Tripadvisor

“The thing that I craved personally the most was the level of impact that the company had, and like four hundred million unique users a month, yeah, with a lot of duplication, you're still counting of impacting the lives, the vacations of A couple of billion p…”

“We see these review places offering to write fake reviews on Google and some other sites. And then they say, except TripAdvisor. Cause like, yeah, if like, if they try, we catch them, we shut them down.”

“I want to do it again. I want to not travel not in software tools. But I figure I have one more startup left in me. And as I turn. As I had turned 59 years old, I look around and say, okay, better get moving. And so I am just open for another adventure that ca…”

“That first revenue check, dot, dot, dot, was 500 dollars.”

“I think we closed 2003 with over twenty million in annual revenue.”

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

“Financially, it was a crazy bad decision. But given everything I knew at the time with the risks you outlined before, the fact that it was kind of a life-changing experience for everyone at the company was absolutely the right decision.”

“And the faster we could get to critical mass of enough reviews everywhere, the harder it was going to be for anyone else to come in and offer reviews as a major service.”

“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…”

“So, we could not get any sales for the first, like, nine months of trying.”

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

“The first thing you do is you thank them. The second thing you do is you thank them profusely. And then the third thing you do is you let them know how much other travelers really appreciate their comments. And all of that's just like, it's the dopamine. It's …”

“March marked our first month of profitability. Since we didn't know how long it would take to turn things around, if we could turn things around, we had cut back on everything non-essential, and so our burn rate was about 70, and March we made it a profitable …”

“It would have been great if we'd held on to Viator for just a few more years, tossed another twenty million dollars into the bucket, and turned it into a billion dollar exit.”

“They'll do, I think, over four billion dollars in gross revenue in 2024.”