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

“Yeah, can we digress for a minute because at that quarter September of 2001 was 9-11. And so like, who, thank goodness we had Lycos.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, we were high fiving. This was a quarterly revenue check. And, you know, we didn't know that Lycos by themselves would pay all of our bills. But with them as a major client? Hey, things were looking up.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, and Lycos said, okay, well, we don't really want to pay you for this content on a per query basis, but we'll do a rev share with you. So for all the people that come to the page, you'll get half the revenue that we make from selling ads on those pages. And we thought that was a great deal given how big Lycos was.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that was our software, our algorithms. We had a very small sort of editorial team in the sense that they were helping us to find all of the articles. And then we would scrape the web, we would find reviews of the popular hotels on these other sites. And again, I named them Lonely Planet or Fedors or Fromers. Those folks would have given them a score. We took that score. We aggregated it with some other information that we had and produced an overall ranket.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, all of a sudden on Lycos Travel Now, you could look for hotels in Boston. You could see a ranked list of which hotels were the best ones. You could click off to read why we thought they were the best ones. But it was a, it looked strikingly similar to demo.tripadvisor.com, but Lycos had the eyeballs, their travel section was huge. At least we thought it was huge. And we had a major marquee client that we had hoped would. opened the doors for many more.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and we attributed that to the fact that, well, we didn't even have a cited database. So the first nine months were still building the product. When we launched in October the next nine months, okay, now we're launch. People can see what we have. Let's go get em we hopped on planes. I thought we did all the right things to try to land the client. And really it wasn't until I think second quarter of 2001 that we got our first client. you know, was a big client, but one client was not going to make the company.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, travel was a great category for the Internet. You didn't have to worry about shipping something, your reservation was already... That all fit pretty well? But like we had this business model of licensing search results. And so the proverbial 9 out of 10 venture firms that we went to said, yeah, thanks, but no thanks. I get the consumer value proposition, but just not sure that there's a company here versus it being a feature or something else.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it just became very apparent that they wanted us to pay them a million dollars a year for our logo to be featured there to help us build our brand. And we're saying, no, no, no, guys, we need you to pay us a million dollars a year for the benefits of all this amazing. Content that we have, and when they realize that we weren't about to be a paying client to them and we realized that, yeah, this group was not remotely interested in improving their product using somebody else's search results. Yeah, forget it.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we could not get any sales for the first like nine months of trying. And, you know, Yahoo's response is etched in my brain. They said, because we got to some fairly senior folks there. And they said, hey, we love your search. You guys do a really good job of delivering travel specific results. And yeah, we'll put your, what do you call your company, TripAdvisor logo right next to the, we'll put powered by TripAdvisor right next to the search box.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was everyone that we could wrangle a connection to in the travel space. It was expedient, it was Yahoo search, it was Lycos, it was American Airlines, it was anyone and anyone that could or would take the call. And that was tough going.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For the first six months, it just had a splash page coming soon. And then we did kind of launch a demo.tripadvisor.com is the way I think about it. But yeah, it's a fair question. You're a B2B company. What do you need a site for? And our answer was, well, when we would talk to the folks at American Airlines or whatever, they would want to like, well, I don't understand what content you have Can I see this thing? And our answer was, hey, go to demo.tripadviceR.com. I'll give you the password to get in. And then you can see how everything's organized.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So conveniently my wife was running a spin-off company of Centerline software called Centerline Development Systems. And she had that office above the pizza parlor in Needham, Massachusetts. And there was enough room for six or eight people. And so we made several hires that worked out of that office.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, we raised $1.2 million to begin with. Aye, and Langley gets a ton of the credit for that. But I immediately called up our two other co-founders Tom Pulka, Nick Shanney, and persuaded them to come on out. And I acted as kind of CEO and product guy, and away we went.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Any client of ours would pay us a penny a query or a small amount. So our business would scale beautifully. The Lycos, or let's take American Airlines as a potential client. They always want to get people who are already on their site to go plan more vacations, but if you are on American Airlines and you search for Aruba, they tell you flight schedules, but they wouldn't give you any great content about why to go to Aruba, where to stay. And so we approached them and would say like, hey, let us power a great destination service for you. So if someone searches on Aruba, you can give them a link to say explore more about Aruba. We'll do all the work for you. We'll build that part of your site. It'll be on your site. You'll sell more airline tickets. And we promise, or we hope, you'll sell more airline tickets than it will cost you in fees to us for the service.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Find all this incredibly valuable information, license it to all the other travel sites or anyone else who wanted it that already had visitors. So a client could be Yahoo Travel or Expedia or American Airlines or any of the other folks that wanted a better travel search experience on their own site.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where to go? Okay, I should go to Cancun or I should go to Aruba or Paris. What's great to do in all these places? Amazing experiences. Where should we stay? But if you think about the timing on this, this is very late ninety nine, early 2000, we incorporated in February. And so like, hmm, around that time, all of many of the dot-com companies that were super high flying had spent zillions of dollars acquiring eyeballs, as they were called back then. Many had gone up in flames. And so we decided a much better opportunity. We laugh at this to this day, would be a B2B or business-to-business type offering where we would search the web.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we were going to build, we were going to search the entire web for all this fantastic information that we figured was already out there.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, and it was a terrible name. Fortunately, we recognize that before we actually launched anything. And so by the time we had to print stationary and have a demo site up, we had changed the name to TripAdvisor.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right, there was huge information asymmetry. It was an incredibly important purchase, a vacation. It was a big purchase in your annual budget. You couldn't return it like, hey, I bought a TV. I don't like it. I'm returning it. And Expedia had just launched maybe a couple of years earlier. So travel, I think was like the number three or number four industry on the internet at that time. And our goal was to become the best travel search engine. And technically, the first name, my nerdy come out, was called TripResearch.com. That was the first URL register”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When on the week vacation had a great time and kind of on the way home, she's like, maybe you should start a company that could help make this easier for other people. And I remember saying. But I did write it down and a year later that was still the kind of the founding story that got us off the ground.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fast forward a few days later because I can be pretty persistent. I want to figure out how to find a site that wasn't a travel agency. So using it's called negative keywords. So I don't find me the pages that talk about this hotel that don't have the word facts or deal on it because that turned out to give me pages that weren't travel agencies because every travel agency had a fax and a telephone number. And it gave me a page, and eventually I found, you know, this person's a precursor to a travel blog. They had wrote up their trip that stated this property, and they had actually posted a couple of photos that they had taken. And Lordy, the difference between those photos and the ones in the brochure night and day, I showed them to my wife. We looked at each other and like, wow, thank goodness we didn't pick that place”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I laugh when I think about it because when we got home, I'm like, hey, so we're going to stay in the cheap one, right? And my wife was like, well, let's make sure that that is still up to our standards. I'm like, yeah, great idea. So I went online. Super disappointing. I come to a travel agency site in Cincinnati, Ohio. It's got a low res picture of the beautiful picture I already had in front of me from the brochure and a 1-800 number to call to make a reservation. This was not helpful to me. I wanted the prose, the cons, the people that loved it, that hated it. I wanted the candid photos, not what I suspected were touched up photos that were in the brochure.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it was actually the planning of that trip. My wife and I walked into a travel agency and a nice, it's usually a lady, lady says, you know, how about Mexico? We said, sounds good. And we settle on a place called Playa del Carmen, which is just south of Cancun. And she hands us three brochures of resorts and said, well, this one is not very expensive. This one is moderately priced. This one is on the luxury side. Where would you like to stay?”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. It was a fire sale or bankruptcy. Part of the sale to CompuWare involved me staying with the company for a year for the transition.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. A big turning point, frankly, was when we had to do our first round of layoffs. Ironically, or perhaps not surprising to you, but I learned way more on the downhill trend of that company than the upswing. And so that stuck with me to this very day as a like, wow, just like really messed up managing this company. And I just really never wanted to have to go through that again.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yes. And we had proverbial blinders on. We kept telling ourselves if we just did one more thing with the product, sales would revive. And then when we invested in building a different product, we made the absolute classic mistake of, hey, we thought this was what our customers would want, but we neglected to find customers that would say, yeah, if you build that, we will buy it. Before we actually built it”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it grew, we grew up to 150, maybe 160 people, 18 million in revenue. And then, you know, market changed a little bit. You know, the company grew up. And then it started having growth challenges. And then it started to contract. And so it finally sold to a company called CompuWare in 98. And the company was less than a dozen people at that time.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, when you go through school and we were taught to program in C, every kid spends an inordinate amount of time up really late at night trying to find the darn bug or bugs that are in the software. So some of what our software did was automatically check for errors in the code, both when you first wrote it and then when it was running. So we sold a productivity tool and almost everyone that tried it found that to be pretty effective and sales did pretty well.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think we incorporated in 1985 or 86 and did the typical thing of, well, we're going to live together in the same apartment and we're going to code in the night. And we went to our day jobs during the day as we tried to get it off the ground.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was five hundred dollars. You looked at this and said, Massive sigh, we got a massive brahma ahead of us because there's no other way to say it. We just had a failed business model.”
2022-10-31 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT