So we had product advantage in securing better hotel pricing and deals from suppliers. Travelocity focused on air travel, and we thought hotels were way more interesting to travelers than airline tickets. We built a totally radical system called Best Fare Search that enabled consumers to simultaneously shop price and schedule, which had never been done before. Travelocity was built on Sabre, a mainframe-based air-ticket pricing system.
When we IPO’d in 1999, Expedia was half the size of Travelocity, the first to market. Our annual revenue went from zero in 1994 to $70 million in 1999. If you challenge people to think about business in a new way, they tend to forget you don’t look like them. I built relationships based on demonstrated expertise. Microsoft was powerful, and having young kids from the company go into offices to negotiate with old guys at American Airlines didn’t sit well with them. The big challenge was industry relations. We were so cool and interesting that consumer adoption and word of mouth were not a big challenge. I was a small cog in a big company, but I thought of myself as an intrapreneur.īack in 1999, the web was new. Sarah moved to Seattle for her residency, and I became general manager of Expedia (EXPE). So I used Bill Gates as my venture capitalist. He and Steve Ballmer kind of laughed at me, but said they’d get it going internally, and if it made sense to spin out, they’d think about it. I pitched him to fund me to do it outside of Microsoft because one day it would need to be a separate entity in order to thrive. I said, “Everybody’s going to be online eventually, and we can build this for consumers.” I showed him a travel service on Prodigy that allowed travel agents to look up flight information from home. So, at 26, I went into my first product-review meeting with Bill Gates and said I thought the idea was dumb, small, and uninteresting. I didn’t think the travel-book business was very big. One of them was a multimedia CD-ROM on travel guides. At the time, it wanted to produce multimedia CD-ROMs on everything, and I was given a portfolio of things to manage. Microsoft had created Encarta, a multimedia encyclopedia. In preparation for a move, I started casting about for a business to start in the Internet space. Three years later my future wife, Sarah, who was attending medical school in Chicago, began shopping for medical residencies.
GLASSDOOR VENTURE FORTHE WINDOWS
I became product manager of MS-DOS 5.0 and worked on Windows 95. In 1991, I was recruited by a friend to work for Microsoft (MSFT) and moved to Seattle. So I went to work for Alliance Consulting Group in Cambridge, Mass.
GLASSDOOR VENTURE FORTHE HOW TO
I got a general engineering degree but knew I wanted to start my own business.Īfter graduation in 1989, I wanted to learn how to think about business from a CEO’s perspective. I had an aptitude for math and science, and also had the ability to communicate with people. When it was time for college, I decided to go to Stanford University and fell in love with the West Coast. There were early Apple (AAPL) computers in high school, and I was into that stuff. He likes to remind me that in his day, plastics and chemicals were high tech. Dad worked for Union Carbide, had big jobs in sales, and was a mechanical engineer. My mom was a teacher before she married and became the CEO of the family.
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