Expedia

“These are about empowering consumers and then let the chips fall where they may from an industry perspective, right? Building for the future of what consumers want was what we were trying to do, and we were really secondarily thinking about the organization of…”

“We were building for MSN, which we recognized wasn't going to probably succeed as a platform. And so we quietly pivoted to building a web app and we kind of didn't tell anybody. And so we launched, we never launched on MSN, we launched on the broad internet.”

“Creating a new word is very ambitious, and very long-term, and very difficult. But if you are successful, you completely own that word in the dictionary, so to speak, and you get to fill it with whatever meaning you can infuse into it. So it takes, it's a lot …”

“There was a service on Prodigy that enabled me to access directly the airline and hotel reservation systems. I could spoof being a travel agent.”

“We knew that if we started a travel agency, that from an equal access perspective, we ought to be able to plug into these electron, these big mainframe based reservation systems that ran the industry and act like a travel agent. And if we got discriminated aga…”

“To me, Expedia was epileptic, seizure-inducing. I mean, it was really terrible. There was so much animation and graphics and so much stuff going on the website.”

“And we sold our very first, you know, real revenue client, 20,000 clicks for 10,000 dollars in the month of December, 2001.”

“We were moved from IAC into the public company Expedia when that was formed about a year later. And again, we were division within Expedia and to their infinite credit, they let us continue to operate on our own, you know, even though we were selling our leads…”

“Expedia was our biggest client at the time. Expedia was owned by IAC.”