Carro / Aaron Tan

His first company sale nearly collapsed because the buyer found out he was 13.

I've been following Carro for a while. The origin story is wilder than I expected.

When Aaron Tan sold his first company, the buyer sat down with the lawyers and discovered a problem. The founder was 13 years old.

The company was registered under his grandmother's name because Aaron was in Secondary 1. The agreements wouldn't be legally binding. The deal nearly collapsed.

Here's how a 13-year-old in a Jurong HDB flat ended up there in the first place.

His mother bought him a computer at 12. He started borrowing programming books from the Chua Chu Kang library. Taught himself C++ and CGI scripting.

By 13, he'd started a network hosting company. By 16, a second in ad-tech. Both under grandmother's name. Both sold by 21.

He got a scholarship to Carnegie Mellon, came back to Singapore, and in 2015 co-founded Carro with two friends he'd met there — Aditya Lesmana and Kelvin Chng. An online used car marketplace.

But here's where it gets interesting.

Carro launched as an "anti-dealer" brand. Direct-to-consumer, cutting out the dealerships entirely. A frontal attack on the used car industry.

The backlash was fierce.

Dealers controlled inventory, relationships, and trust. By attacking them publicly, Carro was burning bridges with its own supply chain. Aaron later admitted it openly: "Looking back, positioning ourselves as an anti-dealer brand to start was a bad idea."

Most founders would spin that. Reframe it. Call it a "strategic evolution." Aaron just said he was wrong.

The pivot was counterintuitive. Instead of fighting dealers, he became their biggest wholesale buyer. He befriended the exact people he'd antagonised. Added Toyota, Nissan, Grab, and Go-Jek as partners. Built a fintech arm with a S$670M loan book.

The "disruptor" became the infrastructure layer.

FY2025: S$1.2 billion in revenue. S$43 million EBITDA. Profitable. Over 4,500 employees across six countries.

The kid from the HDB flat who was too young to sign his own contracts now runs Southeast Asia's largest automotive marketplace.

Here's the thing that stays with me. Most founders worship disruption. Aaron learned — the hard way, publicly — that sometimes the smarter move is to make your enemies into your partners.

What's something in your career you had to publicly admit was wrong before you could get it right?