Speaker unverified: belief

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…Yeah. So question for Drew is, do you think that they needed to do the acquisitions to do this, to sort of like bring that agency model into the Priceline group or could they have taken their existing supply and demand since they already had some scale and really reinvent that and kind of copy that model themselves. I think it’s tough to see and I guess it particularly plays out when you look at sort of subsequent history. I think it’s tough to see Priceline doing this on their own. In part, I think you have to look at the context for Priceline to make this acquisition, why they’re able to do it. Priceline made efforts to go to market in Europe. Again, remember this is 2004, this is kind of the depths of the dot com buzz. Priceline had been one of the biggest success stories of web 1.0 like we all remember William Shatner, Delta made a billion dollars getting warrants in Priceline, selling them at the top of the market, looked like a genius. And Priceline had moved in to “Name Your Own Price”. Dog food, name your own price. Groceries, name your own price. It was just like all over the place. There’s a great history or partial history of Priceline in the internet bubble in the book eBoys which is about the early days of Benchmark, the venture capital firm. They were the venture investors behind Priceline and the initial Priceline, it was crazy. Drew, like you said, it evolved into travel because that was the only thing that made sense that they did, but originally, it was name your own price for anything.…

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