Nick Askew had fifteen sales calls to make and a pair of broken headphones. His solution involved borrowing his wife's headband and strapping his phone to his ear. There are more elegant ways to start a software company. Most require working headphones.
He later shared the photograph as a reminder of the business before the business: a young entrepreneur doing paid marketing and search optimization for car dealerships, hoping to earn enough to finance something larger. The contraption was temporary. The ambition behind it was Space Auto.
In the same recollection, Askew described installing his company's CRM suite at the dealership group where he had learned the trade. A former employee returning with software of his own makes a satisfying circle. The headband makes it a believable one. His route into technology has involved a fair amount of improvisation, usually in the service of getting on with the job.
A musician gets the keys. Eventually.
Originally from northern England, Askew studied music composition, left his course and moved to Texas, where he played in a touring band. Car sales offered a way to earn a living. At twenty, he was initially turned away from a dealership interview because he could not be covered by its driving insurance. The general manager called back with a compromise: he could sell the cars, provided he did not drive them.
His subsequent work took him through sales, internet sales, finance and insurance, and dealership marketing and operations. He left employment to start his own company at twenty-five. By then, he had accumulated a complaint with considerable commercial potential: completing a car deal required too many separate computer windows.
There was also the matter of taste. He once proposed convention shirts reading I hold gross
, in Helvetica. The marketing team obliged. A familiar dealership anxiety about protecting profit margins had acquired better typography.
The job hidden inside the software
Space Auto gives Askew a way to work on the machinery surrounding a sale. Its premise is that a dealership's website, digital retailing and customer relationship management should share a database. A customer's online activity and the work happening in the store belong to the same transaction. They should remain intelligible to the people trying to complete it.
His published product principles reveal what irritates him. Software should remove steps. An employee should be able to sell a car without becoming the attendant to a collection of dashboards. An AI assistant should understand the deal it is helping with.
Read as a founder's brief, this is unusually concerned with the working day. The object of attention is the salesperson before noon, the customer repeating information, the employee trying to remember which system contains the useful detail. Askew builds from the kinds of inconvenience that are too small for a grand speech and quite large enough to spoil an afternoon.
Keep the context as the conversation moves from screen to store.
A familiar name joins the cap table
In June 2023, Space Auto announced Series A financing from investors including John Paul DeJoria, the co-founder of Paul Mitchell and founder of Patrón. DeJoria also became a special advisor. The announcement earmarked the money for AI automation across the company's website, retailing and CRM products.
For Askew, the connection placed a founder known for consumer brands alongside a company selling dealership infrastructure. The announced roadmap was practical: help with vehicle information, consumer-dealer communication and the work involved in putting a deal together. The promise was to make a complicated transaction easier for both participants.
That funding announcement also establishes an important piece of chronology. AI was part of Space Auto's stated development plans in 2023. Its ambitions were already tied to centralized customer data, an architectural choice that would become a recurring subject in Askew's later public conversations.
Thirty days, thirty appointments with a song
In April 2025, Askew discussed a different sort of project: learning and recording a song every day for thirty days. A public challenge brings its own management structure. Yesterday's successful performance does very little to excuse today's missing recording.
He described having to change direction when a prepared song was not working and returning to the task even when he no longer felt like doing it. His wife, he recalled, was rather ready for the month to end. Creative discipline is easier to admire when it is not occupying the next room every evening.
The lesson he drew concerned keeping a promise to himself. He also acknowledged a leadership complication: large ideas can look impulsive when their author does not explain the intention behind them. Someone imagining next year's possibilities still has to communicate with the team doing this week's work. The musician's exercise had become a lesson in managing a company.
A self-imposed daily song challenge, discussed in April 2025.
The music never left
Music remains an active part of his life. His catalog includes Let Go, Diamonds and CocoDeMer; his official artist site also lists Kiss and False Awakening (Interlude) among his 2026 singles. The recordings have their own home, apart from the dealership software.
There is a more technical meeting of those interests in InertiaPhysics, a browser-based synthesizer he created. The project explores oscillator drift, changing parameters with inertia and nonlinear feedback. Its published thesis treats computational instability as material for making sound. Instead of presenting the browser as an obstacle to an instrument, it makes the browser's behavior part of the experiment.
That provides a useful glimpse of the person behind the product presentations. Askew's interest in building extends from the arrangements inside a business to the behavior of a note. Some experiments have prospective dealership customers. Others can simply be played.
The employee named after the dog
At Askew AI, his work extends into AI-first software development. In a July 2025 conversation, he described an experimental system intended to build software and coordinate business functions, including communication, sales and support. Its AI project manager was named after his dog.
The experiment is revealing as a statement of curiosity. Askew is interested in what happens when software can perform connected tasks, rather than merely produce an answer in a chat window. He also argues that people using these systems need to understand the foundations: software architecture, integration and the information available to the tools.
These are experiments he has described publicly, with ambitions that should be understood as ambitions. The interesting personal detail is the choice to test the idea himself. A founder selling software to dealerships is also spending time asking how much of a software business can be coordinated by software.
A room full of businesses, one ordinary question
At LSU Shreveport in October 2025, Askew addressed more than thirty business leaders. His advice began with repetitive work and the time it consumed. Choose a task that blocks something more valuable, he suggested, then examine whether AI can help.
He discussed Nina, an AI employee named after his dog, which helped customers troubleshoot software problems. He also used the example of dealership follow-up: a hundred prospects need not receive the same copied email when their histories and interests differ.
His view of organizational speed included an earthy comparison of slow-moving corporations to a smell. Small businesses, he argued, could move more quickly and gain access to analytical capabilities previously associated with much larger employers. It is an appealing pitch to a room of people who would like their smaller size to count as an advantage for once.
“Start with your biggest time sink or an activity that could result in your biggest revenue opportunity.”
Nick Askew · LSU Shreveport, 2025
Making room for somebody else's software
By July 2026, Askew was writing about Space Auto joining the A2A Protocol partner ecosystem. The standard concerns communication between AI agents built by different organizations. His vision included specialized agents handling different dealership functions and working across vendor boundaries.
There is a tension worth noticing here. A company that brings several dealership tools into one platform also needs a position on the tools it does not own. Askew's published answer favors shared standards and cooperation between systems. His argument is that the industry should avoid recreating its disconnected software arrangements with a new population of AI assistants.
That makes the problem larger than one product roadmap. A dealership's working world includes manufacturers, lenders, service providers and software vendors. The ambition is to let those participants exchange useful work without requiring every relationship to become another custom integration. Joining an ecosystem is one step toward that aspiration, rather than proof that the whole arrangement already exists.
Who gets the credit?
Askew was included in Auto Remarketing's 2024 40 Under 40: Industry program. His more recent writing also gives some sense of whom he wants readers to notice. In October 2026, he celebrated Space Auto engineer Evgeni Obuchowski for work on DAISI's agent infrastructure and the CRM backend.
He described enjoying a colleague who listens to other people's ideas, sees possibilities and helps develop them. The praise focused on initiative as well as implementation: finding an improvement before a customer complains, bringing a solution and taking responsibility for it.
In September, Askew had published an argument for software that helps salespeople prioritize customers and complete routine work. Put those two pieces together and a consistent preference emerges. He values people who can see what needs doing, and wants the tools around them to leave more room to do it.
The broken-headphone photograph belongs in that story. It records an awkward little repair made so the next call could happen. Years later, the subject has expanded to customer records, AI agents and the work of an entire dealership. Askew is still concerned with what is stopping someone from getting on with their day.