YouSaid · the spoken record

Steve Kaufer

lines on the record: 80
first: 2022-10-31
most recent: 2022-10-31
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

“Oh, it's a great question. So 50-50 maybe, absolutely a ton of luck in there. But we had to make some good choices and work our tails off because very few businesses have a straight line to success. But after 22 years Want to do it again. I want to not travel Not in software tools, but I figure I have one more startup left in me. And as I turned 59 years old, I look around and say, okay Something akin to the type of impact that TripAdvisors had, if I could get that lucky.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I fell in love with being an entrepreneur and then scaling things and then the thing that I craved personally the most was the level of impact that the company had. And like 400 million unique users a month with a lot of duplication, you're still counting impacting the lives, the vacations of a couple of billion people and that's with the B and like why was I ever going to when it was 200 million unique users a month and I could see how you could get it to 400 why was I going to walk away from that level of opportunity to impact people”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Married to an absolutely lovely woman. She has four children. I have four. We are entirely blessed that they all get along. And yes, we moved, we did move in together. The house does have a lot of bedrooms. We're now empty nesters. The kids are all off of college or in medical school or whatever they're off to. Yes, things look good on that front.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did most painful chapter of Trip Advisor, period. And we just didn't know how long, how severe, how bad could it get? And we didn't have a really big cash balance at that point. We had to go reach out to the financial markets, which fortunately were open. Borrow some money. And it forces you to really be focused in what you are going to work on because we wanted to come out of the pandemic a different looking company. The opportunity to come out, you know, leaner and meaner was what we set our sights towards and by and large that's what we achieved.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was something that we never thought could happen. We had always been a company that had been wonderfully profitable, had planned for contingencies. Look, there have been horrific terrorist events between 9-11 and here that caused bumps and blips, but travel was very elastic. And I got to admit, pandemic was just not on our radar screen.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the general answer was we were fast-growing, successful, profitable media company, and Expedia was a traditional online travel agency transaction company. And there was an opinion around that said, like, we're kind of probably looking at different types of investors, yet we were one ticker. We were one stock. And so eventually they said, hey, let's just make it easier for our investors. We will dividend a share of TripAdvisor to All Expedia shareholders, and they will be two completely separate, independently run companies. Big change for me was all of a sudden I was the public company CEO and I had never done that before. And, like, it was never a goal of mine to be a public company CEO, but sounded like it would be interesting to say the least, so I was up for it, and that's how it happened.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We see these review places offering to write fake reviews on Google and some other sites. And then they say accept TripAdvisor. Because like, yeah, if they try, we catch them, we shut them down. We view that as core to our success way back in 2002, 2003, 2004. Because if people came to TripAdvisor to get recommendations and the actual place didn't live up to the expectations, they wouldn't use our site again.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The beauty is, you don't need to. You just have to deliver what the user expects. There's a whole bunch of ways that we've developed over the years to catch this level of fraud. We know where people are. They have to advertise their services. And then we go talk to a hotelier that we suspect is paid for the services. And we say, look, we have some strong evidence that you paid for this review. They will face a penalty from us because they've been trying to buy their way to the top. And the most extreme example is called a red badge where we're posting on their page and we drop them in the ranks as a penalty. My evidence that it's been tremendously successful over the years is the fact that we see on what you might consider the dark”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, hey, sorry, we are out. We are squarely on the side of the traveler here. We want to help them avoid hotels, restaurants, whatever that are bad and stay at the great ones.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I understand that quite well. I was on the board of Glassdoor for many years. Soyer review site, and I would read the reviews about Steve Coffer. See the anonymous review and be frustrated that didn't have enough detail. I appreciate constructive criticism. I really do. I just want to know how I can go and fix this. And so, but having said that, if you are in the hospitality business, This is your life. Don't be in the hospitality business if you can't take feedback and if you can't take feedback, some of which is good and some of which is not living up to expectations, however unreasonable they might be, you just shouldn't be in the hospitality business. So we went through phases where businesses would like, how dare you even list me on your site.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right, the fork, which is the new name for La Fouchette, and Viator in the attraction space were like our two biggest acquisitions, fortunately our two most successful acquisitions. And they're really in the transform the company over the next five to ten year in terms of what it does for our audience.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know the different companies that we acquired over the years, and you're right, we have bought quite a few. There's the transformational, and I put Viator and LaForchette into those categories.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I found Trip Advisor to be much more of a blessing than a burden, because, as I said before, I'm like, starting with, you know, Nick and Tom and Langley as co-founders, these are great people to work with. They could run the company without me. I really appreciate that level of confidence that my teammates provided during that time.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A fair question, you know, when you first get a diagnosis, you're like, oh my God, this upend your life. This changes everything. And you go into like, well, what am I going to do about it mode? And you try to find the best healthcare you can. You set things up so you disrupt the kids' life as little as possible. And my late wife was a trooper about it in terms of accepting what the outcome was likely to be and you know being part of the journey with the kids and grief is in chatting with other people very individualized.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My wife and my kids came first. We did the best we could by way of caring. It was a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor. It's a really tough type of cancer to deal with. But yeah, that was my priority. Trip Advisor was second. The board knew it. The company knew it. I also liked being able to put my head in work at times because I was all incumbent. For all the chemo appointments, I'm like, yeah, that was, of course, in my view, that was me at the hospital with her. I, just as I would expect the same and how I feel we've supported all of our employees that have gone through anything similar.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. There was always lots of works in the road, and Expedia was our biggest client at the time. Expedia was owned by IAC So it would have been. A hardball negotiation tactics for IC to say, Expedia, do you mind stopping your spend on Tripidmuzer for the rest of the year? That'll help get the price down. Or, you know, that'll make them into more of a negotiating mood. So, like, there's all sorts of factors going on Was a, don't get me wrong, please. It was a wonderful story to be bought by IC. They did a fabulous job. And then when fast forward, we were moved from IEC into the public company Expedia when that was formed about a year later. And again, we were division within Expedia and to their infinite credit, they let us continue to operate on our own. Even though we were selling our leads and our traffic to their direct competitors.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But given everything I knew at the time with the risks you outlined before, the fact that it was kind of a life-changing experience for everyone at the company was absolutely the right decision.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we were a party that was interested enough in selling. We just wanted it to be a fair reflection of the value we had created. I see turned up with a number that everybody was super happy with. And it was truly life-changing money for all of the founders, the venture firm, everyone that had put a dollar into the company. And they came with the message, their game plan for us was, look, keep doing what you're doing. You think you're early on, Steve, we want you to stay CEO, team, we want the entire team. As an aside, I didn't necessarily believe them, but they were certainly saying the right things. I'm sometime asked, hey, was that a good decision to sell or not? I'm like, well, financially, it was a crazy, bad decision.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, we recognized what could interfere with this rocket ship we were on and we didn't stay a 30 person company. We were trying to grow as fast as we can. Our goal was not to be at a 50% profit margin. Our goal was to reinvest and scale the business. And maybe it was a year or so later we started buying some search engine traffic as well because that at least was more in our control on the traffic side.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These were not year-long contracts. If we got a call from any client that says, you know, I'm out of budget this month, I'm going to turn you off next month. Boom, that could be half of our revenue could disappear.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We assume that they would if they didn't buy us just go compete head to head. We knew Yahoo had a ton of free traffic that they could point at their own product and to one degree I'm like okay bring it on there's a ton of competition we also thought Yahoo is a pretty big company at that point and like many big companies it's hard to get something done so right Even though we were small, we thought we could truly outmaneuver them, outbuild them in innovations. And to the point of your question, yeah, it was a massive gulp choosing to walk away from a deal that was on the table for a hoped-for potential deal down the road.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We thought it had a good likelihood, but then they started kind of like pushing back on some of the price as deal negotiators do. And yeah, at the end of the day, in January of 2004, our traffic just shot up because we didn't realize it at the time, but January was a really big traffic month. Everyone after they opened their Christmas presents, they hit the internet and start planning to travel somewhere. And we saw a massive spike, which in our mind meant the company was meaningfully more valuable. And that was too hard for Yahoo to swallow. So, uh, We took a very deep breath and walked away.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we already had a business model that had gone through more than one pivot that was phenomenally profitable. We had very few sales reps because we didn't have that many clients who Generate that $23 million in revenue. So our magic ticket was taking the $12 million unique users a month to $120 million unique users a month, 10x growth in traffic, and therefore 10x growth in revenue. So, our first goal for the first five, ten years was like grow traffic. And the faster we could get to critical mass of enough reviews everywhere, the harder it was going to be for anyone else to come in and offer reviews as a major service.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we didn't have that approach. We looked at it and said, you know, 2003, 2004, you know, we had, I think, 10 million unique users a month, something like that. So decent size, but we were far from the biggest.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've done a bunch of things over the years, but one of the best things we did was literally just thanking people. And we quickly discovered that people didn't want to thank you from TripAdvisor. They wanted to thank you from other travelers. So when we asked people, why did they write reviews in the first place? The answer in general was we found the site so helpful, we want to pay it forward. Traveler didn't give a hoot about whether Trip Advisor as a corporation succeeded, they wanted to help some other traveler the way previous reviewers had helped them.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that was off of nothing, or a whopping $10,000 in 2001. So that's a really skyrocket approach. And at that point, like, whoa, let's harness this. Let's keep going. Let's expand geographically. Let's very much go global, go multilateral. And that we entertain some thoughts about, well, we did it for travel, could we also do it for other verticals? Because this notion of UGC or user generated content was pretty darn powerful.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The notion that we were onto something was really apparent by the time we got to 2003. 2002 was still like... Oh wow, we can make some money do this. 2003, I'm like, oh, we're scaling this. We're growing by leaps and bounds here. I think we closed 2003 with over 20 million in annual revenue.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Embarrassed, good enough, too busy, lots and lots of reasons. But if you just do the math, if you have 100,000 people coming in a month and 1% of them will write a review, then you've got a thousand new reviews. And that happens all the time. And as you gather more traffic, you're getting more visitors, more visitors, more reviews, more reviews. And then, of course, we got much smarter about how to get somebody who is a contributor to write more reviews. The first thing you do is you thank them. The second thing you do is you thank them profusely. And then the third thing you do is you let them know how much other travelers really appreciate their comments. And all of that's just like, it's the dopamine. It's the extra little pat on the back that says, oh, I'm appreciating. Did. Let me go write another review.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. You have to remember most people were still not of the contributor mindset. I don't want to write a review. I don't know what to say.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely, much harder. But there's also a lot more great content on lots of websites out there. So again, wind the clock back. Nobody else that I can remember had a website that had all of the hotels in the United States, let alone the world, that were crawlable or available for users to see without having to search for something. And of course, it was brand new in a category and the category itself, travel was exploding.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For the former, getting more traffic to the site. Well, we hadn't focused on that at all, so it was like learning a new skill, and we looked around like, well, how are other sites? And oh, search engines for the first couple years, we worked really hard at making sure TripAdvisor would appear in as many different searches as possible.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bet we now needed more traffic to our website. We looked and said, Hey, we don't have a lot of time because somebody else could copy us. And our answer we thought and was going to be, well, look, if we can build this massive marketplace of reviews globally, it's really hard for somebody else to catch up.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Super fast turnaround, and that March marked our first month of profitability. Since we didn't know how long it would take to turn things around if we could turn things around, we had cut back on everything non-essential. And so our burn rate was about 70. And March, we made it a profitable month. We were literally profitable every quarter thereafter until the pandemic.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Other folks said, Well, sure, but that's going to be their opinion from the stay they had last week. That's super relevant. I really want to hear that. So we said, sure, we'll test it. And sure enough, a lot of people wanted to do that. And obviously quickly grew and quickly took over. And our users on our site were skipping over the reviews of Fedora's planet and the others and going straight to the section that had reviews from their peers, essentially just other travelers. And there was a book out at the time called, or came out a little bit later, I think, Wisdom of the Crowds. And it was examples of how the collective wisdom of a whole lot of people was going to end up being more accurate than even an expert.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it was actually we had, if you went to that hotel page, you could click off to a Fedora. There was split opinion. A couple of people said, like, why would anyone be interested in one random person's opinion?”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, isn't this a great experience for a consumer who's looking at this hotel who says, all right, let me see how much it costs on expedia. Let me see how much it costs on travelocity. That's a good price comparison value proposition for a traveler. You know, if that user clicks on both links, I just got paid twice for.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. But, you know, we knew from just reading around that, you know, maybe 5% of our leads were actually booking something. So one out of 20. So we figured if we were getting 50 cents a click, the fastest way to get Expedia to pay a dollar a click was to get another client on the site who would be positioned above Expedia in the list of places you could go make a reservation for this hotel.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And that became a very beginning of a very long-term relationship with Expedia and eventually all of Expedia's competitors to form a business model that has us selling leads on a cost per click basis. To people who may want to make reservations.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And at the end of the month, when we called them, because we're looking like, hey, can we do this again for January? And I vividly remember these like magic words at the end of that conversation, which was, hey, you know, the quality your leads is pretty good. We're happy to continue the order. If you have more leads, you can send. We're happy to spend more so long as the quality stays high.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then they did the math on their end, big top secret can't possibly share that information with you guys. So in November, we did a test, which since they had all the power, it was a free test. We sent them 10,000 clicks and called them up at the end of the test and they said, ah, looks like you got some conversions. We're willing to keep the test going. And we said, well, it's not a test anymore. It's a paid order now. And we sold our very first real revenue client twenty thousand clicks for ten thousand dollars in the month of December 2001.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly if the person made the reservation. Right. And so no risk for expedia. And we were desperate, but we eventually agreed to was 50 cents per click.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we called up Expedia and said, hey, we just tested something. We got people over to your site. So would you be willing to buy some leads from us? And they said, never heard of you. We don't buy leads, but we'll essentially give you a rev share on reservations that you make. Like, okay.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and so search engines were finding us and, you know, some folks were finding it. And, you know, and we had our web analytics, some people are coming to the site. And what we eventually did find leveraged the fact of like, if you are a consumer, if you're a traveler on the site and you are looking at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in the middle of New York City. And we give you some reviews and some rankings, and I'm like, hey, I might want to stay here. The Consumer Insight says the next thing that traveler wants is Is it available for when I'm going to be in New York and how much is it going to cost? So we created a text link that said check price and availability. And if you clicked on that link, we sent you to the Marriott Marquis page on Expedia.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we went into a controlled panic mode. We were like, everything is all about how can we get a dollar, what new business models could we tried, and we tried three or four very, very different ones. But it was touch and go.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, and when they did have a paying client, in general, they ran those ads on a page that they got 100% of the revenue for and they didn't have to share it with anyone. And so the blindfold came off. We looked at this and said, Massive psych. We got a massive brahma ahead of us because travel industry is in total disarray. We have just a, there's no other way to say it. We just had a failed business model. And, like, okay, what's next, team?”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were advertising all the ads that I was seeing when I looked at the site were ads for other Lycos products, Lycos games, Lycos Finance.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, poignant because the $500 wasn't even going to cover our, you know, free lunches on Mondays to the company. But sure enough, I talked to the product manager, very nice lady, who just kind of pointed out, because I'm like, but I see ads on Lycos travel site all the time. And she calmly pointed out like we tried to lower your expectations a bit, but like most of those ads are what we call house ads. Light bulb goes off in my head like holy cow, I'm getting 50% of a zero dollar ad. How dumb is that?”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, I did not panic. I was not worried about this. Of course, this was just a mistake. Like they didn't have all the tracking codes, blah, blah, blah. So, you know. I called them up. I'm like, hey, something must be wrong here. Like for a quarter, we got $500 check. What's going on?”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I was, I thought, like, is the decimal point just in the wrong place? Is there a typo on this check? What the heck could be going on? But I looked at it, I showed everyone like it was $500.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're still getting advertisers would enable us to weather the storm. And so to your question, that first revenue check. was five hundred dollars”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT