For now I’m finding adventures in my own city and have done some road trips. I’m a total travel, history and adventure nerd, so I’ve hugely missed traveling during the pandemic. What are some of your personal interests? My passion for travel and experiences is a key part of what drives me when it comes to making successful.īashir was always fascinated by other cultures.
Great talent attracts great talent.ģ) Passion. Great companies are built by great teams, and it’s key to attract people from diverse fields so that you have a well-rounded group. But it’s key to remember that often you just need one investor or potential partner to really get on board, and that can give you the confidence to keep going.Ģ) Attracting amazing talent. You can hear a lot of no’s, and it takes persistence and resilience to conquer that feeling. What are the traits of a successful entrepreneur?ġ) Perseverance. We had a surge in these local bookings, especially with families. So many Americans had their summer vacations canceled so we were able to help offer fantastic local experiences like renting a boat, learning to horseback ride, going kayaking, or taking a photography lesson in your own city. With less tourists coming, we then focused on appealing to locals. We focused on three core strategies:ģ) Finding ways to reach new customers.
We realized the small businesses we partner with were going to struggle to make it through, so they became our main focus. After hitting $1 billion in bookings in early 2020, activity bookings dropped to zero in April. We’ve now raised over $50 million from a great group of tech and travel investors, such as Paul English (Kayak founder), Geoff Donaker (Yelp COO), David Bonderman (TPG), and Pete Flint (Trulia founder).ĭescribe how rebounded from virtually no bookings in April, 2020 to $50 million a few months later?ĬOVID hit hard.
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We’ve often been called “Square for travel'' because we focused a lot on empowering these SMBs with our powerful Peek Pro software tools that allow them to take online bookings and grow their revenues by over 30%. It created the desire for consumers to just look for fun things to do near them that day, and the opportunity for these small businesses to run their companies from their phones. They all understood the problem acutely too: this was a massive market (worth hundreds of billions) made up of small businesses that hadn’t made the transition to online bookings, and where the rise of mobile was changing everything. That meant that they had a good sense of our background and our complementary skill sets. Our early investors like Jack Dorsey, Eric Schmidt and Ron Conway’s SV Angel had previously invested in startups that my co-founder Oskar Bruening and I had worked at.
How did secure financial backing by the likes Jack Dorsey and Eric Schmidt? My time at the Oxford Union helped give me the confidence to succeed in these situations, when I felt quite different to my peers and out of place. For example, I was the first woman on my team of 90 investment professionals at the Blackstone Group. That was challenging but it also helped me get more comfortable being an outsider - in roles I’ve taken on since I’ve often been in the same situation. When I became President of the Union, I was a bit of an outsider as well - the first British Asian woman to do so and I didn’t come from one of the elite backgrounds that most of the presidents before me had. I’ve always been hugely intellectually curious so meeting with people who are brilliant at what they do was incredibly inspiring. The experience had a huge impact on my career, as I was able to meet world leaders, Nobel prize winners, and amazing artists who came to speak. Yes, the Oxford Union is a debating society but it’s not university funded as students pay for the membership, so it was my first time managing a large team and a budget of over £1 million.
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