Founders at Work.pdf

Stephen Kaufer 369
from being successful; it was the sales and marketing strategy. I said, “Look, we
will take everyone in the company and turn them into somebody that’s going to
help close the sale to keep this company afloat. So you’re doing one of two
things: you’re either helping on some prospect we were chasing, or you’re helping
in the financing prospect we were chasing.”
I was always certainly cognizant of the fact that, if we didn’t do something
different, we were going to run out of money in the first half of ’02. But it never
crossed my mind to just give it up or shut it down.
Livingston: A lot of startups that are based strongly on technology don’t have
the luxury of having a business guy as one of the founders. Do you think that
having Langley on your founding team helped you?
Kaufer: Absolutely. We never would have succeeded without Langley on the
team. If I were funding a startup, I wouldn’t want to put money in unless I saw
somebody identified as having an interest in the business development side of
it. I’m an engineer by training myself, but at this point I have so much experience
dealing with customers and what they want that I can bring that back to
shape the product. Look at me 20 years ago, and at best I was a smart engineer.
I didn’t know much about business, knew nothing about selling, and unless you
have somebody who has an interest in talking with whoever you’re selling your
product or service to, your product isn’t going to turn out to be what the customer
wants.
In almost all circumstances I can think of, if not a member of the founding
team, you want to say, “With the money I hope to raise from you, this is the person—here’s
his/her résumé—that we’re going to bring on board to take care of
the business marketing aspect of it.” I’ve always had that in the startup companies
I’ve been associated with.
Livingston: What competitors were you most scared of as you were building
TripAdvisor?
Kaufer: There weren’t really direct competitors. We were fighting more of a
problem of, “No one else is using your stuff. We seem to be doing OK without
it. So why is your stuff critical? Why do I have to pay you for it?” The dollars
that might have been spent on us were probably going to a Frommer’s or
Fodor’s, which were branded content sites.
We would say, “No, no, no. They have one person’s opinion, and it was written
6 years ago by someone that may or may not have even visited the hotel.
We’ve got fresh stuff. We’ve searched for all the stuff around the Web that your
visitors want.”
But, there were drawbacks to our model, too. A user on Yahoo Travel looking
at their description of Boston was reading it on Yahoo Travel. When they
came to our Boston page and they wanted to read about fun things to do, we’d
take them off to an article on the New York Times, or on Frommer’s, whereupon
they would be leaving TripAdvisor or leaving the Yahoo network. Yahoo, like
most companies, didn’t really want to send a lot of people away. Yet that was
how we had such a rich database of information. So a tougher sell.