Randy Nonnenberg, the Internet’s Coolest Car Guy

Randy Nonnenberg started Bring a Trailer in 2007 so he and his friends could buy and sell vintage cars. Today it has more than 900,000 active users and 400,000-plus registered bidders. The site’s fun live auctions are the draw. Bidding can get pretty heated: If a counteroffer comes in the last two minutes of a sale, two more minutes are put on the clock, with bidders going head-to-head while thousands of people look on and comment, often astutely, on the action. The format is so successful that established auctioneers such as Bonhams, Gooding & Co. and RM Sotheby’s—whose online auctions haven’t traditionally been live—have developed their own versions.

A Stanford University grad who held various jobs at BMW of North America LLC, Nonnenberg has made the buying and selling process more efficient, too. Buyers pay a 5% service fee, half of what the big auction houses typically require, and it’s capped at $5,000, whether the car sells for $100,000 or $1 million. Sellers pay a $99 listing fee. In January a 2005 Porsche Carrera GT sold on the site for a little more than $1.9 million, a world record for that model, and then two weeks later one with only 250 miles sold for $2 million.