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Johannes Reck

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2025-06-23
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2025-06-23
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  1. “But Masa was a very friendly person. He's Japanese. So he's in a way very calm and he's very gentle. He was very interested actually in the P&L, surprisingly. So he was literally looking at, okay, how do we value this business? How can this be very profitable over time? So with marketplace investments, I think he's much more financially oriented than with the deep tech stuff. So he's really going deep there, surprisingly deep. And he's actually really good at this. So I was surprised because, you know, you have these stories of Masa that he's just this crazy person, but he's actually really good financial investor as well. So don't be kidded by like all of the headlines. He knows what he's doing. And then the second part of the meeting, you know, apart from the financial traction, the KPIs and like P&L and all of that was really about the product vision itself and to give him credit. He was already completely onto AI in 2019. So he was like,”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I was very nervous. Yeah. Yeah, of course, because he could have just put his thumb down. We had just worked on this investment for half a year in this meeting of like one hour determines whether you get it or not, right?”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “No, it was in his private home in San Francisco. He had this incredible painting of Napoleon right behind him, which I still vividly remember. This is kind of funny.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “It was not with us. I think that group of people, which was doing marketplace investments at the time out of San Francisco, they invested in DoorDash, they invested in Get Your Guide. They were much more like traditional growth equity investors who are very metrics oriented. It was a very deep diligence process. Ultimately, while I did get to meet MASA, he was just one meeting along the road of raising that investment. It was very much a growth equity investment process. So there was nothing crazy about it.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Soft background came together in that at the time there was a small team there with Jeff Hausenbold, Ted Feig, Andrew Slodo, some of which have worked at Airbnb. Airbnb had tried experiences from 2015 onwards. They had failed. They had seen Get Your Guide as being clearly the innovation leader in the space. They were like, this is a big market. We just raised this massive vision fund. Let's put some dollars behind it and make that market a reality. And to be honest, the vision fund in a way actually did do that. So with that funding, our market went on to like the completely different stratosphere.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Was a big one to take hold of, and to be honest, probably we did it prematurely if I'd go back in time. It's another lesson for a lot of founders. I would have not gone as early. I would have done more in Europe. I think we would have had even more growth and more profitability. But we did a little bit in the US. It wasn't detrimental, so we weren't overextending ourselves and we were building a good foothold there. All of that leads up to raising a massive round from SoftBank Vision Fund and Timasek in 2019.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “So from then onward, we basically rinsed and repeat for a number of years. And we're obviously growing our supply base, we're growing the demand base, we're growing to more European countries. We're doing a little bit in the US. But it was basically rinse and repeat all”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “It's all in the numbers, I think, from the series B and C onwards. If you don't have the numbers to prove it's very hard to raise that round.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “It was very easy because Highland actually co invested with Spark, and those guys actually really liked each other. And the partner who actually joined from Highland Fogel Mullen, he sat down and I vividly remember when he invested, he literally let us pitch for 30 minutes and then he pitched for 30 minutes. So we were like, you know, this guy is like something special. Like I had never seen that NVC before. You know, he showed me through his fun deck. He was like, this is my strategy for the fund. I wanted to do something for Europe, you know, highland Europe. just came back from the US and it was really about creating that ecosystem here in Europe. So we felt it was such a good connection. So it was actually that that was a very easy one.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Series B was co led by Spark Capital and Highland Europe. So Spark Capital was so impressed by us going through that roller coaster of like dropping off the cliff, reshaping the company, bringing Case Colon in that they said, hey, you guys are clearly onto something. You're doing this right. And this, by the way, another advice for a lot of founders. We gained so much more respect when we went against the board and said, we're not going to do this. We're not going to do that. We'll focus on this. This is my opinion. This is where I stand. You know, suddenly we see we're like, yeah. we follow you. You're right. Instead of just saying, oh, this is a great idea. We're going to do it, you know, really shaping the opinion of the board and of the investors is something that I really learned during that period. That is something that also say then afterwards helped us actually raise the subsequent rounds because we're so much more opinionated about what we were doing.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Absolutely, and we did perform. So the beautiful thing was we had a lot of really good people in the company. So instead of hiring expensive new execs, I just promoted the best people in the company, which was the best thing I ever did and gave them a responsibility. We refocused the company really on all core segments of attraction tickets and guided tours and just the core European capital. So we weren't looking worldwide as we did after Series A, but just looked at Rome, Paris, London. We went and acquired all of the supply there and no big magic, but suddenly demand was coming back and growth was coming back. We're going back to more than 100% year-over-year growth at much better unit economics, just I think six, 12 months after that we could raise a really good series B.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Not having a really tight strategy. You know, founders typically think that they have way more capacities that they really have. So being really tight on what's the core thing that we want to be doing and how can we deliver value to the customers and how can we obsessively focus on that? So those are really the core lesson from case and booking.com is don't do too much. He told me at booking, you know, they had looked at experiences for many, many years. And he said, you know, on these type of innovation projects, you know, people had to go to the innovation department. The innovation department had one person. There was himself, and it was called the no department because he was always saying, no, go and refocus on the core. Because typically people underestimate the runway that they have with their core products and really improving that and achieving product market fit and scaling that over a longer period of time is much more valuable than doing 10 things that are all sexy.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “And typically also different types of people. And oftentimes VCs mix these two phases. So you really need to have these very entrepreneurial people in the early days who oftentimes, by the way, don't work out in the late days. So when you're going public and that stage of your life, those are not the same type of skill sets. So it's really about can you find these people who are strong culture fits, who are right for your company at that point in time.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “I think you need fundamentally different people for a series A to Series CD stage company than for a pre-IPO public company with billions in revenue. And I do see it today being on the other side of that. People who are incredibly effective at Netflix or Meta or Google or even get your guide today are not the type of people who really thrive with a 30 or 50 people company where you still need to continue to refine that core product market fit where the way how you manage and do things is so different because you're in the weeds every day with the team you need to ship stuff. You need to be really opinionated about what's going on. And then the muscle that you have later on around managing multiple teams, managing organizations, doing roadmaps and creating more structure in the organization, which you need at some point, otherwise things don't work anymore when you're at a certain scale. Those are just fundamentally different”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Say the full day, and then he leaves, and he's like, I'm gonna come on board, like I'm joining a board of directors, I'm gonna personally invest a million bucks in the company. That was incredibly pivotal because it happened exactly at the point of time, like when I was laying off the 30% of the people, when I need to reboot the company. At that point in time, I had someone alongside with me who had done this before and who was like a really good mentor. And that truly transformed me. And, you know, I told Case two, three years later when the company was successor, probably learned more from you than from my dad.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “One Friday night, I was watching Netflix with my wife sitting there, and he called me up and he said, you know, here's Kolan. And I obviously knew him because he was the founder and CEO of Booking.com. And he said, you know, look, Johannes, I just left Booking.com. I've heard about your company. I think you're on to something. Give me your numbers. So I run him through the numbers. He was like, you know, giving me like every cohort and like, you know, every kind of like supplier. And it was just like really going deep on the first call. And by the end of it, it was like, you know, one and a half hours. And he said, this is interesting. I'm going to be in Berlin tomorrow morning, 9 a.m. at your office. This is Saturday morning, right? Next morning, 9 a.m. I'm there. So a case is there. And like he goes to the meeting room with me and to the whiteboard and like he basically maps out like the entire journey of like, you know, where he sees value and like where I see value as a ton of questions. It was literally like being in the room with the Jedi grandmaster, you know, for almost.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Thankfully, I did it quick enough and I got incredibly lucky that at the time a person that's actually not very well known in the European startup ecosystem was probably one of the most successful European founders of all time called case colon called me amazing.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Well, they had a much longer term vision around, you know, hey, you should build SaaS products for your vendors, you should do multi-market, should go into all of these new customer segments, into all of these new supply segments. And most importantly, you should hire all of these senior people to do all of that. And that's about the worst thing you can do as a Series A company without proper management experience. It's much better to stay very narrow and go very deep and continue to drive the growth that you're seeing from the core customer segments that you have and do much less but do that much better. So we were going way too broad, hiring a bunch of people that were completely wrong for the stage of company, no culture fits. And growth then started to really calm down while expenses spiraled up like crazy. And I remember like a year or so after raising that A round, I needed to lay off 30% of the company and completely.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “We first and foremost listen way too much to the VCs. We were like these young founders not having a clue and we completely lost our way and going to the board meetings, literally looking for advice of what we should be doing in our strategy instead of pushing for the strategy that we saw working in the day to day.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “100%. I think the only equivalent at much greater scale happened in 2019 when we raised from Softbank Vision Fund like that massive round. So those were like the two, I think, defining rounds of the company. But with the A, it was really going from being a complete nobody to someone who is like very present on the startup raider and in the scene. We could hire a completely different people. But also I must say that was the moment when I made the biggest mistakes in hindsight in building the company. So we almost lost the company after raising that A round.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Completely change our life because at the time the Series A was very large in terms of total quantum. So we had a lot of money and also very few USVC companies were investing in Europe at the time. So we went from a nobody to a superstar, literally overnight.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Totally. No, look, I think the founder incentives that you see first and foremost should happen after a longer period of time, right? So, you know, if I look at myself, I think the first founder incentive package. Like much, much later”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “I would have not raised as big of a series A looking back, I think it was too much dilution. Ultimately, it all worked out because, you know, if you're in the company for long enough, this is a founder re-ops and all of that. So I would say personally, it didn't matter, but I do think you should actually manage dilution because otherwise you end up with problems with your employees, with the other investors and also the chair of early stage investors just gets too large, which might be a problem later down the road. We fortunately at Get Your Guide got all of that fixed over the years, but I do think at the time it was a little bit too much.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Series A at the time was actually very big for European standards at the time, somewhere around 14 million Series A, like I think like 30, 35 million pre-money.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Business was doing somewhere around 2 million net revenue at that point and growing, I think, two x to 3x year over year.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “We continued with our bootstrapping mode, but with a little bit more money and not going bankrupt all the time, which was positive. But what Brand actually then did is he pretty much immediately afterwards set up a meeting with a bunch of VC funds in the US in that referral from him as a proven travel entrepreneur made all of the difference. So suddenly we were starting to get meetings. People got more interested and just there was just a much better reference for me as a first time founder as well. Ultimately there was a partner called Alex Finkelstein at Spark Capital. It took like a very keen interest in get your guide and he was like, no, this is interesting. Like there's something there. And then he led the A round in 2013. And that was really the moment that Getchride was transformed.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Constant is you have to have tremendous tenacity and you will have to pitch a hundred times and it will only work once, maybe.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Yeah, I tried to raise capital, but like we got rejected everywhere because, you know, again, like, we were not the copycat of anything. We were first-time founders. No one likes to invest in travel. Like, you know, this is a very weird industry for a lot of people in Silicon Valley. For the people that I met in the US, most people said, you know, move over here or we're not going to give you funding. And I said, no, we're very happy in Europe. We don't want to move to the US.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “To buy booking.com at the time as a seed stage company. I still regret that to the present day. I'm not going to make that mistake twice. I'm going to invest in you. That was the moment really we got our first funding and the rest from their history.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Brand was on stage, and you know, I couldn't raise VC funding. We had this business that was constantly going bankrupt, but growing really fast. I just hit brand up after he was on stage and said, like, I'm in travel. You found it last minute. We should talk. And he was like, okay, interesting. Here's my business card. And, you know, picked up the business card, wrote him an email, just like cold email basically. And he said, yeah, come and see me in London. So I remember I went to see Brent at the mate.com offices back then, this probably like 2011, 2012. I had to wait for four hours to get like a 10 minute meeting with Brandt. I still vividly remember the meeting. I think he does too. And I was basically, you know, this is what we're doing. We're creating the experiences marketplace. You know, this is the next biggest thing in travel. It's the last big greenfield no one has conquered it. And Brent looked at me and he said, you know, I made one pivotal mistake at lastminute.com. I had the opportunity.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “So, first VC funding was from Brandt Hoberman, who invested a small seed check alongside with an outfit called Profounders here out of London, Sean, Seaton Rogers, exactly. And that was actually really weird because I got a ticket, a sponsor ticket, I think, through some lottery or something to go to Low Web, which is like a big startup conference at the time.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “No, this is 2010, 2011. There was basically no venture capital scene whatsoever in Europe. And the biggest problem was that we didn't have a US original, that we were a copy of. So I remember I was talking to Oliver somewhere at the time. We had started to relocate some of the stuff from Switzerland to Berlin because Switzerland was just too expensive for us to survive in our bootstrap mode. You know, he looks at me. He's like, you know, so what's the equivalent here? in the US like you know you're the copy of what exactly and it's like there is no exact copy you know we're trying something new here like you know experiences marketplaces don't really exist right now but i believe it's the future of travel and he was like so do you do you want to join rocket internet or do you want to work on your own startup and i was like you know i'm going to work on my own startup he was like okay thank you very much see ya and you know this is really the spirit of the time it's very hard to like recollect because things are so different today but”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “As you remember the day when they went live on Sunday, the booking started to tick in. And then we had more and more of these types of experiences. The revenue just came and were growing and growing. I think we did something like half a million then in the first year in 2010 in net revenue, so commission revenues, more or less profitable. But we didn't have any cash because we were just living off the mortgages from our parents. So we're constantly looking into the abyss. And that was also the first time when I realized there's actually seasonality in travel. So it actually goes up in the summer and then November it really goes down. So for the first one or two years without any type of VC funding, we're literally going bankrupt every winter and needed to somehow survive. So it was very tough early years.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Literally cold calling and going to people. I remember I traveled to Salzburg and signed up the hop on up off bus tour. It was very random. There was like no CRM or anything like that, right? So it was very much, you know, what looks good. So what's nearby? Whom can we address? We got very lucky because we got a very good tour agency which did tours to the Vatican.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Well, then what happened was a miracle because we signed up the first couple of suppliers and we got very lucky with a few of them.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “So, honestly, I have no idea looking back. But the way how we operated at the time was really being in this deep tunnel. I once met the great race car driver, Nico Rosberg, like Formula One champion, and he said, you know When you go and race, right? You look at the road, you don't look at the wall. Because if you look at the wall as a race car driver, you're going to hit the wall. So stay focused on the road. And I think that's very much what it felt like at the time. We were even considering failing. Like for me, like failure was non-optional. It was like, you know, that's not a valid option. We will stay the course. We'll win this.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “It was a very stressful moment. And even worse, I need to go to my parents and basically say you need to fund me for like another year of the university. So, you know, can you please put a mortgage on your house and like fund me because there was no seed capital available? No one would give a bunch of students money at the time for an idea that was proven.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “No, respectfully, you have to be all in, and we had an all in moment. So the first iteration of the product actually failed, right? As I told you, and then we had to go out with the second iteration. And with that second iteration, we were done with our degrees and we really needed to try to make this work because it was clear you can't just do this on the side. You really need to sign up supply now. You need to sort of like build an online marketing function and need to do online marketing. And at that point in time, we really needed to go full time with a prototype that was unproven and two years of failure. In a weird way.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Living honestly of very little money at the time, but the great thing about it was we could fail. Like there was no problem in failing. Even more so, it was just a lot of fun. Like, you know, we didn't do that really to build a company even at the time. It was more like, you know, this is a great space. We want to build like a really successful web product. Facebook was going viral at the time. So those were like the days of Web 2.0. And we're really working at night, to be honest. We were studying throughout the day. And then at night, we'd do this.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “In two years, yeah. But then, like, what we realized through that prototype was that there was this gigantic market out there for experience providers, particularly in Europe. I mean, Europe has 60% of the global inbound travel. There's just so much to do in any city. And none of that was digitized in 2009-2010. So we went back to the drawing board and said, you know, look, we clearly didn't find product market fit. Like this first iteration was terrible. Let's pivot into this much bigger market that's out there and that's just not digital.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “First iteration was literally a peer-to-peer websites for guides, small like untold story is we also considered doing something like couch surfing at the time homes and we you know we thought no one is going to stay at someone else's home so like you know discarding that idea someone else in San Francisco picked it up very successfully and then you know we went to guides and we're like you know guiding is such an important thing in travel so can't we build a community of guides but we were thinking this you know from the lens of the student we didn't do any market research or anything so we built a social network only 100 students signed up most students don't have time to be guides we had i think three to five bookings in the first two years of our prototype three of which was my mother because she took so much pity on us students”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “No, so you Beijing, you know, we'll go to the Beijing wall, the great wall. We have Beijing doc in the Hutong. So it was like a really special day. And from that epiphany, really, of having seen the city through the eyes of a local someone who speaks the language, we went back to Switzerland to ETH and said, we have to build a website. We have to build a community for people so they are able to do that. And we did that. And like the prequel to get your guide was like, we were building a travel community for everyone to be a guide. No one actually used that. I think we had 100 guides.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “Yeah, totally. So, this is actually 2007, 2008. Tow and I were both students at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. He was doing physics. I was doing biochemistry and neurobiology. So something very remote from online travel. And we both led a student delegation to Beijing and China at the time. And I made a pivotal mistake in that I booked my flight ticket a day early and arrived in Beijing without the group. And I was trying to do stuff then in my hotel room. I logged on the internet. I was like going on Google, trying to find things to do, going to the Beijing wallet, like doing something with the day. And I couldn't find anything. I was stuck in the hotel room. And the next day, Tao shows up as the guide, literally. He's like, hey, Anis, I'm going to take you out.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “I think in Europe, much less than the US, to be honest, I think that's again something that's quite positive about Europe if you look at Germany and many other European countries, our Gini coefficient is actually quite healthy overall. And we have a ton of redistribution. So I don't think that redistribution per se in Europe is our biggest problem. I think it's rather how we choose to invest that money. If I sum up my claim here is I'd say we need to invest that more in the younger generation, not just in the older generation. I think ultimately we'll need to make sure that the older generation understands that that's the right thing to do.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “That are very dissatisfied. A lot of them, I don't know what it's like in the UK, but a lot of them in Germany actually now vote for right-wing or left-wing parties. And we need to make sure that they understand that. To ensure that we have again opportunity for the young generation in Europe.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “So, what I do is I support a lot of, so I donate to a bunch of different political parties across Europe. I do support young politicians. To be honest, I don't know whether politics is the only thing that's broken here. I think a lot of it also has to do with the education of the people. I think it's really, the politics are ultimately a reflection of like what the people think and what they want. So I think it's really upon us also as leaders in technology to bring that progress closer again to the people. That's why I try to speak out about this type of stuff as much as possible, try to educate, even if you get a blowback like I got with the tax incentives. I don't give up. You know, I continue to try to make the point and I try to do that in a way that is as inclusive to these people as possible. And I feel like if more of us do that on a continuous basis, ultimately things will change because we have a very loud voice from the younger generation.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “A lot of people have asked me that. I think the biggest contribution I can give to Europe right now is build a really big company.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Absolutely, but I think that's going to be the challenge for our generation, Harry, to do that. I think if we don't display that level of optimism, if we don't believe in Europe, if we just look at the US and are like,”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “I think today, like when you think of Germany, you just think of things that don't work, and social media has just spiraled that up so much. I think the UK is a little bit in the same spot after Brexit. So, to be honest, I think we need to turn the page and be much more optimistic about our future.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “No, no, it's stronger than ever. People like understand why Germans or Brits are very upset because we have all of that red tape. We have these stories that I just told. But the problem is if we turn into nation states and if we turn into kind of like these very nationalistic things in Europe, then ultimately we'll detract the people that we really desperately need right now. So I think having really a functioning civic society and that ranges really from good education systems to good hospitals to good roads and infrastructure to actually people just engaging and loving Europe again to be honest and like advertising it. That is something that we need. And I think frankly in Germany we've done a terrible job at this over the last couple of years. We've had a really good brand for a long period of time. I think we've really tarnished our brand over the last couple of years.”

    2025-06-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank | Why My Biggest Mistakes Came From Listening to VCs | Why 100 VCs Turned Us Down | Why European Founders Are Tougher Than US Founders with Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source