This isn't your average business podcast and he's not your average host.

This is the James Alteter Show on the Stansbury Radio Network.

So I have Sam Shank on the line. Sam, how are you doing?

I'm good.

And Sam, you're here.

You're the creator of one of my favorite apps, Hotel Tonight, where when I first started using it, it was like, it was like God came down and saved the world for me.

Because whenever I was in New York City late at night, I would say, okay, it's too late to go back upstate home.

I'm just going to go from hotel to hotel. There's got to be a room open.

And it would take me hours sometimes to find a room in a hotel. Like you never know if like the president's in town. There's no rooms available.

But hotel tonight is this app where I could just like essentially click a button and there's a hotel room available for me.

That's also the other. That's one of the key use cases. And that's one of the reasons why we built the app is that we thought that with mobile, with mobile becoming more prevalent, that what was the thing that we could bring to the world for hotel booking that couldn't exist before.

And that was that last last minute. We didn't have your computer anymore. And that's what we focused on initially and really just built the best service possible for that specific use case.

So I have a ton of questions about the app, but I want to start off with your background. Like you kind of right before hotel tonight, you were doing a lot of stuff kind of in the online travel industry.

But even before that, like what's your secret origin story? I know you got an MBA that you're ashamed of. What's the story with that?

Well, I think that that's not as interesting as the the early origin story, the sort of secret origin story that I was in the college.

Yeah, exactly. I've got a weakness of crypto to crypto night, but I started in wanting to be a film director and moved from Virginia where I grew up to Hollywood and worked on the movie screen and was an assistant to West Craven and realized that ultimately I didn't want to be a film director,

but I like to create stuff and like technology a lot more than I like the filmmaking industry. So why didn't you want to be a film director? And I would imagine, you know, West Craven was probably a really interesting guy to learn from.

Yeah, you are and he's one of these like in Hollywood, there's a lot of like, you know, unintended bad actors, but there's he is one of just the generally nice guys out there and and was very helpful and supportive and understanding on everything.

You know, I wanted to be I guess I'm just sort of creative. I like to build things I like to make things also just a huge lover of films and entertainment and storytelling. So wanted to see if I could do that myself and I was sort of the childhood dream that I gave a shot to for a year and then and then moved on to what ended up being a much better fit for me.

Okay, but again, like the film industry sounds great. Like and you were you were an assistant to West Craven. You're and scream was like the top movie of the year.

What what made you what kind of turned you off to the whole thing?

Yeah, you know, I think a lot of it has to do with very few people actually ever get to direct movies and I was looking around and I saw a guy that were double my age that were doing glorified versions of my job.

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