YouSaid · the spoken record

Rolf Schrömgens

lines on the record: 77
first: 2017-02-15
most recent: 2017-02-15
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

“I think it's interesting to think about it, but I don't see that of a dramatic shift. I think that to the outside, the shift looks more dramatic because basically Airbnb got lots of attention, right? But if you're looking at it really more rational, then you're seeing that still Airbnb is making up a very, very small percentage of the overall hotel market. And that doesn't mean that there is not a very interesting direction where it will move to. It just is the shift is probably less dramatic than it might seem from the outside.”
2017-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rolf Schrömgens, co-founder, Trivago · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We want to show everything. So, we want to build just a marketplace, and everybody should come in and everybody should show their rates on Trevago. And we are agnostic where the user goes at the end. So we show him the cheapest price, but if he wants to go somewhere else, that's fine too, right? So, if there's a strong brand and people always want to book with that brand, that's great. It just should see that there is price differences and they should take a decision. So we just want to give transparency. And that is a very clear statement. So we never want to be a shop. We never want to sell people something. And that is also ingrained in the culture of the company. It's really empowerment.”
2017-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rolf Schrömgens, co-founder, Trivago · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Structurally inferior. Why that is because you can only show parts of the hotels, parts of the inventory. You never have the full overview. So you never have all the inventory. And we Very like agnostic and very independent in a way that we”
2017-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rolf Schrömgens, co-founder, Trivago · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think nobody really tries to be competitive of ours. Why is that? Why is that? So the space is basically you have on one hand you have the shops. So when you speak about hottex.com, it's basically a shop, right? So they have a limited amount of availability and hotels on the website and they're selling room nights like Expedia, like hotelscom, like Booking.com, and so on and so on. They always have only access to a very limited set of inventory. So that is a cool value proposition because you own the customer. They want to own the customer. That's great. We don't own the customer. On the other side, you're losing out because basically you always, if you wear a surge, you're always showing an inferior search result.”
2017-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rolf Schrömgens, co-founder, Trivago · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know. I would see Google is definitely the largest competitor. So I don't see another competitor there really in our space.”
2017-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rolf Schrömgens, co-founder, Trivago · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Erective, so liquid. So basically, like liquid intelligence. So basically Constantly challenging itself and constantly learning. And I think if there's one thing about Trevago that is really different, it's not our advertising campaign or whatever. So what's different about Trevago is we are learning company. It's super fast learning and very liquid company.”
2017-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rolf Schrömgens, co-founder, Trivago · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So basically, like a company becoming larger and larger, more and more of the knowledge crystallizes. So it's not dynamic anymore. Not challenged anymore within the company. And it's super, super hard. And I've seen this with Trevago every day. It's super, super hard when an organization becomes larger.”
2017-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rolf Schrömgens, co-founder, Trivago · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think what is the ultimate thing that you would do, right? So if you realize you can't do it yourself You're just not able to go into all these verticals and do it yourself. Then you basically use the access you have and create a platform. And of course, like Facebook is, for Facebook, it's way easier to do that because they don't have the legacy, right? They never try to explain the world So they can create with messengers. So they can create basically a platform. For Google, of course, it's way harder. But I think that's a problematic thing of like a large company and being in a field for such a long time. So what I always think is that knowledge within the company or intelligence within the company crystallizes.”
2017-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rolf Schrömgens, co-founder, Trivago · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Vertical, you know, every single vertical is so super hard. And I think maybe it would be better for companies like this, like Facebook is, for example, doing it, maybe it would be better to create a platform. Or maybe, or would I think how the future will look like? It's rather a platform of vertical searches and like one search who does everything for you.”
2017-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rolf Schrömgens, co-founder, Trivago · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the problem is if an organization becomes larger and more complex, there are very interesting mechanisms happen within these organizations. And I don't believe that there can be one company who explains to the world at the end. It's just not possible because interactions become more complex. Cannot talk to each other anymore and so on and so on. So it's just a complexity. It's not because they're not very smart people there. It's just a complexity grows exponentially. And that's why I don't believe into this idea of one company doing it all. And I think that is something they might realize, actually. So they might realize over time that you today you expect from a search more than getting website results back. And so the expectations toward a search or towards like a personal assistant or whatever, they are so much higher today.”
2017-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rolf Schrömgens, co-founder, Trivago · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And more and more of these people come to Trevago. And also, when you're looking at Google, looking at Hotel Finder, for example, they started in 2010. And actually when they started, I remember that very well. Because one of our managing directors today, he was an intern in that time. And he stood up in a company update that we do every year. And he stood up and said, like, guys, you know, why are we here? I'm Google starting Hoodle Finder. We will have no chance. And that was 2010. And it's now 60th. And I still think the product is not there.”
2017-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rolf Schrömgens, co-founder, Trivago · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, Google is always a competitor, right? And it is for a very long time. So I think the good thing is that in 2008, we were already foreseeing that and saying, okay, we can't go on like this. We have to build a brand ourselves. And the question is always how you look at it. What's aggressive? Actually, I think we are aggressive because we're taking share from Google every day because in the old times people were always going to Google when they were looking for a hotel.”
2017-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rolf Schrömgens, co-founder, Trivago · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The type in Travado. So when you're getting into a search business, you obviously have Google sitting there doing, and they have search, they have a very aggressive travel search thing How do you differentiate yourself as an entrepreneur? I talked to a lot of entrepreneurs, and some have to go up against Facebook, some of them have to go up against Google”
2017-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rolf Schrömgens, co-founder, Trivago · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because, I mean, right. So if you just get traffic from others, they basically get paid at the end, right? So you basically only get paid for the value create in between. But the most important thing is, you know, getting people's attention and getting people to you directly. And we were foreseeing, you know, at the end, also foreseeing okay, Google will probably natural search will be disappearing over time. And we were foreseeing that. And then we said, okay, the only chances we have to build up a brand. So people have to come to us directly. We have to tell them about our service. And that was a very important decision to go into brand marketing. And from that point on, we basically always took the money that we made through natural search traffic and directly put it back into the business.”
2017-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rolf Schrömgens, co-founder, Trivago · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just want to create a search, a perfect search experience. And the third important decision that we took was we want to be independent from Google. Because at that time, basically, 90% of our traffic was coming from Google. It was natural search traffic. But we were seeing, okay, if we go on like this, this will be not a sustainable model, right? So we said, okay, we have to take a decision. We have to become independent from Google. We have to get people directly to our site. And that was basically the really important decision for us.”
2017-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rolf Schrömgens, co-founder, Trivago · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the end about technology and creating a search, so we don't want to be a community and we don't want to be an OTAs and online travel agents. We don't want to sell stuff. We don't want to be a shop, right?”
2017-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rolf Schrömgens, co-founder, Trivago · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we don't want to do flights, we don't want to do package deals, we don't want anything else, just hotels. We only want to be a search.”
2017-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rolf Schrömgens, co-founder, Trivago · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, doing the travel search. No, no. So for a long time, because we were so attached to this community idea for even two more years or so, we didn't even realize that more and more people were not using us anymore for reading the articles. Right. They were just looking at the ads. And so the ads became more and more space until the 2008, we really decided what we wanted to be. And I think that was a major step change in the development of Trivago. So basically for the first two years, the 2007, we still got some funding in. It was not much. So we got like 1.4 million in external capital funding. And then in 2008, we really said, okay, now we have to, you know, money was running out, basically. And we're saying, okay, now we don't want to go into funding rounds again and so on. We want to be profitable. So we have to nail down what we want to be in, what we not want to be. And in that time, we really took the decision to say, okay, actually we just want to care for hotels.”
2017-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rolf Schrömgens, co-founder, Trivago · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Database ourself. So, stuff like this, right? And then we said, okay, if you can't do that, we can. So we programmed basically bots emulating user behavior going to the website, grabbing the data from there, and basically showing the ads next to our articles. And what you do then is, right, you do that for the first advertiser you do this for the second for the third, and then you're seeing like all your site is messed up. Why? Because they all have the same hotels. Right. So you look at the site and say like, okay, you know, they all have the same hotel and different prices. It doesn't make sense so much to show it like this. So then we started creating a database and putting all these different ads basically, attaching it to each other. So we've shown the hotel only once and other prices underneath.”
2017-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rolf Schrömgens, co-founder, Trivago · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, we really love the idea of Wikipedia, but we thought we could basically commercialize it and give the money to the writers. And just provide the infrastructure of it. And that was the idea, basically. And then it worked okay. So we could make a living. So that was okay for us. So just earn enough to make a living for the first one, two years. And then we realized or people started to look at performance of banner advertising. And they came to us and said, guys, you know, we gave you 5,000 bucks last month, but there was not any booking coming to our site. Sure. And we told them, okay, guys, you know, actually, it's not our fault. You're basically showing super untargeted advertising on a site. So how should that ever work? How should everybody convert on your side? Can't you, when we show an article about the Eiffel Tower, can you not just put next to it basically your advertisings of hotels close to the Eiffel Tower? And we were going to the Expedias and bookings and so on of this world and they were all saying, no, we are not able to do that. We don't have an API that could provide you. We don't even have access to the data.”
2017-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rolf Schrömgens, co-founder, Trivago · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Too much, yeah. I think for us, it's more an evolutionary process. So we had a very romantic idea when we started, so we wanted to have kind of a commercialized Wikipedia for travel. So that was our very initial ideas. It was not so much about.”
2017-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rolf Schrömgens, co-founder, Trivago · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that was in the 2000s, the 99 2000s. And when we started Trivago a few years later, actually, we were not so sure in which direction we would move the business model, but we were super sure that we would not want to do this again. So when we started Trivagos, it was rather about like bootstrapping and not taking up so much money so early in the process. And so what do you do if you don't have money and but you need to develop an application, you have to learn coding yourself. And that's what we did. So basically we learned coding and created an early version of Trivago. And for the first two years or so, basically we didn't, we just coded everything ourselves.”
2017-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rolf Schrömgens, co-founder, Trivago · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, first review portal basically in Germany, but for consumer products. So I'm not sure if you remember this kind of opinions in the US. Yes, of course, yeah. So that was basically the opinions of Europe.”
2017-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rolf Schrömgens, co-founder, Trivago · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you know, my first company I did at the old school business student way, so basically raising lots of money very early, burning lots of cash, losing lots of money. And after a year being left with a very small part of the company and basically”
2017-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rolf Schrömgens, co-founder, Trivago · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so at the end, you know, it's all about algorithms and learning. And at the end, when people react to them and can remember the name, then at the end you have to err more. Yeah, all right. And so we started the business in 2005, around 2005.”
2017-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rolf Schrömgens, co-founder, Trivago · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You remember them, so they're working. Exactly. So unfortunately, these ads are working, and that's why we show you more of them.”
2017-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rolf Schrömgens, co-founder, Trivago · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's not so many. I was not trying to insult you, but it is harder to find them across the globe. There's a lot of American entrepreneurs and a lot of people from China and Israel. But we're going to talk about that issue in a little bit. I want to talk about what the scene in Europe is like. But talk about, you guys went public last year, just late last year, so recently. Talk a little bit about the background of the company that you started and how it was started and sort of your entrepreneurial journey.”
2017-02-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rolf Schrömgens, co-founder, Trivago · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT