As co-founder and longtime chief technology officer of ACV Auctions, Dan Magnuszewski has already built an enduring business legacy in Buffalo.
Now it’s time for him to try on a new role.
The 38-year-old is sliding over to a senior adviser position at the Buffalo-based tech firm, which went public on the NASDAQ stock exchange in March in a $414 million initial public offering.
Magnuszewski is still fully engaged with ACV (NASDAQ: ACVA) and expects to have a long-term future there, but there is no question his role is undergoing a meaningful shift. ACV this week announced that it has hired Bahman Koohestani as CTO. Koohestani, who will relocate from San Francisco to Buffalo has held numerous financial and executive roles at leading tech firms, most recently as CTO and chief product officer at LendingClub.
“Bahman has a stellar track record of scaling companies,” ACV chief operating officer Vikas Mehta said. “He is a very thoughtful leader and a great people manager.”
ACV is “still in the early stages of building out our overall marketplace and platform," Mehta said. "A lot of capabilities and infrastructure are still being designed and built. Bahman is here to accelerate all of that.”
Magnuszewski, who was involved in the search for Koohestani, said he’s excited to take on a more technical role, using advanced technologies to drive innovation at the company. He recently enrolled part-time in a master’s degree program for computer science at the University at Buffalo.
“The CTO role changes a lot, especially when you grow as fast as we did,”he said. “It’s a great thing to bring in someone from Silicon Valley who’s done it. As we’ve scaled to hundreds of engineers, we wanted someone who has scaled it to thousands of engineers.”
As ACV’s engineering team has grown to more than 200 employees across its Buffalo headquarters and office in Toronto, the company decided to move to a CTO with extensive experience in corporate technology, Mehta said. He credited Magnuszewski’s early investments in research, development and data science as key ingredients in ACV's overall success.
“Dan’s contributions are very significant in getting ACV to where it is today,” Mehta said. “He built a phenomenal culture within product and tech.”
ACV became Buffalo’s first software unicorn earlier this year and now has about 1,700 employees nationally — ACV declined to say how many it employs in Buffalo — with a mandate to continue expanding its wholesale automotive marketplace across the United States.
The company has numerous local investors and hundreds of employees, but its prominence is also symbolic: that marketing-leading tech companies can raise hundreds of millions in venture capital from Buffalo.
Magnuszewski was a noticeable face in Buffalo’s startup community even before ACV, serving as executive director of the Z80 Labs technology incubator. Along with Jack Greco and Joseph Neiman, he formed ACV Auctions in 2014 as part of a new wave of growth-stage tech firms in Buffalo.
Greco left several years ago and is now a highly active angel investor. Neiman was the company’s first CEO but transitioned to the chief customer success officer position several years ago. He moved last year to Florida.
Along the way Magnuszewski achieved not just prominence but wealth – he sold 475,000 ACV Auctions shares during the IPO (the IPO price was $25 per share) and held on to another 1.66 million (shares are now around $20 each), according to documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Magnuszewski’s moves will always be watched closely in Buffalo as one of the few entrepreneurs to complete a full cycle of the startup technology journey.
Given the continuation of his longview focus at ACV, his community-facing profile won’t change much for now. Magnuszewski has made a few angel investments and actively mentors local entrepreneurs.
“It’s continuing to carry that torch and help the next class in getting more ACVs in Buffalo,” he said. “Getting one ACV in Buffalo was my initial goal. And we have one, so how do we develop five to 10 more?”
