consider applicable advertising and consumer protection laws and regulations in designing our products and services. With respect to paid advertising, other than display advertising and Featured Listings, we believe that most of the content displayed on the websites we operate does not constitute paid advertising for the sale of motor vehicles. Nevertheless, we endeavor to design the content in a manner that would comply with relevant advertising regulations and consumer protection laws if, and to the extent that, the content is considered to be vehicle sales advertising.

Our websites and mobile applications enable us, dealers, and users to send and receive text messages and other mobile phone communications, which requires us to comply with the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, or TCPA, in the U.S.  The TCPA, as interpreted and implemented by the Federal Communications Commission and federal and state courts, imposes significant restrictions on utilization of telephone calls and text messages to residential and mobile telephone numbers as a means of communication, particularly when the prior express consent of the person being contacted has not been obtained.  

In addition, we are subject to numerous federal, national, state, and local laws and regulations in the United States and around the world regarding privacy and the collection, processing, storage, sharing, disclosure, use, cross-border transfer, and protection of personal information and other data.  While the scope of these laws and regulations is changing and remains subject to differing interpretations, we seek to comply with industry standards and all applicable laws, policies, legal obligations, and industry codes of conduct relating to privacy and data protection.  We are also subject to the terms of our privacy policies and privacy-related obligations to third parties.  

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Corporate Information

We were originally organized on November 10, 2005 as a Massachusetts limited liability company under the name “Nimalex LLC.” Effective July 15, 2006, we changed our name to “CarGurus LLC.” On June 26, 2015, we converted into a Delaware corporation and changed our name to “CarGurus, Inc.”

Our principal executive offices are located at 2 Canal Park, 4th Floor, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02141, and our telephone number is (617) 354-0068. Our U.S. website is www.cargurus.com. Information that is contained on, or that can be accessed through, our websites is not incorporated by reference into this Annual Report on Form 10-K, and you should not consider information on our websites to be part of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

CarGurus, the CarGurus logo, and other trademarks or service marks of CarGurus appearing in this Annual Report on Form 10-K are the property of CarGurus, Inc. Trade names, trademarks, and service marks of other companies appearing in this Annual Report on Form 10-K are the property of their respective holders. We have omitted the ® and ™ designations, as applicable, for the trademarks used in this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

Additional Information

The following filings are available on our investor relations website after we file them with the Securities and Exchange Commission, or the SEC: Annual Reports on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and Proxy Statements for our annual meetings of stockholders.  These filings are also available for download free of charge on our investor relations website. Our investor relations website is located at http://investors.cargurus.com.  You may obtain copies of these documents by mail from the Public Reference Section of the SEC, 100 F Street, N.E., Room 1580, Washington, D.C. 20549. The SEC also maintains a website that contains reports, proxy statements and other information about issuers, like us, that file electronically with the SEC.  The address of that website is https://www.sec.gov.

We webcast our earnings calls and certain events that we participate in or host with members of the investment community on our investor relations website.  Additionally, we provide news and announcements regarding our financial performance, including SEC filings, investor events, press and earnings releases, on our investor relations website.  Corporate governance information, including our policies concerning business conduct and ethics, is also available on our investor relations website under the heading “Governance.” No content from any of our websites is intended to be incorporated by reference into this Annual Report on Form 10-K or in any other report or document we file with the SEC, and any reference to our websites is intended to be an inactive textual reference only.

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Item 1A. Risk Factors.

Investing in our Class A common stock involves a high degree of risk. You should consider carefully the risks and uncertainties described below, together with all of the other information contained in this report, including “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations” and our consolidated financial statements and related notes, before evaluating our business. Our business, financial condition, operating results, cash flow, and prospects could be materially and adversely affected by any of these risks or uncertainties. In that event, the trading price of our Class A common stock could decline. See “Special Note Regarding Forward‑Looking Statements.”

Risks Related to Our Business and Industry

Our business is substantially dependent on our relationships with dealers, and our subscription agreements with these dealers do not contain long-term contractual commitments.  If a significant number of dealers terminate their subscription agreements with us, our business and financial results would be materially and adversely affected.

Our primary source of revenue consists of subscription fees paid to us by dealers for access to enhanced features on our automotive marketplace.  Our subscription agreements with dealers generally may be terminated by us with 30 days’ notice and by dealers with 30 days’ notice at the end of the committed term.  While we are transitioning many of these dealers to contracts with one-year committed terms, the majority of our contracts with dealers currently provide for one-month committed terms.  The contracts do not contain contractual obligations requiring a dealer to maintain its relationship with us beyond the committed term.  Accordingly, these dealers may cancel their subscriptions with us in accordance with the terms of their subscription agreements.  If a significant number of our paying dealers terminate their subscriptions with us, our business and financial results would be materially and adversely affected.

If we fail to maintain or increase the number of dealers that pay subscription fees to us, or fail to maintain or increase the fees paid to us for subscriptions, our business and financial results would be harmed.

If paying dealers do not experience the volume of consumer connections that they expect during their subscription period, or do not experience the level of car sales they expect from those connections, they may terminate their subscriptions at the conclusion of the committed term or may only be willing to renew their subscriptions at a lower level of fees.  Even if dealers do experience increased consumer connections or sales, they may not attribute such increases to our marketplace.  If we fail to expand our base of paying dealers or fail to maintain or increase the level of fees that we receive from them, our business and financial results would be materially and adversely affected.

We allow dealers to list their inventory in our marketplace for free; however, dealer identity and contact information are not permitted in such free listings and these dealers do not receive access to the paid features of our marketplace.  Many dealers start with us on a non-paying basis and then become paying customers in order to take advantage of the features of our Enhanced or Featured Listing products.  If dealers do not subscribe to our paid offerings at the rates we expect, or if a greater than expected number of our paying dealers elect to terminate their subscriptions, our business and financial results would be harmed.

If dealers or other advertisers reduce their advertising spend with us and we are unable to attract new advertisers, our business would be harmed.

A significant amount of our revenue is derived from advertising revenues generated primarily through advertising sales, including for display advertising and retargeting services, to dealers, auto manufacturers, and other auto-related brand advertisers.  We compete for this advertising revenue with other online automotive marketplaces and with television, print media, and other traditional advertising channels.  Our ability to attract and retain advertisers, and to generate advertising revenue, depends on a number of factors, including:

 

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Our agreements with dealers for display advertising generally include terms ranging from one month to one year and may be terminated by us with 30 days’ notice and by dealers with 30 days’ notice at the end of the committed term.  The contracts do not contain contractual obligations requiring an advertiser to maintain its relationship with us beyond the committed term.  Our other advertising contracts, including those with auto manufacturers, are typically for a defined period of time and do not have ongoing commitments to advertise on our websites beyond the committed term.  We may not succeed in capturing a greater share of our advertisers’ spending if we are unable to convince advertisers of the effectiveness or superiority of our advertising services as compared to alternative channels.  If current advertisers reduce or end their advertising spending with us and we are unable to attract new advertisers, our advertising revenue and business and financial results would be harmed.

If we are unable to provide a compelling vehicle search experience to consumers through our platform, the number of connections between consumers and dealers using our marketplace may decline and our business and financial results would be materially and adversely affected.

If we fail to continue to provide a compelling vehicle search experience to consumers, the number of connections between consumers and dealers through our marketplace could decline, which in turn could lead dealers to stop listing their inventory in our marketplace, cancel their subscriptions, or reduce their advertising spend with us.  If dealers stop listing their inventory in our marketplace, we may not be able to maintain and grow our consumer traffic, which may cause other dealers to stop using our marketplace.  This reduction in the number of dealers using our marketplace would likely adversely affect our marketplace and our business and financial results.  As consumers increasingly use their mobile devices to access the internet and our marketplace, our success will depend, in part, on our ability to provide consumers with a robust and user-friendly experience through their mobile devices.  We believe that our ability to provide a compelling vehicle search experience, both on the web and through mobile devices, is subject to a number of factors, including:

 

If the use of our marketplace, particularly on mobile devices, does not continue to grow, our business and operating results would be harmed.

We rely on internet search engines to drive traffic to our websites, and if we fail to appear prominently in the search results, our traffic would decline and our business would be adversely affected.

We depend, in part, on internet search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo! to drive traffic to our websites.  The number of consumers we attract to our marketplace from search engines is due in part to how and where our websites rank in unpaid search results.  These rankings can be affected by a number of factors, many of which are not under our direct control and may change frequently.  For example, when a consumer searches for a vehicle in an internet search engine, we rely on a high organic search ranking of our webpages to refer the consumer to our websites.  Our competitors’ internet search engine optimization efforts may result in their websites receiving higher search result rankings than ours, or internet search engines could change their methodologies in a way that would adversely affect our search result rankings.  If internet search engines modify their search algorithms in ways that are detrimental to us, or if our competitors’ efforts are more successful than ours, overall growth in our traffic could slow or our traffic could decline.  In addition, internet search engine providers could provide dealer and pricing information directly in search results, align with our competitors, or choose to develop competing products.  Search engines may also adopt a more aggressive auction-pricing system for keywords that would cause us to incur higher advertising costs or reduce our market visibility to prospective users.  Our websites have experienced fluctuations in search result rankings in the past, and we anticipate fluctuations in the future.  Any reduction in the number of consumers directed to our websites through internet search engines could harm our business and operating results.

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Any inability by us to develop new products, or achieve widespread consumer and dealer adoption of those products, could negatively impact our business and financial results.

Our success depends on our continued innovation to provide products and services that make our marketplace, websites, and mobile applications useful for consumers and dealers or that otherwise provide value to consumers and dealers.  These new products must be widely adopted by consumers and dealers in order for us to continue to attract consumers to our marketplace and dealers to our products and services.  Accordingly, we must continually invest resources in product, technology, and development in order to improve the attractiveness and comprehensiveness of our marketplace and its related products and effectively incorporate new internet and mobile technologies into them.  These product, technology, and development expenses may include costs of hiring additional personnel, engaging third-party service providers and other research and development activities.  In addition, revenue relating to new products is typically unpredictable and our new products may have lower gross margins and higher marketing and sales costs than our existing products.  We may also change our pricing models for both existing and new products so that our prices for our offerings reflect the value those offerings are providing to consumers and dealers.  Our pricing models may not effectively reflect the value of products to consumers and dealers, and, if we are unable to provide a marketplace and products that consumers and dealers want to use, they may become dissatisfied and instead use our competitors’ websites and mobile applications.  Without an innovative marketplace and related products, we may be unable to attract additional, unique consumers or retain current consumers, which could affect the number of dealers that become paying dealers and the number of advertisers that want to advertise in our marketplace, which could, in turn, harm our business and financial results.

We may be unable to maintain or grow relationships with data providers, or may experience interruptions in the data they provide, which may create a less valuable or transparent shopping experience and negatively affect our business and operating results.

We obtain data from many third-party data providers, including inventory management systems, automotive website providers, customer relationship management systems, dealer management systems, governmental entities, and third-party data licensors.  Our business relies on our ability to obtain data for the benefit of consumers and dealers using our marketplace.  For example, our success in international markets is dependent in part upon our ability to obtain and maintain inventory data and other vehicle information for those markets.  The large amount of inventory and vehicle information available in our marketplace is critical to the value we provide for consumers.  The loss or interruption of such inventory data or other vehicle information could decrease the number of consumers using our marketplace.  We could experience interruptions in our data access for a number of reasons, including difficulties in renewing our agreements with data providers, changes to the software used by data providers, efforts by industry participants to restrict access to data, and increased fees we may be charged by data providers.  Our marketplace could be negatively affected if any current provider terminates its relationship with us or our service from any provider is interrupted.  If there is a material disruption in the data provided to us, the information that we provide to consumers and dealers using our marketplace may be limited.  In addition, the quality, accuracy, and timeliness of this information may suffer, which may lead to a less valuable and less transparent shopping experience for consumers using our marketplace and could materially and adversely affect our business and financial results.

The failure to build and maintain our brand would harm our ability to grow our audience and to expand the use of our marketplace by consumers and dealers.

While we are focused on building our brand recognition, maintaining and enhancing our brand will depend largely on the success of our efforts to maintain the trust of consumers and dealers and to deliver value to each consumer and dealer using our marketplace.  If consumers were to believe that we are not focused on providing them with a better automobile shopping experience, our reputation and the strength of our brand may be adversely affected.

Complaints or negative publicity about our business practices, our management team and employees, our marketing and advertising campaigns, our compliance with applicable laws and regulations, the integrity of the data that we provide to consumers, data privacy and security issues, and other aspects of our business, irrespective of their validity, could diminish consumers’ and dealers’ confidence and participation in our marketplace and could adversely affect our brand.  There can be no assurance that we will be able to maintain or enhance our brand, and failure to do so would harm our business growth prospects and operating results.

Portions of our websites enable consumers and dealers using our sites to communicate with one another and other persons seeking information or advice on the internet.  Claims of defamation or other injury could be made against us for content posted on our websites.  In addition, negative publicity and user sentiment generated as a result of fraudulent or deceptive conduct by users of our marketplace could damage our reputation, reduce our ability to attract new users or retain our current users, and diminish the value of our brand.

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While we historically focused our marketing efforts on internet and mobile channels, we have implemented brand-focused campaigns using television, social media and online video and these efforts may not be successful.

As a consumer brand, it is important for us to increase the visibility of our brand with potential users of our marketplace.  While we historically focused our marketing efforts on internet and mobile channels, we now advertise through television, social media, online video, and other channels, with the goal of driving greater brand recognition, trust, and loyalty from a broader consumer audience.  If our brand-focused campaigns are not successful and we are unable to recover our marketing costs through increases in user traffic and increased subscription and advertising revenue, or if we discontinue our brand marketing campaigns, it could have a material adverse effect on our business and financial results.

Our recent, rapid growth is not indicative of our future growth, and our revenue growth rate will continue to decline in the future.

Our revenue increased to $454.1 million for the year ended December 31, 2018 from $316.9 million for the year ended December 31, 2017, representing a 43% increase between such periods, and increased to $316.9 million for the year ended December 31, 2017 from $198.1 million for the year ended December 31, 2016, representing a 60% increase between such periods. In the future, our revenue growth rates will continue to decline as we achieve higher market penetration rates, as our revenue increases to higher levels, and as we experience increased competition.  As our revenue growth rates decline, investors’ perceptions of our business may be adversely affected and the market price of our Class A common stock could decline.  In addition, we will not be able to grow as expected, or at all, if we do not accomplish the following:

 

If we fail to expand effectively into new markets, both domestically and abroad, our revenue, business, and financial results will be harmed.

We intend to continue to expand our operations to target new markets, both domestically and abroad, and there can be no assurance our expansion into these new markets will be successful.  Our expansion into new markets places us in unfamiliar competitive environments and involves various risks, including the need to invest significant resources and the likelihood that returns on such investments will not be achieved for several years, or possibly at all.  In attempting to establish a presence in new markets, we expect, as we have in the past, to incur significant losses in those markets and face various other challenges, such as obtaining and maintaining access to inventory data, competition for consumers and dealers using our marketplace, monetizing dealers, new regulatory environments and laws, different consumer shopping habits than those we are familiar with, and our ability to expand the number of our account managers to cover those new markets.  Our current and any future expansion plans will require significant resources and management attention.  Furthermore, expansion into international markets may not yield results similar to those we have achieved in the United States.

Our international operations involve risks that are different from, or in addition to, the risks we may experience as a result of our domestic operations, and our exposure to these risks will increase as we expand internationally.

We expect to expand our international operations significantly by continuing to enter new markets and expanding our offerings in new languages.  In most international markets, we would not be the first entrant, and our competitors may be more established or otherwise better positioned than we are to succeed.  Our competitors may offer services to dealers that make dealers dependent on them, such as hosting dealers’ webpages and providing inventory feeds for dealers, which would make it difficult to attract dealers to our marketplace.  Dealers may also be parties to agreements with other dealers and syndicates that prevent them from being able to access our marketplace.  In addition, we may also face litigation from competitors in new markets.  Any of these barriers could impede our expansion into international markets, which could affect our business and potential growth.

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In addition to English, we have made portions of our platform available in French, German, Italian, and Spanish, and we will need to make all or portions of our platform available in additional languages as we launch in new countries.  We may have difficulty modifying our technology and content for use in non-English speaking markets or fostering new communities in non-English speaking markets.  Our ability to manage our business and conduct our operations internationally requires considerable management attention and resources, and is subject to the particular challenges of supporting a rapidly growing business in an environment of multiple languages, cultures, customs, legal and regulatory systems, alternative dispute resolution systems, and commercial infrastructures.  Expanding internationally may subject us to new risks or increase our exposure in connection with current risks, including risks associated with:

 

We participate in a highly competitive market, and pressure from existing and new companies may adversely affect our business and operating results.

We face significant competition from companies that provide listings, information, lead generation, and car-buying services designed to help consumers shop for cars and to enable dealers to reach these consumers.  Our competitors offer various marketplaces, products, and services that compete with us.  Some of these competitors include:

 

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We compete with these and other companies for a share of dealers’ overall marketing budget for online and offline media marketing spend.  To the extent that dealers view alternative marketing and media strategies to be superior to our marketplace, we may not be able to maintain or grow the number of dealers subscribing to, and advertising on, our marketplace, and our business and financial results may be harmed.

We also expect that new competitors will continue to enter the online automotive retail industry with competing marketplaces, products, and services, which could have an adverse effect on our business and financial results.

Our competitors could significantly impede our ability to expand the number of dealers using our marketplace.  Our competitors may also develop and market new technologies that render our existing or future marketplace and associated products less competitive, unmarketable, or obsolete.  In addition, if our competitors develop marketplaces with similar or superior functionality to ours, and our web traffic declines, we may need to decrease our subscription and advertising fees.  If we are unable to maintain our current pricing structure due to competitive pressures, our revenue would likely be reduced and our financial results would be negatively affected.

Our existing and potential competitors may have significantly more financial, technical, marketing, and other resources than we have, and the ability to devote greater resources to the development, promotion, and support of their marketplaces, products, and services.  They may also have more extensive automotive industry relationships than we have, longer operating histories, and greater name recognition.  As a result, these competitors may be able to respond more quickly with new technologies and to undertake more extensive marketing or promotional campaigns than we can.  Additionally, to the extent that any competitor has existing relationships with dealers or auto manufacturers for marketing or data analytics solutions, those dealers and auto manufacturers may be unwilling to partner with us.  If we are unable to compete with these competitors, the demand for our marketplace and related products and services could substantially decline.

In addition, if one or more of our competitors were to merge or partner with another of our competitors, the change in the competitive landscape could adversely affect our ability to compete effectively.  Our competitors may also establish or strengthen cooperative relationships with our existing or future data providers, technology partners, or other parties with whom we have relationships, thereby limiting our ability to develop, improve, and promote our solutions.  We may not be able to compete successfully against current or future competitors, and competitive pressures may harm our business and financial results.

Our business could be adversely affected if dealer associations or auto manufacturers were to discourage or otherwise deter dealers from subscribing to our marketplace.

Although the dealership industry is highly fragmented, a small number of interested parties have significant influence over the industry.  These parties include state and national dealership associations, state regulators, automotive manufacturers, consumer groups, independent dealers, and consolidated dealer groups.  If and to the extent these parties believe that dealerships should not enter into or maintain subscription agreements with us, this belief could become shared by dealerships and we may lose a number of our paying dealers.

Furthermore, auto manufacturers may provide their franchise dealers with financial or other marketing support conditioned upon such dealers’ adherence to certain marketing guidelines.  Auto manufacturers may determine that the manner in which certain of their franchise dealers use our marketplace is inconsistent with the terms of such marketing guidelines, which determination could result in potential or actual loss of the manufacturers’ financial or other marketing support to the dealers whose use of our marketplace is deemed objectionable.  The potential or actual loss of such marketing support may cause such dealers to cease paying for our paid features, which may adversely affect our ability to maintain or grow the number of our paying dealers.

Dealer closures or consolidations could reduce demand for our products, which may decrease our revenue.

In the past, the number of United States dealers has declined due to dealership closures and consolidations as a result of factors such as global economic downturns.  When dealers consolidate, the services they previously purchased separately are often purchased by the combined entity in a lesser quantity or for a lower aggregate price than before, leading to volume compression and loss of revenue.  Further dealership consolidations or closures could reduce the aggregate demand for our products and services.  If dealership closures and consolidations occur in the future, our business, financial position and results of operations could be materially and adversely affected.

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We rely on third-party service providers and strategic partners for many aspects of our business, and any failure to maintain these relationships could harm our business.

Our success will depend upon our relationships with third parties, including our payment processor, our data center hosts, our information technology providers, our data providers for dealer inventory and vehicle information, our human resources information system provider, our billing subscription software provider, our customer relationship management software provider, our financial planning and analysis software provider, our information integration platform providers, our marketing platform providers, our business intelligence and data analytics providers, our search engine and social media advertising providers, our invoice and expense provider, our equity administrator provider, and our general ledger provider, as well as our other strategic partners, including consumer and commercial lenders.  If these third parties experience difficulty meeting our requirements or standards, have adverse audit results, violate the terms of our relationship or applicable law, fail to obtain or maintain applicable licenses, or if the relationships we have established with such third parties expire or otherwise terminate, it could make it difficult for us to operate some aspects of our business, which could damage our business and reputation.  In addition, if such third-party service providers or strategic partners were to cease operations, temporarily or permanently, face financial distress or other business disruptions, increase their fees, or if our relationships with these providers or partners deteriorate or terminate, we could suffer increased costs and we may be unable to provide consumers with content or provide similar services until an equivalent provider could be found or we could develop replacement technology or operations.  In addition, if we are unsuccessful in identifying or finding high-quality partners, if we fail to negotiate cost-effective relationships with them, or if we ineffectively manage these relationships, it could have an adverse impact on our business and financial results.

If we continue to grow rapidly, we may not be able to manage our growth effectively.

We have experienced rapid growth in our headcount and operations, which places substantial demand on management and our operational infrastructure.  In addition, with further growth and expansion, our employee base will continue to spread outside of our headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  As we continue to grow, we must effectively integrate, develop, and motivate a large number of new employees, while maintaining the beneficial aspects of our company culture.  If we do not manage the growth of our business and operations effectively, the quality of our services and efficiency of our operations could suffer, which could harm our brand, results of operations, and overall business.

We depend on key personnel to operate our business, and if we are unable to retain, attract and integrate qualified personnel, our ability to develop and successfully grow our business could be harmed.

We believe our success has depended, and continues to depend, on the efforts and talents of our executives and employees.  Our future success depends on our continuing ability to attract, develop, motivate, and retain highly qualified and skilled employees.  Qualified individuals are in high demand, and we may incur significant costs to attract and retain them.  In addition, the loss of any of our executive officers or key employees could materially adversely affect our ability to execute our business plan and strategy, and we may not be able to find adequate replacements on a timely basis, or at all.  Our executive officers and other employees are at-will employees, which means they may terminate their employment relationships with us at any time, and their knowledge of our business and industry would be extremely difficult to replace.  We cannot ensure that we will be able to retain the services of any members of our senior management or other key employees.  If we do not succeed in attracting well-qualified employees or retaining and motivating existing employees, our business could be materially and adversely affected.

If we are unable to successfully respond to changes in the market, our business could be harmed.

While our business has grown rapidly as consumers and dealers have increasingly accessed our marketplace, we expect that our business will evolve in ways which may be difficult to predict.  For example, we anticipate that over time we may reach a point when investments in new user traffic are less productive and the continued growth of our revenue will require more focus on developing new products for consumers and dealers, expanding our marketplaces into new international markets to attract new consumers and dealers, and increasing our fees for our products.  It is also possible that consumers and dealers could broadly determine that they no longer believe in the value of our marketplace.  Our continued success will depend on our ability to successfully adjust our strategy to meet the changing market dynamics.  If we are unable to do so, our business could be harmed and our results of operations and financial condition could be materially and adversely affected.

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We may be subject to disputes regarding the accuracy of Instant Market Value, Deal Rating, Dealer Rating, New Car Price Guidance and other features of our marketplace.

We provide consumers using our marketplace with our proprietary Instant Market Value, or IMV, Deal Rating, and Dealer Rating, as well as other features to help them evaluate vehicle listings, including price guidance for new car listings, or New Car Price Guidance.  Revisions to our automated valuation models, or the algorithms that underlie them, may cause the IMV, the Deal Rating, New Car Price Guidance, or other features to vary from our expectations regarding the accuracy of these tools.  In addition, from time to time, regulators, consumers, dealers and other industry participants may question or disagree with our IMV, Deal Rating, Dealer Rating or New Car Price Guidance.  Any such questions or disagreements could result in distraction from our business or potentially harm our reputation, could result in a decline in consumers’ use of our marketplace and could result in legal disputes.

As we acquire other companies or technologies, such activities could divert our management’s attention, result in additional dilution to our stockholders, and otherwise disrupt our operations and harm our operating results.

Our success will depend, in part, on our ability to grow our business in response to the demands of consumers, dealers, and other constituents within the automotive industry as well as competitive pressures.  In some circumstances, we will do so through the acquisition of complementary businesses and technologies rather than through internal development.  The identification of suitable acquisition candidates can be difficult, time-consuming, and costly, and we may not be able to successfully complete identified acquisitions.  The risks we face in connection with acquisitions include:

 

Our failure to address these risks or other problems encountered in connection with future acquisitions and investments could cause us to fail to realize the anticipated benefits of these acquisitions or investments, cause us to incur unanticipated liabilities, cause us to be reluctant to engage in future transactions, and harm our business generally.  Acquisitions could result in dilutive issuances of our equity securities, the incurrence of debt, contingent liabilities, amortization expense, and impairment charges associated with acquired intangible assets or goodwill, any of which could harm our financial condition.  Also, the anticipated benefits of any acquisitions may not materialize.

We are subject to a complex framework of federal, state, and foreign laws and regulations, many of which are unsettled, still developing and contradictory, which have in the past, and could in the future, subject us to claims, challenge our business model, or otherwise harm our business.

Various aspects of our business are, may become, or may be viewed by regulators from time to time as subject, directly or indirectly, to U.S. federal, state and local laws and regulations, and to foreign laws and regulations.  Failure to comply with such laws or regulations may result in the suspension or termination of our ability to do business in affected jurisdictions, the imposition of significant civil and criminal penalties, including fines or the award of significant damages against us and dealers in class action or other civil litigation, or orders or settlements requiring us to make adjustments to our marketplace and related products and services.

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State Motor Vehicle Sales, Advertising and Brokering, and Consumer Protection Laws

The advertising and sale of new and used motor vehicles is highly regulated by the states in which we do business.  Although we do not sell motor vehicles, and although we believe that vehicle listings on our site are not themselves advertisements, state regulatory authorities or third parties could take the position that some of the laws or regulations applicable to dealers or to the manner in which motor vehicles are advertised and sold generally are directly applicable to our business.  These advertising laws and regulations are frequently subject to multiple interpretations and are not uniform from state to state, sometimes imposing inconsistent requirements with respect to new or used motor vehicles.  If our marketplace and related products are determined to not comply with relevant regulatory requirements, we or dealers could be subject to significant civil and criminal penalties, including fines, or the award of significant damages in class actions or other civil litigation, as well as orders interfering with our ability to continue providing our marketplace and related products and services in certain states.  In addition, even absent such a determination, to the extent dealers are uncertain about the applicability of such laws and regulations to our business, we may lose, or have difficulty increasing the number of paying dealers, which would affect our future growth.  

If state regulators or other third parties take the position in the future that our marketplace or related products violate applicable brokering, bird-dog, consumer protection, consumer finance or advertising laws or regulations, responding to such allegations could be costly, could require us to pay significant sums in settlements, could require us to pay civil and criminal penalties, including fines, could interfere with our ability to continue providing our marketplace and related products in certain states, or could require us to make adjustments to our marketplace and related products or the manner in which we derive revenue from dealers using our marketplace, any or all of which could result in substantial adverse publicity, termination of subscriptions by dealers, decreased revenues, distraction for our employees, increased expenses, and decreased profitability.

Federal Laws and Regulations

The Federal Trade Commission, or the FTC, has the authority to take actions to remedy or prevent acts or practices that it considers to be unfair or deceptive and that affect commerce in the United States.  If the FTC takes the position in the future that any aspect of our business, including our advertising and privacy practices, constitutes an unfair or deceptive act or practice, responding to such allegations could require us to defend our practices and pay significant damages, settlements, and civil penalties, or could require us to make adjustments to our marketplace and related products and services, any or all of which could result in substantial adverse publicity, distraction for our employees, loss of participating dealers, lost revenues, increased expenses, and decreased profitability.

Our platform enables us, dealers, and users to send and receive text messages and other mobile phone communications.  The Telephone Consumer Protection Act, or the TCPA, as interpreted and implemented by the Federal Communications Commission, or the FCC, and federal and state courts, imposes significant restrictions on utilization of telephone calls and text messages to residential and mobile telephone numbers as a means of communication, particularly if the prior express consent of the person being contacted has not been obtained.  Violations of the TCPA may be enforced by the FCC, by state attorneys general, or by others through litigation, including class actions.  Statutory penalties for TCPA violations range from $500 to $1,500 per violation, which is often interpreted to mean per phone call or text message.  Furthermore, several provisions of the TCPA, as well as applicable rules and orders, are open to multiple interpretations, and compliance may involve fact-specific analyses.

Any failure by us, or the third parties on which we rely, to adhere to, or successfully implement, appropriate processes and procedures in response to existing or future laws and regulations could result in legal and monetary liability, fines and penalties, or damage to our reputation in the marketplace, any of which could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, and results of operations.  Even if the claims are meritless, we may be required to expend resources and pay costs to defend against regulatory actions or third-party claims.  Additionally, any change to the TCPA or its interpretation that further restricts the way consumers and dealers interact through our platform, or any governmental or private enforcement actions related thereto, could adversely affect our ability to attract customers and could harm our business, financial condition, results of operations, and cash flows.

Federal Antitrust Laws

U.S. federal antitrust laws prohibit, among other things, any joint conduct among competitors that would lessen competition in the marketplace.  We believe that we are in compliance with the legal requirements imposed by such antitrust laws.  However, a governmental or private civil action alleging the improper exchange of information, or unlawful participation in price maintenance or other unlawful or anticompetitive activity, even if unfounded, could be costly to defend and could harm our business, results of operations, financial condition, and cash flows.

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Other

Claims could be made against us under both U.S. and foreign laws, including claims for defamation, libel, invasion of privacy, copyright or trademark infringement, or claims based on other theories related to the nature and content of the materials disseminated by users of our marketplace and portions of our websites.  In addition, domestic and foreign legislation has been proposed that could prohibit or impose liability for the transmission over the internet of certain types of information.  Our defense against any of these actions could be costly and involve significant time and attention of our management and other resources.  If we become liable for information provided by our users and transmitted in our marketplace in any jurisdiction in which we operate, we could be directly harmed and we may be forced to implement new measures to reduce our exposure to this liability.

The foregoing description of laws and regulations to which we are or may be subject is not exhaustive, and the regulatory framework governing our operations is subject to continuous change.  As we expand our operations internationally, we are, and we will continue to be, exposed to legal and regulatory risks including with respect to privacy, tax, law enforcement, content, intellectual property, competition, and other matters.  The enactment of new laws and regulations or the interpretation of existing laws and regulations, both domestically and internationally, in an unfavorable way may affect the operation of our business, directly or indirectly, which could result in substantial regulatory compliance costs, civil or criminal penalties, including fines, adverse publicity, loss of participating dealers, lost revenues, increased expenses, and decreased profitability.  Further, investigations by governmental agencies, including the FTC, into allegedly anticompetitive, unfair, deceptive or other business practices by us or dealers using our marketplace, could cause us to incur additional expenses and, if adversely concluded, could result in substantial civil or criminal penalties and significant legal liability, or orders requiring us to make adjustments to our marketplace and related products and services.

Our business is subject to risks related to the larger automotive industry ecosystem, including consumer demand, global supply chain challenges, and other macroeconomic issues.

Decreases in consumer demand could adversely affect the market for automobile purchases and, as a result, reduce the number of consumers using our platform.  Consumer purchases of new and used automobiles generally decline during recessionary periods and other periods in which disposable income is adversely affected.  Purchases of new and used automobiles are typically discretionary for consumers and have been, and may continue to be, affected by negative trends in the economy, including: the cost of energy and gasoline; the availability and cost of credit; rising interest rates, which may reduce the demand for consumer credit due to the higher cost of borrowing; reductions in business and consumer confidence; stock market volatility; increased unemployment; and changing trade barriers, including increased tariff rates or custom duties.  

Further, in recent years the market for motor vehicles has experienced rapid changes in technology and consumer demands.  Self-driving technology, ride sharing, transportation networks, and other fundamental changes in transportation could impact consumer demand for the purchase of automobiles.  A reduction in the number of automobiles purchased by consumers could adversely affect dealers and car manufacturers and lead to a reduction in other spending by these groups, including targeted incentive programs.  

In addition, our business may be negatively affected by challenges to the larger automotive industry ecosystem, including global supply chain challenges, changes to trade policies, and other macroeconomic issues.  For example, the United Kingdom’s referendum to exit the European Union, or the EU, commonly referred to as “Brexit”, could adversely affect European and global economic or market conditions, contribute to instability in global financial markets, and cause disruptions to and create uncertainty surrounding our business and operations in the United Kingdom. These factors could have a material adverse effect on our business, results of operations, and financial condition.

Making decisions that we believe are in the best interests of our marketplace may cause us to forgo short-term gains in pursuit of potential but uncertain long-term growth.

In the past, we have forgone, and we will in the future continue to forgo, certain expansion or short-term revenue opportunities that we do not believe are in the long-term best interests of our marketplace, even if such decisions negatively impact our results of operations in the short term.  For example, we manage the text-chat feature of our websites where consumers can message paying dealers.  Our management of this feature has helped improve dealer response times to consumers, which in turn improves the consumer experience.  While our management of this feature provides value to both consumers and paying dealers and could be a potential source of short-term revenue for us, we are not currently charging for this feature and are instead focusing on the potential long-term value of this feature to our marketplace and its users.  However, this strategy may not result in the long-term benefits that we expect, in which case our user traffic and engagement, business, and financial results could be harmed.

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A significant disruption in service on our websites could damage our reputation and result in a loss of consumers, which could harm our business, brand, operating results, and financial condition.

Our brand, reputation, and ability to attract consumers, dealers, and advertisers depend on the reliable performance of our technology infrastructure and content delivery.  We may experience significant interruptions with our systems in the future.  Interruptions in these systems, whether due to system failures, computer viruses, ransomware, or physical or electronic break-ins, could affect the security or availability of our marketplace on our websites, and prevent or inhibit the ability of dealers and consumers to access our marketplace.  For example, past disruptions have impacted our ability to activate customer accounts and manage our billing activities in a timely manner.  Such interruptions could also result in third parties accessing our confidential and proprietary information, including our intellectual property.  Problems with the reliability or security of our systems could harm our reputation, harm our ability to protect our confidential and proprietary information, result in a loss of consumers and dealers, and result in additional costs.

Substantially all of the communications, network, and computer hardware used to operate our platform is located in the United States near Boston, Massachusetts, and in Europe near London, England.  Although we have two locations in the United States and we believe our systems are redundant, there may be exceptions for certain hardware or software.  In addition, we do not own or control the operation of these facilities.  We also use third-party hosting services to back up some data.  Our systems and operations are vulnerable to damage or interruption from fire, flood, power loss, telecommunications failure, terrorist attacks, acts of war, electronic and physical break-ins, computer viruses, earthquakes, and similar events.  The occurrence of any of these events could result in damage to our systems and hardware or could cause them to fail.  In addition, we may not have sufficient protection or recovery plans in certain circumstances.

Problems faced by our third-party web hosting providers could adversely affect the experience consumers have while using our marketplace.  Our third-party web hosting providers could close their facilities without adequate notice.  Any financial difficulties, up to and including bankruptcy, faced by our third-party web hosting providers or any of the service providers whose services they use may have negative effects on our business, the nature and extent of which are difficult to predict.  If our third-party web hosting providers are unable to keep up with our growing capacity needs, our business could be harmed.

Any errors, defects, disruptions, or other performance or reliability problems with our network operations could cause interruptions in access to our marketplace as well as delays and additional expense in arranging new facilities and services and could harm our reputation, business, operating results, and financial condition.

Although we carry business interruption insurance, it may not be sufficient to compensate us for the potentially significant losses, including the potential harm to the future growth of our business, that may result from interruptions in our service as a result of system failures.

We collect, process, store, transfer, share, disclose, and use consumer information and other data, and our actual or perceived failure to protect such information and data or respect users’ privacy could damage our reputation and brand and harm our business and operating results.

Use of some functions of our marketplace involves the storage and transmission of consumers’ information, such as IP addresses and contact information of users who connect with dealers and profile information of users who create accounts on our marketplace, and dealers’ information.  We also process and store personal and confidential information of our vendors, partners and employees.  Some of this information may be private, and security breaches could expose us to a risk of loss or exposure of this information, which could result in potential liability, litigation, and remediation costs.  For example, hackers could steal our users’ profile passwords, names, email addresses, phone numbers, and zip codes.  We rely on encryption and authentication technology licensed from third parties to effect secure transmission of such information.  Like all information systems and technology, our websites, mobile applications, and information systems are subject to computer viruses, break-ins, phishing attacks, attempts to overload the systems with denial-of-service or other attacks, ransomware, and similar incidents or disruptions from unauthorized use of our computer systems, any of which could lead to interruptions, delays, or website shutdowns, and could cause loss of critical data and the unauthorized disclosure, access, acquisition, alteration, and use of personal or other confidential information.  If we experience compromises to our security that result in website or mobile application performance or availability problems, the complete shutdown of our websites or mobile applications, or the loss or unauthorized disclosure, access, acquisition, alteration, or use of confidential information, consumers, customers, advertisers, partners, vendors and employees may lose trust and confidence in us, and consumers may decrease the use of our websites or stop using our websites entirely, dealers may stop or decrease their subscriptions with us, and advertisers may decrease or stop advertising on our websites.  

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Further, outside parties have attempted and will continue to attempt to fraudulently induce employees, consumers, or advertisers to disclose sensitive information in order to gain access to our information or our consumers’, dealers’, advertisers’ and employees’ information.  As cyber-attacks increase in frequency and sophistication, our cyber-security and business continuity plans may not be effective in anticipating, preventing and effectively responding to all potential cyber-risk exposures.  In addition, because the techniques used to obtain unauthorized access, disable or degrade service, or sabotage systems change frequently, often are not recognized until after being launched against a target, and may originate from less regulated and remote areas around the world, we may be unable to proactively address these techniques or to implement adequate preventative measures.

Any or all of the issues above could negatively impact our ability to attract new consumers and increase engagement by existing consumers, cause existing consumers to curtail or stop use of our marketplace or close their accounts, cause existing dealers and advertisers to cancel their contracts, cause employees to terminate their employment, cause employment candidates to be unwilling to accept employment offers, and or subject us to governmental or third-party lawsuits, investigations, regulatory fines, or other actions or liability, thereby harming our business, results of operations, and financial condition.

There are numerous federal, national, state, and local laws and regulations in the United States and around the world regarding privacy and the collection, processing, storage, sharing, disclosure, use, cross-border transfer, and protection of personal information and other data.  These laws and regulations are evolving, are subject to differing interpretations, may be costly to comply with, may result in regulatory fines or penalties, may subject us to third-party lawsuits, may be inconsistent between countries and jurisdictions, and may conflict with other requirements.

We seek to comply with industry standards and are subject to the terms of our privacy policies and privacy-related obligations to third parties.  We strive to comply with all applicable laws, policies, legal obligations, and industry codes of conduct relating to privacy and data protection.  However, it is possible that these obligations may be interpreted and applied in new ways or in a manner that is inconsistent from one jurisdiction to another and may conflict with other rules or our practices and that new regulations could be enacted.  Several proposals have recently become effective or are pending, as applicable, before federal, state, local, and foreign legislative and regulatory bodies that could significantly affect our business, including the General Data Protection Regulation in the EU, or the GDPR, which went into effect on May 25, 2018, and the new California Consumer Privacy Act, which is expected to become effective in January 2020.  The GDPR in particular has already required, and may further require, us to change our policies and procedures and, if we are not in compliance, may seriously harm our business.  Similarly, Brexit may further require us to change our policies and procedures and, if we are not in compliance, may seriously harm our business. Any failure or perceived failure by us to comply with our privacy policies, our privacy-related obligations to consumers or other third parties, or our privacy-related legal obligations, or any compromise of security that results in the unauthorized release or transfer of sensitive information, which could include personally identifiable information or other user data, may result in governmental investigations, enforcement actions, regulatory fines, litigation, or public statements against us by consumer advocacy groups or others, and could cause consumers and dealers to lose trust in us, which could have an adverse effect on our business.  Additionally, if any third party that we share information with experiences a security breach or fails to comply with its privacy-related legal obligations or commitments to us, such matters may put consumer or dealer information at risk and could in turn expose us to claims for damages or regulatory fines or penalties and harm our reputation, business, and operating results.

We may in the future be subject to intellectual property disputes, which are costly to defend and could harm our business and operating results.

We may from time to time face allegations that we have infringed the trademarks, copyrights, patents, and other intellectual property rights of third parties, including from our competitors or non-practicing entities, or may learn of possible infringement to our trademarks, copyrights, patents, and other intellectual property.  We could also be subject to lawsuits where consumers and dealers posting content on our websites disseminate materials that infringe the intellectual property rights of third parties.  We have encountered lawsuits in the past containing allegations of intellectual property infringement.

Patent and other intellectual property litigation may be protracted and expensive, and the results are difficult to predict and may require us to stop offering some features, purchase licenses, or modify our marketplace and features while we develop non-infringing substitutes or may result in significant settlement costs.

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In addition, we use open source software in our platform and will use open source software in the future.  From time to time, we may face claims from companies that incorporate open source software into their products, claiming ownership of, or demanding release of, the source code, the open source software, or derivative works that were developed using such software, or otherwise seeking to enforce the terms of the applicable open source license.  These claims could also result in litigation, require us to purchase a costly license or require us to devote additional product, technology, and development resources to change our platform or services, any of which would have a negative effect on our business and operating results.

Even if these matters do not result in litigation or are resolved in our favor or without significant cash settlements, these matters, and the time and resources necessary to litigate or resolve them, could harm our business, our operating results, and our reputation.

Failure to adequately protect our intellectual property could harm our business and operating results.

Our business depends on our intellectual property, the protection of which is crucial to the success of our business.  We rely on a combination of patent, trademark, trade secret, and copyright law and contractual restrictions to protect our intellectual property.  In addition, we attempt to protect our intellectual property, technology, and confidential information by requiring our employees and consultants to enter into confidentiality and assignment of inventions agreements and third parties to enter into nondisclosure agreements as we deem appropriate.  Despite our efforts to protect our proprietary rights, unauthorized parties may attempt to copy aspects of our websites features, software, and functionality or obtain and use information that we consider proprietary.

Competitors may adopt service names similar to ours, thereby harming our ability to build brand identity and possibly leading to user confusion.  In addition, there could be potential trade name or trademark infringement claims brought by owners of other registered trademarks, or trademarks that incorporate variations of the term “CarGurus.”  If we are restricted in any way in registering our CARGURUS mark in international markets, it could impact our ability to establish and grow our business in Europe and other countries.  Also, while we have registered the CARGURUS and CG logos in the EU and the United Kingdom, as well as the word-mark CARGURUS in the United Kingdom and Spain, we are not able to register the word-mark CARGURUS in the EU as the mark was deemed to be non-distinctive, and thus unregisterable.  We may be unable to register CARGURUS, the word-mark, in certain other countries in the EU.  If we are unable to register the CARGURUS word-mark in any country, it may limit our ability to challenge unauthorized users of marks that are the same as or similar to CARGURUS.

We currently hold the “CarGurus.com” internet domain name and various other related domain names.  The regulation of domain names is subject to change.  Regulatory bodies could establish additional top-level domains, appoint additional domain name registrars, or modify the requirements for holding domain names.  As a result, we may not be able to acquire or maintain all domain names that use the name CarGurus.   In addition, third parties may create copycat or squatter domains to deceive consumers, which could harm our brand, interfere with our ability to register domain names, and result in additional costs.

Confidentiality agreements with employees and others may not adequately prevent disclosure of trade secrets and other proprietary information.

In order to protect our technologies and processes, we rely in part on confidentiality agreements with our employees, independent contractors, and other advisors.  These agreements may not effectively prevent disclosure of confidential information, including trade secrets, and may not provide an adequate remedy in the event of unauthorized disclosure of confidential information.  Others may also independently discover our trade secrets and proprietary information, and in such cases we may not be able to assert our trade secret rights against such parties.  To the extent that our employees, contractors, or other third parties with whom we do business use intellectual property owned by others in their work for us, disputes may arise as to the rights to related or resulting know-how and inventions.  The loss of confidential information or intellectual property rights, including trade secret protection, could make it easier for third parties to compete with our products.  In addition, any changes in, or unexpected interpretations of, intellectual property laws may compromise our ability to enforce our trade secret and intellectual property rights.  Costly and time-consuming litigation could be necessary to enforce and determine the scope of our proprietary rights, and failure to obtain or maintain protection of our trade secrets or other proprietary information could harm our business, results of operations, reputation, and competitive position.

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We may be unable to halt the operations of websites that aggregate or misappropriate our data.

From time to time, third parties may misappropriate our data through website scraping, robots, or other means and aggregate this data on their websites with data from other companies.  In addition, copycat websites may misappropriate data in our marketplace and attempt to imitate our brand or the functionality of our websites.  If we become aware of such activities, we intend to employ technological or legal measures in an attempt to halt their operations.  However, we may be unable to detect all such activities in a timely manner and, even if we could, technological and legal measures may be insufficient to halt their operations.  In some cases, particularly in the case of entities operating outside of the United States, our available remedies may not be adequate to protect us against the impact of the operation of such websites.  Regardless of whether we can successfully enforce our rights against the operators of these websites, any measures that we may take could require us to expend significant financial or other resources, which could harm our business, results of operations, and financial condition.  In addition, to the extent that such activity creates confusion among consumers or advertisers, our brand and business could be harmed.

We have incurred operating losses in the past and we may generate losses in the future.

We have incurred net operating losses in the past.  Although we have experienced significant growth in revenue, our revenue growth rate is likely to continue to decline in the future as a result of a variety of factors.  Our international expansion and new product launches may cause our costs to increase in future periods as we continue to expend substantial financial resources to enter into those markets and promote the new products, as applicable.  Our costs may also increase due to general administrative expenses, such as legal and accounting expenses related to being a public company.  If we fail to increase our revenue or manage these additional costs, we may incur losses in the future.

 

Complying with the laws and regulations affecting public companies has increased and will continue to increase our costs and the demands on management and could harm our operating results.

As a public company, we are incurring significant legal, accounting, and other expenses that we did not incur as a private company and these expenses are increasing as we are no longer an “emerging growth company,” as defined in the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act of 2012, or the JOBS Act, as of December 31, 2018. In addition, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, or the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and rules subsequently implemented by the SEC and the Nasdaq Stock Market, or Nasdaq, impose various requirements on public companies, including requiring certain corporate governance practices.  Our management and other personnel expect to devote a substantial amount of time to these compliance initiatives.  Moreover, these rules and regulations have increased and will continue to increase our legal, accounting, and financial compliance costs and have made and will continue to make some activities more time consuming and costly.  These rules and regulations could also make it more difficult for us to attract and retain qualified persons to serve on our board of directors or our board committees or as executive officers.

In addition, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act requires, among other things, that we assess the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting annually and the effectiveness of our disclosure controls and procedures quarterly.  In particular, as we are now a large accelerated filer, our independent registered public accounting firm is required to attest to the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting, pursuant to Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, or Section 404, and the cost of our compliance with Section 404 has correspondingly increased.  Our compliance with applicable provisions of Section 404 requires that we incur substantial accounting expense and expend significant management time on compliance-related issues as we implement additional corporate governance practices and comply with reporting requirements.

We must maintain proper and effective internal controls over financial reporting and any failure to maintain the adequacy of these internal controls may adversely affect investor confidence in our company and, as a result, the value of our Class A common stock could decline.

We are required, pursuant to Section 404 and the related rules adopted by the SEC, to furnish a report by management on, among other things, the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting on an annual basis. This assessment includes disclosure of any material weaknesses identified by our management in our internal control over financial reporting. During the evaluation and testing process, if we identify and fail to remediate one or more material weaknesses in our internal control over financial reporting, we will be unable to assert that our internal controls are effective.

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In addition, our independent registered public accounting firm must attest to the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting under Section 404. Our independent registered public accounting firm may issue a report that is adverse to us in the event it is not satisfied with the level at which our controls are documented, designed or operating. We may not be able to remediate any future material weaknesses, or to complete our evaluation, testing and any required remediation in a timely fashion. We are also required to disclose significant changes made to our internal control procedures on a quarterly basis. Our compliance with Section 404 will require that we incur substantial accounting expense and expend significant management efforts.

Any failure to maintain internal control over financial reporting could severely inhibit our ability to accurately report our financial condition or results of operations. If we are unable to assert that our internal control over financial reporting is effective or our independent registered public accounting firm is unable to express an opinion on the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting when it is required to issue such opinion, we could lose investor confidence in the accuracy and completeness of our financial reports, the market price of our Class A common stock could decline, and we could be subject to sanctions or investigations by Nasdaq, the SEC or other regulatory authorities.

Seasonality may cause fluctuations in our operating results.

Across the retail automotive industry, consumer purchases typically increase through the first three quarters of each year, due in part to the introduction of new vehicle models from manufacturers, and our consumer-marketing spend generally grows accordingly.  As consumer purchases slow in the fourth quarter, our rate of marketing spend typically also slows.  This seasonality has not been immediately apparent historically due to the overall growth of other operating expenses.  As our growth rates begin to moderate, the impact of these seasonality trends on our results of operations could become more pronounced.

We expect our results of operations to fluctuate on a quarterly and annual basis.

Our revenue and results of operations could vary significantly from period to period and may fail to match expectations as a result of a variety of factors, some of which are outside of our control.  Our results may vary as a result of fluctuations in the number of dealers subscribing to our marketplace and the size and seasonal variability of our advertisers’ marketing budgets.  As a result of the potential variations in our revenue and results of operations, period-to-period comparisons may not be meaningful and the results of any one period should not be relied on as an indication of future performance.  In addition, our results of operations may not meet the expectations of investors or public market analysts who follow us, which may adversely affect our stock price.

Our management team has limited experience managing a public company.

Members of our management team have limited experience managing a publicly traded company, interacting with public company investors, and complying with the increasingly complex laws pertaining to public companies.   Our management team may not successfully or efficiently manage a public company that is subject to significant regulatory oversight and reporting obligations under the federal securities laws and the scrutiny of securities analysts and investors.   These obligations and constituents require significant attention from our management team and may divert their attention away from the day‑to‑day management of our business, which could materially adversely affect our business, financial condition and operating results.

We may require additional capital to pursue our business objectives and respond to business opportunities, challenges, or unforeseen circumstances.  If capital is not available to us, our business, operating results, and financial condition may be harmed.

We intend to continue to make investments to support our growth and may require additional capital to pursue our business objectives and respond to business opportunities, challenges, or unforeseen circumstances, including to increase our marketing expenditures to improve our brand awareness, develop new products, further improve our marketplace and existing products, enhance our operating infrastructure, expand internationally and acquire complementary businesses and technologies.  Accordingly, we may need to engage in equity or debt financings to secure additional funds.  However, additional funds may not be available when we need them on terms that are acceptable to us or at all.  Volatility in the credit markets may also have an adverse effect on our ability to obtain debt financing.

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If we raise additional funds through further issuances of equity or convertible debt securities, our existing stockholders could suffer significant dilution, and any new equity securities we issue could have rights, preferences, and privileges superior to those of holders of our Class A common stock.  If we are unable to obtain adequate financing or financing on terms satisfactory to us when we require it, our ability to continue to pursue our business objectives and to respond to business opportunities, challenges, or unforeseen circumstances could be significantly limited, and our business, operating results, financial condition, and prospects could be adversely affected.

Changes in applicable tax law could negatively affect our business, results of operations and financial condition.

 

We are subject to taxation in the United States. On June 21, 2018, the United States Supreme Court issued its decision in South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc., the Wayfair Decision. The Wayfair Decision overturned prior case law that held that out-of-state merchants were not required to collect sales taxes unless they had a physical presence in the buyer’s state. Although we currently believe that the Wayfair Decision is unlikely to have a material effect on our business, it has created uncertainty over sales tax liability, and could precipitate reactions by legislators, regulators and courts that could adversely increase our tax administrative costs and tax risk, and negatively affect our overall business, results of operations and financial condition.

Risks Related to Our Class A Common Stock

Our founder controls a majority of the voting power of our outstanding capital stock, and, therefore, has control over key decision-making and could control our actions in a manner that conflicts with the interests of other stockholders.

Primarily by virtue of his holdings in shares of our Class B common stock, which has a ten-to-one voting ratio compared to our Class A common stock, Langley Steinert, our founder, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman, is able to exercise voting rights with respect to a majority of the voting power of our outstanding capital stock and therefore has the ability to control the outcome of matters submitted to our stockholders for approval, including the election of directors and any merger, consolidation, or sale of all or substantially all of our assets.  This concentrated control could delay, defer, or prevent a change of control, merger, consolidation, or sale of all or substantially all of our assets that our other stockholders support, or conversely this concentrated control could result in the consummation of such a transaction that our other stockholders do not support.  This concentrated control could also discourage a potential investor from acquiring our Class A common stock, which has limited voting power relative to the Class B common stock, and might harm the trading price of our Class A common stock.  In addition, Mr. Steinert has the ability to control the management and major strategic investments of our company as a result of his positions as our Chief Executive Officer and Chairman, and his ability to control the election or replacement of our directors.  As a board member and officer, Mr. Steinert owes a fiduciary duty to our stockholders and must act in good faith in a manner he reasonably believes to be in the best interests of our stockholders.  If Mr. Steinert’s status as an officer and director is terminated, his fiduciary duties to our stockholders will also terminate, but his voting power as a stockholder will not be reduced as a result of such termination unless such termination is either made voluntarily by Mr. Steinert, due to Mr. Steinert’s death, or if the sum of the number of shares of our capital stock held by Mr. Steinert, by any Family Member of Mr. Steinert, and by any Permitted Entity of Mr. Steinert (as such terms are defined in our amended and restated certificate of incorporation), assuming the exercise and settlement in full of all outstanding options and convertible securities and calculated on an as-converted to Class A common stock basis, is less than 9,091,484 shares.  As a stockholder, even a controlling stockholder, Mr. Steinert is entitled to vote his shares in his own interests, which may not always be aligned with the interests of our other stockholders.  

We believe that Mr. Steinert’s continued control of a majority of the voting power of our outstanding capital stock is beneficial to us and is in the best interests of our stockholders.  In the event that Mr. Steinert no longer controls a majority of the voting power, whether as a result of the disposition of some or all his shares of Class A or Class B common stock, the conversion of the Class B common stock into Class A common stock in accordance with its terms, or otherwise, our business or the trading price of our Class A common stock may be adversely affected.

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The multiple class structure of our common stock has the effect of concentrating voting control with our founder and certain other holders of our Class B common stock, which will limit or preclude the ability of our stockholders to influence corporate matters.

Our Class B common stock has ten votes per share and our Class A common stock has one vote per share.  Stockholders who hold shares of Class B common stock, including certain of our executive officers, employees, and directors and their affiliates, together hold a substantial majority of the voting power of our outstanding capital stock.  Because of the ten-to-one voting ratio between our Class B and Class A common stock, the holders of our Class B common stock collectively control a majority of the combined voting power of our common stock and therefore are able to control all matters submitted to our stockholders for approval so long as the shares of Class B common stock represent at least 9.1% of all outstanding shares of our Class A and Class B common stock.  This concentrated control will limit or preclude the ability of our stockholders to influence corporate matters for the foreseeable future.

Transfers by holders of Class B common stock will generally result in those shares converting into Class A common stock, subject to limited exceptions, such as certain transfers effected for estate planning or charitable purposes.  The conversion of Class B common stock into Class A common stock will have the effect, over time, of increasing the relative voting power of those holders of Class B common stock who retain their shares in the long term.  If, for example, Mr. Steinert retains a significant portion of his holdings of Class B common stock for an extended period of time, he could, in the future, continue to control a majority of the combined voting power of our outstanding capital stock.

The price of our Class A common stock has been and may continue to be volatile and the value of our stockholders’ investment in our stock could decline.

The trading price of our Class A common stock has been and may continue to be volatile and fluctuate substantially.  The trading price of our Class A common stock depends on a number of factors, including those described in this “Risk Factors” section, many of which are beyond our control and may not be related to our operating performance.  Factors that could cause fluctuations in the trading price of our Class A common stock include the following:

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In addition, the stock market in general, and the market for technology companies in particular, have experienced extreme price and volume fluctuations that have often been unrelated or disproportionate to the operating performance of those companies.  Broad market and industry factors may seriously affect the market price of our Class A common stock, regardless of our actual operating performance.  In addition, in the past, following periods of volatility in the overall market and the market prices of a particular company’s securities, securities class action litigations have often been instituted against these companies.  Litigation of this type, if instituted against us, could result in substantial costs and a diversion of our management’s attention and resources.

The exclusion of our Class A common stock from major stock indexes could adversely affect the trading market and price of our Class A common stock.

Several major stock index providers have announced they will begin to exclude, or are considering plans to exclude, from their indexes the securities of companies with unequal voting rights such as ours.  Exclusion from stock indexes could make it more difficult, or impossible, for some fund managers to buy the excluded securities, particularly in the case of index tracking mutual funds and exchange traded funds.  The exclusion of our Class A common stock from major stock indexes could adversely affect the trading market and price of our Class A common stock.

Anti-takeover provisions contained in our amended and restated certificate of incorporation and amended and restated bylaws, as well as provisions of Delaware law, could impair a takeover attempt.

The provisions of our amended and restated certificate of incorporation and amended and restated bylaws, and provisions of Delaware law, may have the effect of rendering more difficult, delaying, or preventing an acquisition deemed undesirable by our board of directors. Our corporate governance documents include provisions:

 

These provisions, alone or together, could delay or prevent hostile takeovers and changes in control or changes in our management.

As a Delaware corporation, we are also subject to provisions of Delaware law, including Section 203 of the Delaware General Corporation law, which prevents some stockholders holding more than 15% of our outstanding common stock from engaging in certain business combinations without approval of the holders of substantially all of our outstanding common stock.

Any provision of our amended and restated certificate of incorporation, amended and restated bylaws, or Delaware law that has the effect of delaying or deterring a change in control could limit the opportunity for our stockholders to receive a premium for their shares of our Class A common stock, and could also affect the price that some investors are willing to pay for our Class A common stock.

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Our amended and restated certificate of incorporation includes a forum selection clause, which could limit our stockholders’ ability to obtain a favorable judicial forum for disputes with us.

Our amended and restated certificate of incorporation provides that, unless we consent in writing to the selection of an alternative forum, the Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware will, to the fullest extent permitted by law, be the sole and exclusive forum for any stockholder to bring: (i) any derivative action or proceeding brought on behalf of us; (ii) any action asserting a claim of breach of a fiduciary duty owed by any of our directors, officers or other employees or agents to us or to our stockholders; (iii) any action asserting a claim against us arising pursuant to any provision of the Delaware General Corporation Law or our amended and restated certificate of incorporation or amended and restated bylaws; (iv) any action to interpret, apply, enforce or determine the validity of our amended and restated certificate of incorporation or our amended and restated bylaws; or (v) any action asserting a claim against us or any of our directors, officers, or other employees or agents governed by the internal affairs doctrine.  Any person or entity purchasing or otherwise acquiring any interest in shares of our capital stock is deemed to have notice of and have consented to the foregoing provisions.  This forum selection provision in our amended and restated certificate of incorporation may limit our stockholders’ ability to obtain a favorable judicial forum for disputes with us.  It is also possible that, notwithstanding the forum selection clause included in our amended and restated certificate of incorporation, a court could rule that such a provision is inapplicable or unenforceable.

If securities or industry analysts do not publish, or cease publishing, research or reports about us, our business or our market, or if they change their recommendations regarding our stock adversely, our stock price and trading volume could decline.

The trading market for our Class A common stock is influenced by the research and reports that industry or securities analysts may publish about us, our business, our market, and our competitors.  If any of the analysts that covers us changes its recommendation regarding our stock adversely, or provides more favorable relative recommendations about our competitors, our stock price would likely decline.  If any analyst that covers us were to cease coverage of our company or fail to regularly publish reports on us, we could lose visibility in the financial markets, which in turn could cause our stock price or trading volume to decline.

We do not intend to pay cash dividends for the foreseeable future.

We have never declared or paid cash dividends on our capital stock.  We currently intend to retain any future earnings to finance the operation and expansion of our business, and we do not expect to declare or pay any cash dividends in the foreseeable future.  As a result, our stockholders may only receive a return on their investment in our Class A common stock if the trading price of their shares increases.

Our status as a “controlled company” could make our Class A common stock less attractive to some investors or otherwise harm our stock price.

More than 50% of our voting power is held by Mr. Steinert.  As a result, we are a “controlled company” under the corporate governance rules for Nasdaq-listed companies.  Under these rules, a company of which more than 50% of the voting power is held by an individual, a group or another company is a controlled company and may elect not to comply with certain Nasdaq corporate governance requirements, including:

 

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We have relied on certain or all of these exemptions.  Accordingly, should the interests of our controlling stockholder differ from those of other stockholders, the other stockholders may not have the same protections afforded to stockholders of companies that are subject to all of the corporate governance rules for Nasdaq-listed companies.  Our status as a controlled company could make our Class A common stock less attractive to some investors or otherwise harm our stock price.

As of December 31, 2018, we are no longer an emerging growth company and, as a result, we have incurred and expect to continue to incur significant additional legal and financial compliance costs by preparing to comply, and complying with, increased disclosure and governance requirements.

As of December 31, 2018, as a result of our market capitalization as of June 29, 2018 (and our having been public for at least 12 months as of December 31, 2018 and our having filed our 2017 Annual Report with the SEC), we are a large accelerated filer and ceased being an emerging growth company. Therefore, we are subject to certain requirements that apply to other public companies but did not previously apply to us due to our status as an emerging growth company. These requirements include:

We have already begun incurring significant additional legal and financial compliance costs in connection with our loss of emerging growth company status. We expect that our compliance with these additional requirements, including the provisions of Section 404, will continue to substantially increase our legal and financial compliance costs and make some activities more time consuming and costly.

 

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Item 1B. Unresolved Staff Comments.

Not applicable.

Item 2. Properties.

We do not own any real property. Our principal executive offices are located in Cambridge, Massachusetts where we lease a total of approximately 148,375 square feet of space in three buildings under leases that expire in November 2022, January 2024, and October 2033. We also lease office space in Dublin, Ireland for our European operations, and in Detroit, Michigan, for additional space for our advertising sales employees.

Item 3. Legal Proceedings.

From time to time we may become involved in legal proceedings or be subject to claims arising in the ordinary course of our business. We are not presently subject to any pending or threatened litigation that we believe, if determined adversely to us, individually, or taken together, would reasonably be expected to have a material adverse effect on our business or financial results.

Item 4. Mine Safety Disclosures.

Not applicable.

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PART II

Item 5. Market for Registrant’s Common Equity, Related Stockholder Matters and Issuer Purchases of Equity Securities.

 

Market Information for Common Stock

Our Class A common stock has been listed on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol “CARG” since October 12, 2017. Prior to that date, there was no public trading market for our Class A common stock. Our initial public offering, or IPO, was priced at $16.00 per share on October 11, 2017.

 

On February 27, 2019, the last reported sale price of our Class A common stock on the Nasdaq Global Select Market was $42.65 per share.

 

Holders

As of February 22, 2019, we had 28 holders of record of our Class A common stock. The actual number of stockholders is greater than this number of record holders, and includes stockholders who are beneficial owners but whose shares are held in street name by brokers and other nominees. The number of holders of record does not include stockholders whose shares may be held in trust by other entities.

 

Dividends

We have never declared or paid any cash dividends on our common stock. We currently anticipate that we will retain future earnings to fund development and growth of our business, and we do not anticipate paying cash dividends in the foreseeable future.

Performance Graph

This performance graph shall not be deemed “soliciting material” or to be “filed” with the Securities and Exchange Commission for purposes of Section 18 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, or the Exchange Act, or otherwise be subject to the liabilities under that section, and shall not be deemed to be incorporated by reference into any filing of CarGurus, Inc. under the Exchange Act or the Securities Act of 1933, as amended.

 

The following graph shows a comparison from October 12, 2017 (the date our Class A common stock commenced trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market) through December 31, 2018 of the cumulative total return for our Class A common stock, the Nasdaq Composite Index and the S&P 500 Index. All values assume a $100 initial cash investment and data for the Nasdaq Composite Index and the S&P 500 Index assume reinvestment of dividends, if any. Such returns are based on historical results and are not intended to suggest future performance.

 

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Recent Sales of Unregistered Securities

None.

 

Purchases of Equity Securities

None.

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Item 6. Selected Consolidated Financial Data.

The following Selected Consolidated Financial Data should be read in conjunction with “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations”, the consolidated financial statements and related notes, and other financial information included in this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

We derived the consolidated statements of operations data for the years ended December 31, 2018, 2017, and 2016 and the consolidated balance sheet data as of December 31, 2018 and 2017 from our audited consolidated financial statements, which are included elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. We derived the consolidated statement of operations data for the year ended December 31, 2015 and the consolidated balance sheet data as of December 31, 2016 and 2015 from our audited consolidated financial statements, which are not included in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. Historical results are not necessarily indicative of the results to be expected in future periods.

 

 

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Adjusted EBITDA

To provide investors with additional information regarding our financial results, we monitor and have presented within this Annual Report on Form 10-K Adjusted EBITDA, which is a non‑GAAP financial measure. This non‑GAAP financial measure is not based on any standardized methodology prescribed by U.S. generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP, and is not necessarily comparable to similarly titled measures presented by other companies.

We define Adjusted EBITDA as net income (loss), adjusted to exclude: depreciation and amortization, stock‑based compensation expense, other (income) expense, net, the (benefit from) provision for income taxes, and certain one‑time, non‑recurring items, if and when applicable. We have presented Adjusted EBITDA in this Annual Report on Form 10-K because it is a key measure used by our management and board of directors to understand and evaluate our operating performance, generate future operating plans, and make strategic decisions regarding the allocation of capital. In particular, we believe that the exclusion of certain items in calculating Adjusted EBITDA can produce a useful measure for period‑to‑period comparisons of our business.

We use Adjusted EBITDA to evaluate our operating performance and trends and make planning decisions. We believe Adjusted EBITDA helps identify underlying trends in our business that could otherwise be masked by the effect of the expenses that we exclude. Accordingly, we believe that Adjusted EBITDA provides useful information to investors and others in understanding and evaluating our operating results, enhancing the overall understanding of our past performance and future prospects, and allowing for greater transparency with respect to key financial metrics used by our management in its financial and operational decision‑making. In addition, we evaluate our Adjusted EBITDA in relation to our revenue. We refer to this as Adjusted EBITDA margin and define it as Adjusted EBITDA divided by total revenue.

Our Adjusted EBITDA is not prepared in accordance with GAAP, and should not be considered in isolation of, or as an alternative to, measures prepared in accordance with GAAP. There are a number of limitations related to the use of Adjusted EBITDA rather than net income, which is the most directly comparable GAAP equivalent. Some of these limitations are:

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Because of these limitations, we consider, and you should consider, Adjusted EBITDA together with other operating and financial performance measures presented in accordance with GAAP.

The following table presents a reconciliation of Adjusted EBITDA to net income (loss), the most directly comparable measure calculated in accordance with GAAP, for each of the periods presented.

 

 

 

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Item 7. Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations.

You should read the following discussion and analysis of our financial condition and results of operations together with our consolidated financial statements and the related notes and other financial information included elsewhere in this report. Some of the information contained in this discussion and analysis or elsewhere in this report, including information with respect to our plans and strategy for our business and our performance and future success, includes forward‑looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. See “Special Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements.” You should review the “Risk Factors” section of this Annual Report on Form 10-K for a discussion of important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the results described in or implied by the forward‑looking statements contained in the following discussion and analysis. In this discussion, we use financial measures that are considered non‑GAAP financial measures under Securities and Exchange Commission rules. These rules regarding non-GAAP financial measures require supplemental explanation and reconciliation, which is included elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. Investors should not consider non‑GAAP financial measures in isolation from or in substitution for, financial information presented in compliance with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP.

Company Overview

CarGurus is a global, online automotive marketplace connecting buyers and sellers of new and used cars. Using proprietary technology, search algorithms, and innovative data analytics, we provide information and analysis that create a differentiated automotive search experience for consumers. Our trusted marketplace empowers users with unbiased third‑party validation on pricing and dealer reputation as well as other information that aids them in finding “Great Deals from Top-Rated Dealers.” In addition to the United States, we operate online marketplaces in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, and Spain.

We generate marketplace subscription revenue from dealers through Listing and Dealer Display subscriptions, and advertising revenue from automobile manufacturers and other auto‑related brand advertisers. We generated revenue of $454.1 million in 2018, $316.9 million in 2017, and $198.1 million in 2016, representing year-over-year increases of 43% in 2018 and 60% in 2017. 

In 2018, we generated net income of $65.2 million and our Adjusted EBITDA was $49.0 million, compared to a net income of $13.2 million and Adjusted EBITDA of $24.1 million in 2017, and a net income of $6.5 million and Adjusted EBITDA of $11.0 million in 2016. See “Selected Consolidated Financial Data — Adjusted EBITDA” for more information regarding our use of Adjusted EBITDA, a non-GAAP financial measure, and a reconciliation of Adjusted EBITDA to our net income.

We have two reportable segments, United States and International. See Note 11 of our Consolidated Financial Statements included in Item 8 of this Annual Report on Form 10-K for more information.

Key Business Metrics

We regularly review a number of metrics, including the key metrics listed below, to evaluate our business, measure our performance, identify trends affecting our business, formulate financial projections, and make operating and strategic decisions. We believe it is important to evaluate these metrics for the United States and International segments. The International segment derives revenues from marketplace subscriptions, advertising services, and other revenues from customers outside of the United States. International markets perform differently from the United States market due to a variety of factors, including our operating history in the market, our rate of investment, market size, market maturity, and other dynamics unique to each country.

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Monthly Unique Users

For each of our websites, we define a monthly unique user as an individual who visited such website within a calendar month, based on data as measured by Google Analytics. We calculate average monthly unique users as the sum of the monthly unique users in a given period, divided by the number of months in that period. We count a unique user the first time a computer or mobile device with a unique device identifier accesses one of our websites during a calendar month. If an individual accesses one of our websites using a different device within a given month, the first access by each such device is counted as a separate unique user. We view our average monthly unique users as a key indicator of the quality of our user experience, the effectiveness of our advertising and traffic acquisition, and the strength of our brand awareness. Measuring unique users is important to us because our marketplace subscription revenue depends, in part, on our ability to provide dealers with connections to our users and exposure to our marketplace audience. We define connections as interactions between consumers and dealers on our marketplace through phone calls, email, managed text and chat, and clicks to access the dealer’s website or map directions to the dealership.

 

 

Monthly Sessions

We define monthly sessions as the number of distinct visits to our websites that take place each month within a given time frame, as measured and defined by Google Analytics. We calculate average monthly sessions as the sum of the monthly sessions in a given period, divided by the number of months in that period. A session is defined as beginning with the first page view from a computer or mobile device and ending at the earliest of when a user closes their browser window, after 30 minutes of inactivity, or at midnight Eastern Time each night. A session can be made up of multiple page views and visitor actions, such as performing a search, visiting vehicle detail pages, and connecting with a dealer. We believe the volume of sessions in a time period, when considered in conjunction with the number of unique users in that time period, is an indicator of consumer satisfaction and engagement with our marketplace.

 

 

Number of Paying Dealers

A paying dealer is a dealer, based on a distinct associated inventory feed, that subscribes to our Enhanced or Featured Listing product at the end of a defined period. We believe that the number of paying dealers is indicative of the value proposition of our Listing products, and our sales and marketing success, including our ability to retain paying dealers and develop new dealer relationships.

 

 

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Average Annual Revenue per Subscribing Dealer (AARSD)

We measure the average annual revenue we receive from each paying dealer. We define AARSD, which is measured at the end of a defined period, as the total marketplace subscription revenue during the trailing 12 months divided by the average number of paying dealers during the same trailing 12-month period. We believe that our ability to grow AARSD is an indicator of the value proposition of our products and the return on investment, or ROI, our paying dealers realize from our products. Increases in AARSD, which we believe reflect the value of exposure to our engaged audience in relation to subscription cost, are driven by our ability to grow the volume of connections to our users and the quality of those connections, which result in increased opportunity to upsell package levels and cross-sell additional products to our paying dealers.

 

 

Adjusted EBITDA

We define Adjusted EBITDA as net income (loss), adjusted to exclude: depreciation and amortization, stock‑based compensation expense, other (income) expense, net, the (benefit from) provision for income taxes, and certain one‑time, non‑recurring items, if and when applicable. We monitor and have presented Adjusted EBITDA in this Annual Report on Form 10-K as a non‑GAAP financial measure to supplement the financial information we present on a GAAP basis to provide investors with additional information regarding our financial results. Adjusted EBITDA, as a non‑GAAP financial measure, should not be considered in isolation from, or as an alternative to, measures prepared in accordance with GAAP. We consider, and you should consider, Adjusted EBITDA together with other operating and financial performance measures presented in accordance with GAAP. Also, our non‑GAAP measure may not necessarily be comparable to similarly titled measures presented by other companies.

We believe that Adjusted EBITDA is a key indicator of our operating results. For further explanation of the uses and limitations of this measure and a reconciliation of our Adjusted EBITDA to the most directly comparable GAAP measure, net income, please see “Selected Consolidated Financial Data — Adjusted EBITDA.”

Components of Consolidated Statements of Operations

Revenue

Our revenue is derived from two primary sources: (i) marketplace subscription revenue and (ii) advertising and other revenue, as described below.

Marketplace Subscription Revenue

We offer three types of marketplace Listing products to dealers: Basic Listing, which is free; and Enhanced or Featured Listing, which require a paid subscription under a monthly, quarterly, semiannual, or annual subscription basis. Contractual subscriptions for customers generally auto‑renew on a monthly basis and are cancellable by dealers with 30‑days’ advance notice. We also offer Listing dealers access to the Dealer Dashboard, which includes a performance summary, Dealer Insights tool, user review management platform, Pricing Tool, and Market Analysis tool. The Pricing Tool and Market Analysis tool are available only to paying dealers.

In addition to listing inventory in the marketplace and providing access to the Dealer Dashboard, we offer Enhanced and Featured Listing dealers other subscription advertising and customer acquisition products, including display advertising that appears in our marketplace and on other sites on the internet. This advertising can be targeted by geography, search history, and a number of other factors, and dealer search engine marketing, which helps dealers more effectively acquire customers through paid search, social media, and retargeted advertising.

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Advertising and Other Revenue

Advertising and other revenue consists primarily of non-dealer display advertising revenue from auto manufacturers and other auto-related brand advertisers sold on a cost per thousand impressions, or CPM, basis. An impression is an advertisement loaded on a web page. In addition to advertising sold on a CPM basis, we also have advertising sold on a cost per click basis. Auto manufacturers and other brand advertisers can execute advertising campaigns that are targeted across a wide variety of parameters, including demographic groups, behavioral characteristics, specific auto brands, categories such as Certified Pre-Owned, and segments such as hybrid vehicles.

For a description of our revenue accounting policies, see “— Critical Accounting Policies and Significant Estimates.”

Cost of Revenue

Cost of revenue primarily consists of costs related to supporting and hosting our product offerings. These costs include salaries, benefits, incentive compensation, and stock‑based compensation expense related to the customer support team and third‑party service provider costs such as data center and networking expenses, allocated overhead, depreciation and amortization expense associated with our property and equipment, and amortization of capitalized website development costs. We allocate overhead costs, such as rent and facility costs, information technology costs, and employee benefit costs, to all departments based on headcount. As such, general overhead expenses are reflected in cost of revenue and each operating expense category. We expect these expenses to increase as we continue to scale our business and introduce new products.

Operating Expenses

Sales and Marketing

Sales and marketing expenses consist primarily of personnel and related expenses for our sales and marketing staff, including salaries, benefits, incentive compensation, commissions, stock‑based compensation expense, and travel costs; costs associated with consumer marketing, such as traffic acquisition, brand building, and public relations activities; costs associated with dealer marketing, such as content marketing, customer and promotional events, and industry events; and allocated overhead. We expect sales and marketing expenses to increase as we grow our audience and attempt to strengthen our brand awareness and, as informed by trends in our business and the competitive landscape of our market, fluctuate from quarter to quarter, which will impact our quarterly results of operations.

Product, Technology, and Development

Product, technology, and development expenses, which include research and development costs, consist primarily of personnel costs of our development team, including payroll, benefits, stock‑based compensation expense and allocated overhead costs. Other than website development costs and other costs that qualify for capitalization, research and development costs are expensed as incurred. We expect product, technology, and development expenses to increase as we develop new products and make improvements to our existing platform.

General and Administrative

General and administrative expenses consist of personnel costs and related expenses for executive, finance, legal, human resources, and administrative personnel, including salaries, benefits, incentive compensation, and stock‑based compensation expense, in addition to the costs associated with professional fees for external legal, accounting and other consulting services, insurance premiums, payment processing and billing costs, and allocated overhead costs. We expect general and administrative expenses to increase as we continue to incur the costs of compliance associated with being a publicly traded company, including legal, audit, and consulting fees.

Depreciation and Amortization

Depreciation and amortization expenses consist of depreciation on property and equipment and leasehold improvements.

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Other Income, Net

Other income, net consists primarily of interest income earned on our cash, cash equivalents, and investments, interest expense on lease obligations, and net foreign exchange gains and losses.

(Benefit from) Provision for Income Taxes

We are subject to federal and state income taxes in the United States and taxes in foreign jurisdictions in which we operate. We have recognized a benefit from income taxes for the period ended December 31, 2018 as a result of stock-based compensation benefits recorded. We have recorded a provision for income taxes for the periods ended December 31, 2017 and 2016 as a result of our consolidated taxable income position. We recognize deferred tax assets and liabilities based on temporary differences between the financial reporting and income tax bases of assets and liabilities using statutory rates. We regularly assess the need to record a valuation allowance against net deferred tax assets if, based upon the available evidence, it is more likely than not that some or all of the deferred tax assets will not be realized. We have not provided a valuation allowance against our net deferred tax assets at December 31, 2018 or 2017.

Results of Operations

The following table sets forth our selected consolidated statements of operations data for each of the periods indicated. The period‑to‑period comparison of financial results is not necessarily indicative of future results.