Stefan, CEO and co-founder of GetYourGuide. Welcome, Johannes. Please tell us who you are.
Hi, my name is Johannes. I'm the CEO and co-founder of GetYourGuide. I was born and raised in Cologne in Germany and then had the great privilege to study at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, ETH, which is where I co-founded GetYourGuide, which today is the global market leader for travel experiences.
Thank you, Johannes, for joining. As you mentioned, you started in a venture master course at ETH Zurich back in 2007. You pivoted your first idea from B2C to B2B. What memories come back when you relive these moments in your mind?
Yeah, it was a very turbulent time. We were in the middle of the financial crisis when I graduated from ETH. At the same time, social networks and websites more broadly were proliferating and there was an entrepreneurial spirit in the air. We were clearly very passionate about the internet and all of the opportunity it entailed, and we were very keen to get going. Our first website was a peer-to-peer network for local student tour guides. The issue was that after launching it in 2007, two years later we only had five bookings, three of which were from my mother. So the first idea clearly didn't work out. Yet, what we also realized was that a lot of the professional tour and experience suppliers, the boat cruises, sightseeing tours, guided walking tours, at the time didn't have any internet presence or opportunity to upload their content to the web. And that's when we decided to repurpose our tooling and actually start to help those folks upload content and distribute content on the internet. That second iteration of the idea was ultimately what took off. We launched that in early 2010. I went back to our parents and essentially asked them for a little more time on their payroll and asked them for a bit of money to start the company. And the rest is history.
Exactly. And in 2010 you traveled with Venture Leaders to Boston to accelerate internationalization. How have you benefited from this road show in Boston, and is there anything that still impacts you today?
Yes, for sure. As I described, when we started in those early days where we pivoted and tried to find product-market fit, I couldn't even read a P&L. I had no idea. Venture Lab was my first acquaintance with the business world. I still remember all the classes vividly. It was also new and so interesting. My entire education up to that point was purely academic and very scientific in nature, which has its merits but is very different from running a business. So that was incredibly helpful. And then we went to the US with the Venture Leaders program. It really upped the ante again. We were immersed in business classes and had direct access to a lot of entrepreneurs in the US who were clearly thinking a lot bigger than we were at the time. We were pretty constrained in our local student network. There weren't a lot of role models. Being an entrepreneur was rather odd compared to the US. So it was definitely expanding our minds, seeing completely new perspectives and people who were much more daring than what we had seen in the past. There was also one specific instance that really changed the trajectory of the company during Venture Leaders. Through a Swiss contact in the Swiss business network, we got introduced to TripAdvisor, which at the time was a giant travel platform in reviews and content. They had a pretty significant business in experiences as well, just on the content and review side, but they hadn't monetized it yet. They were so interested that they immediately wanted to acquire GetYourGuide, which ultimately fell through for a number of reasons, but that acquaintance ended up in a partnership. That partnership was an instrumental part of driving traffic to the website in its early innings and also a reason why venture capitalists ultimately discovered the market and invested in GetYourGuide. The Venture Leaders trip wasn't only important for giving us a better sense of entrepreneurship, but it also really secured our first and most important business distribution deal.
That's great to hear that Venture Leaders not only trained you but also helped you in business. I think if you look at today, that's what most of the Venture Leaders say: it's really something for their life, it's a once-in-a-lifetime experience. You also mentioned that in one of your quotes. Jumping into today, GetYourGuide is now available in more than 170 countries around the globe. How do you choose these markets to expand to?
So for us, we have grown out of Switzerland, Germany, and Austria. Those were the initial countries. Then we always followed the customers and looked at where they were traveling to. In the very early days, 2010 to 2015, 2016, it was really Paris, London, Rome, Barcelona, etc., the usual suspects for European travelers. But over time, as we grew our inventory in all of these cities, we also started to get international customers coming to these cities, and then we started to broaden the network. So it is really not just an assessment of the countries per se where we expand into; that is one lens, but it is also a question of the richness in the destinations that the travelers from these countries go to. We are always basically matching supply and demand and grow from that matrix point of view. At this point in time, at this development stage, 16 years onward, it is a very scientific question because we have very accurate measurement methods for supply density, customer acquisition, and retention. There are a couple of building blocks in our go-to-market playbook, ranging from brand awareness, customer acquisition techniques, website localization, payment methods, supply, etc. We basically have a market maturity index, and based on that we determine where to go next.
I remember you had from very early on international offices, for example, one in Berlin, but also Las Vegas. What is the hardest and most rewarding part of building a team across different countries and cultures?
Yeah, I'll start with the rewarding part. I think it's incredible to work with such a diverse set of employees. I've truly learned a lot over the years managing a very international company. You clearly get new perspectives, and for us in Europe that's super valuable. I think there's a reason why Switzerland is so successful, and that is the diversity of the country and the fact that it has not just German speakers but also French and Italian speakers. It has been capable of integrating that heterogeneity. GetYourGuide has been very similar in that we've had, at this point, more than 80 nations working for us. At any given time, the total percentage of Swiss and German employees at the entire company is less than 10%. So 90% of the employees at GetYourGuide are diverse. I think that is part of the recipe for our success because we've been able to put ourselves into the customers' shoes much better, because ultimately people use the product in their native language with their native point of view, which makes a huge difference even in the age of AI. The challenge is that with such a broad footprint, it's hard to have a common culture and truly bring everyone together. Having satellite offices around the world is just hard. For motivational standpoints, if you sit in Dubai right now, in the middle of the Iran war, you have a very different perspective than if you sit in New York City. As a CEO, I have to cater to both and make sure both feel valued, seen, and heard. That's certainly difficult. We've also had our stops and goes. The Las Vegas office ultimately didn't work out, so we closed it down after a couple of years when we needed to restructure and contain costs. Later we went back to the US and reopened in New York and San Francisco. Running a global workforce at the same pace with the same culture and good integration requires a lot of work. I spent a very significant portion of my last couple of years on airplanes, and you just need to go that extra mile if you have that global workforce. You need to stay present and connected.
And for all the entrepreneurs, are you doing like global meetings with all employees or how do you force the culture? What is your recipe there?
I think there are multiple building blocks. As you grow, the number one important thing in your toolbox is the principles and values that you put forward to the company. At GetYourGuide, we have a set of guiding principles: choose growth over comfort, navigate with agility, customer first not me first. Those are principles that everyone knows by heart, and they are used for recruiting, performance management, running projects, and putting forward hypotheses about what products we need to build. Ultimately, as you ingrain these principles in the culture, that is the most important thing you can do, more important than any offsite or cultural event. That is what will stay and glue people together even if they have very different jobs or languages. Great companies can always be identified by a very distinct culture. That culture might not be for everyone, but that's the hallmark of a great culture: it's distinct and people can disagree with it. In terms of rituals, we have multiple all-hands summits across the world in APAC, Europe, and the US, both internally for employees in the region and externally with partners and suppliers. That's very important because it shapes the connection with the ecosystem. For employees, we have a yearly summit in Berlin where we bring the entire workforce globally together. With over a thousand people, it's a very expensive endeavor, but culturally it's very important. It sets the tone for the year, gives people a different level of strategic insight, and naturally they bond. We can see in our employee engagement scores that there's a huge boost in motivation after the summit. The next one is in two weeks, and the key theme is going to be the AI transformation in the company.
That sounds like an amazing event upcoming. Looking back, you mentioned Dubai, the tragic events there. But even looking back more, the COVID pandemic was a real challenge for your business model due to the shutdown of travel activities, I assume. How did you manage these difficult times as an entrepreneur and also as a company?
