Founders at Work.pdf

362 Founders at Work
By that point, I had spent a couple of days in sort of mindless searches, trying
to find the real scoop on the hotel, not the official blurb. My wife suggested,
“You know something about technology. You could build a better search engine
to find what you’re looking for in travel—not the published opinion, but the
unpublished, unbiased opinion about a place, a location, something to do.”
I was employed at the time, so we put the idea on ice for about a year. In
late ’99, the idea resurfaced. I wanted to get out of what I was doing, and
started to assemble friends that I had worked with before who might be interested
in starting an Internet company to build the best travel search engine out
there—where we would define “best” as not searching for prices, but really
finding the unbiased information.
I was introduced by a friend to another cofounder, Langley Steinert, on the
business, marketing, business development, financing side of things. So the two
of us kind of took up the project as, “Hey, this is something the world clearly
needs.” I felt I could build it with the team of folks I had in mind from past
lives. Langley had the business development experience and connections to sell
and market it. Because I had started a few companies before, I knew it was
important to have the right combination of skills and interests amongst the
founders. We assembled four initial founders of the company and got our first
round of funding in February of 2000.
Livingston: Where was your office when you started?
Kaufer: My late wife actually owned a software company that was just down the
road in Needham [Massachusetts]. It was a small and declining company,
which, for the first 10 months or so of our existence, gave TripAdvisor free rent,
T1, computers, and other stuff that it had and wasn’t using. So it wasn’t technically
a garage. It was closer to a second-floor attic above a pizza place. It was all
one big, open floor, and the room could comfortably seat eight. By the time we
busted out of there, we had 15 people. Then we just moved down the street.
Livingston: So your idea was to somehow collect the consumer feedback on
different hotels, airlines—anything related to travel?
Kaufer: We were going to focus on destinations, hotels, and attractions. We’ve
always pretty much stayed away from collecting opinions on air, for instance.
But we were going to search the Web, just like Google—or AltaVista, which was
king of the hill in those days—but with a focus on travel. We’d be able to come
up with better results, where better was, again, not just all the booking sites that
would help you book a room in a hotel, but really opinionated information.
We’d find the articles from the New York Times, Boston Globe, LA Times,
local newspapers, etc. The back issue of Ski Magazine might have a great article
all about Aspen, but you’d never find it, because it’s tucked away in the archive
section and probably wouldn’t show up on Google. It was written last year—
“Great Things To Do for Families in Aspen.” A fantastic article, and what was
good last year is probably still just as good today, but you’d never find it but for
our very focused travel search engine.
Livingston: How was the technology designed to do this? Was it a crawler?