Acquired26 Heinä 2017

Episode 41: Booking.com with Jetsetter & Room 77 CEO Drew Patterson

Acquired trains its lens on the “second or third best acquisition of all-time”, Priceline’s 2005 purchase of Booking.com. Our heroes are joined by friend-of-the-show and former Jetsetter & Room 77 CEO Drew Patterson to help understand how this little-known startup from The Netherlands grew into the largest travel company in the world, with nearly $8B in annual revenue. Was this deal even better than Instagram??? We debate, hotly.

Sponsors:

Sentry: https://bit.ly/acquiredsentry
WorkOS: https://bit.ly/workos25
Anthropic: https://bit.ly/acquiredclaude25
Statsig: https://bit.ly/acquiredstatsig26

More Acquired!

Get email updates with hints on next episode and follow-ups from recent episodes
Join the Slack
Subscribe to ACQ2
Merch Store!

Topics covered include:

The biggest startup you’ve never heard of (in the US), Booking.com, and its parent company Priceline (yes, the William Shatner Priceline)
Booking’s founding in Amsterdam in late 1996: by recent college graduate Geert-Jan Bruinsma
Skift.com’s Definitive Oral History of Online Travel
The travel industry's GDS's (“Global Distribution Systems”) and the development of Sabre
How Bruinsma raised the initial money for Booking: by emailing anyone he know who had an email address
OTAs ("Online Travel Agencies”) and how they operate; the "merchant model" versus the “agency model"
The role of search in online travel
Bill Gurley on Conversion: The Most Important Internet Metric of All
Expedia’s early flirtation with Booking, and decision not to acquire the company
Priceline head of M&A Glenn Fogel’s vision for how powerful the agency model for OTAs could become in Europe
Priceline and Glenn's 2004 acquisition of Active Hotels in the UK, followed by the 2005 acquisition of Booking for $133M and the combination of the two businesses into Booking.com
Booking’s incredible growth in the decade since the acquisition, from less than 20M room-nights to over 500M, and $7.8B in revenue in 2016

The Carve Out:

Ben: Scott Forstall talking about the original iPhone at the Computer History Museum
David: The Big Sick
Drew: Bloomberg’s Money Stuff by Matt Levine

Tämä jakso on lisätty Podme-palveluun avoimen RSS-syötteen kautta eikä se ole Podmen omaa tuotantoa. Siksi jakso saattaa sisältää mainontaa.

Jaksot(214)

Nvidia Part II: The Machine Learning Company (2006-2022)

By 2012, NVIDIA was on a decade-long road to nowhere. Or so most rational observers of the company thought. CEO Jensen Huang was plowing all the cash from the company’s gaming business into building a...

20 Huhti 20222h 13min

Platforms and Power (with Hamilton Helmer and Chenyi Shi)

We sit down once again with one of the world’s very best strategy thinkers, 7 Powers author Hamilton Helmer — this time joined by his impressive Strategy Capital colleague Chenyi Shi — to discuss plat...

6 Huhti 20221h 24min

Nvidia Part I: The GPU Company (1993-2006)

He wears signature leather jackets. He can bench press more than you. He makes cars that drive themselves. He’s cheated death — both corporate and personal — too many times to count, and he runs the 8...

28 Maalis 20222h 1min

Altimeter (with Brad Gerstner)

We hear a lot these days about hedge funds becoming venture firms, and venture firms becoming hedge funds. But a decade before either of those approaches became mainstream, a tiny $3m fund in Boston n...

15 Maalis 20221h 54min

SONY

Born in the unlikeliest of places — the terrible, wasteland-like aftermath of post WWII Japan — Sony rose to capture the imaginations (and wallets) of consumers and engineers around the world. The com...

7 Maalis 20223h 3min

Super Pumped (with Brian Koppelman and Joseph Gordon-Levitt)

We sit down with two of the most talented and respected people in Hollywood — Brian Koppelman and Joseph Gordon-Levitt — to talk about the process of adapting Mike Issac’s story of Uber, “Super Pumped...

22 Helmi 20221h 4min

The Browser (with Brendan Eich, Chief Architect of Netscape + Mozilla and CEO of Brave)

We sit down with perhaps the only person besides Marc Andreessen who’s had a major influence on each of the Web 1, 2 and 3 eras: Brave Browser CEO (and former Netscape + Mozilla Chief Architect) Brend...

15 Helmi 20221h 43min

Peloton

The Peloton journey has been one seriously wild ride. From can’t raise money to one of Tiger Global’s first venture investments, to pandemic darling to the stock being down 85% in 6 months... there’s ...

10 Helmi 20222h 20min