The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank

I think the biggest difference is that The US investors just have had much bigger home runs, and that relieves a lot of the pressure. So, talk Spark Capital, our Series A lead. The deal after GetYourGuide was Oculus Rift, right? Know, Palma Lucci. So, we were basically off the hook a couple of months after they made the investment in us because the fund was already returned. And then afterwards, Wayfair was in the same fund. The fund got returned another time. And then, you know, if GetYourGuide returns at another time, that’s great, but that’s icing on the cake.

So, that, I think, has a completely different dynamic and VCs in Europe don’t have that. And that allows you to think much bigger because your early stage investors don’t feel the same pressure. On The US versus Europe, I think we have ambition level among the founders in Europe and The US. I think it’s bullshit, to be honest, when people say European entrepreneurs don’t work as hard, are not as ambitious. You know, I’ve heard Peter Thiel and others say that, but I think that’s BS, to be honest.

Like, I think people here, on average, have a much tougher time because it’s much harder to raise funds. It’s much harder to build a business across Europe than in The US where, you know, when you raise funding, the addressable market, everything is much bigger. I think where we have a big difference and that’s where we need to catch up is just the overall flywheel of having had successful VCs that have raised bigger and bigger funds and also, and that’s very important, having the talent density in the different startup capitals of Europe.

If I wanna hire, let’s say, the next chief product officer at GetYourGuide, it’s almost impossible to do that in Europe. I need to go to Silicon Valley because the density of people who have done that scale, have served tens of millions of customers a year, build a business that’s, you know, 10,000,000,000 plus valuation. That just doesn’t exist to build the structures and the processes and everything to do that.

Totally. I think that’s why both of us are so committed to Europe. I think that’s the eureka moment of Europe. I think we need to seize that moment. And I wish, like, we had the landscape and the leadership to do that. I mean, if I was in charge of Europe, I would say pump up venture capital funding to match US levels. We spent 50,000,000,000 a yen VC in Europe. The US is north of 200,000,000,000. Why do we have that gap? Doesn’t make any sense. I mean, just to give you another number, like Germany subsidizes its broken retirement system every year with 100,000,000,000.

Right? But we don’t We have 7,000,000,000 invested in VC, 100,000,000,000 subsidies in retirement system. That doesn’t make any sense. That’s not the future. Right?

I disagree with you, Harry. So I agree on, like, the seed and Series A and, like, all of that territory. Yes, probably there is enough capital. Maybe. I don’t know, but probably there is enough capital. But when you look at the GetYourGuide stage and our last couple of rounds, we had to go round the world. It is harder to raise as a European company, and that’s where the big rounds happen. I get you. So you’re saying CDE? CDE, pre IPO, and then even public. I mean, like, how can a German company go public in Europe?

It’s impossible. And, like, if we go public, it’s only with American funds. Well, you’re not gonna list in Europe. We haven’t decided that, but the reality is regardless of where we list I’m sorry. I’m I’m not being a journalist, being honest with you. How could you? It’s very difficult because we don’t have the pools of capital here. That’s the problem. And, you know, we don’t have these pools of capital pre IPO. We don’t have these pools of capital post IPO. So that’s what I mean with like we need to invest a lot more in innovation.

It’s not just about the next seed run. It’s really about scaling these companies and making sure that they stay in Europe and making sure that they continue to innovate and build in Europe. We need way more budgets for innovation, and that ultimately comes with a lower cost of capital, which means higher valuations for growth stage companies, and that means more money for these companies.

one, as the prime minister of Europe that I would recommend here is we should attract talent like crazy right now. We’ve got the entire immigration debate, Europe just kills me because we have the wrong debate. Of course, we cannot have all the refugees in the world migrate to Europe. We need to solve that problem. Agreed. But why don’t we spend that airtime now discussing how we get the greatest minds in the world to Europe? Because that’s gonna make or break

A 100%. I would go so far to say anyone who relocates to Europe with a computer science degree or just like joining a tech company should get massive tax benefits. I don’t know, five years tax free or like no taxation on stock options, whatever it is. Like, bring them over. We can’t compete with less capital, a more scattered European landscape, more bureaucracy, and less talent. Like, it’s not gonna work. Right? So we gotta solve the talent part. And the great thing is we can turn our weakness into a strength because everyone wants to live in Europe.

Everyone I talk to, they wanna live here. They wanna live in London, Berlin, Munich, like, you name it. We’re a very livable continent. People love to be here,

By the way, I recommended that, and Germany got shut down immediately because, you know, people said, you know, this is not egalitarian, you know, it’s like we need to pay the same taxes everywhere, but I think it’s so misguided because we have such a

Yeah. Not I don’t ask me. The problem, though, if if you look even at the, you know, old industries of Volkswagen, Mercedes, etcetera, what do they need? Brilliant software engineers. They do need the next people figuring out autonomous driving. Right? So we need that level of talent. And, Harry, at GetYourGuide, have 90% of our employees in Berlin are not German. Are not German. Are not German. Most of them don’t even come from Europe. Because the reality is, with demographic change, we don’t have enough people here.

Even if I wanted to hire only Germans, I couldn’t do that. It wouldn’t be possible.

90% are not German. That’s astonishing.

90% are not German, and it’s not because, like, we opted to not hire Germans. Was really because that’s the only candidates that are available. Like, we relocate massive amounts of people from India, you know, Northern Africa, The United States, you know, and then obviously in the European Union.

very sad, but actually making it easy, removing the red tape and and the barriers. So we hired a CTO from Netflix last year, Gaurav Agarwal. Amazing guy. He was the guy who led all of growth at Netflix, you know, which was very successful. Was at Meta before. Tremendous resume. He’s Indian. For him to get a visa to come to Germany after he had signed a job contract, and this guy makes a lot of money, took him six months. Why? Because he had to go to the consulate in San Francisco, and they only take appointments two times a week.

And they’ve been booked out for the next six months. So I literally had to call up the foreign office in Germany to get him an appointment Francisco so he could bring his paperwork, literally the paperwork because he can’t send that anywhere, so that he can get the visa and migrate to Germany. I kid you not. I mean, if you make it that hard, it’s no wonder that we don’t have a tech ecosystem in Europe. Okay. Make it easier. Anything else? I think, lastly, this comes to the nuts and bolts.

Like, you need to have, like, a really functioning society. I’m actually really concerned about the far right in Europe because that will be a huge detractor for these type of people. Mean, something that we do I’m

No, no, it’s stronger than ever. Oh. And people, like, I understand why Germans or Brits are very upset because we have all of that red tape. We have these stories that I just told. But the problem is if we turn into nation states and if we turn into nationalistic things in Europe, then ultimately will detract the people that we really desperately need right now. So I think having really a functioning civic society, and that ranges really from good education systems to good hospitals to good roads and infrastructure to actually people just engaging and loving Europe again, to be honest, and, like, advertising it.

That is something that we need. And and I think, frankly, in Germany, we’ve done a terrible job at this over the last couple of years. We’ve had a really good brand for a long period of time. I think we’ve really tarnished our brand over the last couple of years. How do you think you’ve tarnished your brand? I think today, like, when you think of Germany, you just think of things that don’t work, and, like, you know, social media has just spiraled that up so much. I think The UK is a little bit in the same spot after Brexit.

So to be honest, I think we need to turn the page and, like, be much more optimistic about our future.

Absolutely. But I think that’s going to be the challenge for our generation, Harry, to do that. I think if we don’t display that level of optimism, if we don’t believe in Europe, if we just look at The US and are like,

A lot of people have asked me that. I think the biggest contribution I can give to Europe right now is build a really big company.

Ask me

I support a lot of so I donate to a bunch of different political parties across Europe. I do support young politicians. To be honest, I don’t know whether politics is the only thing that’s broken here. I think a lot of it also has to do with the education of the people. I think it’s really the the the politics are ultimately a reflection of, like, what the people think and what they want. So I think it’s really upon us also as leaders in technology to bring that progress closer again to the people.

That’s why I try to speak out about this type of stuff as much as possible, try to educate. Even if you get a blowback like I got with the tax incentives, I don’t give up. You know, I continue to try to make the point, and I try to do that in a way that is as inclusive to these people as possible. And I feel like if more of us do that on a continuous basis, ultimately things will change because we have a very loud voice from the younger generation that are very dissatisfied.

A lot of them I don’t know what it’s like in The UK, a lot of them in Germany actually now vote for right wing or left wing parties. And we need to make sure that they understand that they can still shape their future, at the same point in time, I think we need to build up the empathy from the older generation, which is the biggest voting block. Right? They have the power to change things to ensure that we have, again, opportunity for the young generation in Europe.

I think in Europe, much less than The US, to be honest. I think that’s, again, something that’s quite positive about Europe. If you look at Germany and many other European countries, our Gini coefficient is actually quite healthy overall, and we have a ton of redistribution. So I don’t think that redistribution per se in Europe is our biggest problem. I think it’s rather how we choose to invest that money. If I’d sum up my claim here is I’d say we need to invest that more in the younger generation, not just in the older generation.

I think, ultimately, we’ll need to make sure that the older generation understands that that’s the right thing to do.

Yeah. Totally. So this is actually 2007, 2008. You Tao and I were both students at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. He was doing physics. I was doing biochemistry and neurobiology, so something very remote from online travel. And we both led a student delegation to Beijing and China at the time. And I made a pivotal mistake in that I booked my flight ticket a day early and arrived in Beijing without the group. And, you know, I was trying to, you know, do stuff then in my hotel room.

I logged on the Internet. You know, I was, like, going on Google, trying to find things to do, going to the Beijing Wall. I’d, doing something with the day, and I couldn’t find anything. I got stuck in the hotel room. And the next day, Tao shows up as the guide, literally, and he’s like, hey, Johannes, gonna take you out, I’ll show you Beijing. You know, we’ll go to the Beijing Wall, the Great Wall. You know, we have Beijing duck, you know, in the Hutong. So it was like a really special day.

And, you know, from that epiphany, really, of, like, having seen the city through the eyes of a local, someone who speaks the language, we went back to Switzerland to ETH and said, you know, we have to build a website, we have to build a community for people so that they are able to do that. And we did that. And, like, the prequel to GetYourGuide was, like, we were building a travel community for everyone to be a guide. No one actually used that. You know, I think we had a 100 guides.

Because that’s

fit.

It was terrible. So

First iteration was literally a peer to peer websites for guides. Small, like, untold story is. We also considered doing something like couch surfing at the time, homes, and we, you know, we thought, you know, no one is gonna stay at someone else’s home, so, like, no discarding that idea. You know, someone else in San Francisco picked it up very successfully. And then, you know, we went to guides, and we’re like, you know, guiding is such an important thing in travel, so can’t we build a community of guides?

But we’re thinking this, you know, from the lens of the student. We didn’t do any market research or anything. So, we built a social network, only 100 students signed up, most students don’t have time to be guides. We had, I think, three to five bookings in the first two years of our prototype, three of which was my mother because she took so much pity on us students. Three to five bookings. In two years, yeah. But then, like, what we realized through that prototype was that there was this gigantic market out there for experienced providers, particularly in Europe.

I mean, Europe has 60% of the global inbound travel. There’s just so much to do in any city, and none of that was digitized in two thousand and nine, twenty ten. So, we went back to the drawing board and said, you know, look, we clearly didn’t find product market fit. Like, this first iteration was terrible. Let’s pivot into this much bigger market that’s out there and that’s just not digital.

still at uni at the time. So we were still at uni living, honestly, of very little money at the time. But the great thing about it was, you know, we could fail. Like, there was no problem in failing. Even more so, it was just a lot of fun. Like, you know, we didn’t do that really to build a company even at the time. It was more like, you know, this is a great space. You know, we wanna build, like, a really successful web product. Facebook was going viral at the time, so those were like the days of Web 2.0.

And we’re really working at night, to be honest. Like, we were studying throughout the day, and then at night, we’d do this.

No. Respectfully, you have to be all in, and we had an all in moment. So the first iteration of the product actually failed, right, as I told you, and then we had to go out with the second iteration. And with that second iteration, you know, we were done with our degrees, and, like, we really needed to try to make this work because it was clear you can’t just do this on the side. You really need to sign up supply now. You need to sort of, like, build an online marketing function or need to do online marketing.

And at that point in time, we really needed to go full time with a prototype that was unproven and two years of failure. Right? So in in a weird way, it was a very stressful moment. And even worse, I need to go to my parents and basically say, Hi, you need to fund me for another year after university, so can you please put a mortgage on your house and fund me? Because there was no seed capital available. No one would give a bunch of students money at the time for an idea that wasn’t proven.

honestly, I have no idea looking back. But the way how we operated at the time was really being in this deep tunnel. You know, I once met the great race car driver, Nico Rosberg, like, Formula One champion, and he said, you know, when you go and race, right, you look at the road, you don’t look at the wall. Because if you look at the wall as a race car driver, you’re gonna hit the wall. Like, so stay focused on the road, and I think that’s very much what felt like at the time, like, we’re even considering failing.

Like, for me, like, failure was non optional. It was like, you know, that that’s not a valid option. We will stay the course. We will win this.

Well, then, what happened was a miracle because we signed up the first couple of suppliers, and we got very lucky with a few of them. How do you do that? Literally cold calling and, like, you know, going to people. Like, I I remember I traveled to Salzburg and signed up to hop on up off bus tour. It was very random. There was, like, no CRM or anything like that. Right? So it was very much, you know, what looks good? You know, it’s, like, what’s nearby? Whom can we address?

We got very lucky because we got a very good tour agency which did tours to The Vatican very early on, and The Vatican is like one of the major sites in all of Europe, and no one had sold The Vatican online at that point in time. As you remember, the day when they went live and suddenly the bookings started to tick in, and then we had more and more of these types of experiences. The revenue just came and, like, you know, we’re growing and growing. I think we did something like 500,000 then in the first year in 2010 in net revenues, so commission revenues, more or less profitable.

But we didn’t have any cash because we were just living off the mortgages from our parents. So we’re constantly looking into the abyss. And that was also the first time when I realized there’s actually seasonality in travel. So it actually goes up in the summer, and then November, it really goes down. So for the first one or two years without any type of VC funding, we’re literally going bankrupt every winter and needed to somehow survive. So it was very tough early years.

2010, 2011. There’s basically no venture capital seen whatsoever in Europe. And the biggest problem was that we didn’t have a US original that we were a copy of. So, I remember I was talking to Oliver somewhere at the time. We had started to relocate some of the staff from Switzerland to Berlin because Switzerland was just too expensive for us to survive in our bootstrap mode. You know, he looks at me and he’s like, So, what’s the equivalent here? Know, it’s like in The US, like, You’re the copy of what exactly?

I was like, There is no exact copy. Know, we’re trying something new here. Like, you know, experiences, marketplaces don’t really exist right now, but I believe it’s the future of travel. And he was like, so is you do you wanna join Rocket Internet, or do you wanna work on your own startup? And I was like, you know, I’m gonna work on my own startup. And he was like, okay. Thank you very much. See you. And, you know, this is really the spirit of the time. It’s very hard to, like, recollect because things are so different today, but

first VC funding was from Brent Hoberman, who invested, like, you know, a small seed check alongside with an outfit called Pro Founders here out of Sean. Out of London, Sean, Seaton Rogers, exactly. And that was actually really weird because I got a ticket, I mean, a sponsor ticket, I think, through some, like, lottery or something to go to Lowepb, which was like a big startup conference at the time, and Brent was on stage and, you know, I couldn’t raise VC funding. We had this business that was constantly going bankrupt but growing really fast.

I just hit Brent up after he was on stage and said, like, I’m in travel. You found it last minute. We should talk. And he was like, okay, interesting. Here’s my business card. And, you know, I picked up the business card, you know, wrote him an email, just like cold email, basically, and he said, you know, come and see me in London. So, I remember I went to see Brent at the mate.com offices back then. This was probably like 2011, 2012. I had to wait for four hours to get like a ten minute meeting with Brent.

I still vividly remember the meeting. I think he does too. And it was basically, you know, this is what we’re doing. You know, we’re creating experiences marketplace. You know, this is the next biggest thing in travel. It’s the last big greenfield. No one has conquered it. And Brent looked at me and he said, you know, I made one pivotal mistake at lastminute.com. I had the opportunity to buy booking.com at the time as a seed stage company. I still regret that to the present day. I’m not gonna make that mistake twice.

I’m gonna invest in you. That was the moment, really, we got our first funding, and, you know, the rest from there is history. How much did you raise then? It was a million bucks. A million bucks at at what price? It was, I think, at, like, a 5 or 6,000,000 pre money. So you eat it very well.

Yeah. I tried to raise capital, but, like, we got rejected everywhere because, you know, again, like, we were not the copycat of anything. We were first time founders. No one likes to invest in travel. Like, you know, this is a very weird industry for a lot of people in Silicon Valley. For the people that I met in The US, most people said, you know, move over here or we’re not gonna give you funding. And, you know, I said, no, we’re very happy in Europe. Like, we

The constant is you have to have tremendous tenacity, and you will have to pitch a 100 times, and it will only work once, maybe.

bootstrapping mode, but, know, with a little bit more money and so, like, not going bankrupt all the time, which is positive. But what Brand actually then did is he pretty much immediately afterwards set up a meeting with a bunch of VC funds in The US, and that referral from him as a proven travel entrepreneur made all of the difference. So, suddenly, we were starting to get meetings and people got more interested. There was just a much better reference for me as a first time founder as well.

Ultimately, there was a partner called Alex Finkelstein at Spark Capital who took like a very keen interest in GetYourGuide, he was like, No, this is interesting. Like, there’s something there. And then he led the A round in 2013, and that was really the moment that GetYourGuide was transformed. Where was the business at that point? Business was doing somewhere around 2,000,000 net revenue at that point, and growing, I think, two x to three x year over year.

Series A at the time was actually very big for European standards at the time, somewhere around 14,000,000. Series A, like, I think, like, $3,035,000,000 pre money.

I would have not raised as big of a Series A. Looking back, I think it was too much dilution. Ultimately, it all worked out because, you know, if you’re in the company for long enough, you know, this is a founder re ups and all of that. So I would say, personally, it didn’t matter, but I do think you should actually manage dilution because, otherwise, you end up with problems with your employees, you know, with the, you know, other investors and also the, so, like, share of, like, early stage investors just gets too large, which might be a problem later down the road.

We, fortunately, at GetYourGuide got all of that fixed over the years, but I do think at

Totally. I don’t think that you should walk back and you cannot correct a mistake.

Totally. No. Look. I think the founder incentives that you see, first and foremost, should happen after a longer period of time. Right? So, you know, if I look at myself, I think the first founder incentive package that I personally got awarded by the board with, I think, happened after, like, a decade or so. So this

at the time, the Series A was very large in terms of total quantum, so we had a lot of money, and also very few US VC companies were investing in Europe at the time. So we went from a nobody to a superstar literally overnight. Did you feel that in the ecosystem, in the presence, how people respond? A 100%. I think the only equivalent at much greater scale happened in 2019 when we raised from SoftBank Vision Fund, that massive round. So so those were, like, the two, I think, defining rounds of the company.

But with the a, it was really going from being a complete nobody to someone who is, like, very present on the startup radar and and in the scene. We could hire, like, completely different people. But, also, I must say, that was the moment when I made the biggest mistakes in hindsight in building the company. So we almost lost the company after raising that A round.

We first and foremost listened way too much to the VCs. You know, we were like these young founders not having a clue, and we completely lost our way and going to the board meetings, literally looking for advice of what we should be doing in our strategy, instead of pushing for the strategy that we saw working

Well, they had a much longer term vision around, you know, hey, you should build SaaS products for your vendors, you know, you should do multi market, you know, you should go into all of these new customer segments, into all of these new supply segments, and most importantly, you should hire all of these senior people to do all of that. And that’s about the worst thing you can do as a Series A company without proper management experience. It’s much better to stay very narrow and go very deep and continue to drive the growth that you’re seeing from the core customer segments that you have and do much less, but do that much better.

So, were going way too broad, hiring a bunch of people that were completely wrong for the stage of company, no culture fits, and growth then started to really calm down while expenses spiraled up like crazy. And I remember like after raising that a round, I needed to lay off 30% of the company and completely rejuggle GetYourGuide to refocus us on the core. Did you do that quick enough? Because sometimes you can leave it quite late. Thankfully, I did it quick enough and I got incredibly lucky that, at the time, a person that’s actually not very well known in the European startup ecosystem, it was probably one of the most successful European founders of all time, called Case Colon.

Amazing. Know, one Friday night, was watching Netflix with my wife, you know, sitting there, and, you know, he called me up and he said, you know, here’s Case Colon. And I obviously knew him because he was the founder and CEO of booking.com. And he said, you know, look, Johannes, I just left booking.com. I’ve heard about your company. I think you’re onto something. Give me your numbers. So I run him through the numbers. He was, like, you know, giving me, like, every cohort and, like, you know, every kind of, like, supplier, and it was just just, like, really going deep, like, on the first call.

And by the end of it, was like, know, one and a half hours. And he said, this is interesting. I’m gonna be in Berlin tomorrow morning, 9AM at your office. This is Saturday morning. Right? And next morning, 9AM, I’m there. So, the is there, and, like, he goes to the meeting room with me and to the whiteboard, and, like, he basically maps out, like, the entire journey of, like, you know, where he sees value and, like, where I see value. Asks a ton of questions. It was literally, like, being in the room with the Jedi grandmaster, you know, for almost, I’d say, the full day.

And then he leaves and he’s like, I’m gonna come on board, like, I’m joining a board of directors, I’m gonna personally invest a million bucks in the company. That was incredibly pivotal because it happened exactly at the point of time, like, when I was laying off 30% of the people when I needed to reboot the company. At that point in time, I had someone alongside with me who had done this before and was like a really good mentor and that truly transformed me. You know, I’ve told Case two, three years later when the company was successful, probably learned more from you than from my dad.

I think you need fundamentally different people for a Series A to Series C, D stage company than, you know, for a pre IPO public company with billions in revenue. And I do see it today being on the other side of that. People who are incredibly effective at Netflix or Meta or Google or, you know, even GetYourGuide today are not the type of people who really thrive with a 30 or 50 people company where you still need to continue to refine that core product market fit, where the way how you manage and do things is so different because you’re in the weeds every day with the team, you need to ship stuff, you need to be really opinionated about what’s going on.

And then the muscle that you have later on around managing multiple teams, managing organizations, doing roadmaps, and creating more structure in the organization, which you need at some point, otherwise things don’t work anymore when you’re at a certain scale. Those are just fundamentally different skill sets and typically also different types of people. And oftentimes, VCs mix these two phases. So you really need to have these very entrepreneurial people in the early days who oftentimes, by the way, don’t work out in the late days. So when you’re going public and, you know, that stage of your life, those are not the same type of skill sets.

So it’s really about can you find these people who are strong culture fits and who are right for your company

having a really tight strategy. You know, founders typically think that they have way more capacities than they really have. So being really tight on what’s the core thing that we wanna be doing, and how can we deliver value to the customers, and how can we obsessively focus on that? So, this is really the core lesson from Case and booking.com was don’t do too much. He told me at Booking, you know, they had looked at experiences for many, many years. And he said, On these type of innovation projects, people had to go to the innovation department.

The innovation department had one person that was himself, and it was called the no department because he was always saying, No, go and refocus on the core. Because typically people underestimate the runway that they have with their core products, and really improving that and achieving product market fit and scaling that over a longer period of time is much more valuable than doing 10 things that are all sexy, but you’re gonna be

perform. So the beautiful thing was we had a lot of really good people in the company. So instead of hiring expensive new execs, I just promoted the best people in the company, which was the best thing I ever did and gave them responsibility, although a lot of them were very junior to their jobs. We refocused the company really on all core segments of attraction tickets and guided tours and just the core European capital. So we weren’t looking worldwide as we did after Series A, but just looked at Rome, Paris, London.

We went and acquired all of the supply there, and no big magic, but suddenly demand was coming back and growth was coming back. We’re going back to more than 100% year over year growth at much better unit economics. Just, you know, I think six to twelve months after that, we could raise a really good Series B. What was the Series B? Series B was co led by Spark Capital and Highland Europe. So, Spark Capital was so impressed by us going through that roller coaster of like dropping off the cliff, reshaping the company, bringing Case Colon in, that they said, hey, you guys are clearly onto something.

You’re doing this right. And this, by the way, another advice for a lot of founders. We gained so much more respect when we went against the board and said, we’re not gonna do this. We’re not gonna do that. We’ll focus on this. This is my opinion. This is where I stand. You know, suddenly, VCs were like, yeah, we follow you. You’re right. Instead of just saying, oh, this is a great idea. We’re gonna do it. You know, really shaping the opinion of the board and of the investors is something that I really learned during that period.

That is something that I would also say then afterwards helped us actually raise the subsequent rounds because we were so much more opinionated about

It was very easy because Highland actually co invested with Spark and, you know, those guys actually really liked each other. And the partner who actually joined from Highland, he sat down and I vividly remember when he invested, he literally let us pitch for thirty minutes and then he pitched for thirty minutes. So we were like, this guy is like something special. Like, I had never seen that in VC before. You know, he showed me through his fund deck. He was like, this is my strategy for the fund.

I wanted to do something for Europe, you know, Highland Europe. You know, he just came back from The US. And it was really about creating that ecosystem here in Europe. So we felt it was such a good connection. So it was actually that that was a very easy one. How big was the Series B? Series B was, I think, roughly 25,000,000, if I remember correctly. At, like, 100? Yeah. A little bit less than that, but 90, a 100. Yeah. To what extent do you think Series B is traction versus story?

It’s all in the numbers, I think, from the Series B and C onwards. If you don’t have the numbers to prove it, it’s very

So from then onward, we basically rinse and repeat for a number of years. And, you know, we’re obviously growing our supply base, we’re growing the demand base, we’re growing to more European countries, we’re doing a little bit in The US. But it was basically rinse and repeat all Why did you do The US? That’s an interesting one. Big one to take hold It was a big one to take hold off, and to be honest, probably we did it prematurely. If I’d go back in time, it’s another lesson for a lot of founders.

I would have not gone as early. I would have done more in Europe. I think we would have had even more growth and more profitability, But we did a little bit in The US. It wasn’t detrimental, so we weren’t overextending ourselves and we were building a good foothold there. All of that leads up to raising a massive round from SoftBank Vision Fund and Temasek in 2019. How does the SoftBank Round come together? A SoftBank Round came together in that, at the time, there was a small team there with Jeff Hausenbold, Ted Fike, Andrew Sloto, some of which have worked at Airbnb.

Airbnb had tried experiences from 2015 onwards. They had failed. They had seen GetYourGuide as being clearly the innovation leader in the space. They were like, This is a big market. We just raised this massive Vision Fund. Let’s put some dollars behind it and make that market a reality. And to be honest, the Vision Fund, in a way, actually did do that. So so with that funding, our market, you know, went on to, like, a completely different stratosphere.

was not with us. I think that group of people, which was doing marketplace investments at the time out of San Francisco, they invested in DoorDash, they invested in GetYourGuide. They were much more like traditional growth equity investors who are very metrics oriented. It was a very deep diligence process. Ultimately, while I did get to meet Masa, he was just one meeting along the road of raising that investment. It was very much a growth equity investment process, so there was nothing crazy about it. Dude, how was meeting Masa?

Very interesting. Was it in London or No, it was in his private home in San Francisco. He had this incredible painting of Napoleon right behind him, which I still vividly remember. This is kind of funny.

Are you nervous?

I was very nervous. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Because he could have just, you know, put his thumb down. We had just worked on this investment for, half a year. And this meeting of like one hour determines whether you get it or not. Right? But Masa was a very friendly person. He’s Japanese. So he’s, in a way, very calm and he’s very gentle. He was very interested actually in the P and L, surprisingly. So he was literally looking at, okay, how do we value this business? How can this be very profitable over time?

So with marketplace investments, I think he’s much more financially oriented than with the deep tech stuff. So he was really going deep there, surprisingly deep. And he’s actually really good at this. So I was surprised because you have these stories of Masa that he’s just this crazy person, but he’s actually a really good financial investor as well. So don’t be kitted by all of the headlines. He knows what he’s doing. And then the second part of the meeting, apart from the financial traction, the KPIs, P and L and all of that, was really about the product vision itself.

And to give him credit, he was already completely onto AI in 2019. So he was like, how is AI going to transform this? Now, how do you think about the UX of the future? Now, how can you build an app that is much more personalized, much more engaging? How can you embed virtual reality in there, you know, for instance, finding the meeting points or, you know, even like being in the Louvre, like, you know, how can that experience transform? So, he was really very visionary and at the same time very

go make it up. How how big was their check? Between SoftBank Vision Fund and Temasek, we raised an aggregate of roughly $450,000,000 at the time. We did take some of that capital to buy out earlier shareholders, so not all of that was primary. Do you think that was the right decision? It’s a lot of money. Do you think you needed that much money? It was the decision that ultimately made GetYourGuide into what it is today because just six months after we raised that money, COVID hit.

So

we would be bankrupt without that round. And so we have that what was the price of that round? I think that

No. Not really, to be honest. What did change was that suddenly I felt like a celebrity. It was like you’re going into rooms, like everyone was trying to please you, and everyone wanted to do business with you. All of, like, you know, the VPs of, like, the Googles and Matters, like, were calling me up, and, you know, all of the VCs in the world wanted to have a meeting and were suddenly speaking of you as as if you were, like, the greatest and, like, smartest person on the planet.

Did you believe the hype? To be honest, I had too little time to really reflect on that because six months later, we were managing the biggest crisis in the history of online travel, so that was such a brief honeymoon period that to me it was very surreal looking back, but I actually did learn the hard way that when you’re down, then none of these people call.

like, like,

in February 2020, we have this BART meeting with SoftBank, Temasek. Those are obviously Asian funds, and they’re already seeing what’s going on in Asia where you have lockdowns and everything. And they were saying, you know, we better build some contingency plans if this actually spreads to Europe and The US. And the naive, like, still very gung ho founders that we were, we said, you know, look, we’ve managed crises before. We’ve had the Barracklan attacks in Paris in 2015, which hit us hard. You know, we we managed to survive and all of that.

We’re gonna manage. Famous last words. It took three weeks from that board meeting to us being at zero revenue. It was literally zero. Like, I was going on the website Three weeks. I think there was, like, maybe 15 bookings a day, down from, like, tens of thousands. There was no one on our website. I looked at Google Analytics. It was just really no one. It was just no traffic. We had 600, 700 employees. We had no revenue.

What do you do?

That’s a really good question. Like, you get in a room with town and go, fuck. I mean, the closest I can describe to the feeling that I had was, like, having a car crash on the highway at, like, a 100 miles an hour just straight on hitting a wall, basically. So I was like You’re almost like my analytics must be broken. For, like, two or three days, I felt like this is surreal. This can’t happen. This can’t happen to me. I did this for more than a decade.

This is just not right. I felt like, no, the world is not right. There’s something wrong in the world right now. But then I quickly turned into a mode that, in retrospect, I described as being the surgeon. So, I tried to put myself outside of the car and the car accident just said, okay, everything is broken, like the car is completely destroyed, the patient needs to survive, I need to help the patient survive. So I put my strategy hat on and thought about, you know, what are the potential scenarios that we have from here, and how am I going to survive, and not only survive, but also thrive after this crisis.

And the good thing was I had, you know, a lot of cash on the bank. The bad thing was I had a lot of investors who basically called me up and said, you have to lay off the entire company immediately to save all of the dollars you have on the balance sheet, and then afterwards, we’ll rebuild. You know, with these different pieces of information, I needed to build a picture of what the right solution was for GetYourGuide at the time, and, you know, Tao, Niels, the CFO, and I, we all huddled in a room for multiple days to work out that crisis plan.

In hindsight, we made all of the right moves at the time, which was number one, not to listen to the investors who wanted to lay off the entire company, but to rather focus on different scenarios of how long this crisis could take and then how we could build a company that is actually prepared for the rebound. Because already in March 2020, we thought that this is a massive crisis, but there’s also a tremendous opportunity in here. We have the cash on the bank.

So if we are the first ones out of the gates afterwards, if we do really well by our suppliers in the interim and we help help them survive as well, if we’re really agile, if we continue to build our product, you know, we could be a much better company actually coming out of this pandemic than going in. And that was really the mindset that we took. That same week, I sent an email to the entire staff, and I told them about something that I had learned a year, two years earlier when I did a tour with my wife, Annika, through Sequoia National Park.

And one of the interesting things about the big Sequoia trees is that they actually grow after wildfires. So when the park is devastated, the biggest trees grow because they have the nutrient rich soil after wildfire and they have full exposure to the sun. And I said, I wanna be that Sequoia after the COVID crisis, crisis, so let’s build that Sequoia now.

So we did a couple of, like, very extraordinary measures. First of all, we came back with that vision and that target picture to our entire organization, and particularly the engineering and product org, which is the majority of our expenses on the people side. And we told them, we would love for you to reduce your salary, but we’ll give you shares as a compensation. So if this actually works out, financially, it will be great for you, but you’ll need to take the short term hit. And what happened was magical.

Our product and engine organization, and even beyond that and into management function, people on average reduced their salaries by more than 30% in exchange for shares. Some people went down to, like, 80% salary reduction in leadership. I kid you not. It was crazy. And with these type of measures, we basically could go very deep into the pandemic and only had to cut marginally. So we only had to ultimately lay off throughout the entire two years, roughly 15 to 20% of the staff, not a single engineer, not a single product person, despite being at zero revenues for more than a year.

Knowing all that you know now, what did you not do that you wish you had done? I think the thing that really helped our plans was that the recovery then after I forgot it was the Delta virus, like, you it was the benign virus, I think, in early twenty twenty two, people were storming back to travel. Right? And suddenly, there was, like, this complete over demand. Did you really see the numbers just go We went from, you know, late twenty twenty one to March 2022. We grew 10x.

It was crazy. And then all of 2022, we already doubled pre pandemic volumes. When did you get back to 2019 levels? Literally, like, in 2022, we’re double 2019 levels.

Wow.

And 2021 was still half 2019 levels. Was that

Yeah. I didn’t expect the rebound to be as

We, thankfully, because all of the measures still had plenty of cash, and we did another thing during the pandemic which actually helped us quite a lot in that we raised some convertible debt. On top, we raised roughly 100,000,000, both from existing and some new investors. So that was kind of like the reserve that we had on the bank. But

Convertible debt basically means that’s a note that converts with your next equity round at a discount to that price. The only thing that was kind of not so great was the moment we came back, the equity markets went down like crazy, right? So, it was this completely weird world where everyone in 2021 was celebrating in tech. It was like the boom year of tech. We were deeply depressed. We were saving the business. We were nowhere. And then in 2022, we had this massive year growing super fast.

Everything was working out, but no VC was available because they were all, like, working on saving their portfolio for most of their companies. It was really doomsday at the time. So, it was a very interesting dynamic. So, we actually held off raising more capital until early twenty twenty three, which was, like, the first round then we raised after COVID.

do think that founders can over raise, particularly in the early days. I told the story of my 2013 race. So I don’t think founders should take too much cash too early, so I often advise against that. But fundamentally, if you have traction and if there is a big market opportunity, and if it’s clear that there will be plenty of competition later down the road, make sure you raise the capital and and make sure that you go fast. The tricky part is to maintain the discipline of raising and then not overspending in your own organization and staying nimble and staying focused.

Right? So you need to do both. You need to stay incredibly focused on building out your core customer segments, your core value proposition, and then you ultimately need to out raise your competition. You

Yes. I do. I’ve seen that time and again. Also, with my personal investments, if you have a Sequoia Capital or an Index or a Spark Capital on your cap table, the reality is that your next round will be so much easier. Would you say they should take them at a discount? I wouldn’t take anyone at a discount. I would actually have a competitive process, and then I would really look at the GP. I think that’s very undervalued because there are many people at these different funds, and I think the GP probably matters more than the fund itself.

While I do think the brand name really does matter, the GP probably even matters more.

never

Exactly. So Alex Finkelstein, the guy who wrote the check from Spark and then also Fargo Mullen of Highland Europe, they were both cofounders of their respective firms. Yeah. They’re never leaving. Which I didn’t consider at the time, but that was genius for us because they are still with those firms today. They’re still crushing it. That’s like a very important consideration, so I would take a discount for that. So for these type of people, I would take discount.

We raise another round. We never touched any of that capital because we broke even at the same time. Wow. Which is great. But, know, I love Is that

Yeah. Totally special. Particularly after the pandemic, we were at scale at that point in time. Fast forward today, we’re now five times the size of pre pandemic and we’re profitable. And it’s a very different company in the sense that suddenly we can invest our own cash flows into innovation, right? We can do all of these great projects, you know, we can do all of this stuff, but it is actually our own cash flow

If I had an idea where I’d say we absolutely have to do this, and we can’t stomach it from our own cash flows, I would go out and raise that capital and do it. But the reality is when you break even and you have that constraint and you start to grow your EBIT, it’s a wonderful constraint in a way that you’re much more disciplined about investing your own cash, actually. And that is an important lesson I wish I had a little bit earlier, being an entrepreneur, because very often we’re like investing and we hope for the best and we don’t cut these projects, but they’re not really working.

And again, we dilute our focus. And the beautiful thing is if you’re a profitable company, I feel it actually forces you to focus a lot more.

then, we only raised an incremental 100,000,000. We still had quite a bit of cash on the balance sheet. Was

No. That was after convertible. So we converted the convertible debt, and we raised some additional capital back then. What price did you do that at? Because it was on top

This is where you get into, you know, the whining of the CEO and a consumer Internet company these days. Like, we all feel that we’re very undervalued compared to a lot of other AI or even SaaS businesses. But the reality is, it is what it is. Like, I do think that at the end of the day, these valuations will expand and sometimes they will contract, and you need to build a really good business. I very much empathize now with Jeff Bezos, who said, you know, willing to be misunderstood.

Right? So I think you need to invest for the long term, and then maybe the valuation will be slightly below where you would personally want it. You know, that’s fine as well because, ultimately, I don’t need to sell any shares. Right? I’m gonna be in this for longer, we’re profitable. We’re investing. We’re growing like crazy. The numbers are amazing. They’re better than they’ve ever been. I’m pretty sure that over time, you know, the valuation will take care of itself. Can I ask, did you sell secondaries?

You mentioned that selling shares. I did sell secondaries, thankfully, in 2019 as part of the SoftBank round, which actually was very helpful. I was very averse against selling secondaries before that, and I had a very hard time. Why were you averse against it before? Because I felt I wanted to be all in. I felt like, you know, that would show that I’m not 100% committed to the company anymore, and I was really wrestling with myself whether I should be selling or not. You know, I told you, like, you know, had even debt from my parents and, you know, Please tell me you paid them back.

Family and friends. I offered. They never wanted to. And with the SoftBank Round, I said, you know, now finally I can pay you back, but my mom said, you know, this is your inheritance. Go be happy. Don’t worry. Like, we we love you. Look, I’m very happy ultimately that I did because that gave me another level of calm in the pandemic because I How much do you think is a reasonable amount to take off? A couple million bucks is probably the right thing if you’re a mature company.

I don’t think that you should be taking too much off the table. So it shouldn’t be enough so that you retire forever, never need to work again. I think that’s not the right amount. Do you think 10,000,000 is too much?

should not. I was like, well, okay. It’s You should not get into that lifestyle. Right? So so the way I mean, like, also, like, for me, right, I put that money into MSCI World, right, so I haven’t touched it, right? So, like, you shouldn’t change your lifestyle. Think that’s the most important part.

Okay. Let me rephrase. All of these things, totally fair, and I do that as well. You should not lift the lifestyle of all of your paper wealth being liquid. And I think that’s what a lot of people do. They even take loans against, you know, their paper and all of that. So don’t do that. Don’t do the private jet. Don’t go to, like, the most expensive resorts. Like, don’t hang out with all of the crowd, you know, that has that level of wealth, and don’t delude yourself.

That’s what I’m saying. Did you ever find that tempting?

Yeah, I don’t think you’ll be successful, if you will, if you look at the most successful founders in Europe. They are super smart. They’ve been working on their companies for a long period of time. They don’t get eaten up by their success and by their wealth. In fact, they reinvest a lot of this into the startup ecosystem. I don’t think that hanging out with that type of crowd or living in that world brings you joy and fulfillment. Like, what brings me joy and fulfillment personally is seeing the next founder succeed.

I was, you know, just literally, like, you know, with some pocket cash and some advisory shares in the seed round of TravelPerk, which was a big success. So, Avi Meir, you know, is an Love amazing him. Fantastic. Amazing CEO. I was early on in Trade Republic, which is amazing success, and, you know, next to Revolut is probably one of the best ones. And there are, like, lots of smaller SaaS companies that are growing really fast. Love that. Did you have a strategy going into angel investing?

No. It’s the strategy of investing behind great people and business models that I really enjoy and also spaces where I think I want to learn. So it wasn’t a consistent check size? No. It was somewhere between 500 k to 150

Very much so. Before investing, I thought there was just one way to be successful, and that was the way how we build GetYourGuide because I saw how that worked, and I had such strong beliefs, and I’m such an opinionated CEO, and I was so opinionated and deliberate about building our culture and all of that. Even the operating model and the strategy, I felt there was just one way to do it. And then, for instance, take a Trade Republic, which is a very successful fintech company, probably one of the most underrated companies in Europe.

You know, they’re absolutely crushing it. And the founder is great, but in many ways, what he’s built in terms of culture, in terms of operating model, is a 180 degrees different to what I’ve built. I would not make the same decisions at all in many instances, but he’s very, very successful. Masa, what decision did he make that you would not have made the same as? He’s centralizing all of product under him. You know, basically, every product review runs through him. You know, he has a culture that is much, much harder hustling than we are, and maybe to a degree, you might call You have a worry that you’re soft.

A little less empathetic. So so what I learned my take on this is different markets deserve different cultures. So we’re in the business of selling experiences. We’re in the business of hospitality. We’re in the in the business of unlocking unforgettable memories for our customers. The way how we have to build our cultural DNA, by its nature, has to be different. It needs to be a little bit softer than a Revolut because we’re just serving a different type of customer. And also the employees that will join us will have very different motivations and personal needs than people working at a fintech company or people working at a SaaS company.

So it’s really how can you build a culture for your market and for your customer base.

This is a very tough question because any founder who’s built a successful company will remember that they did work seven days a week, right? So it does happen. I don’t know of any founder personally, none of the ones that I’ve backed, and certainly not me personally, who have not been absolutely obsessed and have not worked insane working hours. At the same point in time, I think the danger with the general statements is it is not always the same throughout the entire journey, and clearly, I would not expect today people to work seven days a week at GetYourGuide, and I don’t work seven days a week anymore.

In fact, there comes a time when working too much can actually destroy your startup as well. Because after a time, it is actually much more about sustainable growth and sustainable working hours at very high intensity at scale. So today, you know, I’m much more focused If on you

I don’t know.

I don’t know the exact routines of the different CEOs. I think, as a CEO, you need to see yourself as a system, ultimately, and you need to build up your own capabilities system, and you need to understand what you’re uniquely qualified to do and what you can do different than anyone else in the organization. And that’s particularly true for a founder CEO with all of that history and that context. So for me, what that means is I have a strong spike in strategy. I think I’ve built a really successful business because I’ve made the right bets, and my intuition is very good.

That means for me personally, I need to take some time off to actually brainstorm, talk to people, understand where we’re at, review the numbers, review the metrics, and refine the strategy and bring that back to the company because that’s my unique position and my unique role. And I structure my day exactly like that. There are other people, you know, I’d say Daniel Eck, for instance, is probably one of the world’s best people at, like, product. For him, it’s really a lot about introspection and understanding what product types that he likes to build.

And, you he actually, I think, said that he doesn’t have anything on his agenda all day long. So I think there are just, like, different ways of doing it. Any founder is gonna be in the business anyways all the time. If you’re not thinking about your business all the time, you’re not doing something that you love, and then you won’t be successful anyway. So any founder thinks about it all the time.

Yeah. And that’s, I think, the point where we need to be careful with ourselves, and we need to make sure that we have a sustainable life. Because don’t become you, Harry. And, no, look, I think, ultimately, life is long. And I do think, you know, when I’m 60, 70, I wanna look back at my life, and I want to make sure that I’ve spent the time in the right way. And that means I will want to have built a very big business. But my lesson has also been you don’t build that in a year or two, you build that in decades.

Right? And you need to sustain over decades. You need to sustain that pressure. You need to have that high level of energy over decades. Right? How how do you do that? That’s like a question I ask myself quite a lot. I’ve completely changed my own lifestyle because of that. You know, I do a lot more sports. You know, I do spend more deliberate time with my family and my kids, for instance, because that actually helps me sustain. That is the antidote.

Jeff Bezos. He’s been one of the most inspirational leaders for me in how I built the company, I think, for most people in marketplaces. I think just his level of rigor and thinking about the customer and about building the business would be amazing to have on the board.

engineers or less engineers in five years’ time? We’ll have more, but a lot less than we thought we would add. So in other words, we’ll gradually grow, but I think the productivity gains from these engineers will be massive.

has AI most impacted GetYourGuide today? On the supply side. The supply side is completely transformed. It used to take, I think, days to upload a product because experiences are so complex. You know, you need to add a description and photos and, like, take 100 boxes in the meeting point and the tour itinerary, etcetera, and now you just paste in a URL or, you know, you upload a bunch of files and done. It’s huge. And and then the pricing and availability management and, like, the AI insights on, you know, how you can improve your experience, I mean, of that is pure magic.

What supply do you still not have that you would love to have? I would love to go deeper into what we announced this year is shows and events. Think that’s actually massively important for tourists. So when I come here to London, wanna see Arsenal in London, I wanna see Chelsea, etcetera, and we’re just dipping our toes into that market. There’s tremendous interest also from these clubs, from these shit show going into the ticketing market.

We’re not going into the core ticketing market. We’re going into the touristic part of the ticketing market. It’s a very different market, much higher margin, people love to spend on hospitality tickets. That’s something that the clubs also love because they get the true fans, they get to build their brand internationally, and at the same point in time, those are people that spend much more when they come to the games or the shows, etcetera. So it’s a different part of the market that I think is very interesting.

It’s going to grow a lot over the next couple of years. How have you most changed as a CEO when you look back over the last, what is it, fifteen years? Yeah. I’ve become a lot more humble. I do know my deficiencies, and I think the things that I get wrong a lot more. I really, you know, was very, very self confident when I started the company, which, you know, really helped us survive and I think grow over the first five years. Today, I’m still very self confident, but I also understand much more how I need to be complimented.

Where did your confidence hurt you? Why did it help you? I think it helped me in just having the sheer stamina and energy to drive the company forward time and again and not take failure as as an option. I think it hurt me and that I don’t think I was as inclusive as I could have been, and I think that has hurt innovation to a certain degree at times.

Yeah. Exactly. Don’t do that. Don’t don’t be too hard on yourself. You you will not be a perfect parent, and that’s fine. And you also won’t be a perfect CEO, and that’s also fine. I think find your balance. I think balance is the most important thing when you’re a parent and you’re growing a tech company and you have that demand on you. So really, like, make sure that you find time for both. At the end of the day, when we’re 60, 70, 80, I mean, GetYourGuide will be a very important part of my life, and I would want to make sure that that is as successful as possible.

But at the same point in time, I think my kids will mean more than anything else in the world.

At the highest level, if Johannes had a massive impact on creating more human connection, I think, and that’s across GetYourGuide and the product we sell, but then also the topic of Europe and recreating the future of Europe, I think, if I would put that under