David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…David, if only there were someone to aggregate these disparate one-off hotels that had their ecommerce system. If only. And he calls his little project Bookings.nl (NL for the Netherlands). And that is how Bookings.com was born and in the early days, unsurprisingly again, it was actually mostly Americans that used the site. Americans who were traveling to Europe and looking for a way to book online. Because in those days, it was only Americans that really had access to the consumer internet. There was AOL at the time, lots of common people in the US were online but in Europe, it was much more still of a kind of confined academia type thing and average Europeans didn’t have access to the internet in the same way. So ironic because Booking ends up becoming such a large company on the back of European customers but the initial customers were Americans. Yeah, and it’s really easy to forget too sort of the roots of the internet in sort of American University and defense infrastructure, like of course it's not elsewhere in the world yet. It was brand new and it was invented in the US. It’s kind of shocking to imagine a world where people are playing around with websites. In the US, Amazon is being founded in the mid ‘90s but it hasn’t really made it everywhere else yet.…

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