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

“Well, the travel industry has conferences and there was a conference called Focus Right that had popped up to focus on the online travel space. And we went along and Rich Barton, who I know you've spoken to,”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had just prior to this occurring, we had raised a couple of million dollars from a Sydney-based venture capital firm who agreed with us that there was a lot of potential in the web to partner John Murray, like us wasn't sure exactly what we were going to do, but he was confident that there was enough depth in this marketplace that something was going to pop. He took a risk with a couple of million dollars.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that doesn't ring well. We went to the State Library of New South Wales, which was near our office, and they had a book called The Book of Saints, published in 1921. And according to the lady behind the counter, nobody had ever looked in it. It had never been checked out. It was dusty. We opened it up. We looked through the list and there's Viator, which is the Latin word for traveler. And we knew aviator. Aviator is an air traveler. We quickly check the domain name. The domain is available for like 25 bucks Via tool. Probably Latin speakers would have said we are sort of, you know. It's easy off the tongue. We thought people would remember it. So we went for it.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not sure why we hit upon the idea of looking for the name of a saint, but we did. We thought it would be good to explore the name of all the Catholic saints. That's a strange thing to admit, but we”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we didn't have a name. So it took us all of about 48 hours, I think, to work through that. But it was important that we have a name because Fox Interactive Media wasn't going to work.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we decided we'd build a consumer website. So we conceived of an online travel agency that was very focused just on tours, activities, sightseeing, experiences.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Although the idea of selling tours and activities on the web wasn't ours, it was absolutely Sabers idea, we very quickly warmed to it. We could tell that there was a terrific opportunity in this business. The one difference was we didn't like the idea of selling the travel agents because we thought the travel agents were going to disappear. And on that point, we were absolutely right”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was. Kind of an unbelievable situation to be in. We were developers, we weren't operators. And they said to us, if you want, you can go out and do this thing yourself. It's entirely up to you.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We knew the names of various executives up the line and we just kept calling the switchboard until we got through to one of them who told us, well, have you heard of collateral damage? That project of yours, that's collateral damage. We don't want it. We don't need it. You are welcome to do whatever you wish with it.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's what was happening. Multiple hundreds of people were let go in this particular layoff. It turned out that the people that we were dealing with They weren't let go, but their division or their group was disbanded. They had simply dropped the idea of this project. It wasn't going to go anywhere.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sabre was a large corporation. And like many large corporations, occasionally they do layoffs. The CFO says we're top heavy or whatever. We pulled into the car park and we immediately realized there's something odd happening. There are security guards in the lobby of the building. And there are people standing around the lobby with cardboard boxes and they're crying And it took us a few minutes. Nobody wanted to talk to us, really. It was a very emotional time. I mean, it was traumatic for the people involved. It was shocking for us.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. The difficulty was just going to be building a system that was easy for travel agents to navigate and find what they wanted, get the booking to the operator and get everybody paid and happy.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they weren't able to book the on-ground activities that you often would want to do when you get there. But there was also another more fundamental reason why they weren't doing it, and that is that the operators, say the Moulin Rouge or the Eiffel Tower, etc., if they get a single booking from a travel agent, is he ever going to pay them? The client has paid the agent, has the agent paid the operator. That was the key question. The operators would have to follow up and follow up. And it was difficult in those days for an operator in Paris, for example, or Rome or wherever to follow up with an agent in Sydney or San Francisco or wherever.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Way for travel agents who have got So, you know, Guy Ros goes into an agency and says, hey, we're going to go to Paris. What can we do? What can we do? And they say, Well, let's book your flight and let's book your hotel, and now, you know what, you really should see the Eiffel Tower. There's a terrific restaurant up on top. Let's book you a ticket for that.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was early in the year and it was one of those after work we went out to dinner and dinner finished at about 8.30 and the sunset's like 9 or something like that. So the sun was very low in the sky. This doesn't sound like a business story, does it? But it is. We went for a walk from one end of Bondi Beach to the other, the two women that had come out from Sabre. And they took their shoes off and were just walking in the shallows. And it was really beautiful. It was clear to me that they developed an emotional attachment to Sydney. They really loved it. It's a world away from Dallas. And we got the contract, and whether they gave us the contract because they really wanted to come back to Sydney because they really loved it, or because they thought we were the best, I don't know.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Jill made contact with him and said, look, we've got a lot of experience at Fox Interactive on building websites for travel companies. We know exactly what is required. She really sold us. There was no particular reason why Sabre based in Dallas, Texas should contract with a company in Sydney, Australia. There were plenty of people in the Northern Hemisphere that could do this, but they sent some of their people down to meet with us to talk about the contract. And lo and behold, we won it. And, you know, the winning of it was kind of easy in a way. At the time, I lived at Bondi Beach. I don't know if you've been to Sydney, but Bondi Beach is sort of an iconic.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, Sabel would not, you know, they were not silly. They knew that the web was going to really impact their business. So they couldn't move airline or hotel bookings over to the web quickly, but they landed upon the idea of what they called ground content. In other words, sightseeing, tours, attractions, the Eiffel Tower, tickets, that sort of thing. They knew that there was a lot of that out there and there was no way for travel agents to easily book it. So they wanted somebody to build a web solution that they could then market to their travel agents, and that would be their first step into the agency locations. It was a good idea.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In Australia, Sabre had a very big operation in Australia, half of all the travel agents. I think there were 4,000 agency locations in Australia at the time, so probably 2,000 of them. Use Sabre, which meant that if there were four actual agents in each agency, there was probably 8,000 agents every day booking flights and hotels, you know, dozens of flights and hotels every day, and every booking Sable were picking up, you know, $5 or $10 in fees. Sable was an amazing business.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And in the back of our minds, we saw that bigger things were going to happen in travel, transactions were going to start happening. Travel really lends itself to sale on the web because there are no physical goods. There's lots of product description and images required. It's just the perfect thing to sell online. So we had that in the back of our minds. We just didn't know how we would get there.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it was a major cost to them producing these physical brochures. So the idea of moving their brochure production onto the web where they had complete instantaneous control if they wanted to change price, if for example one of the hotels that they were using in Hawaii backed out or for some reason they couldn't put their customers in there anymore, they wanted to take that off. They could do it instantaneously in the brochure. It's there till next year. So it was very attractive to travel companies to move onto the web. So they would show us their brochure and they would leave it in our hands. And at that time, pretty much no matter what we did, it looked better than what they had before, which was nothing.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it seemed like a logical name, and because it was a service business building websites, it didn't seem really important that we have a snazzy name that people remember. It's just like, okay, let's go with that.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so he had this background in television production, but he didn't understand software, he didn't understand, you know, tech. So I went in and saw him. We had coffee, and we agreed pretty much on the spot to, we each put some money in, I think $30,000 each. On Australia had given me a terrific payout. They were generous. They gave me six months salary when they fired me. So I had the capacity to take some of that and put it into this new venture. We had no idea what we would do, just that we would build websites.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To be honest, all these ideas were pretty dumb at the time. But he was a really good guy. I just thought he and I could work together. And we would find a nation just seemed so obvious that the web was going to be important”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, he was a content creator. He had a background in television and production And he had a bunch of ideas. None of them very well formed, but I liked him. And I thought, oh, we could do something with this guy. Well, turns out we didn't do anything with him because I got fired the following day. So I'm sitting at home thinking, what am I going to do? And I thought, you know, I'm going to go see that guy that I met and talk to him about doing things, but not on the Microsoft network. Let's do him on the web.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so at the time that that sort of web explosion was happening, Microsoft decided to launch this network in Australia for various reasons they called it on Australia. I got a job there and I was there for a few months and I was probably pretty bad at it. Maybe I didn't like my boss. I don't know. Maybe I was out of my depth. That's probably the right reason. But in any event, they decided to fire me. It happened that the day before Guy had come in. His name was Peter Fox, and he'd come in to talk about things that he wanted to do”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Get anywhere between $5 and $10,000 for a sort of basic setup, and you haven't got a printer yet, so you need to spend some more money. But people were excited. Whilst a lot of people were ignoring it, there were many people who were just so excited. They saw the potential.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anybody could go in. And we did sell to some home users, but typically they were architects or engineers or schools or commercial operations, accountancy firms, etc., etc.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, selling PCs. We quickly got an Apple dealership as well and an IBM dealership. Guy, honestly. We had to do was open the door. Turn on the lights and open the phone because in those days”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, in 84, I think 83 deck released their personal computer. And my job at the time was to find dealers in Melbourne, to sell their personal computer. It's called the Rainbow. IBM and Apple had released their machines and the market was a buzz with this new thing, PCs. And I just couldn't find enough dealers to sell this thing. We were not going to be able to get this product to market. So I approached a couple of my buddies at the office at DEC and said, you know, we should do this ourselves. Let's find some money, beg, borrow or steal, go to the bank. Let's open a location of our own. So that's what we did. We started a business.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I wrote in application of a job that I saw in the paper for a computer operations role. And my qualification was that my dad did this job and I occasionally went in there. I got an interview. I got the job. And there I was. I was a computer operator in the time of mainframes. There was no PCs. At this time, there wasn't even mini computers. It was just like huge rooms with raised floors and lots of air conditioning and disk drives and line printers. It was a very different world.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was a serious table tennis player. I was in the Tasmanian junior team and I had aspirations to do more. And those aspirations lasted about three weeks as I spent more and more time competing with the locals in Melbourne. I realized I was never going to make the cut.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Did. We were coming up to the end of your exams in year 12, what you would call the senior year of high school, I guess. And my dad died towards the end of the year. And I sort of, I have to admit in looking back, I kind of use that as an excuse to just not finish all the exams. I just didn't see that they were going to be important to whatever it was I was going to do next. I wasn't going to go. So I didn't complete my year 12 exams. And after Christmas, I packed a bag and got on a plane and there I was in Melbourne.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct. They've always had brothers and my mum until recently and so many cousins and friends of many reasons to go back. But I haven't lived there since 75.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Probably true to say that some people paint the story of their life on a really small canvas. They're happy to stay close to home and others just need a bigger canvas. They want to explore. And I always wanted to explore. So it just made sense to me to get on a plane and leave at the earliest possible opportunity.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A surreal set of circumstances Couple of weeks after we took control of the business, somebody broke into it overnight and stole the servers that ran their operations. So we had bought this business, we'd paid millions of dollars for it, was doing tremendously well. We were very excited. It literally disappeared overnight. It was just gone. There was nothing there.”
2024-10-14 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Viator: Rod Cuthbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT