Overview

Auctomatic was a Y Combinator Winter 2007 company that built a SaaS auction and marketplace management platform for eBay power sellers. Founded by Patrick Collison, John Collison, Kulveer Taggar, and Harj Taggar, the company operated for less than ten months before being acquired in March 2008. Its core product helped high-volume sellers on eBay, Amazon, and Overstock manage listings, track inventory, and optimize auction performance across multiple marketplaces simultaneously.

Auctomatic was not a traditional failure — it was a premature exit. The company was acquired for $5 million before it had generated a single dollar of revenue, selling a promising but entirely unvalidated idea to a Canadian public company that subsequently wrote down nearly $600,000 of the purchase price within 15 months.

The acquisition made teenage millionaires of Patrick and John Collison, gave Harj Taggar the credibility to become Y Combinator's first non-founding partner, and handed Patrick and John the payment-processing frustrations that would directly inspire Stripe. The acquirer, Live Current Media, got a pre-revenue product and a founding team that departed quickly — and had little to show for it.

Founding Story

Auctomatic did not begin as Auctomatic. It emerged from the collision of two separate YC Winter 2007 applications, two distinct ideas, and two teams who had never worked together — united by a willingness to abandon everything they had built the moment a better opportunity appeared.

The Collison side of the story started in Limerick, Ireland. Patrick Collison, then a freshman at MIT, and his younger brother John founded a company called Shuppa in early 2007 — a play on the Irish word siopa, meaning "shop." ^[1] Shuppa was conceived as a direct competitor to eBay, an ambitious target for a two-person team operating out of Ireland. When Enterprise Ireland declined to fund the project, the Collisons looked elsewhere. ^[2] Y Combinator's interest provided the path of least resistance to California.

The Taggar side of the story started at Oxford. Harj Taggar left Oxford law school in 2006 to pursue startup ideas in Silicon Valley. ^[3] He and his brother Kulveer had built a site called Boso — "Buy Online Sell Online" — a Craigslist-style marketplace for UK college students. They pitched YC on expanding that concept. ^[4] Paul Graham admitted them despite the fact that neither Taggar brother could write a line of code — a first for the program. As Chris Sacca later noted: "When I met these guys during my annual visits to Oxford, they couldn't write a line of code. Never did they seem to let that dim their prospects of being web startup guys." ^[5] Paul Graham and YC had never previously admitted non-coders to the program. ^[6]

Within three weeks of arriving in Silicon Valley, both teams had abandoned their original concepts entirely. Shuppa and Boso were dead. The four founders merged into a single team and pivoted to eBay power-seller tooling — a narrower, more tractable problem than competing with eBay outright. ^[7] The new company was called Auctomatic.

The support network that assembled around the team was extraordinary for a pre-product startup. Evan Williams provided workspace while the founders searched for an apartment. ^[8] Paul Buchheit, the lead developer of Gmail, invested and went further — purchasing servers for the team without any formal arrangements in place. ^[9] Chris Sacca, then Google's Head of Special Initiatives, invested based on a prior relationship with the Taggars from his Oxford visits. ^[10]