Steve Kaufer, Langley Steinert, Nick Shanny, and
Thomas Palka started TripAdvisor, an online travel
site, in 2000. Frustrated by the lack of unbiased, useful
information for travelers, they created a site that,
in addition to searching relevant content already on
the Web, let users contribute personal reviews of destinations,
hotels, and attractions. The online travel
forum was a pioneer in the now common practice of
having users pick the winners, instead of leaving the
choices up to human editors.
TripAdvisor became the largest online travel community
in the world,...

there—where we would define “best” as not searching for prices, but really
finding the unbiased information.
I was introduced by a friend to another cofounder, Langley Steinert, on the
business, marketing, business development, financing side of things. So the two
of us kind of took up the project as, “Hey, this is something the world clearly
needs.” I felt I could build it with the team of folks I had in mind from past
lives. Langley had the business development experience and connections to sell
and market it. Because I had started a...

Kaufer: We tried different approaches. We tried to randomly crawl the Web
and we thought, “How are we going to randomly select out of the billions of
pages?” So we tried crawling from known travel hubs. We’d start from the
Yahoo Travel directory and see where those sites led us. We tried to pick out
good, interesting information and automatically categorize it. That didn’t work
so well. What we call the signal-to-noise ratio wasn’t good enough—meaning
that, when they got our results back, people wouldn’t say, “Oh yeah, that’s what
I was looking...

first. Your experience on TripAdvisor—again, this was initially, when we
launched the site—was very fulfilling, because the information we found was
always spot-on. We didn’t always have something, but what we had was always a
match.
Jumping forward in time as the site grew, all of a sudden now those hundreds
of thousands of articles are dwarfed by the user reviews that our visitors
have generated. It’s fresher information and tends to be more detailed. To
many people, it’s more reliable.
There’s a whole other theoretical discussion of, “Would you rather read...

was that it would become a requirement that, if you were in the travel industry
or offering a travel section of your site, you have access to our content. And we
would license it out and/or get a share of the revenue generated on the page
views from that. Lycos Travel, Yahoo Travel, AOL Travel, Expedia, Travelocity—
all the players would have to have it. No one would try to build it themselves,
because we’d always be able to stay ahead, since we were entirely focused on it.
That would be our business model,...