David Rosenthal: commitment

Transcript context

…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. Yup. It was a different time. And also a different time, venture capital and in particular venture capital in Europe was a very, very different kind of proposition and Geert had a tough time getting funding so what he decided to do, and again, he talks about this oral history and I just love this, he needed funding so he decided that he was going to email everyone who he knew who had an email address because he figured if they had an email address, they at least knew something about the internet. That's a direct quote from him. I just love that. So he emails about 50 people and 18 of them end up investing. He raises about 50,000 euros to get going, hire some early employees, and they start to get off to the races. What they evolved into, and this is where we’re going to spend the bulk of this episode and I want to bring Drew in here, they really become one of the first online travel agencies. So the same general model as Expedia or Priceline or Orbitz or Travelocity here in the US. There are kind of three pieces to the business that they started. One, they need to acquire the travelers. Two, they need to acquire the hotels, the supplies, the supply and demand. Then three, they need to provide some form of customer service. So Drew, for our listeners who aren’t as familiar with the OTA world, how did all this evolve? You got the basics of it, right? All these businesses really are a marketplace. It's about how they bring together a supply and demand. It’s interesting to think back to where this industry was as Booking.com was starting. We’re talking a little bit about who had email addresses and it was all AOL, it was MSN, it was all these kind of dial-up services. We forget it now but the real things that made the first generation of OTA businesses in the US were like [___ 00:12:04]. Do you remember these? It was like Travelocity got the deal on Yahoo and therefore Travelocity was by far in a way the leader in this category but actually, Travelocity managed to get a couple of those. It was AOL, it was Yahoo. I forget which the other ones were.…

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