What I’ve Learned About Technology, Operators, and the Future of the Industry
About a year ago, Tom Klauer began pulling me into the auto recycling industry.
I did not arrive with a lifetime of experience in the business. Tom had that. Many of the operators I have spent time with over the past year had that. I came from a different world: the Marine Corps, DARPA, IST Research, and years spent building and transitioning technology into difficult operational environments.
My background was not in buying cars, managing parts, running self- service locations, or understanding the economics of a recycling yard. My background was in watching technology succeed or fail based on whether it truly understood the environment where it was supposed to operate.
That distinction matters. When you come into a new industry from the technology side, it is tempting to believe the work is mostly about modernization. You see systems that do not talk to each other, workflows that depend on manual effort, spreadsheets that carry too much of the business, and data that exists but is hard to use. The instinct is to say, “This industry needs better software.” After a year in auto recycling, I think that statement is true, but incomplete.
What I found in auto recycling was a community of operators whose ingenuity reminded me of the best young Marines I served with: practical, adaptive, resourceful, and focused on solving the problem in front of them. The best operators here have a feel for supply, demand, vehicle mix, labor, parts velocity, towing economics, commodity swings, local customer behavior, and yard flow at a level that is hard to appreciate from the outside. Much of that intelligence was earned over decades. It lives in conversations, habits, judgment calls, and the operating rhythm of the business.
Double Helix Development
The opportunity is not to replace that knowledge with technology. The opportunity is to build technology close enough to the operation that it can capture, amplify, and extend that knowledge. That idea is familiar to me. At IST Research, we used to talk about something we called Double Helix Development. The concept was simple but important: technologists and operators need to work side by side so that technology and operations can coevolve. One strand is the technology. The other is the operational environment. Each shapes the other.
As the technology creates new possibilities, operators begin to imagine new ways to work. As operators test those possibilities against reality, technologists learn what actually matters and what needs to be built next. I have come to believe that the same principle applies directly to auto recycling. The future of the industry will not be built by software teams sitting apart from operators and guessing what they need. It will be built by technologists and recyclers working closely enough together that both sides change.
Designing and Investing in the Future
One of the most encouraging things I have seen over the past year is that this is not just an idea. It is happening. The operators who have joined us in this endeavor represent ownership of roughly 75 self-service recycling yards. That matters because they are not simply watching from the sidelines. They are investing, participating, questioning, and designing. They bring different markets, different operating models, different histories, and different opinions about where the industry is headed.
That range of perspective is incredibly valuable. If you are trying to build something meaningful for an industry, you need more than one operator’s view of the world. You need a community of operators willing to put the work under pressure.
That is why our weekly design sessions have become so important. Each week, we sit with different groups of operators and work through real problems. Some conversations are about buying. Some are about pricing, inventory, marketing, reporting, integrations, or how information should move through the business. The best sessions are not polite product reviews; they are practical discussions about what happens on a busy day, what employees actually do, what customers actually ask for. Those conversations are where the real product work happens.
The lesson for me is that operators are not just a source of requirements. They are part of the development process itself. They know when an idea is interesting but irrelevant. They know when a number is technically correct but operationally useless. They know when a workflow looks clean in a software demo but breaks down in the real world. Most importantly, they know where the margin is won and lost. In a business where small decisions compound across hundreds or thousands of vehicles, that knowledge is not optional. It is the foundation.
The first major area where this becomes clear is vehicle acquisition. I have come to see buying as one of the strategic centers of the business. A recycler can operate well in many other areas, but if it buys the wrong cars, overpays for the right cars, or depends too heavily on channels that add cost without adding value, the margin problem begins before the vehicle ever reaches the yard. The industry needs better ways to answer a more specific question than “What is this vehicle worth?”
The better question is what that vehicle is worth to a particular operator, in a particular market, with a particular cost structure, demand profile, labor model, and downstream sales opportunity. That is not just a pricing problem. It is an operational intelligence problem.
The same is true across the rest of the business. Every recycler has data, but much of it is scattered across systems, people, vendors, and processes. A dashboard that does not change a decision is decoration. A report that arrives too late may explain what happened, but it does not improve what happens next. The real value comes when intelligence reaches the workflow at the moment decisions are made.
The yard remains central, but it is no longer the full boundary of the market. Customers search before they drive. They compare before they call. Repair shops, rebuilders, exporters, and retail customers expect better visibility into what is available and whether it is worth their time. The digital side of the business has to match the physical reality of the yard.
AI Matters When Grounded in Real Operations
That is also how I think about AI in this industry. AI will matter only if it is grounded in real operations. Generic tools will not understand the difference between an interesting pattern and an actionable one. But AI shaped by operating data and tested by operators can help surface signals, improve pricing decisions, summarize performance, and expose demand that would otherwise stay buried.
After a year in auto recycling, I am more convinced than ever that the industry is entering a new phase. The opportunity is to help recyclers buy better, process smarter, sell wider, integrate faster, and use their own operating knowledge as a competitive advantage.
That will require software, data, AI, and better systems. But above all, it will require respect for the operators who understand the business from the inside. Real innovation happens when the people building the technology and the people living the operation are close enough to learn from each other.
That is the double helix. And I believe it will define the next chapter of auto recycling