CARS AND CODE
Vancouver tech entrepreneur buys and rebuilds brand new Lamborghini Huracan Performante
Can you remember March 31 of this year?
Kevin Gordon sure can. “That was a big day,” the 32-yearold Vancouverite says with a laugh. “I was speaking at an event the night before so I woke up in Toronto, hopped on a plane — I flew business class which I don’t normally do — arrived in Vancouver, went to my house, dropped off my luggage, went to BMO and got a bank draft, drove straight to Lamborghini Vancouver — they didn’t know who I was — and I bought one of the baddest Lamborghinis ever made.”
He continues: “It was pouring rain, I drove straight home to my parkade and literally sprinted to Earls, where my whole team was waiting for me at our company celebration.”
And amid that party to celebrate the sale of the tech startup he co-founded, among the hugs and high fives, no one knew their boss had just bought his dream car.
That would change of course, and thanks to Instagram, most if not all of the civilized world knows all about Kevin Gordon’s 2018 Lamborghini Huracan Performante.
“It’s the most modified 2018 Lamborghini Huracan Performante in the world,” he says, basing that statement on Instagram’s global reach.
“I feel if there was one somewhere on the planet (more modified), it would be on Instagram.”
After just three days on the social media platform, he had well over 200,000 likes (check it out at kevin.j.gordon).
“It’s a crazy story, very unique,” he tells me, again with a laugh and big smile, as we’re sitting in the boardroom of Convertus Digital Inc., the Vancouver-based company he co-founded with Nick Williams almost six years ago.
Gordon grew up in the White Rock area and describes his younger self as a really ambitious kid who hustled all the time.
“Before I knew what the word ‘entrepreneurial’ meant I was doing entrepreneurial stuff,” he says. “I was always building something, scheming something, trading stuff.”
But before those formative years came a passion for cars, one passed down to him from his parents.
“We didn’t have a lot of money but they loved them,” he says of his mom and dad, adding his parents had a shop in the back of their house where they taught young Gordon how to work on cars.
“We fully tore cars apart there, right down to the frame and we’d build them back up.”
At age 15, his passion for cars and his budding business acumen merged. He started buying car parts locally, and shipping them all over Canada. This was also the start of Gordon connecting the offline and online worlds, something that would prove prophetic for his future.
He would buy parts traditionally— at garage sales—and sell them online to people all over the continent. As he was into modified cars — particularly Toyota Supras, of which he owned 10 before the age of 20 — it was this marketplace where he found a niche.
This was a time when Craigslist was getting started, and before people were comfortable connecting their credit card number to a computer. It was also a time when computer chips were starting to show up in cars, and for the teenager this too proved a match made in heaven.
“You could do piggyback or stand-alone ECUs and tune them with your own computer for things like fuel ratio use. And that’s where I totally geeked out.”
As to high school: “It was a really bad time. I had a really, really rough go of it. Got bullied, didn’t have a lot of friends. Didn’t go to parties or on dates. So I wanted nothing to do with school.”
That’s not to say he didn’t embrace learning, however. In this case, HTML, SES and JavaScript.
“I was really interested in it and Craigslist was just starting to take off and I could see dealers were interested in marketing their cars there,” he recalls.
“But they were just posting the worst, text-based ads with a couple of crappy pictures.”
So Gordon wondered if there was a way to automate that process for dealerships, thus provide a service to those dealers that didn’t have the time or technological knowhow. Translation: every single one.
So he wrote a code, which became a script, that would ‘crawl’ dealership websites, look at their inventory, and then extract that as code. Then the ‘bot’ he created would upload and post an ad on Craigslist. And since it was posted with HTML formatting, he says, it looked very professional and stood out. Not surprisingly, dealerships were “super-stoked to pay $500 a month for that service,” and all it took was for Gordon to spend a couple of hours setting up the program on the dealers’ system. He took a job at a White Rock dealership, hired ostensibly to set up a web-based marketing system, but he seized the access he was given to learn about the business from the inside. He learned a lot, he says, most notably that he didn’t like working at a dealership.
Fortune, or in this case misfortune, stepped in again. Gordon, now 21, broke his tibia and his fibia playing baseball and spent two months in bed. Lots of time to sit, think and plan his next move.
“That’s when I stumbled across the Jim Pattison Group and how terrible their online presence was. I felt there was an opportunity to just get them as a client (he was still running and selling the Craigslist system for dealers) so I wrote out 15-page marketing-slash-business plan and just emailed it off to them.”
But it worked, with the company giving him one dealership, on a short-term basis, to try out his plan.
Again, to make a short story even shorter, he worked day and night, by himself, and four months in he was overseeing the entire group’s ecommerce division. He hadn’t turned 23 yet, and he had a direct line to Jimmy Pattison.
Three years into his stint with the Pattison Group, Gordon’s ingrained entrepreneurial spirit did battle with his current corporate gig. Take a wild guess which one prevailed?
Teamed with Nick Williams — a friend from his White Rock days who was his first hire into his Pattison Group team — Gordon walked away from the perks, title and status at Pattison to start his own company.
Convertus Digital Inc. began life in Gordon’s Yaletown apartment with just him and Williams as employees. Today, some five-anda-half years later, the company employs 75 people in a low-slung building in the shadow of B.C. Place.
Essentially, Convertus is a digital-based solution system that helps car dealerships and auto manufacturers run their business more efficiently. It provides things like inventory management solutions, a VIN decoder, portals for customers into Facebook, and a suite of marketing tools integrating Google and Google Ads.
Convertus caught the attention of the big traditional players, in particular Trader, formerly known as Auto Trader.
What followed was a 10-month vetting process, followed by a shortlist that was very intense with ‘granular’ due diligence.
Then came a letter of intent to purchase Convertus from Trader. They started talking numbers and it all added up for both parties, with a purchase prize of $18 million. The deal saw Trader’s entire client base migrated over to Convertus’s tech stack. And it saw Gordon and William’s bank accounts balloon.
Gordon says Williams’ big purchase was a condo.
“He loves cars too but didn’t want to get one,” says Gordon. “So I bought him an Audi R8.” “I bought, essentially, the fastest production Lamborghini that’s ever been made.”
So how do you improve on a V10-equipped, all-wheel drive supercar that received top reviews from the world’s motoring press?
Says Gordon: “The car has been completely torn apart. The fuel system has been completely replaced, and several inter-coolers added. I supercharged it, so it’s now like 900 horsepower. It’s got Brixton Forged wheels on it. It’s got a full aftermarket carbon-fibre body kit.
“Essentially, every single thing on this car that can be changed has been changed,” he says, adding that the warranty on the half-million dollar car was voided mere days after he purchased it thanks to the modifications.