On this page of StockholderLetter.com we present the latest annual shareholder letter from CARVANA CO. — ticker symbol CVNA. Reading current and past CVNA letters to shareholders can bring important insights into the investment thesis.

 •  3/25/2025 Letter Continued (Full PDF)
 •  3/21/2023 CVNA Stockholder Letter
 •  3/26/2024 CVNA Stockholder Letter
 •  More "Auto Dealerships" Category Stockholder Letters
 •  CVNA Benford's Law Stock Score = 100

CVNA Shareholder/Stockholder Letter Transcript:

ANNUAL REPORT
2024

OUR MISSION IS TO
CHANGE THE WAY PEOPLE
BUY AND SELL CARS.


To our valued shareholders,
20 years ago on a hot day in Palo Alto,
several future members of the Carvana
team sat impatiently fidgeting during our
college commencement address. We didn   t
realize it then, but that commencement
speech by Steve Jobs would end up
being considered one of the greatest
commencement speeches of all time.
they told us it was too expensive and too
complicated to build the customer solution
we wanted to build, we pushed forward
anyway. When we struggled to raise money
and were told that we needed to be realistic
and convert the business to a software
solution for traditional dealers, we refused
to compromise. We stubbornly marched.
Speaking for myself, I completely failed to
appreciate how much wisdom he shared
with us when he said:
Connecting the dots from where we sit
today, there was no path to becoming
the fastest growing and most profitable
automotive retailer that didn   t start with
   foolish   .
   You can   t connect the dots looking
forward; you can only connect them looking
backwards.   
Of all the dots we can connect from that
speech with the benefit of hindsight, I think
the most important might be what he ended
with:
   Stay hungry. Stay foolish.   
Words carry connotations that we are all
familiar with and    hungry    has a positive
one while    foolish    has a negative one. I
think sometimes saying something positive
with a word that is usually regarded
as negative is a very effective way to
communicate because it makes you really
confront the underlying idea.
I think builders are always hungry and
foolish. And I think experiences in the world
tend to slowly take that away from us.
We    mature.    We suddenly find ourselves
   realistic.   
The team inside Carvana started
hungry and foolish and that gave us the
opportunity to build something awesome.
When people told us customers wouldn   t
buy cars online, we didn   t listen. When
CARVANA 2024 ANNUAL REPORT
But    foolish    isn   t free. Everything has
costs. I think our challenges in 2022 were
the result of many headwinds coming
together that were hard to foresee in
advance, but one reason it hit us so hard
was that we had been foolishly ambitious
and aggressive.
These days I sometimes find myself in
meetings with investors where I feel like
they are asking us to say:
   We lived through 2022. We learned to not
be foolish. We added to our toolset and now
everything will just be better, and you don   t
have to worry about looking foolish.   
We hear you. And we hope and believe that
what you want to believe is more true today
than it has ever been. We have learned
lessons the hard way. We have added to
our toolset. We are the most productive
versions of ourselves we have ever been,
and we plan to keep marching in that same
direction. But it isn   t completely true.

Sometimes, when a question is complex
enough, you can   t expect to get it exactly
right. You have to pick your errors     and you
have to acknowledge who you are.
We are hungry and foolish. And we plan to
stay that way. Please don   t expect us to get
it exactly right. We won   t. But we will claw
and fight and push and build. And we will
continuously learn.
We will relentlessly focus on creatively
finding solutions for our customers, building
them, and continually improving them.
We will set ambitious goals for ourselves
and we will aggressively pursue them.
We will learn from our successes and from
our mistakes and find ways to get more of
the former and less of the latter without
changing who we are.
We will buy and sell millions annually,
and we will do so by delivering the best
experiences our customers can find
anywhere.
And if we do all of that, we will fulfill our
mission of changing the way people buy
and sell cars by building a business that
operates at a scale and with a level of
impact that hasn   t been seen before in our
industry.
And we will have fun doing it. Foolishly.
The march continues,
Ernie
CARVANA 2024 ANNUAL REPORT



 3/25/2025 Letter Continued (Full PDF)