A decade of incredible experiences

On January 1st, 2010, GetYourGuide was a small beta website that had just been launched to the public a few weeks earlier. We had spent half a year retooling our failed peer-to-peer service for students into a platform for booking tours & activities. The site had less than 100 visits a day, our inventory was limited to a few early adopters, and the company had around €20,000 in the bank - our collective savings, which we had put into the company. We had no idea what the next decade would hold in store for us, but we didn't spend a lot of time thinking about it. 

We were in a mad rush to build something that we believed could make an impact on the way people travel. 

My sole activity on January 1st, 2010 was to meet an angel investor in London, where I had just rung in the New Year with a few friends from university the night before. I met him for coffee in East London in the early afternoon, where he listened to our business plan for an hour before telling me that he did not feel comfortable enough to invest. In the evening, I met a friend for dinner at a cheap Indian place, where I caught terrible food poisoning. I spent the first night of the new decade between my friend's sofa and his bathroom. The next morning, I caught my flight back to Zurich and went straight to work. We had a big vision to chase, so there was no time for an upset stomach!

In these first months of the decade, all the odds were stacked against GetYourGuide. We were competing against much larger companies, had no clue about our own industry, and no money to fund our plans. 

Yet in these months, my cofounders and I laid the foundation for the entire GetYourGuide platform as we know it today: our customer-facing website, portals for suppliers & partners, customer service tools and so much more. Our ambitious vision was the only boundary for our productivity. To the present day, we still use many of the products we built back then. And over time, we managed to exceed our wildest expectations, redefining the travel experience for millions of travelers along the way. 

Reflecting on the past decade, I want to share 3 lessons, which are deeply ingrained in our culture and that I believe will be the cornerstones of making the next decade even more successful for GetYourGuide. 

1: We profoundly invest in the long-term vision and then relentlessly focus on short-term progress

I’m still astounded by the clarity of our vision for the future of the travel experiences industry in the early days in 2010. In many ways, our technology was 5-10 years ahead of the game. Over lunch in the small kebab shop next to our office, we would often discuss things like supplier reservation systems or option pricing models, all of which came to the market at a much later point in time. On our large whiteboards, one of the few early investments we made, we would sketch endlessly complex (and often overcomplex) views of what the future of our industry would look like. 

At the same time, we had limited cash in the bank, and it would take another three years before we would land our first big venture capital round. Automation and rapid execution were the only ways to move ahead without running out of money. We were pushing each other to the limits all the time, and there were many tense moments. Shortly before our Series A, we actually ran out of money and needed to get a short term loan from our families to plug the hole. Having to approach our parents, hat in hand, remains a vivid and not-at-all-pleasant memory for me. 

In all of these moments, we never thought about failing, because we were literally obsessed with the next feature release, the next supplier to sign up, or the next customer to serve. We were frenetically pushing for progress, trusting that everything else would somehow fall in place. 

The lightness of having nothing to lose and chasing a vision with no strings attached is a very powerful position. It made all the difference between GetYourGuide and the incumbents. 

Fast forward a decade, and we find ourselves as the market-leading incumbents, with deep pockets and a big reputation. The set-up is different. But my most important task at GetYourGuide remains the same as it was in 2010:  ensuring we maintain the challenger mindset and push ourselves to relentlessly execute against our big vision of what the industry will look like a decade from now. Every day will matter, just like it did in 2010.

2: We seek incredible for the customer 

The terrorist attacks across Paris on November 13th, 2015 stand as one of the most transformative moments of the past decade for GetYourGuide. That same night, we had just closed our Series C financing round, and I was out with friends, colleagues and loved ones to celebrate the big milestone with a bottle of champagne. I still remember waking up the next morning with a pounding headache and my girlfriend filling me in on the tragic news, her voice trembling as she read about the hundreds of casualties. It felt like I was still in the middle of a terrible nightmare.

Upon switching on my notebook, I was stunned to find that the GetYourGuide team was already on top of the dramatic events. More than a dozen people had rushed to the office that same night to pull the list of affected customers, locate them and make sure that they were being taken care of by the French authorities. At the time, we had no emergency protocols, so everything was invented on the fly. 

It was a truly collaborative effort between customer service, engineers and our sales staff in Berlin and Paris. By the time I arrived in the office later that day, I found a company that had quite literally turned into a rapid-response customer service organization overnight, without any direction or orders from the executive team. To this day, witnessing how much everyone cared for the well-being of our customers in the midst of that tragedy stands as one of my proudest and most moving moments as a founder.

At the time, the attacks and the subsequent state of emergency in Paris were deeply painful for the company. GetYourGuide was highly concentrated on Paris as a top destination, where we had just opened our second local office. While we were busy helping customers throughout late 2015 and early 2016, our growth dwindled and our burn rate spiked. Looking back, I am moved by the alignment and trust that our entire team and investors had in putting customers first, even in the most difficult times. It paved the way to building out customer service as a GetYourGuide superpower and innovating on our growth engine so that we would be less reliant on a few big cities. Within months, we were growing at the fastest pace since founding the company. It was all driven by a team with an obsession to seek incredible for the customer.

3: We put learning & growth at the core of our culture

One of the most unconventional details in the founding story of  GetYourGuide is that we began with five co-founders. By textbook definition, this cannot work out — today, as an early-stage investor, I would be extremely hesitant to consider investing in a young company with such a setup. Against the odds, we made it work, and four out of the five founders still work at the company a decade later (and the other is a successful venture investor). 

How did this happen? The answer is a bit of luck, a lot of humility, and a shared obsession.

We were lucky that GetYourGuide had amazing talent from the earliest days; a rarity in the startup world. Rarer still, none of the founders or early employees had an outsized ego or tried to maneuver for their personal benefit. We were all obsessed about improving the customer experience and improving ourselves along the way.

We institutionalized these early cultural attributes by making cultural fit a top priority for hiring and retaining employees during the growth stage. Tao and I famously interviewed every prospective employee up to a size of about 200 people and implemented a bar raiser program thereafter. We continue to look for a strong willingness to learn and grow. It's a real superpower to admit that you've made a mistake and to learn from it. I personally have learned a lot more from my failures in the past decade than from my successes. 

If we want to continue to be successful in the next decade, we must continuously accelerate the pace of learning for the entire organization. This means that we will make many mistakes and will feel highly uncomfortable at times. Yet, if we obsess over the pace of improving and not over our mistakes, the wins will ultimately overcompensate the failures. 

Final thoughts

Today, we find ourselves in the lucky position to build one of the world's leading tech companies over the next decade. We are deeply grateful and humbled to see so many customers, suppliers, partners and employees being inspired by the vision that we started to formulate a decade ago. 

The energy around GetYourGuide has become so electric that nothing feels impossible at this point. Now, in the early days of this new decade, it’s my top priority to ensure we harness this momentum to give the entire world access to incredible experiences.