A great article by @Mauricio from Travel Tech Essentialist about co-founding eDreams.com and leading the company to a successful IPO with a valuation of €1.6 billion ($2.2 billion) in 2014.
The article covers these three main topics:
• Finding Your Way (When The Map Doesn't Exist)
• Building the Machine: When Constraints Become Superpowers
• Business Fundamentals: Building Something Real
Read the full article at traveltechessentialist.substack.com/p/from-zero-to-ipo-building-edreams
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Most successful founders in travel don't share their lessons when they exit, so these insights from Mauricio Prieto are invaluable teachings to any founders building or scaling their travel business. Thanks for sharing, Mauricio!
Fun fact (according to Wikipedia): eDreams was the first-ever IPO of an Internet startup in Spain, and remains the only IPO of an Internet startup in Spanish history!
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We know the Web Summit today as the mega-conference run in Lisbon. Back before it was really at it's "1.0" iteration (2010) we had the Brent Hoberman, founder of Lastminute.com sharing his story - if I'm remembering this correctly now - about how they'd receive faxes from BA about distressed inventory to sell on their platform. This involved paper and typing to "transfer" the inventory.
Sometimes you just need to do what you need to do to make a platform work.
I love seeing echoes of this in Mauricio sharing this type of story here: setting up a call center to bridge between "pure internet" and "real transactions" was clever looking back on it (and to a point, still the reality for anything novel in travel to this day).
Thanks for sharing Ian :-)