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Entrepreneur Stories 4⃣ Inspiration

050: Winding Tree takes on Airline Travel via the Blockchain Space with Max Izmaylov & Pedro Anderson.

Entrepreneur Stories 4⃣ Inspiration

Millionaire Interviews Podcast & Sir Austin Peek

Careers, Business:careers, Business

4.72K Ratings

🗓️ 1 January 2021

⏱️ 42 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Max Izmaylov is the CEO of Winding Tree & Pedro Anderson is the COO of the company. Winding Tree is a blockchain-based decentralized open-source travel distribution platform. The company makes travel cheaper for the end user and profitable for travel companies, like hotels, airlines, and travel agencies because it removes the middlemen from the equation. Maksim Izmaylov is a software engineer, entrepreneur, and previously founder of Roomstorm and Travel Tech Con. Max is also passionate about making travel a more enjoyable experience for everyone. Pedro Anderson specializes in crypto-investment and social entrepreneurship. Being in charge of partnerships at Winding Tree, he had previously sold millions of dollars of SaaS products. *** For Show Notes, Key Points, Contact Info, & Resources Mentioned on this episode visit here: Max Izmaylov & Pedro Anderson Interview. ***

Transcript

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0:00.0

Basically, if you're an introvert that's right at Co. right now, find a good body, who is very outgoing.

0:21.0

Hiring is one of the most important tasks in your company that you're at, too. Talent is everywhere. It's not just in Silicon Valley.

0:41.0

If you don't want to mind introducing yourselves and telling us what you'll do.

0:45.0

My name is Max on the Milofe. I'm a self-taur engineer by experience and I'm a lawyer by education. But nowadays, I've co-founded two tech companies so far and one conference for travel startups and software engineers in the travel industry.

1:01.0

My name is Pedro Anderson. I am a social entrepreneur, crypto investor, Visda of sales guy. Prior to winding tree, I founded a social entrepreneurship project in Ukraine, helping our friends find work with international companies to ensure that they would climb up social mobility ladder and so on.

1:22.0

I was one of the founding employees of a mobile app company that helped us to grow to one of the leading apps in the space. Now, I'm more on the sales and partnerships side.

1:34.0

Can you tell us where you're at today and tell us your relationship together? We go way back. This is a very private question. I'm Max. My name is Max. I go by Max, of course. I'm the one with a slight Russian accent. That's how Europe was nice.

1:54.0

We are in Prague right now working on our new project. It's called winding tree, which is a decentralized marketplace for travel for very much an oligopolistic travel industry.

2:07.0

So we're trying to fix that, trying to make way for new startups, hackers, entrepreneurs, stuff like that.

2:13.0

Give us a little bit more detail into that. So if I have no idea what you're talking about, how about just tell us how you came about this and what it's about. Right. So I've been working in all sorts of projects in the trail industry for quite some time now.

2:26.0

Working on my previous company that is called the room storm. We realized that travel has a lot of problems. For example, they're still using XML APIs a couple of years ago.

2:37.0

There was a conference where this company wanted to intermediaries that are present on the market today. They were presenting their JSON API with they presented it as a great, greatest innovation that travel industries has seen so far, which was so funny for me as a software engineer in the audience.

2:55.0

In terms of symptoms, there's a lot there is no innovation in trading the travel industry. A lot of people are saying that travelers 10 years behind. So I did my sense of research. If you look me up on LinkedIn, for example, if you go to a list of my article and my name is Maximus Milo, so you can Google that there's one article that's called travel industries invisible battle.

3:14.0

I guess we can just Google that this cry in details. What's going on and basically with that article I come to a conclusion that all the problems in the travel industry come from the fact that it's there only five companies out there that dominate the travel industry completely.

3:31.0

They are big, they're slow, they don't know how to innovate, they have no incentive to innovate. That's why we are where we are today. So we're trying to fix that with the blockchain technology and again, blockchain by definition is a technology that removes intermediaries from all sorts of different markets that is places where buyers and sellers are connected.

3:54.0

We can think about winding tree as of a system. So Bitcoin is a financial system with no intermediaries would don't need banks anymore and winding tree is very, very similar system for the travel industry that removes intermediaries that today sit in the middle of all pretty much all the transactions that happen.

4:12.0

So Peter, how do you get roped into this with Max Max and I go way back that we were saying I met him in Prague maybe eight years ago or seven years ago, we're called while working on the other startup, I was in I was visiting Max a few times and he was telling me about some of the frustrations he was having with the travel industry and its dark little secret.

4:33.0

And for me, it was really shocking and then we started talking about the solution that he had in mind of using blockchain to disintermediate and I was fascinated not only because it was a great business opportunity, but for me, it felt like a cause and like I told you my background is more of a social entrepreneurial.

4:52.0

It appealed to me the significant change you could have in the space to bring it from being old and atrophying really getting worse with time to actually allow travel to flourish technological.

5:05.0

Yeah, travel is a seven trillion dollar industry and it's evolving very, very slowly. So he's just not nice.

5:12.0

I also published a piece on my motivation for getting on board with finding true, which you can also find on like 10 if you look at Anderson winding tree could you give us like a quick summary like so we can throw some of these in the show notes that all these articles that you're talking about sounds good.

5:26.0

Yeah, but would you manage of it's a brief summary of what you wanted to get involved, Peter.

...

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