Motley Fool Money - Interview with Karooooo CEO Zak Calisto

Episode Date: August 17, 2025

Heard the one about the CEO who wanted to buy the url for his company, found out it was taken, and added a few o’s to save a few million? Karooooo CEO and founder Zak Calisto talks with Motley Fool CEO Tom Gardner and analyst Emily Flippen about the business of connected vehicles and about his company’s quirky name. Founder story Future growth Leadership style Autonomous vehicles Karooooo name Host: Tom Gardner, Emily FlippenProducer: Mac GreerEngineer: Adam LandfairDisclosure: Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. The Motley Fool and its affiliates (collectively, “TMF”) do not endorse, recommend, or verify the accuracy or completeness of the statements made within advertisements. TMF is not involved in the offer, sale, or solicitation of any securities advertised herein and makes no representations regarding the suitability, or risks associated with any investment opportunity presented. Investors should conduct their own due diligence and consult with legal, tax, and financial advisors before making any investment decisions. TMF assumes no responsibility for any losses or damages arising from this advertisement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit ⁠megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When I try to get Carew.com, there's someone in America that owns a warehouse and it's Karoo.com. So you want the $10 million for the name and I said, okay, that's fine. You know, I'll keep the money, you keep the name and I'll just do it from three to nine o's. We own all those caroo.com. That was Zach Callisto, CEO and founder of Karu. And yes, that's Karu with five O's. I'm Motley Fool producer Matt Career. Now, Carew provides a software platform for connected vehicles. It's a platform that helps with fleet management, logistics, and safety. Motley Fool co-founder and CEO Tom Gardner and Motley Fool analyst Emily Flippen recently

had a chance to talk with Zach Callisto about the business of Carew. Well, hello, Motley Fool investors. We're so excited to spend the next hour or so with Zach Colisto, the founder and CEO of Karoo. who, who, who, who, which is probably how it's often introduced. And people are always, I'm sure, wondering about the name, which we'll get to in a second. It's a fun story. But I'd really love to just start an Emily flip in here as well, Tom Gardner. Both of us have recommended the stock.

It's been recommended a number of times now in the Motley Fool to our members. And we're so excited to get a chance to spend time with the CEO and hear your thoughts. Zach, and I'd love to just hear the origin story, if you would. What was the moment you realized you wanted to start this business and how has it developed since inception? I had a vehicle stolen from me in around 1994, 1994. At that point in time, someone I knew brought some technology to South Africa, adopted it, and they started the track and trace company to recover stolen vehicles. That's how the business actually started.

I became one of the agents to sell on their behalf and I ended up selling about 80% of their sales. I rolled out quite a big network. In 96, 97, they asked me if I would help them open up the geographies in the neighboring country, South Africa, which I did. And in 99, they asked me if I wanted to go do a joint venture with them in Brazil. I went to Brazil. I said, it's great market, but you'd need to redevelop your technology. because the unit economics won't make sense there. They decided that it was too expensive to develop the technology.

So I developed it myself and entered negotiations still to go to Brazil with them. And then we didn't reach agreement, which then led me to sell all my interests in the previous agency business. And I then decided instead of going to Brazil, it's much easier just to start in the markets that I know. So I had the advantage of knowing what not to do in 2004. We went to the market also a very simple solution of track and trace. And in 2007, we decided we've got a lot of corporate customers that need more than just track and trace. We went into fleet management. And it's been a total building the current platform from the ground up.

And today our platform is much more than just fleet management. well. And if we look back to 20 years ago, what we had and what we've got now is really we're in a very different space. You know, that's sort of my life story. I've always loved that story. In fact, when I first started researching career after you in public, just a handful of years ago, I went to one of the analysts here on our investing team who was actually from South Africa. And I said, have you heard of Car Track? Talk to me about this business. And he says, yes, you as Americans oftentimes don't understand just how pervasive car theft is and vehicle hijacking in geographies, including South Africa.

So it's something that really appeal to consumers. But talk to me about how your business exists today, because making that transition from consumers to full telematics and fleet vehicle management has opened up a lot of opportunities for you from changing a business, from just sticking a device onto a car and saying, we're going to track that to you, to being like, how can we be this vertically integrated solution that includes hardware and software?

When you look at your business and how it breaks down in this moment, how much of that is consumer versus how much of that is enterprise, and where do you see growth from here going? And like I said, we started in South Africa, very much jack and trace. In 2007, we started enhancing our platform to be able to do with fleet management so that we could service our commercial, our enterprise customers better. Today, approximately 50% of our business in South Africa is commercial business. 50% is consumer.

and South Africa today constitute 70% of our subscription revenue of our group. And 30% of the subscription revenue outside South Africa, that's enterprise business in Europe and in Asia. So in total, you're probably looking at this point in time, about a third of our business is a consumer, and about two thirds of our business is commercial customers. Clearly what we do today, we do, we've got a tremendous amount of business intelligence reports, live alerts. We push and pull data through APIs into our customer systems.

We have very complex solutions for different customers depending on what industries they're in. They service customers, whether they're in logistics, whether they're ambulances, whether they're doing cold storage, whether they're moving bio waste. You know, it's an endless amount of industries that we serve. And the reality is we continue to develop this platform because as we closer to our customers, as we develop more, we realize it's just endless challenges that the customers face from being able to either transport goods or transport people and from the whole supply chain, it's addressing all of that.

So I believe we still have a very long way to do development as we get closer to our customers. And I would say the fleet management portion of the business, we probably had that done in about 2012, in a very comprehensive. Now it's everything that lies on top of that fleet management business. These days I'm all about quality over quantity, especially in my closet. If it's not well made and versatile, it's just not worth it.

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mostly U.S. listed, but increasingly we will be moving to evaluate companies around the world, and you have one of the highest financial scores of any public companies, certainly of any small-cap a public company. You also have a Ronta, which is an acronym for return on unlevered net tangible assets, which is something that Warren Buffett has written about in past shareholder letters, essentially evaluating how much operating cash flow you can draw out of your physical asset pace. And the Ronta at Kuru is about 35%. Buffett says, you know, I like it when it's above 25%. So all of the financial metrics are outstanding. And I'd love you to, let's go to the rule of 60. Because we've heard rule of 40. I'm even wondering when we'll get to rule of 90 at Kuru. But tell us

what level you're at now and what that represents to any viewers today that aren't familiar with that concept. I haven't got exact maths with me. And the reality is as I get older, pay less attention to the nitty gritty of all these calculations. And I'm more worried about the the welfare of the business, but I believe it's just a combination of your, you know, your growth margin, your Evertime margin, and you add the two, and you get to 60%. So the reality is that we have got a very profitable business generating really good in operating cash flows. And our growth rates are what I would consider very healthy. But given the cash that we generate, the free cash, which I would like to allocate that cash into the business to grow even faster if that makes any sense.

The reality of it is that we want to grow faster, but given the way we approach our capital and I exposure to risk, it sort of slows us down a bit at times. And perhaps it's given my age. If I was a younger lad, 30 years old with, you know, 20 good degrees, I'd probably throw cash at it. And if it didn't work, I'll just start a new venture next year. week. Just a quick follow-up on that and actually taking in a direction, because I know, Emily, we want to ask a couple of financial questions, but just to take it in direction about you and your leadership, rule of 40, generally revenue growth rate plus profit margins should be greater than 40%.

Your rule of 60, which is an, you know, an indication of unbelievable levels of profitability, extremely high retention rates. But I just wanted to jump in on what you shared about. You're getting older. Other people are in the nitty-gritty. You're looking at the broader vision. Can you talk a little bit about your style as a leader? You know, we run a basic sort of Myers-Briggs-like methodology at the Motley Fool called the Synergist Quiz, which distinguishes four different traits for each of us. And, of course, we have capabilities in all four. But one of them is to have a lot of ideas.

Another is to get things done on time. Another is to build systems. And another is to be a people sort of unifier. And so I'm wondering where you, I'm assuming you have a high vision or idea generation score. I don't know. but how do you view yourself and work with your team? Because when you say you don't get in the nitty-gritty details, having listed your quarterly conference calls,

your presentations are outstanding. You know, obviously have a team that gets it to the nitty gritty very well, and I enjoy them a lot. But can you talk about your leadership style relative to the team that you've built? This might sound like I'm contradicting myself. So I am a man of detail,

but, you know, you've got to focus on the detail that really matters for the health of the business. So when it comes to working out the rule of security, I don't think that's that important for me to determine whether the business is healthy or not. So I just wanted to clarify why that's detailed that might not be that important to me, if that makes sense. You know, this is detail. It's a byproduct, actually. I think I'm quite detailed, but, you know, at the same time, in an healthy way. Otherwise, you could get lost in the analysis paralysis, and, you know, everything matters.

and at the end of the day, you're not making the decisions that's important. I think my forte is building teams, understanding people, understanding what people are good at, and understanding people that will not be a culture fit for us. And I think that's one of my strengths is building teams. I also think I'm quite pedantic at building products and to make sure they work and that the customer is getting the best service possible. and I'm also very pedantic about making sure we've got control about the full value chain of our operations which implies customer service.

So it's very much about making sure we vertically integrated, making sure we've got a great culture and making sure we're building the right teams because at the end of the day, we're in the business of building teams. If you can't build a team, you're not going to have a good business. you might have a big business, but it might not be a good one if that makes sense. So that's for my management style. Great teams, great product, and then pay attention to the way you spend money. It's beautifully said.

And actually, I love your commentary around the details that do matter versus the details that don't matter. When you get into stock research and analysis, you can drown in facts and figures. And 99% of the stuff you come across probably doesn't actually matter to the success of the business. The hard part is finding the little bit that does. And one of the things that has really mattered to me and my research for Gru, going back to your financial profile, has been the return on investment that you get from virtually everywhere

that you put your capital. And in some ways, you run this business like an old business. You can tell it was built up in the 90s. You pay a dividend and you're very disciplined when it comes to capital allocation. But at the same time, you know, when I look at these return on investment metrics, I think to myself, I am 30 years old. I would love to be throwing capital everywhere I could in this business. but it's a pretty capex intensive company.

So you haven't gone out and raised a lot of debt and raised a lot of capital in order to expand really aggressively. And do you intend to maybe change that moving forward as you get success in the new geographies or slow and steady really win the race here? I think the reality is this. Emily, if I could have it my way, I'd be growing at 300% per annum. Does the market exist to grow 300% per annum? Yes, it does.

It's all about execution. And then it's all about execution and keeping your culture so it's sustainable. Because you can go out there, grow at 40, 50%, and then you say you're going to become profitable later and you might never ever become profitable because your customer retention might not be there. The minute you want to contain costs, then staff will leave you because they've been used to, you know, they've been used to not a disciplined environment. They've been used to earning too much money.

So it's always tricky to then. cut back later. So we stick into the way we're doing things, but I'm not against raising cash and getting debt and issuing shares. But we'll do that when we find that our free cash flow is not sufficient. And I would love to be in a situation where we're raising cash so that we can grow faster, but not just raising cash so we can throw cash at it to grow faster. What does leadership really look like On The Power of Advice, a new podcast series from Capital Group, you'll hear from athletes, entrepreneurs, and executives who've led on the field in the boardroom and in their communities. It's not about titles. It's about impact. Discover what drives them and the advice they carry forward. Subscribe and start listening today. Published by Capital Client Group, Inc.

I'd like to hear about new technologies, the impact they're having in your category and how you're approaching them. Autonomous driving and AI. Take them in any order. like to, what do those mean to you and to Kuro? So AI, you know, it's a word that everybody's using now, as you well know, it's a word that can mean a lot of things to a lot of people, to different people. But in our space, AI is really about machine learning. It's the ability to get all that data and all those data points and stitch it together and do predictive analysis on that.

So we've got AI on, for instance, we do a lot of AI for the banks where we can sort of predict potential customers that won't be paying their bill. And we have that sort of technology and we're onboarding more and more banks as they see how reliable our data is. We've got it on the video telemetry. We've also got it on the latest tag unit. There's quite a lot of algorithms there, a lot of data collecting points, which we can, we can. can at that point in time also prevent a fraud that's about to happen or bad behavior, other bad behavior that's about to happen. And that's just because of our experience and the amount of data that we have and the speed that we can process that data allows us to do all, you know,

all these type. I don't like to use the word they are, maybe because it's very generic. And, you know, I'm not sure if it's to write the letter or we more in the algorithms to see. you know, we're less in the arts, we're more in the mathematical space, in the scientific space, and that is really just about being able to have all these data points, bringing it together, making its entails out of it, and being able to predict potential, mitigate risk fundamentally. That's what it's all about. Mitigate risk and prevent costs for companies and optimize things as well. You may have heard that in the last call, Tesla began.

to really emphasize autonomy for their entire business. We expect that some of the difficulties we're going through and all of the things that Elon Musk is involved in, the bet that they're making is autonomous vehicles and optimist, you know, autonomous robots in our daily lives. What does autonomous driving mean for Karu? It's a very good question and I'm not certain that I have the wisdom to answer you because, you know, in the time that I've been in the industry, I've been in the since 1994, there's been so many things that have come and gone and they didn't happen or they didn't happen the way we thought they were going to happen. But fundamentally, if I were to answer that question, I would say there's a few aspects. The first thing is, when will

autonomous vehicles be, when will it all be autonomous vehicles in places like Southeast Asia, South Africa, Europe? How long will that take? That's. That's the one part of the question. The second part of the question, the second part to the question would be that, you know, autonomous vehicle only replaces the driver. It doesn't replace the chores, the jobs, things that need to be happen to happen. So does it mean that if you now don't have a driver, you no longer need a management system, if that makes sense?

And I think if you remove the driver, you've got less risk of bad behavior by a driver, but the whole management system is still relevant. And especially as we get closer and closer to our customers and we're more integrated with our customers into their daily operations, then I believe it really just is a replacement of the driver. But I don't want to oversimplify it because, you know, it's very difficult for me to know, what the landscape's going to look like in 20 years time. But what I can say is we are agile in our thinking. There's a lot that's going to happen in the next 20 years. And, you know, we will work our way through all the different things that could happen. Can you tell us about the Karoo region in South Africa?

Well, it's a semi-arid region. A bit like Arizona, but I thought the Karu was the most beautiful place on earth until I went to Arizona. So it might have been Arizona with 5As on the end.com had you traveled to Arizona before? No, actually I started of Karu because I really liked it. But the reality of the O's is that when I try to get Karu.com, there's someone in America that owns a warehouse and it's Karu.com. So you wanted $10 million for the name and I said, okay, that's fine. You know, I'll keep the money. You keep the name and I'll just do it from three to nine O's.

we own all those guru.com. But you don't own 10Os. You don't own 10Os. I think we might, actually. We might. We might. That was Karu's CEO and founder, Zach Callisto. The stock trades on the NASDAQ under the ticker K-A-R-O.

As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about. And the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for her hits. So don't buy ourselves stocks is so late on what you hear. All personal finance content follows Motley-Foe editor. standards and is not approved by advertising. Advertisements are sponsored companies and provided for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes. For the Motley Full Money team, I'm Matt Greer.

Thanks for listening, and we'll see you tomorrow.