Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…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. So these guys didn’t look like masters of the universe at the time. They looked like yesterday’s news who were trying to figure out a plan B. Priceline had actually tried to go into Europe. I heard the story once that they hired like a former marketer from Burger King to make Priceline “Name Your Own Price” a big deal in Europe and totally flopped. So you could imagine Glenn sitting in Priceline but like no, no, we need to go back to Europe and we need to get big in travel. It wasn’t like they were coming from a position of strength where they had both the capabilities and position to do this. I think, again, it’s absolutely to Glenn’s credit to recognize what they did. A common position for a lot of the US companies. Travelocity tried to go into Europe. Expedia tried to go into Europe. A lot of these companies had tried to go into Europe and really struggled. I think one of the reasons for that, and again, we kind of touched on it briefly earlier, it’s the cultural issues. For big US companies, the US was this kind of dominant formative experience. Everyone speaks the same language. You have national advertising. You are building a single monolithic brand that serves across the US as a market. Europe doesn’t really work that way. UK is a different market than France, than Germany, than Spain, than Italy, than the Dutch. They all have their own languages, they all have their own domains like they all have their own marketing channels. You have your own country managers. It’s a much more complex and nuanced way to serve in the market. You can see why some of the US travel companies really struggled as they tried to build this on their own, and why, from the standpoint of somebody like Glenn, the thought of hiring some Dutch who probably speaks a bunch of different languages, know how to work all these different cultures, go let them do their thing. Well, and to their thing they did. Another kind of theme that we see on this show a lot is Glenn and the Priceline group left them alone to do their thing and so they acquire them in 2005, they complete the merger within Priceline of Active Hotels and Booking.com. In 2005, they do collectively 18.7 million room nights booked, or sorry, that was in 2006 after the merger. And that grows from 18.7 then over the next 10 years such that last year, 2016, they did over half a billion room nights. So that's over 40% growth per year for 10 years and the financial zones now are just pretty staggering. I mean Priceline, the company, the group as a whole did 10.7 billion dollars in revenue in 2016 and of that, Booking.com which again, remember they paid a combined, what is that, 290 million dollars for Active and Booking. They did 7.8 billion dollars of that. Pretty incredible.…

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