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Avi Meir

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29
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2020-05-29
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2020-05-29
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  1. “I don't want to offend anybody who was the real first angel, so we had a group of them, we had around 12 engine investors, more or less in the same time. Most of them are private, not famous names. So people from Israel, business people or entrepreneurs from Israel, from the US, from the UK, from Switzerland, let's say friends and friends of France kind of group.”

    2020-05-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: TravelPerk's Avi Meir on Why 2021 Will Be A Record Year For Business Travel, The 3 Priorities For All Founders During COVID, What VCs Can Do To Really Support Their Founders In A Recession · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “So real first check was founders, right? So we invested our own money. But first, non-founder check was engineer investors. We raised something like $700,000 or $800,000 from NGO investors.”

    2020-05-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: TravelPerk's Avi Meir on Why 2021 Will Be A Record Year For Business Travel, The 3 Priorities For All Founders During COVID, What VCs Can Do To Really Support Their Founders In A Recession · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Yeah, we did something like, I don't know, like the Snapchat of data rooms. Here's everything. Take a look if you don't invest somehow you forget that. Something like that, you know? Because the questions repeat themselves anyway. I mean, you need to be the founder. You need to understand who they are as a person. But a lot of the, let's say, the data exchange transactions are the same. So why do I need to spend an hour with you rather than just give you access to a data room? And I think many founders do that because they are concerned to expose too much. So if we had a way to let you see everything, but you forget it if you don't invest, I think it would be way better. You could look at like a thousand deals a week. It would be amazing.”

    2020-05-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: TravelPerk's Avi Meir on Why 2021 Will Be A Record Year For Business Travel, The 3 Priorities For All Founders During COVID, What VCs Can Do To Really Support Their Founders In A Recession · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Venture. Venture is amazing. The VCs who listen to this are you guys are amazing. Having said that, I try to be politically correct here. So let's less time consuming way to exchange information. You know, this dating period of, let's do a call, let's learn about the company, let's learn a bit more. This think times 10, 15 different conversations takes a lot of time from the founder. So maybe finding a less time consuming way of doing that.”

    2020-05-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: TravelPerk's Avi Meir on Why 2021 Will Be A Record Year For Business Travel, The 3 Priorities For All Founders During COVID, What VCs Can Do To Really Support Their Founders In A Recession · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Superpower, I know how to find great people, great talent, and to make the talent to work together. Weakness, I want to be liked. That's a big weakness”

    2020-05-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: TravelPerk's Avi Meir on Why 2021 Will Be A Record Year For Business Travel, The 3 Priorities For All Founders During COVID, What VCs Can Do To Really Support Their Founders In A Recession · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “So, I'm not sure if it's my favorite book, but I'm just reading it now and I really like it. Distracts me from the coronavirus situation. It's a pretty funny book and pretty smart. I think it's called The 100-year-old man who climbed out of the window. It's a Swedish book, great, great book”

    2020-05-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: TravelPerk's Avi Meir on Why 2021 Will Be A Record Year For Business Travel, The 3 Priorities For All Founders During COVID, What VCs Can Do To Really Support Their Founders In A Recession · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Just fantastic. So, the first thing VC should do if they are able to, and the company is good, is reach out and sign a check to their current portfolio. I think that's one of the best helps because it gives you the oxygen to breathe, it gives you the oxygen to think clearly, not act of panic, act out of lack of discipline. So yeah, just amazing support. I think that's the best thing you can do.”

    2020-05-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: TravelPerk's Avi Meir on Why 2021 Will Be A Record Year For Business Travel, The 3 Priorities For All Founders During COVID, What VCs Can Do To Really Support Their Founders In A Recession · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I got probably one of the best emails I've ever gotten from a VC just at the beginning of this thing. So I'll name them. I hope they don't mind. If they do, I'm sorry. But amazing people at Local Globe run by Solan Robin Klein and George is the person that we're dealing with and Julian from the Latitude Fund, which is the growth fund they raised. Just an amazing team. And as the crisis started, they sent me an email and they said, we have X million waiting for you. Tell us when to hire them. They didn't ask about terms. They didn't ask about if I actually need the money. They just sent me an email. It was like a two-centence email. I should check with them if they came for me to publish the screenshot. It's just amazing. Send me an email out of the blue and said, we have X million waiting for you. Tell me when to wire if you need it. That's the kind of support we need right now. If you have reserves in your fund and your company is good, right? I'm not saying it's a bad company, it's a great company, great product, growing well, and hit hard by this crisis. This is an external factor that will go away. Honestly, they were amazing before and I always recommend them, but for me, this is more than I could even imagine without words, to this level of loyalty, this level of”

    2020-05-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: TravelPerk's Avi Meir on Why 2021 Will Be A Record Year For Business Travel, The 3 Priorities For All Founders During COVID, What VCs Can Do To Really Support Their Founders In A Recession · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Yeah, so unfortunately, that's yes. Really seeing it, so some companies we know already are going under or emerging into other players. First money into travel company, probably dead for a while. Companies wanted to raise the first round are struggling. So this is probably...”

    2020-05-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: TravelPerk's Avi Meir on Why 2021 Will Be A Record Year For Business Travel, The 3 Priorities For All Founders During COVID, What VCs Can Do To Really Support Their Founders In A Recession · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Originally, and not only you have some increasing cases and then they will shut down and then reopen again. So flexibility will become a huge concern for business travelers basically during this period until people are not worried about it anymore. So I think, yeah, I think domestic will be big, which is great news for train, for example. So rail will be bigger than flights, at least by number of bookings, because it's just more convenient to travel domestically in many cases, in train versus flight. And the hassle will lower, you know, like, I think people will be less inclined to sit in a closed metal tube that is the flame versus taking a train. I think you can distance more. Sometimes you can even open the window. The doors open every station. So trains will be bigger than flights at the beginning during this period of domestic travel. And then flexibility will be a huge issue. And we're actually changing the product and the strategy to match that belief. We're changing what we build to match how we see the world evolving.”

    2020-05-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: TravelPerk's Avi Meir on Why 2021 Will Be A Record Year For Business Travel, The 3 Priorities For All Founders During COVID, What VCs Can Do To Really Support Their Founders In A Recession · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Business travel in 2021 will be higher, or the dollar amount will be higher than that of 2019, but it will look differently, right? So I think, for example, domestic travel will emerge faster and sooner than international travel. We already see that, by the way. So we have trips, I mean, volleys are still low, but we see trips being booked in Germany now domestic. In the UK, domestic, in the US as well, I had a chat with a South Korean company where they see a lot of domestic travel. So domestic will come back first is my guess. It's easier, right? It's easier to manage because the two ends of the trip are under the same, let's say, policy. And then I suspect that you will see corridors of travel. So for example, it might be okay to travel or allow to travel from New York to San Francisco, but not from Oklahoma to San Francisco. Don't take my natural states, but you'll have some kind of corridors or maybe countries will allow the UK will allow everybody from France, but not from Spain. Again, I guess, but something like this will have corridors of travel. And then the third point I think will have a lot of kind of red, green kind of start-stop scenarios where you'll have locally”

    2020-05-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: TravelPerk's Avi Meir on Why 2021 Will Be A Record Year For Business Travel, The 3 Priorities For All Founders During COVID, What VCs Can Do To Really Support Their Founders In A Recession · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Yeah, so I think for the first, and I don't know how long it will be, right? It could be two months, it could be 18, 24 months, but basically until people are not worried about it anymore, right? So I don't know what will make people not worried about the virus anymore. Maybe it will be a vaccine. Maybe realize it's not as deadly. Maybe they'll just get used to it. Like something will happen. One of these, or maybe another thing I cannot predict right now, that will get people less worried about it. I don't think 20 years when I will still be worried about it. We're not even worried about HIV anymore in the sense of, of course, we have to be careful. You're too young to remember, but in the 90s, it was a huge pandemic, right? Like people were extremely worried about HIV and now it almost became a chronic disease almost, right? I'm not downgrading the challenges that come with contracting HIV, but it almost became a manageable chronic disease. So something will happen is my guess that will make people less worried about the virus, regardless if it's because it's solved like a vaccine or just not worried about it. Until then, and I don't know if it's two or 24 or more months, until then, we'll live in a weird kind of limbo period. I think people will travel and my prediction is that 2021 will be...”

    2020-05-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: TravelPerk's Avi Meir on Why 2021 Will Be A Record Year For Business Travel, The 3 Priorities For All Founders During COVID, What VCs Can Do To Really Support Their Founders In A Recession · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Twitter, you say that I worry a lot about what the government is doing and I cannot change that, so I'm not sure I have the best answer for that, but I'm trying to worry about things that are within my reach and within my responsibility, within the company, trying to use the help of my team as much as I can, being transparent about the challenges I have, sagas I have when I feel down, etc., not trying to look like I'm always happy and everything is great, and then having a good schedule and a sane life in terms of trying to keep healthy, trying to eat well, work out as much as I can, which is not great, but still just trying to keep sane and having stuff outside of work, not just work.”

    2020-05-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: TravelPerk's Avi Meir on Why 2021 Will Be A Record Year For Business Travel, The 3 Priorities For All Founders During COVID, What VCs Can Do To Really Support Their Founders In A Recession · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Think resilience plays a huge role here. And if you have resilience going into this thing, then it's easier for you. And if you didn't have it, it's time to develop it. And it's funny because I finished reading a book over the Christmas period that helps me a lot. I think it's called The Beginner's Guide to Stoicism. And basically, the point is, if you cannot change something, why worry about it, right? And it's easier said than done. But I think my approach to keep saying was first just usual stuff that everybody's trying to do, but I think itself is my commute is 30 seconds now, right? From the bedroom to where the computer is, and it's very tempting to be working 24-7. If I could have a wife and two kids here, two young kids helps because I have my commitments and I have my responsibility. So it kind of forces me to stop working at one point. But if you don't have that, then you have to find a way to have a schedule and forces yourself to stop working. Just have a sane schedule, I would say. In terms of what you can fix and what you can't and what you should worry about or not, I'm trying to be more tactical in what I worry about, solving problems that I can handle that are completely within my reach, not worrying too much about things I cannot change. Now, am I 100% disciplined? No, if you follow me,”

    2020-05-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: TravelPerk's Avi Meir on Why 2021 Will Be A Record Year For Business Travel, The 3 Priorities For All Founders During COVID, What VCs Can Do To Really Support Their Founders In A Recession · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “How are you doing, Avi? And I said, Well, not so great before this crisis I managed to stop reading my phone first thing I do when I wake up. And I went back to this crappy habit. And I'm checking my phone. One eye is still closed. I'm still asleep. One eye is already open and I'm reading about virus and death and maybe the virus also packs the kidneys and now it also attacks the heart and that's how I start my day, you know. In many cases, no, I'm not doing great, right? And if you are honest about it, you're like, no, I'm not a super person. Everybody's struggling. These are my challenges. I need to cut costs right now to preserve the company and make sure that we survive this thing. And cutting costs might mean saying goodbye to some people in our team. And that's a challenge for me. So being honest about it, being open about it and transparent, I think it's much better than telling them, oh, no, everything is okay. And then like a day later doing huge layoffs. Nobody likes to be treated like that.”

    2020-05-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: TravelPerk's Avi Meir on Why 2021 Will Be A Record Year For Business Travel, The 3 Priorities For All Founders During COVID, What VCs Can Do To Really Support Their Founders In A Recession · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Not sure I have the right answer, honestly. I've been keeping a journal. So, first advice is keep a journal because it's interesting to kind of write it down, don't change what you wrote down and then look back after the crisis is over to see how you thought and what was right, what was wrong. So I'm not sure I have the right answer, but the approach we take is let's be as transparent as possible. It's not a family, right? And if you have to use a cliche, the family one, I like sportsmen one, right? So in a sports team, you have to sometimes give hard, difficult news and deal with it instead of trying to be liked and protective. And I think the big mistake that more kind of greener, let's say, less experienced entrepreneurs would do, and I definitely did that mistake many times, is try to be liked by the team and try to be protective of their feelings versus giving them the hard truth and trusting that there are adults and can handle it. And not only handle it, they can actually come up with better solutions than you can. So having a very transparent communication, sharing the challenges, sharing what you're struggling with, we're doing a lot of Q&A sessions yesterday on Zoom. And somebody asked me, how are you doing? Because I keep asking people, are you doing it, et cetera? So one of the questions in the Q&A was how...”

    2020-05-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: TravelPerk's Avi Meir on Why 2021 Will Be A Record Year For Business Travel, The 3 Priorities For All Founders During COVID, What VCs Can Do To Really Support Their Founders In A Recession · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Turn lemons into lemonade. We created a lemonade factory and we do a lot of stuff that we didn't do before, investing in a product, investing in invent”

    2020-05-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: TravelPerk's Avi Meir on Why 2021 Will Be A Record Year For Business Travel, The 3 Priorities For All Founders During COVID, What VCs Can Do To Really Support Their Founders In A Recession · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “So let me disclose a secret of our action plan during the corona crisis. And I didn't get approval from anybody. So let's see if I need a job after that. I'll reach out to you, Harry, see if you have a job for me. But here's the summary of how we approach this thing. And I would give the same advice to anybody regardless of how much cash they have or not. First priority for us as a business is to survive. So we will do anything we need to do in order to survive and preserve cash, which already answers your question, I think. The fact is, as you say, we are capitalized and we happen to be very efficient with our capital. So our burn rate is low, which gives us more optionality. But if I didn't have that, then I definitely need to do something more drastic. Cash should be the number one priority. Number two priority for us is to emerge strong after this crisis. As I said, it's going to end and people will go back to traveling. And I don't want to lose 12 months after lockdowns are lifted in rebuilding the capacity, rebuilding the muscle that we have lost if we went too deep of a cut. So there's a difference between cutting in the fat or cutting the muscle and definitely not cutting the bone, right? So we want to emerge strong after that. And then the third part.”

    2020-05-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: TravelPerk's Avi Meir on Why 2021 Will Be A Record Year For Business Travel, The 3 Priorities For All Founders During COVID, What VCs Can Do To Really Support Their Founders In A Recession · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Everybody was booking and then everybody was canceling. So a customer careteen was extremely busy up until a few days ago who basically reached almost the end of the backlog in terms of tickets that they needed to enter the cancellation, etc. And now it's a bit calmer. So what we're doing now is we're allocating capital to training for customer care. We are allocating capital to what we call the lemonade factory. And we're changing many things in the company because we believe that some things will not change. I don't buy the, everything will be remote from now on. I think many things will be remote, but people will also understand even more the value of human connection and the value of meeting people in person. So I don't think it's going away. Nobody took the other side of the bed, but I propose if one of the listeners wants to take the other side of the bed, reach out to me. I'm willing to bet that business travel will grow in 2021. Not based on 2020, based on 2019.”

    2020-05-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: TravelPerk's Avi Meir on Why 2021 Will Be A Record Year For Business Travel, The 3 Priorities For All Founders During COVID, What VCs Can Do To Really Support Their Founders In A Recession · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “My first approach was I saw a few, and I'm not trying to blame, right? I'm just observing that I saw a few companies, in my opinion, reacting out of panic and hysteria and cutting extremely fast, extremely deep. And maybe if you look five years from now, maybe they did the right thing and I didn't. I prefer to, in our approach at Robert, was let's buy ourselves some time and understand what's going on. So we can act in a more calm, focused, and disciplined way, which has always been aspire to do that, right? I'm not saying we're always calm and disciplined, but we always try to be. And what it meant for us is, first, I mean, we add a lot of volume, right? So for our sales team, for example, March was the best month ever. We hit a record month in March in terms of closing deals. So it's not like people are just sitting home and not doing anything. They're actually extremely busy in the sales team. Customer care, same story for different reasons. So the march has been the busiest month because everybody was canceling. What we actually grew very, very well multiples year or year in Q1, right? In revenue. So Q1 was an amazing quarter for us in growth, even though we had, of course, not so great March.”

    2020-05-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: TravelPerk's Avi Meir on Why 2021 Will Be A Record Year For Business Travel, The 3 Priorities For All Founders During COVID, What VCs Can Do To Really Support Their Founders In A Recession · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “See a situation where the uncertainty goes away anytime soon, which means we have to open up and operate in travel, talking specifically about travel. We will have to operate under a huge amount of uncertainty, which will change things dramatically for everybody.”

    2020-05-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: TravelPerk's Avi Meir on Why 2021 Will Be A Record Year For Business Travel, The 3 Priorities For All Founders During COVID, What VCs Can Do To Really Support Their Founders In A Recession · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “I've been in travel for 16 years now and know how to read those about history, so we've never seen some, like it never happened. We're talking about the man going probably, and I'm being generous here, probably below 5% globally for travel right now. Some areas just zero, right? Just have no travel at all. We have started to really feel the pain of no bookings and constellations or second week of March. So it was a bit later for us, maybe because we have more European and North America focus. So, and it kind of arrived a bit later. I mean, I came back from holiday on the 1st of March, I remember, and it was still like the airport was still full. It feels like it's been years, but it's only been a month, a month and a half, right, of close to zero. We haven't seen anything like this. A month and a half of close to zero in Europe, a bit longer in Asia. We haven't seen anything like this. And I think more than in the past, we have a huge degree of uncertainty. I mean, going back to the previous point, nobody really knows, right? And the big debates now about what do you do? How do you operate under this huge amount of uncertainty? And I think this is not going to go away. I'm struggling.”

    2020-05-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: TravelPerk's Avi Meir on Why 2021 Will Be A Record Year For Business Travel, The 3 Priorities For All Founders During COVID, What VCs Can Do To Really Support Their Founders In A Recession · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Right now it seems like the Swedish approach is a good compromise between letting people avoid getting sick. Let's say luckily we don't live in a top-down society where the government is here to protect us from everything. Part of being a free person is taking risks sometimes and acknowledging that we take a risk and understanding that and being okay with it, right? It's a part of being free. I don't look for country where the government tells me how to live my life to avoid me taking any risk. I don't think it's interesting to live in a society like this. So if you look at Swedish approach, it seems right.”

    2020-05-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: TravelPerk's Avi Meir on Why 2021 Will Be A Record Year For Business Travel, The 3 Priorities For All Founders During COVID, What VCs Can Do To Really Support Their Founders In A Recession · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Year and a half, what are the implications after that? So I think we have to have all this discussion openly. And there's too much emotion right now and it's being like everything else in our society. Unfortunately, it's becoming a political issue. It's not a political issue. It's a society issue that everybody should be a part of, not just the experts. All of us think to be a part of this discussion and to have a clear understanding of the price and the risk of each of these different alternatives.”

    2020-05-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: TravelPerk's Avi Meir on Why 2021 Will Be A Record Year For Business Travel, The 3 Priorities For All Founders During COVID, What VCs Can Do To Really Support Their Founders In A Recession · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Hospitality industry, healthcare, of course, they can do their job remotely. I saw this great graph in The Economist. I tweeted that I think it was 68% of jobs in Spain cannot be done remotely. And if Southern Europe is roughly 70%, the UK would be closer to 60%, but it's not much lower than that. So you have countries like the UK, Spain, Italy, basically most countries where you have 60-70% of those who work cannot perform their work remotely and they are being sent to some kind of unpaid leave or redundancy. And you're looking at the US and you have 20 plus million people already unemployed, just as today, and you wait another two months of this thing and you get many more. So I think we have to be responsible as a society in a discussion and understand that if your situation allows you to work remotely, it doesn't mean that it's true for everybody working in a factory. And if you work in a factory, it got cancelled because you just physically or legally cannot perform your job. What do you do? What's next for you? Are you able to and do you want to live from government food handouts? Is this a good way to live the next year?”

    2020-05-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: TravelPerk's Avi Meir on Why 2021 Will Be A Record Year For Business Travel, The 3 Priorities For All Founders During COVID, What VCs Can Do To Really Support Their Founders In A Recession · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Idea of lockdown when it started, I thought it was the right approach and the kind of the most cautious approach given that we didn't know anything about this new virus and how deadly it is, how infectious it is, et cetera. So that's kind of the starting point back in beginning of March, we closed all the offices down and moved to be fully remote. So my current chain of mind is we have to understand that's new, right? I didn't start by saying lockdowns are a stupid idea. What I do think right now is that we need to kind of start looking at costs of that and we have to assess the risk versus the reward. And unfortunately, I don't think there is a solution that works perfect. And this is kind of the messy world in which we live, right? We have to choose between something that is unknown bad versus an unknown potential bad. And right now, if we keep locking down and looking around, I think what the Twitter folks don't get is almost by definition if you're spending your day on Twitter during this period, you probably don't have a job that cannot be done, or in other words, your job can be done remotely. But many people work in factories.”

    2020-05-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: TravelPerk's Avi Meir on Why 2021 Will Be A Record Year For Business Travel, The 3 Priorities For All Founders During COVID, What VCs Can Do To Really Support Their Founders In A Recession · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “The first, I would say, if people on Twitter disagree with you, you're probably right. So that's the first thing I would say. But first, Travel Perkin, strong sentiments since very early was that we should lock down, go remote. We actually never did remote work as a company. We always lived in being in the same office, having this kind of serendipity that you get by bumping into people and having an interesting discussion, waiting for the coffee or something. So we never did remote. It was actually one of the main reasons why we would sometimes lose great engineers because they wanted to work remote and we would not accept that. So for a company like us who never did remote to go full remote and it was, I think, a week or two before it was the official policy in Spain where we have most of the people. And the reason we decided to go remote is because it was starting to look, you know, we're in travel, so we see travel data before most other industries do. And we saw that things are looking weird, especially in Asia. So we decided to take the more cautious approach and we moved to full remote, we stopped using the office a week or two before it was mandatory here in Spain. So I wasn't against”

    2020-05-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: TravelPerk's Avi Meir on Why 2021 Will Be A Record Year For Business Travel, The 3 Priorities For All Founders During COVID, What VCs Can Do To Really Support Their Founders In A Recession · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “2014, so sell the business to bookings, stay there for a year or so, and then I quit to start Travel Burke. And the two sentences speech behind Travelberg is business travel sucks and we're here to fix it.”

    2020-05-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: TravelPerk's Avi Meir on Why 2021 Will Be A Record Year For Business Travel, The 3 Priorities For All Founders During COVID, What VCs Can Do To Really Support Their Founders In A Recession · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Complete accident, I would say. I'm always jealous reading about Warren Buffett when he was 70. He was already making millions, selling lemonade or something. And I always liked computers. I liked the engineering part of that. I started coding when I was very young. Even younger than you, Harry. And yeah, I was passionate about understanding systems and hacking in the old sense of the word, meaning understanding how system works and then finding creative ways of getting to system to do something that wasn't meant to do. And that's what I'm passionate about and building stuff, understanding how things work, just evolved into building a team and running a team rather than just coding. So more practically, I've been living in Barcelona for 10 years now, from Israel originally, and I came here for business school and kind of stayed around working a couple of startups, always in online travel that always has been my niche of my industry. Previously, I started another company called Hotel Ninjas, which was a software service for hotel management, which we sold together with a classmate of mine from business school. We sold that business to Booking.com back in”

    2020-05-29 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: TravelPerk's Avi Meir on Why 2021 Will Be A Record Year For Business Travel, The 3 Priorities For All Founders During COVID, What VCs Can Do To Really Support Their Founders In A Recession · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source