1175 He'll Process $100m in Business Travel This Year
SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Nathan Latka
4.6 • 683 Ratings
🗓️ 12 October 2018
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Avi is the CEO and Co-Founder of TravelPerk, a ground-breaking business travel platform offering companies of any size, a one-stop-shop to book and manage all their travel in one place. TravelPerk is one of the fastest-growing tech startups in the world (http://saas1000.com/ we're number 4), and raised $30m from some of the world's leading investors including Spark Capital, investors in Twitter, Slack and Trello as well as Felix Capital, Target Global, LocalGlobe, Sunstone, Amplo and others. Prior to founding TravelPerk, Avi was Co-Founder of Hotel Ninjas, which was acquired by Booking.com in 2014, and VP Product at Budgetplaces, which was acquired by Palamon in 2011. Avi started writing code when he was 12 years old, holds an MBA from IESE, and is a recognized travel-tech thought leader and a frequent speaker at industry events. He lived in three countries and speaks English, French, Spanish, Hebrew, and Klingon.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Founded travel perks a couple years ago after an exit to booking.com. They are focused on growing |
| 0:05.7 | GMV gross volume through their platform. They're growing about 10x year over year, so about 12 months |
| 0:10.8 | ago doing about 2.5 million and again, business trips booked through their platform. Now that's |
| 0:17.7 | up north of 25. They're taken between 5 and 10 cents per dollar through their platform so you can kind of back into revenue that way. |
| 0:24.7 | They've got a team of 100 people, mostly engineering, 50 people on engineering and product, which is great. |
| 0:28.9 | Burning cash, but makes sense and they can do it because he's done a great job raising capital at around 30 million bucks in a hot space, consumer level product, and typically one dominated by enterprise solutions. |
| 0:39.5 | This is the top entrepreneurs podcast where founders share how they started their companies and got |
| 0:46.0 | filthy rich or crash and burn. Each episode features revenue numbers, customer counts, and other insider information that creates business news headlines. |
| 1:00.2 | We went from a couple hundred thousand dollars to $2.7 million. |
| 1:03.4 | I had no money when I started the company. |
| 1:05.3 | It was $160 million, which is the size of any IPOs. |
| 1:08.8 | We're a bit strapped. |
| 1:09.7 | We have like 22,000 customers. |
| 1:13.6 | With over 5 million downloads in a very short amount of time, |
| 1:17.8 | major outlets like Inc are calling us the fastest growing business show on iTunes. |
| 1:22.8 | I'm your host, Nathan Latka, and here's today's episode. |
| 1:27.1 | What's the business model? Is it peer play SaaS or pay per trip? How do you monetize? |
| 1:32.8 | Yes, so we are the only free platform, the only free solution in business travel. We generate |
| 1:37.0 | revenue from commissions that the suppliers pay to us, right? So it's like booking a Complexpedia, |
| 1:42.2 | but instead of selling leisure or vacations, |
| 1:44.7 | we're selling business travel to companies. Okay, give me an example of that. I mean, so like, |
| 1:48.5 | what does an average trip look like that a consumer is booking with you and what's the kickback |
... |
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