The Exchanges

Q So why exactly is travel broken right now?

A I think that you have incredible fragmentation. It's sort of that classic Keith Raboy quote of take a highly fragmented, low NPS industry and vertically integrate it, and that's how you create enterprise value. You have legacy softwares, different types of operators, different qualities of inventory, conflicting incentives, and candidly speaking, no one's looking after the underlying customer. Um, all of these companies are, and, and individuals are just trying to convince you to book a trip with them, or spend your money with them, and then once that's done, they kind of just like, are like, okay, great. Um, versus at Wander, literally, like we have a button in, in the concierge chat, like a thumbs up or a thumbs down, and when you hit that thumbs down button, it doesn't go into the ether, like it actually pings me on Slack.

AI assessment note: “incredible fragmentation. It's sort of that classic Keith Raboy quote”

Q So I want to get into the app, because we have many engineers in the audience, many founders, and tech curious, so the app itself, can you just break down the magic behind it all? Because I know this is actually very robust, and you've built something that's...

A Yeah, so I mean, like, the, the tech stack that we use is actually very simple. We, we made the decision early on to, um, have the company be basically entirely TypeScript, um, Which, of course, you have, like, that classic debate of, like, do you want to do native iOS development or not? Like, what do you want that to look like? And ultimately, we made the decision that we just didn't have enough money to have two different development teams, and we couldn't support, you know, different versions. So we, we wanted to have And use frameworks that were, um, you know, compatible against, across all platforms. And we also made the decision that, you know, building in, in TypeScript to have a little bit of continuity between front end and back end teams, which to be clear for, for all of you who are, you know, gonna like roast me in the, in the comments or, or whatever else, like, um, like, yeah, like there is definitely a, a more performant way to, to build, but you know, in the early days, you know, it's like you have like one or two engineers. And so, You have to make those kinds of decisions. You know, I think that probably the most interesting thing about Wander from a software perspective is that you have the booking engine and the booking platform, and that's the only thing that we surface to guess, but underneath you have what we call Wander OS, which runs 100% of the proper…

AI assessment note: “the tech stack that we use is actually very simple. We made the decision early on”

Q I have heard that you do run by some really strong life philosophies. Could you share more on that?

A When, when I was, when I was younger, um, I, I became self-aware at, like, a pretty young age. Like, um, I, I remember being, like, eight and laying on the grass and doing my homework and, like, stopping for a second and saying, like, life is never gonna get better than this moment. Like, you are eight years old, buddy, and soon you're gonna be 30 and 40 and 50 and, like, this is what's up. Like, enjoy, enjoy it. And so when I was young, I made this, this set of rules, um, to help me live, live a good life, to help, to help me decide, uh, in, in what I thought were challenging circumstances and ideas. Um, and so the, the, the four, the four rules are, and the first one is rather morbid for a kid to come up with, um, is that the worst thing that happens is you die. Um, And for me, what that rule or that mentality enables me to do is it enables me to walk into situations with a level of almost comfort that, like, hey, like, you can do this, you got this, like, you know, the worst thing that happens is you die, right? So it's like, uh, which of course, like, accepting death is a really, like, you know, crazy idea. Um, you know, the, the second one was about urgency. Tomorrow is a lazy man's today. Uh, which was if you want to live a fulfilling life, like, you can't just delay things. Like, you should try and get it done now. You should, you should take that shot. You should take t…

AI assessment note: “I made this, this set of rules, um, to help me live, live a good life”

Q That's fantastic. So to get to basics, could you just explain what Wander is and the evolution of the company?

A Totally. So when explaining Wander, I always ask the question, like, have you ever had a bad vacation rental experience? Um, you know, whether it's bad Airbnb or VRBO, you know, get there, it doesn't look like the photos, et cetera. And the reason why I start with that question is because at the end of the day, Wander is a, Is a company that's entire purpose is to solve a problem rather than, like, trying to force feed people this, like, SaaS or something that we, you know, have an idea for. And so, you know, when you think about Wander and how we've solved that, really it's a verticalized marketplace, which means that we own the booking platform and the distribution, but we also have, um, you know, this curation on the underlying inventory, and then all of the inventory is ran to this consistent standard, almost hotel-like. Um, and so when you pair those different dynamics together, you're able to solve the, the customer experience problem.

AI assessment note: “really it's a verticalized marketplace, which means that we own the booking platform”

Q How do you then match the demand with the rapid increase in supply? You mentioned you're gonna be onboarding like, 200 to 300 new properties. How do you scale that?

A So going back to the dinner that I had with Nigel recently, uh, and Nigel Morris, um, for those entrepreneurs who aren't familiar with him, he is one of the clearest thinking, most interesting, passionate, um, you know, investors that I have ever met, Midas List investor. And we talked about this idea that Wander has about 400,000 users on our platform. And so it was less a question of how do you grow your user base and more of a question of how do you activate them? And I think that that subtle difference in framing is, could be really valuable to a lot of different startup founders out there, which is this idea that you already have all of the customers that you need. They're in your waitlist. They're signed up to your product. They're following you on Twitter, whatever it is. And you don't have a growth problem. You actually have an activation problem. And so the question is, how do you activate? How do you encourage? How do you light a flame under, you know, those, those users to go and make the leap with you to go and try your product for the first time. And if you have a really high MPS product, you know, you should be off to the races. I think the same could be true, like a podcast audience. You think about like, I don't actually need to grow my subscriber count. Like it's more a question of how do I activate that community? How do I activate them? And so that's currentl…

AI assessment note: “Wander has about 400,000 users... it was less a question of how do you grow”

Q How do you keep your mind clear while you're scaling so rapidly, and so many opportunities pop up, and you just have to be dedicated to the mission?

A You know, it's, it's funny. Um, I'd say that I actually don't make like a great dinner guests, especially in periods like this where like we're scaling so quickly. We're going through our series B, you know, I'm dealing with, um, you know, all of the chaos that comes, comes with that. And so like, if you're, if you're, if you're talking to me at dinner, I'll just start staring off like into the distance. And one of my buddies, we were at sushi in New York. We had just, I just signed the term sheet and you know, that was like to celebrate, um, And he's like, you know, John Andrew, like, you just didn't talk for, like, the last five minutes, which I think is also, like, that I was sleep deprived. But, you know, I would say that, like, Wander was actually built for that idea. Like, I started Wander after stepping down from Coder, and I started it because I wanted to get away and the experience that I had, like, wasn't good. And so, you know, I think that getting out into nature, going on a walk, you know, spending time with loved ones and candidly speaking, like going and staying at a wander where you can be in this beautiful new place and have an experience where like everything's taken care of for you and you can think and process and transition. It's actually, we have quite a few customer stories where people send us very special, meaningful notes. That talk about how they were…

AI assessment note: “Wander was actually built for that idea. Like, I started Wander after stepping down”