dealing with customers and what they want that I can bring that back to
shape the product. Look at me 20 years ago, and at best I was a smart engineer.
I didn’t know much about business, knew nothing about selling, and unless you
have somebody who has an interest in talking with whoever you’re selling your
product or service to, your product isn’t going to turn out to be what the customer
wants.
In almost all circumstances I can think of, if not a member of the founding
team, you want to...

monetize their existing travel channel as opposed to improve the content by
licensing with TripAdvisor.
It wasn’t until around 2004 that we looked at Yahoo Travel as a competitor.
It didn’t change in 2000; it didn’t change in 2001. I mean, the ads changed.
They got better at extracting more money, I guess. But the actual content—the
reason to go there—didn’t change for 3 years straight. It was great to have them
as a competitor, in the sense of, you know, pathetic. In 2004 they said, “Whoa!”
and really made dramatic improvements, and...

so they were aware of it, but our response was a polite, “We verified that
the review meets our guidelines.” End of story.
In 5 years, we haven’t been sued by anyone—because, when you actually go
look up the law, we’re protected. There may be some hotel owners with a legitimate
beef, but there are some hotel owners that are really just not very bright.
They’ll complain about how terrible this review is and their email is from
abc@yahoo.com, and then the next day a review will appear on their property,
written by...

reservation at a place you’ve never stayed at, called up the local Better Business
Bureau to find out how many complaints were lodged? None. So here you go to
TripAdvisor and you look up the place, and you see that seven out of the last
eight reviews all gave it a 1 out of 5 rating and talked about smelly carpets and
rude staff. You’re just not going to stay there unless it’s the only place in town.
That’s the impact that five or six people had. Total strangers. But the hotel
owner that...

can iron all that out before you actually start the company, or pick different
founders, it’ll improve your chances of success.
Tip number two: you can’t get too attached to your vision in a startup,
because things may change. It’s not a sign of failure to change your vision. I
remember in a previous company, we wanted to be this, but we were offered a
consulting contract to do this, that, and the other thing, and, yeah, that wasn’t in
the plan, but we’ll take that, because that’s going to add $50,000 to our...