Acquired26 Jul 2017

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:

Vanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvanta
ServiceNow: https://bit.ly/acquiredservicenow26
Legora: https://bit.ly/acquiredlegora
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

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(217)

The Home Depot

The Home Depot's founding story is like an Avengers movie… if the Avengers got fired, went broke, and stacked empty paint cans ten feet high to look legitimate. After being unceremoniously fired from ...

14 Sep 3h 35min

Disney: The Renaissance and the Empire

In 1984, the Walt Disney Company was worth more dead than alive. Disney Animation — the heart of Walt's famous flywheel — had stagnated for years, bleeding away talent while corporate raiders circled,...

10 Aug 4h 32min

The Walt Disney Company

The Walt Disney Company is the most successful enterprise ever created for monetizing human nostalgia. Today it’s the king of global entertainment, holding the intellectual property rights to the chil...

22 Jun 4h 31min

Vanguard

Vanguard is the most effective vehicle ever created for participating in the fruits of American capitalism. Today it’s the single largest equity owner of the majority of corporations in the S&P 500, o...

18 Mai 3h 48min

Ferrari

Ferrari is the pinnacle of luxury scarcity — across its entire 79-year history, the company has sold just 330,000 cars at an average price today of $500,000. For context, Hermès sells that many Birkin...

13 Apr 3h 59min

Rolex

Rolex is a series of paradoxes. They sell obsolete and objectively inferior mechanical devices for 10-1000x the price of their superior digital successors… and demand is stronger than ever in history!...

5 Mar 4h 51min

Costco

Costco is not only Charlie Munger’s favorite company of all time (plus he’s on the board, natch), it’s an absolutely fascinating study in how seemingly opposite characteristics can combine to create i...

4 Mar 2h 53min

Formula 1

Formula 1 is three competitions in one: a 200mph battle of the world's best race car drivers, the world cup of engineering where thousand-person teams spend hundreds of millions designing cars from sc...

2 Mar 4h 18min