YouSaid · the spoken record

Rod Cuthbert

lines on the record: 85
first: 2024-10-14
most recent: 2024-10-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“My wife likes to go to the supermarket and spend ages looking at all the varieties of cheese. And surprisingly, a lot of people like doing that.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I know plenty of people who work really, really hard, and I never claim to be a hard worker. I don't really have any specific skill that I can work hard at. But things did, I guess, work out pretty well, and I do often think, you know, how did that happen? I guess luckily or coincidentally, serendipity, whatever you want to call it, I took a risk at the right time. What is luck? You've got to get out there in the world. I get frustrated with companies that are inward-looking that think that the answers are back at head office or their team's going to be able to figure everything out. I'm always telling people to go out and sort of interface with the world, go to conferences, go talk to your clients, go talk to potential clients, just be out there. Don't stay. Home, and if you're out there, I guess luck can find you.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Book their activities in the lobby of the hotel the next day. They don't get the value of that. So I'm always encouraging people to plan ahead, book in advance because your mind will play this excellent trick on you where the really positive anticipation memories will eventually take over from the actual reality, which may not have been 100%, but hey, that's life.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The drinks come on time, the tour guide is really interesting. Everything goes really well in your anticipation of that event. You go and stay at the resort and you take the tour, etc. Things are probably, the weather might be terrible, the guide may be difficult to understand, whatever it is. It's not perfect like you imagined it. But later on when you remember your experience, those two things, those two memories, the ones you had in the anticipation phase and the ones who had the ones that you had when you actually were experiencing your vacation, they get mixed up and you tend to gravitate towards the rosier view of your vacation if you planned it in advance. People who do things at the drop of a hat who decide on a Friday afternoon let's fly to Manhattan for the weekend and then they”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I use it all the time. Let me share with you one of the things that I learned from researching what academics were talking about because there are a number of academics who study at the intersection of sort of travel and happiness. Why does travel make people happy? The travelers who are happiest, it turns out, are the ones who plan ahead and book things in advance. When you book a tour or a resort or whatever it is in advance, the sky is always blue, the sea is always green.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it is today. In fact, it's a tremendously successful business today. They'll do, I think, over $4 billion in gross revenue in 2024. And it is largely true to what we built when we started. It hasn't deviated very much.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and it's easy with hindsight to look back and say 200 million? Wow, that's really low. And I spoke to Alan just the other day and John, and we all agreed it would have been great if we'd held on to Viator for just a few more years, tossed another $20 million into the bucket and turned it into a billion dollar exit. But at the time, everybody made money. I think Carlyle made eight or nine times their investment.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they did. It's been a really interesting business to watch, and they certainly had the eyeballs to make the Viator acquisition work.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I had met Steve I think the year before and then there he was again the following year at the Focus Right conference and he told me that they were going to pivot to a new model which was based around user reviews of hotels and restaurants and I looked at him and I said man you are smoking dope that is the dumbest idea Who cares Who cares what Joe Blow thinks of the Marriott in New York It's like I want to read a professional reviewer And he smiled and said, I think it's gonna I think it's gonna work well how wrong could I have been?”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, based in Melbourne, two software developers who were at Microsoft in Seattle. They were senior developers, really smart guys, and they came up with this idea for a journey planner, essentially Would tell you how to get from any place on the planet to any other place using any form of transport. That's a very hard problem technically. And people just loved it. Anyway, I met them. When they were working on The sort of first beta, and that's what they were good at, but they didn't know how to raise money or sort of start the company. So I helped them do that. We raised money very quickly and we found ourselves an office and we got it launched.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a really interesting point though. I remember talking about this to my mum when she was alive. She died in 2013 just before we sold the business. And whenever we talked about the company, I would say something like, you know, well, we'll probably get an exit in the next couple of years. And she's like, exit, exit. What's this exit business You've got a couple of hundred employees and you're paying them salaries and you've got all these happy customers and presumably the people who are running the tours, they're happy with you because you're paying them. Isn't that what a business is all about? And it's like, that's a really good point, right?”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, the board meetings became very different after Carlyle came on board. It was less about the sort of big picture strategy and it was more about spreadsheets and more about gross margin and things that weren't really my sort of core expertise. I was less comfortable and I was not really adding a great deal of value because by this time Direction of the company, what we did was completely set in stone. So my ability to add value was sort of run its course. The company becomes almost like your family, so you don't want to leave it. But I also realized that Barry did a much better job of this growth phase than I did. And we got on really well together and I was very happy to leave the business in her hands. Wasn't really happy to leave, but... But I got comfortable with it.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because we were the first and there wasn't any competition, we were able to buy advertising and also get organic traffic relatively easily. Conversely, not having competitors was not great. When you've got competitors, they bring customers into the market as well. And those customers look at their website and then a percentage of them will say, well, who else does this? What are the competitors that I can look at? So if there's other people out there who are also doing marketing, that's good for you as well. There was nobody out there who was marketing tours and activities. There were people selling it like Expedia and TravelOust and others were selling tours, but they weren't marketing. They were marketing hotels and flights. We were the only one doing the marketing.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Couldn't figure anything out. There were phone taps, analysis of hard drives, there was all sorts of things were going on, but they never figured out who had decided they wanted to kill our business. Mystery remains.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was a shock, and what on earth do you do in that situation? So Alan actually from Carlisle, he flew out there as well. I think I was in Paris at the time. I flew back, the staff are in shock. What do they do? So Alan was really good. He said, don't focus on doing a post-mortem here. Just get the business back up and going. They managed to, over the next few days, rebuild the website from, you know, using the Wayback machine and I don't know, a whole bunch of methods that they came up with on the spot. They got the site back up and going in about four or five days. It was, though, quite surreal. It turns out that the US Secret Service have responsibility for Financial crimes that involve credit card details.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct, and that's what Luke Tours did. Sadly, they kept all of the backups in a box that was sitting on top of the servers. And when these servers were stolen in the middle of the night, the backups of all of the code and customer records, etc., etc., were stolen as well. So we had bought this business, we'd paid millions of dollars for it. It literally disappeared overnight. It was just gone. Went to tours on the web, there was nothing there”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was a single owner and he wanted to sell and Alan introduced us and helped us negotiate and we bought that business It turned out to be a really important sort of rocket for us. It was great business, but in a surreal set of circumstances, a couple of weeks after we took control of the business, somebody broke into it overnight. and stole the servers that ran their operations. In those days, pre cloud, there was no Amazon or Google Cloud, many companies ran their web businesses on hardware that they had literally in there.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and John Murray down in Sydney put in some additional funds. So we were sort of off to the races. And they were really terrific to work with. We really had a great relationship. Alan was very involved in the business. In fact, soon after making the investment, he on the grapevine, I don't know how, because we didn't know about it. He told us that there was a company that was kind of like our business called Look Tours. It was an online travel agency focusing on tours and activities, but only in the Las Vegas area. And they did really good business. They were almost as big as us at the time. And just from... Las Vegas Tours of the Hoover Dam and the Grand Canyon and all the shows, the Blue Man Group and Cirque de Soleil, all that sort of stuff. They had a real lock on that business.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, he asked if I knew Mary and I said no, but my cousins went to the same school. It's Tasmania, it's small. I didn't mention that they had gone to that school 25 years before Mary. But I felt that that was a sin of a mission that I would be forgiven for in the long run.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is completely a Disney movie. And I can tell you... Most Australians and certainly most Tasmanians absolutely love this story. We're so proud of her. And I said to Alan, I said, do you want me to tell you about it? And I think Dan's largely a monarchist. They love their royal family, perhaps a little more than the. And he sat down and we spent 15 or 20 minutes with me telling him. In detail what had happened and how it played out. And it's a wonderful story. As you said, a fairy tale. But the important thing is that we spent more time with him. And I think that turned out to be really important. Venture capitalists will often talk about the fact that they invest in people as much as they do in ideas.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She is indeed Queen Mary of Denmark and she's born two sons and a daughter. She's more popular than Prince Frederick, I think most Danes would tell you. But they had met During the Sydney Olympics, the Danes are great sailors. Their sport was over. They were out at a pub in Sydney, a pub called the Slip In one evening. Mary was there with a girlfriend. They met these Danes who they had no idea that he was royalty.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I could tell he sort of knew what I meant by that. And what I meant was Prince Frederick, the crown prince of Denmark, had a couple of years before married a commoner, a young woman from Tasmania by the name of Mary Donaldson.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we grew less confident as the weeks went on. And then a friend in the industry mentioned that he had heard of a relatively new investor at Carlisle Ventures, part of the Carlisle group. And we went and did our pitch. I think it was about the. 20th person. He was certainly the last person we spoke to. And the meeting ended exactly like all the other meetings ended, which was that, you know, I've really enjoyed this. I like what you guys are doing. I'm going to talk to my partners and we'll talk again. It didn't sound any different to the previous meetings until we went to leave. We stood up. And I picked up his business card And his name was clearly Nordic. His name is Alan Tigerson. So I ask him, I said, are you Danish? And he said, Yep. And I said, well, I'm Tasmanian. And he looked at me quizly”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we knew those stories and we knew we really only needed one investor to believe in us. We just couldn't find that investor.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Between $5 and $10 million, five with follow on would be great. Great companies who visit 50 or 100 venture capital firms before somebody finally says yes.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Generally speaking, they were diplomatic. They just thought it was too early to do what we were doing. And they were right about that in many ways.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We saw, I think, 15 to 20 firms and it didn't go well. We had lovely meetings with them, but the meetings always went the same way where it would end by the partner saying, I've really enjoyed meeting you guys, love what you're doing, let me talk to my partners and I'll come back to you next week.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep, in San Francisco. So it was perfect. She had a team of people that she could bring in, but we needed to raise some money We put a pitch deck together and we... Hired a car and headed for Sandhill Road.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Barry had been the VP of marketing at Preview Travel, which along with Expedia was the first ever, the first two online travel agencies, and that was very successful business. And she was”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so what you do is you go out and erase some more money. Maybe you've done a series A and a series B, so it's time for a Series C. So let's put a pitch deck together. Let's make a list of venture firms that have looked at travel and invested in travel before. And let's go pitch to them.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It definitely moved the needle. It wasn't an explosion, but our other product managers saw what was happening. We took the idea of small group tours, skipped the line tours, basically premium touring. And we propagated that around the world. And what that meant was, the most important thing was the people who had previously looked down their nose at the concept of a sightseeing tour. We're now saying, hold on, I could do this. And it's not sightseeing like my grandmother knew sightseeing. It's sort of modern. It's cool. It's fun.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. We actually took it further. I think it was the Vatican's idea, you know, we've got the guards in here 24 hours. If you'd like to bring groups in outside of normal hours, of course we'll need to charge more. So you get these sort of pricing tiers, which is, you know, where it's just your group. Like literally you are the only eight people in the sistine chapel. You might pay $600 for that But believe me, there are many, many people that will pay it.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it did. So Dom said, okay, this works. Let's go to the Coliseum, see if they'll buy it. They were into it straight away and Eiffel Tower, you know, everywhere, major attractions.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Dominique said to herself, you know, these guys, a lot of these guys, they come here on an easyjet flight or a Ryanair flight. They're here for two or three days. And they're spending four hours in the Italian sun waiting to get in there. That doesn't make any sense. So with the tour operator, they approach the Vatican. Church and said, What if we did this thing that we'll call skip the line? What if we charge these guys three times as much but you let them straight in? The Vatican, they're commercial, the church. They saw the value in three times the revenue per person. And they were quick to let us experiment. So we came up with this idea.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A guide anyway with an umbrella flag on the top and you would follow them. And it just was the case that a lot of people looked down their nose at that and said, I just don't want to do that. That's not me. I'm not going to be part of a group of 40 people. So we had a product manager. Her name was Dominique Xmann, a young Australian woman who was managing our key European locations. And she was in Rome talking to one of the tour operators we worked with there about the Vatican Museum, which is one of the most, perhaps the most important tourist attraction in Rome. And I don't know if you've ever been there, but you can stand for four or five hours in a line.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or did you do a bike tour of Gaudi architecture? Did you see the Sagrada familiar? Did you learn anything? And we played a fairly key role in this, which was changing the nature of the way sightseeing tours operated. We've talked about the fact that It used to be a bus with 30 or 40 people and a woman.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Indeed, it was. We were definitely early. I mean, I'm glad that we started the company and were doing what we did when we did. But there were some underlying things that were happening at a societal level that helped us. And one of those things was that if you think back, you can probably remember this, that people started talking about the importance of experiences over material things. It became less of... He who dies with the most toys wins, and more of, you know, what have you done? You know, when you went to Barcelona, what did you do there? Did you come back with a t-shirt and a snow globe? Well.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And certainly the companies realized this is scalable. You know, we can handle millions of interactions with customers in an hour, whereas on the phone lines we can handle, you know, at the most thousands of interactions in an hour. So for the online travel industry, there was this strange perverse effect of 9-11, which is that literally put a rocket under the industry.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So people who hadn't previously attempted to do anything related to travel on the internet found themselves going to American Airlines or Delta or Mariot or to Hilton or whatever. And they liked it. They liked what they found. They liked not having to be on hold and listen to that music for 40 minutes.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was in the US at the time, so I have a direct personal experience of what happened. I was in New Orleans with a colleague from the company, 9-11 happens, all flights in the US, all travel is stopped. There are no planes in the air Everybody who has a booking is on the phone to the airline, to the hotel, to the car rental company. Clearly their phone systems melt down. It's just impossible to get through to anybody. They can't staff up quickly enough. They can't add enough phone lines. It's just complete mayhem. Some of those companies had invested and had sort of fledgling websites and were able to direct their customers to go to the websites to find information, connect with them, change their booking, whatever it was.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that didn't bother us. That's sort of standard. We knew that from the start, that they would sort of pick the eyes out of what works. So they see, for example, that a particular tour in Rome is really selling well, so they send one of their people in and they contract that directly. And that was fine because we were constantly by this stage introducing new things and we also had new white label partners who were picking up that volume plus our own direct business. They played their role”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, in A Venture-Backed Business, you're always hiring for the next growth phase. So you're not focused on profitability. You're focused on how many customers can we attract because there's going to be a lifetime value associated with that customer. And you, in the back of your mind, you know that you're likely to have to go back to the marketplace for another round of funding. It's a tightrope that you walk and it's easy to make mistakes, you know, projects that don't generate revenue quite quickly enough can mesh your cash flow up.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, 25% was pretty normal, an average per person price on a walking tour or a cooking class or whatever it was might be $100 and we would buy that from the supplier for $75.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ride, or a bike tour of gouty architecture in Barcelona or Sunday morning Harlem Gospel walking tour. These things all Emerged over the following years and they emerged because to a large extent they knew people knew that they could put that product on Viator and we would bring it to the marketplace.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, when we started, there were group tours and double-decker hop-on, hop-off tours and museum tours, but there was no, for instance, chocolate lover walking tour of Paris.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is part of the Australian psyche. To travel, it was terrible being in lockdown during COVID for us and there was a lot of revenge travel afterwards. But yes, international travel is sort of core to the Australian being. And it was easy for us to find people to join our company who had worked for companies like Qantas or Lonely Planet, for example, you know, international brands that are well known.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we ended up with hundreds and hundreds of affiliate partners who would have a link on their site that said book tours and activities with us. And if you clicked on that link, you'd go over to a white label site, which had their logo, but it was really the Viator site. But they drove the traffic to it.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that quickly grew to many other white label sites who sort of underwrote the business with the early bookings whilst we were figuring out how to attract customers directly to our own subject.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I approached him after his speech and I said, what are your plans for doing that? Because we can maybe help you. And we didn't have surfing lessons in Fiji, I can tell you, but I was confident we could get them. And he said, okay, we'll give you guys a chance. So our first bookings actually came not from via com but through a white label that we did with Expedia.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so Rich Barton gave a talk about where they were going to go with the Expedia product, what that was going to look like when it was fully formed. And one of the things he said was, we don't just want to be able to sell you a flight to Fiji, for instance, and a hotel in Fiji. We want to sell you surfing lessons in Fiji as well. We want to sell you the Eiffel Tower ticket”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT