As founders, it’s easy to spin your wheels on questions that feel impossible to answer. Scott hosted a live Ask Me Anything session to answer all sorts of burning questions.
As founders, it’s easy to spin your wheels on questions that feel impossible to answer.
Scott Case hosted a live Ask Me Anything session to answer all sorts of burning questions. We tackled what was top of mind for our /Founders Focus audience.
Want a fresh perspective on an issue that your peers are grappling with? As usual, Scott shared his unfiltered advice and feedback. No questions were off limits.
Watch the full session: https://bit.ly/3s32y24
Still have questions?
1️⃣ Connect with Scott on LinkedIn.
2️⃣ Join future live /Founders Focus sessions or schedule 1:1 time with Scott.
Scott Case 0:00
Welcome to Founders Focus, a podcast made for founders by founders. I'm Scott Case, CEO and co-founder of Upside, and I created Founders Focus to help share free resources and actionable advice. Together, we're building a community for business leaders, entrepreneurs and founders to come together to tackle today's challenges. This podcast is powered by my awesome team at Upside. Please visit foundersfocus.com to join the live video sessions or to catch up on past topics.
Scott Case 0:27
I did get, I don't know 10 or so questions in advance, so I'm going to try to burn through a few of those. And then I'll come back to the live questions. We'll kind of go back and forth. So we'll kind of wade in from there.
Scott Case 0:41
I did get kind of a general question to give a little bit of background on my entrepreneurial journey. So I will do that quickly. Which is I've been an entrepreneur my whole life from my earliest memories as being a tween and then a teenager and all the way through high school and college and up until today. And probably if I have a specialty or an area of expertise, it has been in software, I was privileged enough at a very young age to get access to computer technology, and found it to be fascinating. Not only got one of the first early home computers, in the early 80s, all the way through and just found the whole thing to be fascinating.
Scott Case 1:30
I joined a start up when I was in college my junior year and got to the end of my senior year and had a choice between taking what my parents thought of as a stable real job and what I thought of as the adventure of a lifetime, which was to join a startup. I chose the startup much to my parents chagrin. I think today they think it still worked out, but I'm sure that there's still times they question the judgment. And it was a small company, we were in the software space, we had a flight simulator that actually had a simulation of a flight instructor baked into it. We built a fantastic product, but none of us knew anything about how to market the product or even sell the product. So we spent about three years building a fantastic product and then we spent two years learning how to sell it. So it's one of my first lessons was really understanding marketing and sales and a go to market strategy in addition to having a great product. That's all pre-internet, so some of that's changed, but it's still important.
Scott Case 2:28
I then was looking for somebody I could learn marketing from got introduced to a guy named Jay who in the mid 90s, was starting something called Walker Digital. He had this quaint idea that the internet was going to be a big thing and that if you thought about the internet as a pervasive, ubiquitous, always on always connected thing that we all carry around with us, there's probably new business models that might emerge. We came up with the idea for what ultimately became Priceline. We launched a product in a year. We added I don't know another half a dozen products over the course the next year and went public. And then about a year later, we hit about a billion dollars in sales. And that was an interesting journey. And it ended with not only a great company, but we also spun a lot of other companies that at the end of the.com era and coming into 911 we actually had to shut a lot of them down. So I went through very early in my career, a wild ride of experiences that kind of formed a lot of things that I've done since then.
Scott Case 3:29
Started a couple of companies after Priceline, one didn't work, one worked well enough for me to merge it with a company that I'm still involved with called Network for Good. Which today Network for Good as a software as a service platform for small and midsize charities. And then we have a partner business where we work with Facebook and Google and a few dozen other partners. Last year we processed a little over $700 million in donations to about 250,000 different charities. And that was a good experience.
Scott Case 4:03
That kind of led me to spending more time in the nonprofit space. I spent five years as the CEO of Malaria No More then another five years on the board, which is a global public health organization and moved to DC at the end of that adventure to take on something called Startup America. Most of my life was in Connecticut. And Startup America was all about high growth startups in places other than San Francisco and New York, and ran around the country meeting with some of the greatest founders and entrepreneurs in cities all over the place. And we created a network of champions, we called them startup champions. And we connected a bunch of different programs together including things like Startup Weekend and the global accelerator network and a few other programs all focused on high growth. That was a three year project spawned by the Obama administration, the Case Foundation here in DC (not related to me), and the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City.
Scott Case 4:59
I then started a company called Mainstreet Genome, which was all about supporting small businesses. We had built great technology, but we couldn't quite figure out product market fit, and so we sold the technology and that freed me up to actually get back with Jay, who is my co-founder at Upside along with my long long long time friend and co-founder Jon Ellenthal who was actually on /Founders Focus a few weeks ago talking about communications. So that's the fast rapid fire history of my life. It felt like a lot more time went by than the five minutes it took me to explain to you. So that's a little bit about me.
Scott Case 5:41
First question we got was how do you see the intersection of business travel and leisure travel going into the summer of 2021? And as I said, I'm happy to pick up questions live, so go ahead and ask them in the chat. Our expectation is that as far as business travel goes 2021 is going to be very lumpy. We expect some level of recovery to happen based on vaccines and frankly based on people's experiences in leisure travel which we expect to come back a lot faster. There's a lot of pent up demand in leisure travel. It starts with people seeing family that they haven't seen in over a year, and so for those with the disposable income or that have saved up the ability to go visit their family and domestic travel is going to be really important. International travel is going to take a lot longer, we don't quite have standards for who's been vaccinated and who hasn't in the international frame, and that's going to take a lot longer to come back. So we think once leisure travelers get the experience of traveling on their own, maybe to visit family or take a holiday, that they're more likely to feel comfortable, whether that's an executive being open to their employees traveling or employees getting more comfortable to get to that place, so that's kind of how we see this timeframe coming out. I think a lot of this is going to come down to people's comfort of both being able to get vaccines, what percentage of the population gets vaccinated, but it looks like all the trends are in line to get to a place where there's enough herd immunity to keep the variants in check while we get the rest of the vaccines out, and it's looking likely and I've spent enough time in public health to be dangerous, it's looking likely that we're going to have some additional vaccines that we'll need in the coming years to deal with some of these variants based on the way the virus is behaving. So that's our first question.
Scott Case 7:35
Next question is how do you build a team of co-founders versus employees during this pandemic, when your interaction getting to know people is done by Zoom calls only? I think that co-founders in particular, and I think this is true for everybody, but particularly in co-founders, it's really based on a deep understanding of a relationship that's been built usually over some period of time. I think becoming a co-founder, you can absolutely do it in a virtual environment, and it just requires a level of investment to create the kind of relationship that you need in order to go through the crucible of starting a company. I think of it as a 5 or a 10 year endeavor, so you really need to understand this is a person you're going to spend a lot of time with - 10-12 hours a day, 7 days a week, where you really need to be super compatible with each other. And so I think that when it comes to selecting a co-founder, whether it's digital or it's in person, it's really about making sure that you have a strong level of compatibility and do some references. If this is someone that you haven't worked with before, go talk to their other family members, if you're both first time founders or someone is and there's a significant other in either of your lives or there's a sibling or a peer, work on making sure that the person that you're about to go into this endeavor with really understands you well. Give them a picture of you, and particularly the things that are your areas of weakness, the parts of your personality that you struggle with or the things that you want to improve on. Because ultimately the way that your partnership will be tested is through the many many many ways that things do not go well. When things are going well, everybody feels great. It's when things go so well that you really understand the test of your relationship.
Scott Case 10:01
And I think that for early employees, it's a similar risk. Because depending on how big your company plans to get, those early employees will set the tone for future employees. And so establishing not only a good link with your co-founder, but clarity of your cultural vibes, your values between the two or three of you as co founders and then how do you go about making sure that you write them down, then you sort of cement them into the next group of people you bring in. And that could be employees, it could also be who you decide to partner with on a capital front, for example. So when it comes to the co-founders dig deep, and whether it's zoom calls, or voice calls, those are all great ways to build a relationship, because that's what it comes down to. And you can absolutely do it in a remote world.
Scott Case 10:55
There's a follow up question around it, which is, do you have a vetting process for growing a team in this world? We use the exact same process at Upside for recruiting, we've probably recruited 40 or 50 people since the pandemic started. And we use the same process for setting up interviews, we do a screening process, we actually use voice instead of video during the screening process so that we can reduce some of the bias that can occur in our brains when we're interacting over video or even in person, we used to do voice screens prior to bringing someone in person. We do a panel of people, and depending on the role, it can be anywhere from three to five people. And then we then go through what we call a consensus meeting. And so everybody takes their notes. And then we get together and we actually talk about the candidate. We have a pretty strong set of rules that if for any reason anybody is a no, we generally pass on the candidate. We'll talk about why but we have a really low tolerance for sort of incompatibilities. So if somebody is a no, we'll talk through it and maybe they'll change their mind, but often if they come into it as a maybe it's more likely, very few times does somebody come in with a no that they're able to change their mind. So those are sort of the steps that we go through from a recruiting standpoint.
Scott Case 12:23
And Julie, I'll have you just ping me if you think questions are relevant, because there's no way I'm going to be able to keep up with what's happening on the chat. Next question, what are tips for handling conflicts between founders – business doing well, probably is the busy season ever, stress levels are high, but one of the founders thinks the other founder is lazy, wakes up late, has no input in meetings, spends a lot of time after each meeting asking the other founder to explain what was discussed – What's the best way to handle this and make sure we stay successful in a good relationship? So those are all symptoms of something much deeper than what's going on. And what I'd say is, I think that digging in as a group, it sounds like there's at least three founders that are involved, having a separate conversation about expectations. And it's not about accusing somebody of doing anything, but it's about shared expectations among you, because what I see with almost all human relationship conflicts is they almost always come down to expectations. Either expectations were implied and they weren't explicit. Or if they were explicit, one party or the other when something changed didn't reset the expectation, or they didn't communicate it clearly, so that the other person could understand, like, Hey, I can't get to this right now. So in this case, maybe one of the founders is struggling to deal with this new environment. Or maybe there's a timezone issue that's going on there, there's likely to be something fundamental. And then there's likely to be something from an expectation management standpoint that needs to get managed. And so digging in and as founders and when you look at the data, most founders, let me flip it around, most startups that have co-founders, the reason that they fail when you peel the onion away as to what's going on is because of some kind of founder dynamic. It's very rarely that the business itself couldn't make it happen, although that happens, but when you dig underneath, it's often the case that the founders themselves weren't on the same page or didn't communicate well and that had a ripple effect not just between each other, but also on all the other people who are trying to be helpful to them, because maybe they get different information, etc. So digging in on the founder side is really important.
Scott Case 15:02
And with that, I'm gonna, hold one moment, please. I have a tiny heater in my office, because my office is above the garage, which is not heated and it gets cold sometimes. Anyhow, I turned it off because it's getting hot now.
Scott Case 15:21
Next up, have you seen B2C service based business models that successfully addressed both their local market and an online community? That's a really tricky one. I think that it is a difficult thing to run two different businesses and they really are different. And I'm going to imply here that you've got a local market that you're serving, and then an international one or national one rather. So I think that lots of sellers who are individuals, let's say who maybe go to farmers markets and sell their handcrafted wares and then sell them on Etsy. So in that case, you've got some real infrastructure. But my experience is you kind of have to pick one as your, this is what I'm getting after every day, this is my central go to market strategy. And make sure that that anchor business ideally supports your core business, and whether that's the retail in-person side or the local market side, or it's your online presence. But it's very hard, especially if you're early in the process to figure out how to do well at both things. And so oftentimes, when I talk to entrepreneurs that are, whether it's a startup, or they're building some kind of a business, it's like, try to pick one revenue stream, one go to market strategy, one business model that you think can build the business the way you want to, whether it's to raise capital or to be sustainable, or it's to get to a certain revenue target, pick one and get after it.
Scott Case 17:17
If you've already got one that's established, and now you're going to add on another channel, then make sure that you're really ready to treat that channel very, very differently, especially if you're going to an online, it's not the same experience. And so you've really got to design the customer experience, sometimes the business model, the product offering to match the channel and the experience that customer is going to have. And you see it a lot in the reverse, you know, you've seen Amazon opening up physical stores. And they're very, very different. Apple did the same, right? They used to sell mail order, and then over the Internet, and then they opened a physical store. And they really designed the in store experience to be radically different than the experience that you have when you're buying online or even with their products. So you really have to think differently about not just the channel but the experience that the customer has.
Scott Case 18:12
And we got a follow up question, I assume it was live? Can you or should you work on multiple startup projects in the early stage, or just focus on one? My belief is that you should, if you can run, really hard at one thing. And truly determine whether or not it is going to be successful or not. And I say that for even within one startup where maybe you've got different types of experiments you want to run about solutions to the problem that you have. So the problem is the same, but you're going after multiple types of solutions. At an early stage, trying to diversify your approach, it very rarely works. Having a portfolio is just very, very hard. And the reason is, is that by focusing on one thing and iterating on it, and making your twists and turns on it, at the end, if it's not working, you'll be able to have enough of an evidence base and objective set of data that will allow you to actually say this didn't work. And if it does work, or it works somewhat, you then have objective sets of data that say, Well, this is working somewhat, is it working enough for me to want to go build the product or business or whatever else that I'm doing? So my advice is run hard. It doesn't have to take long, right? You could have a problem you want to chase, and you're really excited about it. And then you go do some research and you talk to a bunch of customers and you get to the end and you say you know what? I misunderstood the problem or this isn't a problem I really want to work on or Geez, the solution is going to be more complicated or something I'm not interested in. Good if you could do that in a week, and then you're done. Whereas, if you had three things at the same time, it might take you two months to find out that all of them are done, because you spread yourself too thin across all these other opportunities. So, my advice is, go hard and direct after one piece of the puzzle at a time, especially if you're early, just very hard to do two things at once. Very difficult to do them well. And give yourself the confidence about the decisions you're gonna have to make along the way.
Scott Case 20:25
Okay, next question. And again, Julie, keep popping them in the document that's very helpful. Considering the roller coaster economy with high hopes for the near future, what is the key indicator that you look at when considering the next stage of growth and timing significant investment in the business? Is it cash on hand? Other reserves or resources? Or is it calculated risk when you see the opportunity? It took me a while to figure out that there is never a good time in life to do anything – get married, start a company, switch jobs, move houses, go to college, I mean, just there's just never a good time., so that means it's always a good time. So when I think of timing, I worry less about the timing of the market or the world or anything else that's going on, it's really about where you're at. What signals are you getting from your local world? And how do you make decisions based on the information and the input that you're getting within the context that you are hyper familiar with, and that you can have some influence over? Whether the US Federal Reserve raises interest rates by blah blah, as an entrepreneur living in the world I live, sure, I could pay attention to it, but the chances of me being able to predict what they're going to do and how that might impact all the million things that could go in that way is very, very difficult. Now if you're in financial services and those data points matter to you, absolutely, but that's within your local context. But for most of the people probably listening to this, we're probably not influenced by those things, so focus on where your customers are and try to understand what their behavior is.
Scott Case 22:12
And I think one of the most fascinating things that we're going to experience over the next 12 months is the anti-pattern to what we experienced in the last 12 months. When the pandemic hit and we all had to change our ways, a lot of things that were happening pre-pandemic got accelerated. And so whether it was ordering groceries to our home or figuring out how to use certain types of technology to be able to interact with our colleagues or friends or family in a remote world, all of those things were bubbling and now they've collapsed and become, hey, we all we've all figured this out. And it was very difficult in those few months. Now we've gotten used to it. We're about to go to a new world where it's an unknown, the big differences before was high level of uncertainty with a negative context. I think this is likely to be a high level of uncertainty in a positive dynamic. All that is to say, we all as entrepreneurs need to pay unbelievably close attention to the behavior of our customers, or the stakeholders around them. In a b2b space, there might be a handful of roles in a company, how are they thinking about things? What is their behavior likely to be? And what are other companies that are in our space – how are they behaving relative to that new behavior? Those are the indicators to decide maybe when to make a key investment, obviously your own balance sheet and the cash that you have, your reserves, your prospects, all of those things are shaped by it. It's also the case, though, that sometimes there's shifts in the context, where if you're paying attention to those shifts, like I said, about overall customer behavioral patterns, that you can see those and look for the trend line, and say, Alright, we see where this is going to end up and over the next, whether it's months or years, this is where things have to go, you can often identify areas of almost inevitability. And it's at that point where you can have much more confidence in making an investment because you sort of have more confidence in where things are headed. So that's how I kind of think about it.
Scott Case 24:25
I think that we often wait too long when things are going poorly. And we often don't act quickly enough when things start to go well and try to get ahead of the curve. So it's a strange dynamic. We sort of delay for reasons on both sides. And I think acting quickly when things are going badly and being default decisive about it buys you the time to then be able to be perhaps more assertive down the line.
Scott Case 24:54
Okay, next question. I'm looking to launch a product that has some capital heavy barriers to entry to solve the problem for others seeking to launch products that face the same barriers to entry. I can't afford to bootstrap it. So I need seed funding to hire and get started. What's the best way to tackle getting seed funding when I don't yet have a product, just an idea and some market customer research?
Scott Case 25:16
So it's a really good challenge, it is much, much harder to do that. And there are a few challenges. If you're a first time founder, it's a very, very, very difficult thing to do, because there's no track record. And in early seed stage investing, even all the way up to a series a funding, they're really betting on the founders and the team almost more than anything else. And so making sure that you've demonstrated your leadership capability and your ability to tackle the problem itself and I think the credibility to do it. I think that the most important thing in that case is less about the idea, which we equate mostly to solutions, and more about your robust understanding of the fundamental problem and whatever key insights you have about why this problem is worth solving, market size, etc, what your understanding the customer is, and why they give a shit about this being solved, and what the economic opportunity might look like. And then whatever credibility you can muster that you are somehow ideally, uniquely or one of a small number of people or teams that is going to be capable of finding the solution for this problem. Very, very difficult to do. But you absolutely can do it. But you've got to be in love with the problem to such a degree that anybody walking away from your investor pitch says, Wow, this problem is worth solving or it's a problem we understand and this person understands it way better than even we do. It's worth making a bet, because they're much more likely to go solve it from there.
Scott Case 27:02
The next question, same realm of funding without having a product to show – what's the best way to get Angel and VC attention without an MVP? This is launched mobile money for USAID, the World Bank and the UN currently launching a FinTech startup to serve U.S. immigrants, underserved banks.
Scott Case 27:20
Very hard to get VC attention these days without some kind of an MVP. That said, I think we over index on building something. When I think of MVP, it's really a process, a product, a set of interviews or engagement that you've done that demonstrates first that the problem is well understood and that there's some kind of audience customer base that wants the problem solved. And then you've demonstrated enough of a solution to ideally demonstrate that some subset of those people would be willing to pay you for said solution. Even if you haven't built the solution yet. You can do a lot with some presentations or some very, very low cost web pages or simple designs. And I'm not saying it's zero, but you probably need to invest a little bit of money in creating some, at least some visual designs that support both the problem and the solution that you have. And again, you're going to have to pitch the construct, recognizing that they're really going to be investing in you more than anything else. And so how you establish your credibility and your understanding of the problem and the potential solution space is going to be what the whole process rides on.
Scott Case 28:46
As far as getting people's attention, it's a relationship. My recommendation is that even before if you think you're entering into a space where you're going to need some pre seed funding or angel round funding, start building relationships with both lots of entrepreneurs as well as potential seed stage or angel investors way before. Again, they're going to be investing in you. So having a relationship with them that's been built up over sometimes six months or a year is what's likely to be the difference maker for you.
Scott Case 29:24
Next question, how do I get others to see past biases so that they can hear about real solutions and see that I have a team of 125 years of experience working on five continents? If there was a magic wand to get past people's biases, I would love to give it to every human on Earth as a special gift just from me. You really can't get past them. So, as frustrating as it is and as disappointing as it is, the best thing to do is to identify the people who don't have them or who are predisposed to the problem you're trying to solve. I've talked to a lot of entrepreneurs who have solutions that are around improving workplace dynamics or communications in a remote world. And my advice to all of them is always find CEO's who have already demonstrated that they actually care about their employees. A CEO that doesn't care about their employees, they're not going to be convinced to care about their employees because of your product. So part of this is finding people that are already predisposed to either the problem you're trying to solve, or have already demonstrated that they have a lower likelihood of having those biases show up. And it's a real challenge. We have a session coming up, I think it's next week on exactly this topic, like how do you raise capital in, for example, in a situation where you're going to face all kinds of biases, it's targeted towards women and people of color. So Julie will remind us in the chat on when that is, and then I'll mention it at the end.
Scott Case 31:13
All right, if there are other questions that have popped in, I'm going to try to pick them up here. So in your experience working with SMB and startup founders, have you seen a knowledge gap in their understanding of deal terms, negotiating with investors and preserving equity? 1,000% yes. Most startup founders are way behind the curve. There's a great book by Brad Feld. That is, I think it's called Being Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Your Venture Capitalist. And I highly recommend reading it. And again, the talented Julie will find the link to it and post it. But it's a really good resource for people who want to understand the deal terms. I was mentoring an entrepreneur founder who she had the means to do this so not everybody does, but she wanted to learn more about investing. And so what she did was she joined a local angel investing group. Not that $10,000 is not a lot of money, but it doesn't cost that much to become an angel investor and oftentimes they'll write checks where they might have 25 people participate in a round that draws $2,500 each, depending on the geography and the type of investments you're making. And she did it so that she could understand better what the investment process looked like and what do the investors talk about when they hear a pitch, and it's a really smart way to do it if you have the means to do that. But, Brad's book is also great. And I think that Brad was doing an online course around the book as well, so you can look up Brad's latest there.
Scott Case 32:58
All right, next up – as a 50 plus woman with a product innovation for women aged tween through adulthood, should I consider having a younger co-founder to appeal to younger customers and investors? It's a tough question. It's not like terrible, but more important, to my first question, maybe it was a second, getting compatibility between you and a co-founder is way more important than any of that stuff. And then once you have it, understanding that you're going to have to have people in your market that are on your team or that you have the ability to gain feedback and input from in order to develop your product. You got to do that no matter what the demographics are. And so even founders who start companies that are targeted towards themselves, it's very easy to lose touch very quickly, especially when you're in the middle of starting a company. So how do you find ways to make sure that you stay in touch with the markets that you're serving, and I advise, particularly CEOs, especially as the company starts to grow, to make sure that you're carving out time to get back to those individual users and customers to participate directly as a founder or an executive with the market itself, the individual people that you're serving, because things change way more quickly. And things change way faster in the last decade than in the probably 50 years before that, and likely the next decade is even faster. So trying to find ways to just practice that whether you're a 50 plus founder or a 25 year old founder, you've got to stay in touch with the market that you're trying to serve.
Scott Case 34:56
Next question, what is your experience with behavior assessments for other co founders and our employees? It's a great question. We use a tool called Strengths Finder. We have everybody in the company answer the questionnaire. And we find that it's a really good tool to highlight amounts of people's preferences more than anything else. Myers Briggs is one, there's a disc assessment, there's even a version for entrepreneurs that is focused on founders that really ask a few key questions about founder types and what are the types of co-founders that you want. Again, it's preferences. There's no absolute, there's no amount of questions you can ask anybody to actually figure out their behavioral patterns. But it is really, really valuable to use it as an objective way to have a conversation. And so someone who's top five strengths lean in one direction versus someone who's top five strengths or three out of five of them lean in another, that can both create compatibility, which locks people in, but it's also the case that a person sometimes with the same five strengths as another person with the same five strengths can actually create friction, because they don't understand that sometimes their own preferences for communications aren't being met, despite the fact that they prefer them themselves. They don't necessarily deliver them to the other person. So yes, it's been valuable. And I think, for that co-founder tests, that can be a really good tool.
Scott Case 36:38
My last question that came in earlier, and then I'll try to capture some of the travel related ones here. Are there any VC firms that are 100% return focused? I want to build something that helps transform the restaurant industry, but it mostly will benefit restaurant owners, and I don't want to become a leech on small business owners like the delivery services or open tables the world? It's a great question. I mentioned Mainstreet Genome was a company that we built, we built some great technology, and it failed because the only way we could figure how to make it work was to charge small businesses a large amount of money and that wasn't the problem, even though we delivered a lot of value, but the real problem was is that the owners didn't actually execute on the changes that were necessary to actually realize the benefits. And so we ended up getting stuck. And so we didn't want to run a business where the value was wasn't exchanged. It's very hard to raise capital from venture investors who don't expect some kind of capital return if your target audience is a commercial enterprise itself. It is possible that there are social impact investors that are willing to invest in order to let's say, increase the equity or level the playing field for commercial enterprises. So yes, there are venture investors who will look at the investment, there are foundations that make grants towards programs like that. They exist. But in general, the concept of a VC not looking for return isn't really a thing as a point of fact.
Scott Case 38:24
We have run out of time, but I will go for another couple of minutes to knock out these last few questions. Are there any travel startups that you're particularly excited about right now? I think there are a set of startups. I won't name the names, but there are a set of startups that have started to understand the new dynamic of people's preferences and whether that's around creating mixed use space for hospitality. And there's some exciting things that are happening there because I think the changing geographic preferences as we've kind of learned through the pandemic, so looking at young companies that are focused on understanding the big shifts that are likely to stay for the foreseeable future.
Scott Case 39:18
What key factors besides internet adoption and Priceline's bidding model contributed to its scale? We didn't really have a bidding model. We had what's called an offer model. So there wasn't a competition for pricing. Just to clarify that. The rate of internet adoption definitely drove it. The novelty of taking something that was very confusing and still is confusing to a lot of people how come the person next to me paid a different price for the same seat that I did. There's some frustration with that they move all over the place. And so the idea of you as the customer being able to set the price was a novel idea in that time period and still is a powerful tool. So that really played a big part to it. And then we did some really smart things on the marketing front, including at that time, using radio as an advertising channel with a very distinctive personality whose voice worked on the radio in William Shatner. So those drove a lot of the pieces.
Scott Case 40:22
And then finally – did someone approach you with the idea of going public or did you come up with the idea to list Priceline on your own? We were caught up at the time in the .com mania, and we had raised a bunch of private capital, and our capital partners had identified that we had an opportunity to go public and create both some liquidity for them but also, and this has turned out to be really important historically, to be able to raise enough capital to be both competitive for the long haul. And as it turned out, I don’t think anyone could’ve known this was the case, the twin events of the .com bubble and then 9/11 really clobbered the travel industry. One of the reasons Priceline was able to weather those storms was that we had raised enough capital and put it on the balance sheet to be able to make it through those first few years and then being a public company Priceline was able to acquire a bunch of different businesses, including Booking.com, which turned out to be quite the crown jewel. So those were some of the things that happened in the Priceline land.
Scott Case 41:34
With that, that was a fun AMA. I talked really fast for a long time. I hope some of that translated.
Scott Case 41:40
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