CEOInterviews.AITripadvisor: Steve Kaufer

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Narrator0:00

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Guy Raz3:52

That first revenue check dot dot dot was $500.

S

Stephen Kaufer3:59

$500,000.

G

Guy Raz4:01

That's what I was... I thought like, is it... is the decimal point just in the wrong place? Is there a typo on this check?

S

Stephen Kaufer4:09

That for 3 months of web advertising your 50% rev share?

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Guy Raz4:14

It was $500.

Wow.

S

Stephen Kaufer4:17

We looked at this and said... massive sigh. We got a massive problem ahead of us because... there's no other way to say it. We just had a failed business model.

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Guy Raz4:37

Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz and on the show today, how Steve Kaufer overhauled a disastrous business model to build TripAdvisor, a travel website with over 400 million visitors a month.

When I book a restaurant or a hotel or even search for a product on Amazon, I almost never pay too much attention to the rating. What I do though is I read the reviews because even if a hotel or a restaurant has five stars, you're obviously going to find out a lot more from the words and descriptions of someone who's been there. A lot of times the ratings have nothing to do with the food or the comfort of a hotel room. People will ding you for stupid reasons. The parking lot was full. One star. They didn't refill my water. One star. The line for the bathroom was too long. One star. Which is why I have a love-hate relationship with most review sites. But there's one that's actually been pretty reliable. TripAdvisor. I have literally changed a reservation because one reviewer thoughtfully pointed out how wonderful the hotel was, but also how it wasn't really a great place for kids. And I've left reviews of hotels that are amazing if you have kids, but horrible if you're looking for peace and quiet. But remarkably, what makes TripAdvisor so useful, the user-generated reviews, was an afterthought. It wasn't part of the plan. When Steve Kaufer launched the site in the late 1990s, the idea was to aggregate a bunch of hotel reviews from the internet and then try and sell that information to other websites like Expedia and Yahoo. But that model didn't work. It turns out Yahoo wasn't that interested. And so just months before TripAdvisor looked like it would become another casualty of the dot bust of the early 2000s, Steve Kaufer came up with a new plan: get hotels and airlines to pay a fee anytime someone booked through TripAdvisor, and eventually get travelers to write reviews. That plan wouldn't just save TripAdvisor, it would turn it into a multi-billion dollar travel and review website. Steve Kaufer grew up in Los Angeles and majored in computer science in college. When he graduated in 1985, he and a few friends decided to start a software company in Boston and that turned out to be his first legitimate business. He stayed at that company for over 10 years.

S

Stephen Kaufer7:29

I think we incorporated in 1985 or '86 and did the typical thing of well, we're going to live together in the same apartment and we're going to code at night and we went to our day jobs during the day as we tried to get it off the ground.

G

Guy Raz7:44

Who did you do this with?

S

Stephen Kaufer7:47

So this was with Sesa Pratt and Russ Lopez, two classmates from school.

G

Guy Raz7:52

And so the company that you started, tell me what did it... what did you make? Help me understand what was the problem that you were solving for.

S

Stephen Kaufer8:00

You know when you go through school and we were taught to program in C. Every kid spends an inordinate amount of time up really late at night trying to find the darn bug or bugs that are in the software. So, some of what our software did was automatically check for errors in the code both when you first wrote it and then when it was running. So we sold a productivity tool and almost everyone that tried it found that to be pretty effective and sales did pretty well.

G

Guy Raz8:38

So how quickly... I mean you ran this company, you were part of this company for I think what 12, 13 years.

S

Stephen Kaufer8:48

Yes. It grew. We grew up to 150 maybe 160 people, 18 million in revenue. And then you know market changed a little bit. You know the company grew up and then it started having growth challenges and then it started to contract and so it finally sold to a company called Compuware in '98 and the company was less than a dozen people at that time.

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Guy Raz9:15

Wow. I mean that's... it sounds like it was happening sort of in real time. You grow to 150, 160 people and then by the time you are sold you've got 12 left. There must have been a point where the leadership sort of looked around and said we got to quickly make some decisions here because we're losing market share or we're losing business.

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Stephen Kaufer9:39

Oh yes. And we had proverbial blinders on. And we kept telling ourselves if we just did one more thing with the product, sales would revive. And then when we invested in building a different product, we made the absolute classic mistake of, hey, we thought this was what our customers would want, but we neglected to find customers that would say, yeah, if you build that, we will buy it before we actually built it.

G

Guy Raz10:11

So essentially, you didn't adapt quickly enough. You had this great product, $18 million in revenue at a certain point. But there were clearly competitors who were focusing on a completely different market that began to dominate the sector, I guess.

S

Stephen Kaufer10:31

That's right. The big turning point, frankly, was when we had to do our first round of layoffs. Ironically, or perhaps not surprising to you, but I learned way more on the downhill trend of that company than the upswing. And so that stuck with me to this very day as a like, wow, I really messed up managing this company and I just really never wanted to have to go through that again.

G

Guy Raz11:04

So in 1998, you and the other founders sold I think half the assets of the company. Basically, it sounds like there was no choice. You wouldn't have survived. You had to sell.

S

Stephen Kaufer11:16

That's right. It was a fire sale or bankruptcy. Part of the sale to Compuware involved me staying with the company for a year for the transition.

G

Guy Raz11:29

So, you walked out of that 13 year experience not a rich guy?

S

Stephen Kaufer11:33

Yeah. Nothing there.

G

Guy Raz11:35

So, you didn't walk out with like a $10 million payday?

S

Stephen Kaufer11:38

It was closer to a zero payday.

G

Guy Raz11:42

So, we get to a fateful moment in your life. And really, if I think I'm probably oversimplifying it because I don't think it was so dramatic that it was like a light bulb and then the next thing you have this company, but you go on vacation to Mexico. This is 1998. And tell me about that vacation or what happens on that trip that actually sparks an idea.

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Stephen Kaufer12:08

Well, it was actually the planning of that trip. My wife and I walked into a travel agency and they, you know, a nice lady. Lady says, you know, how about Mexico? We said, Sounds good. And we settle on a place called Playa Del Carmen, which is just south of Cancun. And she hands us three brochures of resorts.

And said, Well, this one is not very expensive. This one is moderately priced. This one is on the luxury side. Where would you like to stay? I laugh when I think about it because when we got home I'm like, Hey, so we're going to stay in the cheap one, right? And my wife was like, Well, let's make sure that that is still up to our standards. I'm like, Yeah, great idea. So I went online. Super disappointing. I come to a travel agency site in Cincinnati, Ohio. It's got a low-res picture of the beautiful picture I already had in front of me from the brochure and a 1-800 number to call to make a reservation. This was not helpful to me. I wanted the pros, the cons, the people that loved it, that hated it. I wanted the candid photos, not what I suspected were touched-up photos that were in the brochure.

Fast forward a few days later because I can be pretty persistent. I want to figure out how to find a site that wasn't a travel agency. So using what's called negative keywords. So I don't find me the pages that talk about this hotel that don't have the word fax or deal on it. Because that turned out to give me pages that weren't travel agencies because every travel agency had a fax and a telephone number. And it gave me a page and eventually I found, you know, this person's a precursor to a travel blog. They had wrote up their trip that stated this property and they had actually posted a couple of photos that they had taken. And lordy, the difference between those photos and the ones in the brochure, night and day. I showed them to my wife. We looked at each other. I'm like, Wow, thank goodness we didn't pick that place.

Went on the week vacation, had a great time, and kind of on the way home, she's like, Maybe you should start a company that could help make this easier for other people. And I remember saying, Nah. But I did write it down and a year later that was still the kind of the founding story that got us off the ground.

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Guy Raz14:54

All right. So the idea was, hey, there's nothing out there. And this is '98 when you first were planning your trip to Mexico. Certainly there was almost nothing out there. I mean people travel agencies were how you booked your trips and you kind of trusted travel agents. I actually remember I think in like 1996 I went on a Thomas Cook package holiday tour. I was living in England. I was a student. It was really cheap to Italy and the hotel was not so great but you just had to kind of hope that it was going to be good enough. And there really was no way of knowing at the time.

S

Stephen Kaufer15:38

That's right. There was huge information asymmetry. It was an incredibly important purchase. A vacation was a big purchase in your annual budget. You couldn't return it like, hey, I bought a TV, I don't like it, I'm returning it. And you know Expedia had just launched maybe a couple of years earlier so travel I think was like the number three or number four industry on the internet at that time. And our goal was to become the best travel search engine. And technically the first name, again my nerdy side coming out, was called TripResearch.com. That was the first URL registered.

G

Guy Raz16:28

TripResearch.com.

S

Stephen Kaufer16:30

Yes. As my co-founders and I soon discovered that name did not excite people to go on vacation.

G

Guy Raz16:39

TripResearch.com. Where are you going to do? Very... I'm going to TripResearch.com. That's where I do all my research for my trips. It's very clear.

S

Stephen Kaufer16:46

Right. And it was a terrible name. Fortunately we recognized that before we actually launched anything and so by the time we had to print stationery and have a demo site up we had changed the name to TripAdvisor.

G

Guy Raz16:59

Which is a softer version, right? It's like you're a friend, the TripAdvisor, not the Trip Researcher.

S

Stephen Kaufer17:06

It did not convey, oh my god I have to go to the library.

G

Guy Raz17:10

But what was the concept in your head? What would it do? What was it going to be? A website. What was it going to be?

S

Stephen Kaufer17:17

So we were going to build. We were going to search the entire web for all this fantastic information that we figured was already out there.

G

Guy Raz17:26

Information about...?

S

Stephen Kaufer17:28

Where to go. Okay, I should go to Cancun or I should go to Aruba or Paris. What's great to do in all these places, amazing experiences, where should we stay? But if you think about the timing on this, this is very late '99, early 2000. We incorporated in February. And so around that time all of the or many of the dot com companies that were super high-flying had spent zillions of dollars acquiring eyeballs as they were called back then. Many had gone up in flames. And so we decided a much better opportunity, we laugh at this to this day, would be a B2B or business-to-business type offering where we would search the web, find all this incredibly valuable information, license it to all the other travel sites or anyone else who wanted it that already had visitors. So a client could be Yahoo Travel or Expedia or American Airlines or any of the other folks that wanted a better travel search experience on their own site.

G

Guy Raz18:49

All right. So this was the idea. And how would you make money from that? You would make money every time somebody used one of these search engines to search for travel and it basically dug into your search engine full of travel information.

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Stephen Kaufer19:04

That's right. Any client of ours would pay us a penny a query or a small amount. So our business would scale beautifully, right? Let's take American Airlines as a potential client. They always want to get people who are already on their site to go plan more vacations. But if you were on American Airlines and you search for Aruba, they'd tell you flight schedules, but they wouldn't give you any great content about why to go to Aruba or where to stay. And so we approached them and would say, Hey, let us power a great destination service for you. So if someone searches on Aruba, you can give them a link to say, Explore more about Aruba. We'll do all the work for you. We'll build that part of your site. It'll be on your site. You'll sell more airline tickets and we promise or we hope you'll sell more airline tickets than it will cost you in fees to us for the service.

G

Guy Raz20:06

All right. So you've got this business model, you've got this concept, and I guess you eventually bring on three co-founders to launch this thing with you.

S

Stephen Kaufer20:14

That's right. And one of them is this guy Langley Steiner who had worked at a VC fund and who I guess helped you raise some of the money to get started, right?

G

Guy Raz20:23

Yes. We raised 1.2 million to begin with and Langley gets a ton of the credit for that. But I immediately called up our two other co-founders, Tom Pulka, Nick Shanny, and persuaded them to come on out and I acted as kind of CEO and product guy and away we went.

All right. So you've got the four of you and where do you start? I know you had... did you get office space? Were you working out of your home? What was the first physical spot that you guys worked at?

S

Stephen Kaufer21:01

So conveniently my wife was running a spin-off company of Centerline Software called Centerline Development Systems and she had that office above the pizza parlor in Needham, Massachusetts. And there was enough room for six or eight people and so we made several hires that worked out of that office.

G

Guy Raz21:27

Help me understand... you did not have a consumer-facing product, right? I mean, if you went to TripAdvisor.com it would look like a corporate website.

S

Stephen Kaufer21:33

Well, for the first six months, it just had a splash page: coming soon. And then we did kind of launch a demo.tripadvisor.com is the way I think about it. But yeah, it's a fair question. You're a B2B company. What do you need a site for? And our answer was, well, when we would talk to the folks at American Airlines or whatever, they would want to like, well, I don't understand what content you have. Where can I see this thing? And our answer was, Hey, go to demo.tripadvisor.com. I'll give you the password to get in and then you can see how everything's organized.

G

Guy Raz22:16

I see. But there was no intention to build a consumer-facing site initially. That was not the intention.

Okay. And where do you go? Who do you start to call to pitch your product to?

S

Stephen Kaufer22:31

It was everyone that we could wrangle a connection to in the travel space. It was Expedia. It was Yahoo Search. It was Lycos. It was American Airlines. It was anyone and anyone that could or would take the call. And that was tough going.

G

Guy Raz22:52

Why was it tough going? Because I mean, what were you basically saying? Look, people are going to search for this stuff and we've got this content.

Yeah. What were some of these potential partners saying? Like when I guess AOL was a big one at the time, what would they say when you offered your services?

S

Stephen Kaufer23:11

So we could not get any sales for the first like 9 months of trying. And you know Yahoo's response is etched in my brain. They said, because we got to some fairly senior folks there and they said, Hey, we love your search. You guys do a really good job of delivering travel specific results. And yeah, we'll put your, what do you call your company? TripAdvisor logo right next to the... we'll put 'powered by TripAdvisor' right next to the search box.

G

Guy Raz23:42

This would be on like Yahoo Travel.

S

Stephen Kaufer23:45

Right. And it just became very apparent that they wanted us to pay them a million dollars a year for our logo to be featured there to help us build our brand. And we're saying, No, no, no, guys. We need you to pay us a million dollars a year for the benefits of all this amazing content that we have. And when they realized that we weren't about to be a paying client to them and we realized that yeah, this group was not remotely interested in improving their product using somebody else's search results. Yeah, forget it.

G

Guy Raz24:23

So, I imagine there was a lot of investor interest in the sector. Did you, when you pitched the idea to investors to raise money, what did they say?

S

Stephen Kaufer24:31

Yes, travel was a great category for the internet. You didn't have to worry about shipping something. Your reservation was already electronic kind of before the internet. So that all fit pretty well. But like we had this business model of licensing search results and so the proverbial 9 out of 10 venture firms that we went to said, Yeah, thanks but no thanks. I get the consumer value proposition, but just not sure that there's a company here versus it being a feature or something else.

G

Guy Raz25:10

They just thought it was... this was not valuable, that the money really was in booking travel, right? Which was a fair thing to say.

S

Stephen Kaufer25:18

Absolutely. And they were 100% right because our B2B model did not work.

G

Guy Raz25:28

So in the first nine months of TripAdvisor, you did not sign up a single client at all. Not one.

S

Stephen Kaufer25:33

Yes. And we attributed that to the fact that well, we didn't even have a site, a database. So the first nine months were still building the product. When we launched in October the next 9 months. Okay, now we're launched. People can see what we have. Let's go get them. Rah rah. And we hopped on planes. I thought we did all the right things to try to land the client. And really, it wasn't until I think second quarter of 2001 that we got our first client. And you know it was a big client but one client was not going to make the company.

G

Guy Raz26:12

That client I believe was Lycos which was a big search engine at the time. I think it was like in the top three or four, right? It was like Yahoo, AOL, Lycos.

S

Stephen Kaufer26:24

Yes. All of a sudden on Lycos Travel now you could look for hotels in Boston. You could see a ranked list of which hotels were the best ones. You could click off to read why we thought they were the best ones, but it looked strikingly similar to demo.tripadvisor.com, but Lycos had the eyeballs. Their travel section was huge. At least we thought it was huge, and we had a major marquee client that we had hoped would open the doors for many more.

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Guy Raz27:00

All right, before I get into how that relationship worked, I want to ask you about the content again. You had no editorial team at TripAdvisor, right? I mean, because you say that you could now go to Lycos and search hotels in Boston and get a ranking of the top 10, but who was making that ranking? How was that determined?

S

Stephen Kaufer27:16

So that was our software, our algorithms. We had a very small sort of editorial team in the sense that they were helping us to find all of the articles and then we would scrape the web. We would find reviews of the popular hotels on these other sites and again I named them Lonely Planet or Fodor's or Frommer's. Those folks would have given them a score. We took that score, we aggregated it with some other information that we had and produced an overall rank of it.

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Guy Raz27:54

So the idea was this was going to be value-added content. That was the argument you were making to companies like Lycos. If you run this, if you use this, more people will come to your site because they'll know you've got this quality information available.

S

Stephen Kaufer28:06

Exactly. And Lycos said, Okay, well, we don't really want to pay you for this content on a per query basis, but we'll do a rev share with you.

G

Guy Raz28:19

So, for all the people that come to the page, you'll get half the revenue that we make from selling ads on those pages.

S

Stephen Kaufer28:22

And we thought that was a great deal given how big Lycos was.

G

Guy Raz28:32

Sounds great. So 50/50 rev share.

S

Stephen Kaufer28:35

Yeah, I mean, we were high-fiving. This was a quarterly revenue check, and you know, we didn't know that Lycos by themselves would pay all of our bills, but with them as a major client, hey, things were looking up.

G

Guy Raz28:52

All right. So that first quarter ends with this deal and they send you a check. How much was it?

S

Stephen Kaufer29:03

Yeah. Can we digress for a minute because at that quarter September of 2001 was 9/11, right? And so like, woo, thank goodness we had Lycos because they are still getting advertising on their site and you're going to get a cut of that.

G

Guy Raz29:21

They're still getting advertisers would enable us to weather the storm.

S

Stephen Kaufer29:24

And so to your question, that first revenue check... was $500.

G

Guy Raz29:37

$500,000.

S

Stephen Kaufer29:39

That's what I was... I thought like, is it... is the decimal point just in the wrong place? Is there a typo on this check? What the heck could be going on? But I looked at it. I showed her. I'm like, it was $500.

$500. I actually I did not panic. I was not worried about this. Of course, this was just a mistake. Like they didn't have all the tracking codes, blah blah blah. So, you know, I called them up. I'm like, Hey, something must be wrong here. Like, for a quarter, we got a $500 check. What's going on?

G

Guy Raz30:14

That for three months of web advertising, your 50% rev share was $500. This must be a mistake.

S

Stephen Kaufer30:20

Exactly. Poignant because the $500 wasn't even going to cover our, you know, free lunches on Mondays to the company.

But sure enough, I talked to the product manager, very nice lady, who just kind of pointed out because I'm like, but I see ads on the Lycos travel site all the time. And she, you know, calmly pointed out like we tried to lower your expectations a bit, but like most of those ads are what we call house ads. So light bulb goes off in my head. Like, holy cow, I'm getting 50% of a zero ad. How dumb is that?

G

Guy Raz31:05

Oh, wait. A zero ad? Wait. Oh, because they were using unsold inventory to just run what?

S

Stephen Kaufer31:13

They were advertising. All the ads that I was seeing when I looked at the site were ads for other Lycos products, Lycos games, Lycos Finance.

G

Guy Raz31:22

Oh, so they were running self-promotional ads, which they don't obviously pay for or make any money from because it's their own ads, right?

S

Stephen Kaufer31:31

Right. And when they did have a paying client in general, they ran those ads on a page that they got 100% of the revenue for and they didn't have to share it with anyone.

G

Guy Raz31:42

Wow.

S

Stephen Kaufer31:42

And so the blindfold came off. We looked at this and said massive sigh. We got a massive problem ahead of us because travel industry is in total disarray. We have, you know, just... there's no other way to say it. We just had a failed business model.

G

Guy Raz32:05

Yeah.

S

Stephen Kaufer32:05

And like, okay, what's next, team?

G

Guy Raz32:10

Why don't we come back in just a moment? How Steve and his team figure out how to make the business work and why they walk away from a big deal with the company that once shunned them, Yahoo. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

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Narrator32:33

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G

Guy Raz36:43

Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So, it's around 2001 and TripAdvisor is doing all the things that a startup does not want to be doing. It's burning through money. It only has one client. And so far, that client's biggest check is 500 bucks. And we went into a controlled panic mode. We were like, everything is all about how can we get a dollar. Yeah. What new business models could we try? And we tried three or four very very different ones, but it was touch and go. And the business model you eventually arrived at, the one that wound up working, I guess, kind of grew out of this really critical decision that you made around this time, which was to make the site public, right? You basically opened TripAdvisor up so that anyone could see it, right?

S

Stephen Kaufer37:38

Yes. And so search engines were finding us and some folks were finding it and we had our web analytics and some people are coming to the site and what we eventually did find leveraged the fact of like if you are a consumer, if you're a traveler on the site and you are looking at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in the middle of New York City and we give you some reviews and some rankings. So I'm like, Hey, I might want to stay here. The consumer insight says, The next thing that traveler wants is, is it available for when I'm going to be in New York, and how much is it going to cost?

G

Guy Raz38:26

Yeah.

S

Stephen Kaufer38:27

So we created a text link that said, Check price and availability. And if you clicked on that link, we sent you to the Marriott Marquis page on Expedia, right? And so we called up Expedia and said, Hey, we just tested something. We got people over to your site. So would you be willing to buy some leads from us? And they said, Never heard of you. We don't buy leads, but we'll essentially give you a rev share on reservations that you make. Like, okay.

G

Guy Raz39:05

So if somebody, in other words, if somebody clicked to a hotel that opened up the Expedia reservation page, they were willing to give you a cut of that reservation if the person made a reservation on the page.

S

Stephen Kaufer39:18

Exactly. If the person made the reservation, right, and so no risk for Expedia, and we were desperate. What we eventually agreed to was 50 cents per click.

G

Guy Raz39:30

50 cents per click, even if the person did not make a reservation.

S

Stephen Kaufer39:33

Correct. Okay. And then they did the math on their end. Big top secret. Can't possibly share that information with you guys. So in November, we did a test which since they had all the power, it was a free test. We sent them 10,000 clicks and called them up at the end of the test and they said, Ah, looks like you got some conversions. We're willing to, you know, keep the test going. And we said, Well, it's not a test anymore. It's a paid order now. And we sold our very first, you know, real revenue client 20,000 clicks for $10,000 in the month of December 2001.

G

Guy Raz40:15

And you could actually track it because you could see when somebody clicked. You didn't need to audit Expedia. You would know exactly how many people were going to their site.

S

Stephen Kaufer40:26

That's right. And at the end of the month when we called them because we're looking like, Hey, can we do this again for January? And I vividly remember these like magic words at the end of that conversation, which was, Hey, you know, the quality of your leads is pretty good. We're happy to continue order. If you have more leads you can send, we're happy to spend more so long as the quality stays high.

G

Guy Raz40:56

The quality of the people who are going to hopefully book, right?

S

Stephen Kaufer41:00

Right. And that became the very beginning of a very long-term relationship with Expedia and eventually all of Expedia's competitors to form a business model that has us selling leads on a cost-per-click basis to people who may want to make reservations.

G

Guy Raz41:20

But here's the thing. You're now starting to send people to drive traffic to Expedia, right? But what you don't know is how many of those people are actually booking. I'm assuming Expedia wasn't sharing that information with you at the time, right? Because that's where the real money is.

S

Stephen Kaufer41:38

Yes. But, you know, we knew from just reading around that, you know, maybe 5% of our leads were actually booking something. So one out of 20. So we figured if we were getting 50 cents a click, the fastest way to get Expedia to pay a dollar a click was to get another client on the site who would be positioned above Expedia in the list of places you

Could go make a reservation for this hotel.

G

Guy Raz42:11

Oh, wait. So, okay, I see. So now what you're saying is that you had the 50 cents per click from Expedia, but maybe there might be someone else out there. I don't know who maybe Travel Velocity is also interested and maybe we will put the Travel Velocity option higher up on the list and maybe Travel Velocity will pay us a dollar a click instead. And so isn't this a great experience for a consumer who's looking at this hotel who says, 'All right, let me see how much it costs on Expedia. Let me see how much it costs on Travel Velocity. That's a good like price comparison value proposition for a traveler. And you know, if that user clicks on both links, I just got paid twice. So, it's not that dissimilar from what travel agents traditionally were doing, right? Which is or any any kind anyone who's who's referring business to somebody else like right that's that is essentially it was just a an updated model of an updated version of that business model.

S

Stephen Kaufer43:12

Exactly.

G

Guy Raz43:13

All right. So you have this site and still collecting information from or aggregating information that was out there professional reviews mainly. Um, but you enabled people who were reading the reviews, I guess, to comment on the reviews to react to the reviews on the website.

S

Stephen Kaufer43:34

Well, it was actually we had if you went to that hotel page, you could click off to a Fodor's or Lonely Planet or a travel blog somewhere to read. And somebody, and unfortunately it's a bit lost in Trip Advisor lore, came up with the idea of like, well, let's just let users write their own review on the site. I'm like, there was split opinion. Yeah. A couple of people said like, why would anyone be interested in one random person's opinion? And other folks said, well, sure, but that's going to be their opinion from the stay they had last week. That's super relevant. I really want to hear that. So, we said, sure, we'll test it. And sure enough, a lot of people wanted to do that, you know, and obviously quickly grew and quickly took over and our users on our site were skipping over the reviews of Fodor's, Lonely Planet and the others and going straight to the section that had reviews from their peers, essentially just other travelers. And there was a book out at the time called or came out a little bit later I think Wisdom of the Crowds and it was examples of how you know like the collective wisdom of a whole lot of people was going to end up being more accurate than even an expert.

G

Guy Raz44:58

Yeah. I mean, I think in, you know, shortly after September 11th, 2001, when you received $500 from Lycos when you were really on the ropes, you kind of took this Hail Mary approach and came to an agreement with Expedia to get 50 cents for every referral. By March of 2002, you guys were making like 70 grand a month in these through these referral fees. That's a very, very fast turnaround. Super fast turnaround and that March marked our first month of profitability.

S

Stephen Kaufer45:33

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 month and we were literally profitable every quarter thereafter until the pandemic.

G

Guy Raz45:54

But now you're a consumer brand. Now you are a consumer-facing brand. You are not a business-to-business brand anymore.

S

Stephen Kaufer46:01

You bet. We now needed more traffic to our website. And

G

Guy Raz46:07

We looked and said, 'Hey, we don't have a lot of time because somebody else could copy us.' And our answer we thought was going to be well look if we can build this massive marketplace of reviews globally. It's really hard for somebody else to catch up. But how did you attract more users? I mean you did not have a significant marketing budget. How are you getting more traffic? Because your site now depended on two things. It depended on traffic and then it depended on people writing reviews. So how did you do that? How did you get people in through the door?

S

Stephen Kaufer46:48

For the former getting more traffic to the site. Well, we hadn't focused on that at all. So it was like learning a new skill and we looked around like well how are other sites and oh search engines. For the first couple years, we worked really hard at making sure Trip Advisor would appear in as many different searches as possible. This was like the, let's be honest here, this was sort of like the golden age of search engine optimization. It was like, I mean, if you knew how to do it in 2002, 2003, it was like shooting fish in a barrel. You could do it fairly cheaply and you could get a lot of conversions if you understood how to make your listing come up on top. And we were very good at it.

G

Guy Raz47:34

Right? I mean, you can't do that today. Today, it's much harder.

S

Stephen Kaufer47:37

Absolutely much harder. But there's also a lot more great content on lots of websites out there. So, you know, again, wind the clock back. Nobody else that I can remember had a website that had all of the hotels in the United States, let alone the world, that were crawlable or available for users to see without having to search for something. And of course, it was brand new in a category, and the category itself, travel, was exploding.

G

Guy Raz48:13

All right. So this was like I mean it was a combination of doing search engine optimization but also we I guess you have to remember at this time people loved seeing what they wrote on the internet. I mean this is the story of Facebook. People were like wait you want to know my favorite music and books and my friends? Yeah I'm going to tell you all about that because it's cool to see it up here now. I think people have a different view of it, but reviews are different because it allows people to it's like comment sections. It's like it gives people a chance to feel empowered. And I guess it was just a self-generating phenomenon.

S

Stephen Kaufer48:56

Right? You have to remember most people were still not of the contributor mindset. Yeah.

G

Guy Raz49:03

Oh, I don't want to write a review. I don't know what to say.

S

Stephen Kaufer49:06

Because they were embarrassed that they weren't good enough or something. Embarrassed, good enough, too busy, lots and lots of reasons. Yeah. But if you just do the math, if you have 100,000 people coming in a month and 1% of them will write a review, then you've got 1,000 new reviews. And that happens all the time. And as you gather more traffic, you're getting more visitors, more visitors, more reviews, more reviews. And then of course we got much smarter about how to get somebody who is a contributor to write more reviews. 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. And it's the extra little pat on the back that says, 'Oh, I'm appreciated. Let me go write another review.'

G

Guy Raz50:10

How when did you think to yourself, 'Wait a minute. This is we could build a massive business on people's opinions.'

S

Stephen Kaufer50:19

The notion that we were on to something was really apparent by the time we got to 2003. 2002 was still like, 'Oh, wow. We can make some money doing this.' 2003 I'm like, 'Oh, we're scaling this. We're growing by leaps and bounds here.' I think we closed 2003 with over 20 million in annual revenue.

G

Guy Raz50:44

20 million in annual revenue from and this is purely from clicks to other sites.

S

Stephen Kaufer50:50

Right? And that was off of nothing or a whopping $10,000 in 2001. So that's a really skyrocket approach. And at that point, whoa, let's harness this. Let's keep going. Let's expand geographically. Let's very much go global, go multi-language. Let's become the well we set our vision for the number one travel site in terms of traffic. And we entertained some thoughts about well we did it for travel. Could we also do it for other verticals? Because this notion of UGC or user-generated content was pretty darn powerful.

G

Guy Raz51:36

How did you I mean clearly knowing that this was valuable and knowing that the more user reviews you had, the more valuable the site became. How did you encourage users to write reviews? We've done a bunch of things over the years, but one of the best things we did was literally just thanking people. And we quickly discovered that people didn't want to thank you from Trip Advisor. They wanted to thank you from other travelers. So, when we asked people why did they write reviews in the first place, the answer in general was we found the site so helpful, we want to pay it forward. That traveler didn't give a hoot about whether Trip Advisor as a corporation succeeded. They wanted to help some other traveler the way previous reviewers had helped them. All right. So now I'm thinking if I'm in there, right, because you guys are doing $20 million by the end of 2003. I mean, I'm thinking I'm coming to my fellow founders. I'm saying, 'All right, listen. We need a piece of this booking money. I mean, we're sending all these people to Expedia and to Travel Velocity and Priceline or whatever is out there. We got to get in on this game. We got to be a travel agency, too.' That's what I'd be thinking. Well, we didn't have that approach. We looked at it and said, you know, 2003, 2004, we had, I think, 10 million unique users a month, something like that. So, decent size, but we were far from the biggest. And we already had a business model that had gone through more than one pivot that was phenomenally profitable. We had very few sales reps because we didn't have that many clients.

S

Stephen Kaufer53:38

Yeah. To generate that $23 million in revenue. So our magic ticket was taking the 12 million unique users a month to 120 million unique users a month, 10x growth in traffic and therefore 10x growth in revenue. So our first goal for the first, you know, 5 to 10 years was like grow traffic. 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.

G

Guy Raz54:15

All right. Around 2003, maybe late 2003, from what I gather, you entered into talks with Yahoo about potentially acquiring you. Tell me what happened. Is that true? Did you guys start to talk to Yahoo about maybe acquiring you?

S

Stephen Kaufer54:35

Yes. Yahoo had, you know, was investing in their travel section and they were Yahoo. Yahoo was big.

G

Guy Raz54:45

They were the 800-pound gorilla.

S

Stephen Kaufer54:47

But, you know, we were growing fast and we went through a fair amount of due diligence with them.

G

Guy Raz54:53

This is just like 18 months after they said or maybe 2 years after they told you we're not interested. If you want to work with us, you got to pay us. Now, they're coming to you to maybe acquire you. The irony of that must have been quite delicious. I think

S

Stephen Kaufer55:08

It was delicious. Yes, that's a good way to phrase it.

G

Guy Raz55:12

All right. So you go into an exclusive negotiating period with Yahoo. This is in 2003 which is pretty great and it's just 3 years after you launch and they're going into your data. They're doing all the diligence. Did you think it was going to go through that Yahoo was going to be the acquirer?

S

Stephen Kaufer55:33

We thought it had a good likelihood but then they started kind of pushing back on some of the price as deal negotiators do. And at the end of the day in January of 2004, our traffic just shot up because we didn't realize it at the time, but January was a really big traffic month. Everyone after they open their Christmas presents, they hit the internet and start planning to travel somewhere. And we saw a massive spike which in our mind meant the company was meaningfully more valuable. And that was too hard for Yahoo to swallow. So we took a very deep breath and walked away.

G

Guy Raz56:26

In January of 2004 when you saw traffic spike, do you remember roughly how many employees you had at Trip Advisor?

S

Stephen Kaufer56:33

Probably around 30, something like that. God. Wow. So, this was like truly an efficient I mean it was like printing money and you had 30 people doing more than $30 million in revenue a year. That's amazing. Yes. We were stunned ourselves.

G

Guy Raz56:58

Well, okay. So, let me ask you about this. So, when you decided not to work with Yahoo and you were going to walk away, because I have to assume it was at least $100 million they were going to pay you. Okay? I don't know. You may not remember. You probably do, but you don't have to tell me. But you were going to walk away, you might have walked away with 20, 30 million bucks at that point, which is a lot of money. And that would have totally changed your life. So you must have been really confident that you guys were going to own this space, because Yahoo at that point could have decided to just go all in and taken you on.

S

Stephen Kaufer57:41

We assumed that they would if they didn't buy us just go compete head-to-head. We knew Yahoo had a ton of free traffic that they could point at their own product. And you know to one degree I'm like okay bring it on. There's a ton of competition. We also thought Yahoo was a pretty big company at that point and like many big companies it's hard to get something done. So even though we were small we thought we could truly outmaneuver them, outbuild them in innovations. And you know to the point of your question, yeah, it was a massive gulp choosing to walk away from a deal that was on the table for a hoped for potential deal down the road.

G

Guy Raz58:33

Why don't we come back in just a moment? How another business buys Trip Advisor for a better price and how the site deals with a chronic problem, fake reviews. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

N

Narrator59:02

We're supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. When I'm prepping for an interview, there's always that moment where I'm trying to turn a pile of research into an actual conversation. A founder's timeline, early decisions, big inflection points, old interviews, company background, all of it matters, but the real work is figuring out what connects. And that's where Claude has been super helpful. It helps me work through the material, organize what I already know, and find the thread, the thing that turns research into better questions. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you. Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. From research to strategy to the tasks that slow everything down, Claude helps you stay with the work and keep moving. For problems worth solving, get started with Claude at claude.ai/hib. AI/hib. When I pull up to a gas pump to fill my car, I'm not thinking about chemistry or engineering. I'm thinking about getting in, filling up, and getting on with my day. And it reminds me a little bit of the founders I talked to on this show because the best ones obsess over things their customers will never see. Tiny details, invisible improvements, relentless iteration, and not because anyone's watching, but because it makes the product better. That's what the Mobil brand does. It engineers fuel the same way great founders engineer their products. Mobil Supreme Plus premium gas helps keep engines three times cleaner, which can mean better performance and improved gas mileage. It's for people who care about what's under the hood, even if they never see it. Three times cleaner compared to Mobil regular gas in port fuel injected engines. Actual results may vary. Visit mobilfuels.com for details.

G

Guy Raz1:01:13

Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So, it's around 2004 and Trip Advisor is in a pretty good place. Its traffic is growing and it's turning a profit, but its business model is still kind of vulnerable. You were dependent. There were two things you were dependent on. You were dependent on these booking sites and there weren't an infinite number of them. There were a limited number of them. So your client base was relatively limited I think. And this was also Google was now starting to become a much more important player and a lot of the search was connected to Google. Right? Am I right about that? Yes. And like prices could fluctuate. It's not like we had these

S

Stephen Kaufer1:02:04

Yeah.

These were not year-long contracts. If we got a call from any client that says, you know, I'm out of budget this month. I'm going to turn you off next month. Boom. That could be half of our revenue could disappear.

G

Guy Raz1:02:19

Yeah. And that could have happened.

S

Stephen Kaufer1:02:21

Yes. We recognized like what could interfere with this rocket ship we were on. And we didn't stay a 30 person company. We were trying to grow as fast as we can. Our goal was not to be at a 50% profit margin. Our goal was to reinvest in and scale the business. And maybe it was a year or so later we started buying some search engine traffic as well because that at least was more in our control on the traffic side.

G

Guy Raz1:02:50

So from what I gather while you were in negotiations with Yahoo, clearly this is what happens in the industry is other potential competitors catch wind of this and as in any industry when someone is interested in you then other people become interested in you when no one's interested in you then no one's interested. And this is what happened basically IAC, Barry Diller's company IAC, they kind of catch wind of this and they say, 'Hey, can we talk?'

S

Stephen Kaufer1:03:24

Right? And you know, we were a party that was interested enough in selling. We just wanted it to be a fair reflection of the value we had created. IAC turned up with a number that everybody was super happy with. And it was truly life-changing money for all of the founders, the venture firm, everyone that had put a dollar into the company. And they came with the message, their game plan for us was, 'Look, keep doing what you're doing. We think you're early on, Steve. We want you to stay CEO team. We want the entire team.' As an aside, I didn't necessarily believe them, but they were certainly saying the right things.

G

Guy Raz1:04:18

Yeah. You know, I'm sometimes asked, 'Hey, was that a good decision to sell or not?' I'm like, 'Well, financially it was a crazy bad decision.'

S

Stephen Kaufer1:04:27

Yeah. 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.

G

Guy Raz1:04:43

I mean, hindsight's always tricky because you say financially it was a bad decision, but at the you'd raised money at a $10 million valuation. From what I have read, you sold for $210 million. That is an incredible return, right? I mean, a $10 million valuation into a $210 million sale in three years is unbelievable. You got a piece of that. Obviously, Trip Advisor would go on to be valued a multi-billion dollar company, but maybe not without the support of IAC and everything that came after, right? It's very possible that would not have happened.

S

Stephen Kaufer1:05:22

Yeah, there was like always lots of forks in the road and Expedia was our biggest client at the time. Expedia was owned by IAC. So, it would have been a hard ball negotiation tactics for IAC to say, 'Hey, Expedia, do you mind stopping your spend on Trip Advisor for the rest of the year? That'll help get the price down or that'll make them into more of a negotiating mood.' So like there's all sorts of factors going on. It was a wonderful story to be bought by IAC. They did a fabulous job. And then when you know fast forward we were moved from IAC into the public company Expedia when that was formed about a year later and again we were a division within Expedia and to their infinite credit they let us continue to operate on our own even though we were selling our leads and our traffic to their direct competitors.

G

Guy Raz1:06:30

Yeah. I mean, I guess this is a little complicated because IAC bought Expedia, I think, from Microsoft, right? And then they bought you guys, then they spun out Expedia as a separate company and Expedia became the parent company of many brands, Hotels.com, Hotwire, and Trip Advisor.

S

Stephen Kaufer1:06:50

That's right. But I should also mention here Steve that right around this time you were going through an extremely difficult time in your personal life. Because I think during this time your wife Caroline was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. You had I think four kids at that time and she passed away in 2005. This was all happening. All of this happening in the business was happening while you were dealing with this. I can't even imagine how challenging that was in your personal life. How are you doing that? How are you dealing with that? And also everything we just talked about.

You know, my wife and my kids came first. We did the best we could by way of caring. It was a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor. It's a really tough type of cancer to deal with. But yeah, that was my priority. Trip Advisor was second. The board knew it. The company knew it. I also liked being able to put my head in work at times because I was you know that's all encompassing. I can do the context switch from when I'm home to when I'm at work but for all the chemo appointments and like yeah that was of course in my view that was me at the hospital with her just as I would expect the same for and how I feel we've supported all of our employees that have gone through anything similar.

G

Guy Raz1:08:38

You became a single dad at 42. And I know you had help, of course, including from family. Steve, I'm sorry to ask you this, but I think it's a really important question to ask because I think you can at least offer some insights on your experience, and I hesitate because I can't imagine how traumatic that time was. But how did you manage your own grief?

S

Stephen Kaufer1:09:09

Yeah, a fair question. You know, when you first get a diagnosis, you're like, 'Oh my god, this upends your life. This changes everything.' And you go into like, 'Well, what am I going to do about it?' mode. And you try to find the best healthcare you can. You set things up so you disrupt the kids' lives as little as possible. And my late wife was a trooper about it in terms of accepting what the outcome was likely to be. And being part of the journey with the kids. Grief is very individualized. I found Trip Advisor to be much more of a blessing than a burden because as I said before, starting with Nick and Tom and Langley as co-founders, these were great people to work with. They could run the company without me. I really appreciate that level of confidence that my teammates provided during that time.

G

Guy Raz1:10:17

So you now are founder CEO running Trip Advisor within Expedia and thus begins I think it's an understatement to say a long march of acquisitions. I mean, this lasted continues to happen, but starting in 2007, Trip Advisor really went on a buying spree, buying a bunch of different companies. So, let's talk about this strategy. Was it basically we got to just grow by buying and own, create as much of a moat around our core business as possible?

S

Stephen Kaufer1:10:59

You know, the different companies that we acquired over the years and you're right we have bought quite a few. There's the transformational and I put Viator and La Fourchette into those categories.

G

Guy Raz1:11:14

Yeah, La Fourchette is like OpenTable in Europe or France mainly, right?

S

Stephen Kaufer1:11:19

That's right. The Fork which is the new name for La Fourchette and Viator in the attraction space were like our two biggest acquisitions. Fortunately, our two most successful full acquisitions and they're really in the like transform the company over the next 5 to 10 years in terms of what it does for our audience.

G

Guy Raz1:11:41

Now, some of these sites like The Fork or Viator, they also rely on user reviews, right? Just like Trip Advisor does. And this kind of gets us into the subject of reviews, right? Because this is I mean, we had Jeremy Stoppelman of Yelp on the show several years ago. And we went down this rabbit hole. And it's important. You know, you are a rational player in this world. And I know what you probably think, which is don't look just at one review, look at many reviews. Don't trust a site if it just has two or three reviews. You want to see if it has a lot of reviews, thousands of reviews.

S

Stephen Kaufer1:12:15

Yeah.

G

Guy Raz1:12:16

And I'm sympathetic to people who get angry about it because I'm also reviewed. If you go to any podcast website, there are reviews of this show. And some of the reviews are just so infuriating because it's not about the content. It's not about what we do. We give this show away for free. And you can pay to be a subscriber, which means you get the show a week early and that's it. Otherwise, if you wait a week, it's free. But some people have written one-star reviews because they're mad about this. And over time, that does have an impact on the show. So, I'm sympathetic to restaurants that get dinged for stupid things because it's their livelihood.

S

Stephen Kaufer1:12:59

I understand that quite well. I was on the board of Glassdoor for many years and a survey review site and I would read the reviews about Steve Kaufer and I'd see the anonymous review and be frustrated that it didn't have enough detail. I appreciate constructive criticism. I really do. I just want to know how I can go and fix this. But having said that, if you are in the hospitality business, don't be in the hospitality business if you can't take feedback. And if you can't take feedback, some of which is good and some of which is not living up to expectations however unreasonable they might be, you just shouldn't be in the hospitality business. So we went through phases where businesses would like how dare you even list me on your site. Like hey sorry, we are squarely on the side of the traveler here. We want to help them avoid hotels, restaurants, whatever that are bad and stay at the great ones.

G

Guy Raz1:14:12

Now, of course, what started to happen and I know that there have been many attempts to resolve this and some successful, some less successful is there are content farms that have turned this into a business, right? Or they have attempted to just write positive or negative reviews for a fee. And how do you I mean you can't eliminate fake reviews 100%. Right?

S

Stephen Kaufer1:14:45

The beauty is you don't need to. You just have to deliver what the user expects. There's a whole bunch of ways that we've developed over the years to catch this level of fraud. We know where people are. They have to advertise their services. And then we go talk to a hotel that we suspect has paid for the services and we say, 'Look, we have some strong evidence that you paid for this review. They will face a penalty from us because they've been trying to buy their way to the top.' And the most extreme example is called a red badge where we're posting on their page and we drop them in the ranks as a penalty. And my evidence that it's been tremendously successful over the years is the fact that we see on what you might consider the dark web, we see these review places offering to write fake reviews on Google and some other sites and then they say, 'Except Trip Advisor' because if they try, we catch them, we shut them down. We viewed that as core to our success way back in 2002, 2003, 2004 because if people came to Trip Advisor to get recommendations and the actual place didn't live up to the expectations, they wouldn't use our site again.

G

Guy Raz1:16:17

In 2011, the company once again kind of spun out of Expedia and went public. What's the story behind that? Why did you become an independent company again?

S

Stephen Kaufer1:16:30

The general answer was we were a fast growing successful profitable media company and Expedia was a traditional online travel agency transaction company and there was an opinion around that said we're kind of probably looking at different types of investors yet we were one ticker, we were one stock. So eventually they said, 'Hey, let's just make it easier for our investors. We will dividend a share of Trip Advisor to all Expedia shareholders and they will be two completely separate independently run companies.' Big change for me was all of a sudden I was the public company CEO and I had never done that before. It was never a goal of mine to be a public company CEO, but it sounded like it would be interesting to say the least. So, I was up for it and that's how it happened.

G

Guy Raz1:17:38

We talked about 9/11 earlier and how that almost sunk the company and there would be anything remotely like it until March of 2020 really. And it hit you guys hard. I mean, I read in the second quarter of 2020 your revenue dropped 86% from the year before. I mean that is I can't even imagine how you even absorb that.

S

Stephen Kaufer1:18:07

It was something that we never thought could happen. We had always been a company that been wonderfully profitable that planned for contingencies. Look, there have been horrific terrorist events between 9/11 and here that caused bumps and blips, but travel was very elastic. And I got to admit, pandemic was just not on our radar screen.

G

Guy Raz1:18:36

Like many companies, you had to do I mean, at the time, I remember many companies just hoarded cash. They had to just hold on to the cash. They had to cut back on marketing, cut back on anything they could, including employees. There were a lot of layoffs you guys had. You had to lay off a lot of people very quickly.

S

Stephen Kaufer1:18:53

We did. Most painful chapter of Trip Advisor, period. And we just didn't know how long, how severe, how bad could it get? And we didn't have a really big cash balance at that point. We had to go reach out to the financial markets which fortunately were open, borrow some money and it forces you to really be focused on what you are going to work on because we wanted to come out of the pandemic a different looking company. The opportunity to come out leaner and meaner was what we set our sights towards and by and large that's what we achieved.

G

Guy Raz1:19:35

So you clearly travel is back but you also announced that you were going to step down. And I should mention because we talked a lot about the tragedy in your life that you did actually get remarried almost 10 years ago I think.

S

Stephen Kaufer1:19:56

Yes. Married to an absolutely lovely woman. She has four children. I have four. We are entirely blessed that they all get along. And yes, we moved in together. The house does have a lot of bedrooms. We're now empty nesters. The kids are all off out of college or in medical school or whatever they're off to. Things look good on that front.

G

Guy Raz1:20:31

22 years you lasted and thrived. I mean, clearly, you left on your own terms. Maybe not. Maybe somebody tapped you on the shoulder and said, 'Steve, it's time to go.' I don't know. But

S

Stephen Kaufer1:20:44

No, this was my choice.

G

Guy Raz1:20:46

It's a long time. I mean, you sold this company in 2004. You stayed until 2022. What do you think explains that? It's very unusual in my experience with people I've interviewed to stay at one place so long.

S

Stephen Kaufer1:21:03

I fell in love with being an entrepreneur and then scaling things. And then the thing that I craved personally the most was the level of impact that the company had. 400 million unique users a month. With a lot of duplication, you're still impacting the lives, the vacations of a couple of billion people. And that's with a B. And why was I ever going to, you know, when it was 200 million unique users a month and I could see how you could get it to 400, why was I going to walk away from that level of opportunity to impact people?

G

Guy Raz1:21:54

When you think about all of this now, first business you walked away from that with zero equity, nothing. Start this business, really not going, the business model is terrible, you're all on the ropes, and then 3 months later you're doing 70,000 bucks a month in revenue, which is pretty great. Complete, you know, selling it in 2004 for $210 million, running it for 20 years, 22 years. When you think about all that, how much of that do you attribute to your intelligence and your work ethic and your skills? And how much do you think has to do with being lucky?

S

Stephen Kaufer1:22:35

Oh, it's a great question. 50/50 maybe. Absolutely a ton of luck in there, but we had to make some good choices and work our tails off because very few businesses have a straight line to success. But after 22 years, I want to do it again. Not in travel, not in software tools, but I figure I have one more startup left in me. And as I turned 59 years old, I look around and say, 'Okay, better get moving.' And so I am just open for another adventure that can have something akin to the type of impact that Trip Advisor had, if I could get that lucky.

G

Guy Raz1:23:27

Oh. So, yeah, because you're not yet 60, so you're looking now maybe to start the next thing.

S

Stephen Kaufer1:23:32

Indeed.

G

Guy Raz1:23:33

Thinking about ideas. Ping me on LinkedIn if any of your listeners have ideas. I got one for you.

S

Stephen Kaufer1:23:39

I'm all ears.

G

Guy Raz1:23:40

A lot of people are talking about crypto. That Steve Kaufer, co-founder and former CEO of Trip Advisor. Included among the site's 1 billion plus reviews are these ones from disappointed travelers. The Golden Gate Bridge, one star. It's covered in fog. It's pointless. Buy a postcard. You'll see more. New York Central Park. One star. It's just grass and trees surrounded by buildings. And finally, three stars for Tuman Beach in Guam. It's a great beach, just too sandy. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. If you enjoyed it, please help us spread the word. Tell someone about How I Built This or post about it on social media. And thank you. If you want to contact the team, our email address is [email protected]. If you want to follow us on Twitter, our account is @howibuiltthis and mine is @guyraz. And on Instagram, I'm @g.raz. This episode was produced by Liz Mezer with music composed by Ramine Arablouie. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Sam Pollson. Our audio engineer was Ko Takasugi-Cherivan. Our production staff also includes JC Howard, Carrie Thompson, Alex Chung, Josh Lash, Katherine Cipher, Elaine Coats, John Isabella, Chris Msini, and Carla Estz. Our intern is Susanna Brown. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.

Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer

About Stephen Kaufer