Viator

“They managed to, over the next few days, rebuild the website from, you know, using the Wayback Machine and I don't know, a whole bunch of methods that they came up with on the spot. They got the site back up and going in about four or five days.”

“I think Carlisle made eight or nine times their investment.”

“So, for the online travel industry, there was this strange, perverse effect of nine-eleven, which is that it literally put a rocket under the industry.”

“25% was pretty normal. An average per person price on, you know, a walking tour, or a cooking class, or whatever it was, might be a hundred bucks, and we would buy that from the supplier for 75 bucks.”

“Sadly, they kept all of the backups in a box that was sitting on top of the servers, and when these servers were stolen in the middle of the night, The backups of all of the code and customer records, et cetera, were stolen as well.”

“We knew the names of various executives up the line, and we just kept calling the switchboard until we got through to one of them, who told us, Well have you heard of collateral damage? That project of yours, that's collateral damage. We don't want it. We don'…”

“So with the tour operator, they approached the Vatican, the church and said, what if we did this thing that we'll call skip the line? What if we charge these guys three times as much, but you let them straight in? And the Vatican, you know, the commercial, the…”

“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.”