GetYourGuide

“I think there's an opportunity in India, like, ah, think like, get your guide or a clue kind of a model. It's a tours and attractions.”

“One of the very first things I did was I approached the co-founder and CEO of get your guide guy named Johannes wreck to be our first advisor.”

“And like the prequel to get your guide was like, we were building a travel community for everyone to be a guide.”

“We had, I think three to five bookings in the first two years of our prototype, three of which was my mother because she took so much pity on our students.”

“I need to go to my parents and basically say, hi, you need to fund me for like another year after university. So, you know, can you please, you know, put a mortgage on your house and like fund me because there was no seed capital available. No one would give a…”

“We got very lucky because we got a very good tour agency, which did tours to the Vatican very early on in the Vatican is like one of the major sites in all of Europe and no one had sold the Vatican online at that point in time.”

“I think we did something like half a million then in, in the first year in 2010 in net revenue. So commission revenues, more or less profitable, but we didn't have any cash because we were just living off the mortgages from our parents.”

“And it is that I never did business with them but I must say that without them even Get Your Guide probably couldn't exist.”

“It was a million bucks... I think at like a five or six million pre-money.”

“For the people that I met in the U S most people said, you know, move over here or we're not going to give you funding.”

“Business was doing somewhere around two million net revenue at that point, and growing, I think two X to three X over a year.”

“Series A at the time was actually very big for European standards at the time so it was somewhere around fourteen million. As a total of Series A, like I think like 30, thirty five million pre-money.”

“I would have not raised as big of a series A looking back. I think it was too much dilution.”

“The first founder incentive package that I personally got awarded by the board with I think happened after like a decade or so.”

“I remember like a year or so after Raising that A round, I needed to lay off 30% of the company and completely re-juggle Get Your Guide to refocus us on the core.”

“I'm going to come on board. Like I'm joining a board of directors and I'm going to personally invest a million bucks in the company.”

“If I'd go back in time, it's another lesson for a lot of founders. I would have not gone as early. I would have done more in Europe. I think we would have had even more growth and more profitability.”

“For us it was the decision that ultimately made Get Your Guide into what it is today, because just six months after we raised that money, COVID hit. So we would be bankrupt without that round.”

“It took three weeks from that board meeting to us being at zero revenues, literally zero.”

“The bad thing was I had a lot of investors who basically called me up and said, you have to lay off the entire company immediately to save all of the dollars you have on the balance sheet.”

“Our product and edge organization, and even beyond that into management function, people on average reduced their salaries by more than 30% in exchange for shares.”

“So we only had to ultimately lay off throughout the entire two years roughly, 15 to 20% of the staff, not a single engineer, not a single product person.”

“We had not a single person in senior leadership leave the company.”

“We went from, you know, late, 20, 21 to March, 20, 22, we grew 10 X.”

“Literally like in 2022 were double 20 19 levels. And 20 21 was still half 2019 levels.”

“We raised some convertible debt. On top, we raised roughly a hundred million, both from existing and some new investors.”

“We never touched any of that capital because we broke even at the same time.”

“Fast forward today, we're now five times the size of pre-pandemic and we're profitable”

“I did sell secondaries, thankfully in 2019 as part of the soft bank round which actually was very helpful.”

“So TalkSpark Capital, our Series A lead, you know, the deal after Get Your Guide was Oculus Rift, right? You know, Palmer Lucchi. So, you know, we were basically off the hook a couple of months after they made the investment in us because the fund was already …”

“If I want to hire, let's say the next chief product officer, At Get Your Guide, it's almost impossible to do that in Europe and need to go to Silicon Valley because the density of people who have done that scale have served tens of millions of customers a year…”

“How can a German company go public in Europe? It's impossible. And like, if we go public, it's only with American funds.”

“At Get Your Guide, we have 90% of our employees in Berlin are not German.”

“For him to get a visa to come to Germany after he had signed a job contract, and this guy makes a lot of money, took him six months.”

“We'll have more, but a lot less than we thought we would add. So, so in other words, we'll gradually grow, but I think the productivity gains from these engineers will be massive.”

“On the supply side. The supply is completely transformed. It used to take, I think, days to upload a product because experiences are so complex. You know, you need to add a description and photos and like take a hundred boxes at the meeting point and, you know…”