- I was a product manager and I traveled a lot.
I was a business traveler.
And it was really frustrating for me
to deal with the corporate travel agency.
I had to plan a trip from Seattle, where I was working.
I had to stop in Denver.
I had to go to Buffalo, New York, to Denver.
I mean, to Dallas, and then back to Seattle.
Okay, this was a really complicated thing
for me to plan with a corporate travel agent,
and we had to do it on the phone.
And I would call him or her on the phone
and I'd hear this clicking on the keyboard, okay,
of this, I knew she was looking at a screen
as she was telling me fares and hotels
and everything like that,
and yet I couldn't see that screen for myself.
I knew, I kinda wanted to jump through the phone,
turn the screen my way and do it myself, okay?
This is a, you know, putting barriers
between people and information
is unsustainable in the world of technology.
And I recognized at that point
that there was a real opportunity
to give power to the people
and take that system that the travel agent was using
and put it in front of people with their PCs.
And it just so happens that the internet was,
the graphical web hadn't quite happened yet,
but the internet was just happening,
and there were these consumer online services,
like America Online, anybody remember that?
CompuServe, Prodigy.
I was a user of these services
and I knew that consumers were using online services
and getting access to information.
So, while I was at Microsoft,
and I was a product manager,
and I was a kind of frustrated entrepreneur,
I knew some day I wanted to be an entrepreneur,
I saw this problem and this opportunity
and the light bulb of an idea for a startup
went off in my head.
And this is at a time when Microsoft was pretty small.
I had opportunities multiple times a year
to get in front of Bill Gates
and give him updates on whatever project I was working on.
And I pitched the idea at the next meeting
of actually building an electronic travel agent
and putting that power of information
in the hands of regular people,
as a startup idea, to Bill.
I actually thought it wouldn't be a software business
and that Microsoft wouldn't be that interested in it.
I said, fund me on the outside
and I'll go fulfill my own entrepreneurial dreams.
So it was kind of a VC interaction
that I was thinking of it as.
And he laughed and he said, "Who are you gonna hire?"
I was 25 or six years old at the time, I was pretty young.
And so he said, "Start it inside of Microsoft
"and if it works and wants to be separate from Microsoft,
"then we'll think about spinning it off."
Okay?
And so that was how Expedia was born.
When I pitched the idea,
one of things that really,
Bill liked a whole lot about the idea,
one was that we were gonna build on PCs
what was being run on mainframes in the travel industry,
and he liked PCs doing the work that mainframes were doing,
but he also saw in me that I had
a really big idea and a big dream.
I went in saying, "We can one day become
"the largest seller of travel in the world,"
because I recognized that this power
to the people technology had the opportunity
to catalyze an industrial revolution
in the travel industry, a giant industry.
And that if we could short circuit
the connection between the suppliers and the consumers
and put them together, one to one,
without anybody else in between,
that the consumers were gonna storm
the best deal and take over the industry.
Okay?
And so I had this BHAG,
this big, hairy, audacious goal,
that was become the largest seller
of travel in the world, some day,
by helping everyone, everywhere,
make and take better trips.
That was my big dream.
And so in this first power to the people story
that I'm telling of this first startup,
this was a startup inside the belly
of the beast of Microsoft,
my takeaway lesson here is the first lesson,
and this is the Pygmalion myth lesson.
This is have great expectations,
great expectations beget great results.