I would have not raised as big of a Series A. Looking back, I think it was too much dilution.
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Now, today we feature one of the most incredible startup stories from Europe.
In the first two years of Get Your Guide Existing, they did just five bookings.
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The show today has so many great stories, including how Johannes Reck, the co-founder and CEO joining us, got a 400 million check from SoftBank, and Masa Sun and the Napoleon portrait behind Masa that was present throughout the whole meeting.
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You have now arrived at your destination.
Johannes, dude, it is so good to make this happen.
I have been a fan and follower from afar for a long time.
So thank you for joining me, man.
Thank you for being here.
I've got a company now, a great company that's raising in Series B in Europe.
And they've just gone to the US from Europe.
And they've just raised a little bit and have meetings in Europe.
And now they're out in the US raising.
And they're like God.
The difference is just insane in terms of Series B investors and how they think and how they operate.
Would you say that you had a vastly different experience between European and US investors?
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 TalkSpark Capital, our Series A lead, the deal after Get Your Guide was Oculus Rift, right?
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 if Get Your Guard returns it 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 the same 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.
I've heard Peter Thiel and others say that, but I think that's BS, to be honest.
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, when you raise funding, the addressable market and 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 NVCs 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 want to hire, let's say, the next chief product officer at Get Your Guide, 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 billion plus valuation.
That just doesn't exist to build the structures and the processes and everything to do that.
Do you think Trump and a less stable America makes it easier for us to bring talent to Europe?
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.
You know, we spent 50 billion a year in VC in Europe.
The US is north of 200 billion.
Why do we have that gap?
Doesn't make any sense.
I mean just to give you another number.
Like Germany subsidizes its retirement system every year with 100 billion right.
But we have 7 billion invested in VC, 100 billion subsidies in retirement system.
That doesn't make any sense.
That's not the future.
I would just push back on that and say we have way too much money in European venture.
We have so much money that your execs are getting emails from VCs encouraging them to leave.
Get your guidance.
Start companies where execs are saying hey, I'm not leaving.
This is a weird VC rumor that I'm leaving.
I disagree with you, Harry.
So I agree on the seed and Series A and 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 Get Your Guide stage and our last couple of rounds, we had to go around the world.
And it is harder to raise as a European company.
And that's where the big rounds happen.
I get you.
So you're saying kind of CDE.
CDE, pre-IPO, and then even public.
I mean, how can a German company go public in Europe?
It's impossible.
And if we go public, it's only with American funds.
Well, you're not going to list in Europe.
We haven't decided that, but the reality is, regardless of where we list.
I'm sorry, I'm not being a journalist, but how could you?
It's very difficult because we don't have the pools of capital here.
That's the problem.
And 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, Ron.
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.
So I agree with you that like on growth, I totally agree with you there and get you there.
Okay.
So more money at growth for companies in Europe.
Next 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 in 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?
And this is the best time ever because they're all going, God, the US is a shit show.
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 going to work, right?
So we got to 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 want to live here.
They want to live in London, Berlin, Munich, like you name it.
We're a very livable continent.
People love to be here.
So let's make sure that they come.
That's such an interesting one.
Okay, so you do like tax incentives for great talented people, whatever that is.
By the way, I recommended that in Germany and got shot 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... Well, it's a progressive tax system then.
That's not egalitarian.
Yeah, don't ask me.
The problem though, if you look even at the old industry, so Volkswagen Mercedes, et cetera 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 Get Your Guide, we 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 we opted to not hire Germans.
It was really because that's the only candidates that are available.
We relocate massive amounts of people from India, Northern Africa, the United States and then obviously, in the European Union.
Is there anything else you'd do to attract great talent?
I love that in terms of the tax incentive for software engineers.
Anything else that you'd do?
It sounds very sad, but actually making it easy, removing the red tape 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, 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.
This guy makes a lot of money.
It 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 in San 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 is 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.
I mean, it's something that we do.
I'm so sorry.
Why the AFD has kind of been diminished slash reduced now?
No, it's stronger than ever.
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 these very nationalistic things in Europe, then ultimately we'll detract the people that we really desperately need right now.
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 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.
We're able to reinvest in energy and innovation and technology the way that we need to, fast enough to, and fundamentally, our governments are totally ill-equipped, 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 But my question to you is, would you ever go into politics?
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.
Post that, would you ever?
Ask me then.
And actually, we don't have the time.
China and the US are accelerating away from us faster than ever before.
So what I do is I support a lot.
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 that 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.
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.
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, but 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.
And, at the same point in time, I think we need to build up the empathy from the older generation, which is the biggest voting bloc right.
They have the power to change things to ensure that we have again opportunity for the young generation in Europe.
Do you not think we're going to see the concentration of capital towards few people and wealth inequality like never before?
We're in these kind of rarefied as we both came from the same conference where everyone's loaded and everyone at the top is just getting so much richer and that will get smaller and smaller.
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.
Project Europe.
Well done.
Project Europe.
I want to go back to the beginning, because I hear that Get Your Guide is actually the result of great friendship.
It's you and Tao coming up with an idea from university together.
Can you just take me back to you and Tao sitting in a room together deciding you're going to start a company together?
Yeah, totally.
So this is actually 2007, 2008.
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 I was trying to do stuff then in my hotel room.
I logged on the internet.
I was going on Google trying to find things to do, going to the Beijing Wallet, doing something with the day.
And I couldn't find anything.
I was stuck in the hotel room.
And the next day, Tao shows up as the guide, literally.
And he's like, hey, Johannes, going to take you out.
I'll show you Beijing.
We'll go to the Beijing wall, the Great Wall.
We have Beijing dark in the Hutong.
So it was like a really special day.
And from that epiphany really, of having seen the city through the eyes of a local, someone who speaks the language, we went back to Switzerland, to ETH, and said we have to build a website.
We have to build a community for people so they are able to do that.
And we did that.
And the prequel to Get Your Guide was like we were building a travel community for everyone to be a guide.
No one actually used that.
I think we had 100 guides.
Because that's what I read.
I read that you pivoted three times before you found real product market fit.
Totally.
It was terrible.
So what was the first iteration?
First iteration was literally a peer-to-peer websites for guides.
Small untold story is we also considered doing something like couch surfing at the time homes and we thought no one is going to stay at someone else's home, so discarding that idea.
Someone else in San Francisco picked that up very successfully.
And then we went to guides and we were like you know, guiding is such an important thing in travel, so can't we build a community of guides?
But we were thinking this 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 what we realized through that prototype was that there was this gigantic market out there for experience 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 2009, 2010.
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.
In those two years, what are you doing?
And when you have three to five bookings and three as your mother, what are you doing?
Completing our degrees.
So we were still at uni at the time.
So we're still at uni living, honestly, off very little money at the time.
But the great thing about it was we could fail.
There was no problem in failing.
Even more so, it was just a lot of fun.
We didn't do that really to build a company even at the time.
It was more like, this is a great space.
We want to build a really successful web product.
Facebook was going viral at the time.
So those were the days of Web 2.0.
And we're really working at night, to be honest.
We were studying throughout the day, and then at night we'd do this.
There's a common mantra that if you want to win, you've got to go all in.
You've got to go all in.
Respectfully, you kind of had the nice landing pad of being at university.
You were working alongside it.
You were doing both at the same time.
You didn't leave university to do Get Your Guide.
In a similar way, I was at law school when I started the show.
It wasn't actually that risky.
If the show didn't work, I'd just carry on being a lawyer.
Luckily, the show worked and so I could drop out.
But like, my question to you is do you think you have to be all in or can you do the?
No, I'm going to build it alongside university and see what works.
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 and 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 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 like another year after university.
So, you know, can you please put a mortgage on your house and like 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.
What gave you the conviction?
Respectfully, you had two years of it not working.
Where did you get the conviction to say hey parents, remortgage the house, fund me, it's going to work?
So 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, is a race car driver going to hit the wall?
So stay focused on the road.
And I think that's very much what it felt like at the time.
We were even considering failing.
For me, failure was non-optional.
It was like, that's not a valid option.
We will stay the course.
We'll win this.
I love that.
And Nico is a fantastic dude in France.
I'm pleased to hear you dropped some wisdom from him.
I do want to go back to that.
So then we said to the parents, hey, you know what?
Fund me for another year.
This is going to work.
What happens then?
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 remember I traveled to Salzburg and signed up the Hop On, Hop Off bus twice.
It was very random.
There was like no crm or anything like that right, so it's 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 booking started to take in, And then we had more and more of these types of experiences.
The revenue just came and we're growing and growing.
I think we did something like half a million then in the first year in 2010 in net revenues or 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's very tough early years.
Take me to that.
So we're starting to see actually relatively good early numbers and we're profitable enough.
At that point, you must be getting inbound from VCs, no?
No, this is 2010, 2011.
It was basically no venture capital scene whatsoever in Europe.
And the biggest problem was that we didn't have a US original that we were a copy of.
I remember I was talking to Oliver Samber 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.
He looks at me, he's like, so what's the equivalent here?
In the US, you're the copy of what exactly?
I was like, there is no exact copy.
We're trying something new here.
Experiences, marketplaces don't really exist right now, but I believe it's the future of travel.
And he was like, so do you want to join Rocket Internet or do you want to work on your own startup?
And I was like, I'm going to work on my own startup.
And he was like, okay, thank you very much.
See ya.
And this is really the spirit of the time.
It's very hard to recollect because things are so different today, but we couldn't raise funding.
Okay, so there's not the VC ecosystem that exists.
We're going through this seasonality where suddenly actually, oh shit, we're going bankrupt twice every year.
When do we start to raise money?
When was your first VC meeting?
So first VC funding was from Brent Hoberman who invested, like you know, a small seed check alongside with an outfit called ProFounders, here out of London, Sean Seaton Rogers, exactly.
And that was actually really weird because I got a ticket you know, sponsor ticket, I think through some like lottery or something to go to low web, 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, 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.
That's probably like 2011, 2012.
I had to wait for four hours to get like a 10 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 the experiences marketplace.
You know, this is the next biggest thing in travel.
It's the last big green field.
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 going to make that mistake twice.
I'm going to invest in you.
That was the moment really we got our first funding and the rest from there is history.
How much did you raise then?
It was a million bucks.
A million bucks at what price?
It was, I think, at like a five or six million pre-money.
So you eat it very well.
Wow.
A million at five or six.
Okay, fantastic.
But that wasn't the first VC meeting.
I heard that you got rejected a hundred times.
We're 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 going to give you funding.
And I said, no, we're very happy in Europe.
Like we don't want to move to the U.S.
What advice do you have to founders who are on the 50th meeting with VCs and it just doesn't seem to be hitting?
It does not seem to be resonating.
To what extent are you like, go back to the drawing board.
It's your story.
You're not resonating versus it's just a game of numbers.
Keep going.
The constant is you have to have tremendous tenacity and you will have to pitch a hundred times and it will only work once, maybe.
So we raise this million at whatever, five or six or whatever the price was.
What happens then?
That's our first bit of money.
Where do we go and double down and how does that change?
We continued with our bootstrapping mode, but with a little bit more money and 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 a very keen interest in Get Your Guide.
And he was like, no, this is interesting.
There's something there.
And then he led the A round in 2013.
And that was really the moment that Get Your Guide was transformed.
Where was the business at that point?
Business was doing somewhere around 2 million net revenue at that point and growing, I think, 2x to 3x year over year.
Got you.
And your blended take is like 10, 20%?
25%.
25%.
So it's kind of doing 8 million in bookings.
Yeah.
And he does the Series A. What's the Series A?
Series A at the time was actually very big for European standards.
At the time, somewhere around 14 million.
Series A, I think like 30, 35 million pre-money.
Wow.
Can I ask you, that's quite a lot of dilution.
How do you think about and advise founders on dilution today?
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 there's also 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, with the other investors and also the share of early stage investors just gets too large, which might be a problem later down the road.
We fortunately at Get Your Guide got all of that fixed over the years, but I do think at the time it was a little bit too much.
I'm going to get in shit for this.
Do you think founder re-ups are kind of fair?
I mean it in the nicest way.
As you said that, with hindsight, you would have not raised as much and not diluted as much.
It's like me as an investor going, oh, my bad.
I paid too much.
I want a better price now with three years of data down the line and then me wanting a better price.
Well, no, I agreed to that.
And that's the deal.
Totally.
I don't think that you should walk back and you cannot correct a mistake.
I'm just seeing so many founder re-up packages now and my investors are getting screwed.
And it's like, why are we getting screwed?
Do you know what I mean?
Totally.
No look, I think the founder incentives that you see, first and foremost, should happen after a longer period of time, right?
So, 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 it's like much, much later.
Okay.
So Finkelstein leads the A and that's a US fund leading a European company.
That's a big moment.
How does that change the company?
Completely changed our life because 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?
100%.
I think the only equivalent at much greater scale happened in 2019, when we raised from SoftBank Vision Fund like that massive round.
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 was very present on the startup radar and in the scene.
We could hire 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.
What were the biggest mistakes that you made in that period?
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 in the day to day.
That's interesting.
What did VCs want you to do, and how did that compare to what you would have done if you'd followed your gut?
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 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 we 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 a year or so after raising that A round, I needed to lay off 30 of the company and completely rejuggle.
Get Your Guide 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 was probably one of the most successful European founders of all time, called Case Colon.
Amazing.
He called me up one Friday night.
I was watching Netflix with my wife.
We were sitting there and he called me up and he said, here's Case Colon.
And I obviously knew him because he was the founder and CEO of Booking.com.
And he said, 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 giving me every cohort and every supplier.
And it was just really going deep on the first call and by the end of it it was, like you know, one and a half hours and he said this is interesting, i'm going to be in berlin tomorrow morning 9am at your office.
This is saturday morning right, and next morning i 9am.
I'm there.
So the case 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, asked 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 going to come on board, like I'm joining a board of directors and I'm going to 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 the 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.
And I've told Case two.
Three years later, when the company was successful, I probably learned more from you than from my dad.
When we look at those bad hires, what do you wish you'd known then?
That you know now about what makes a good hire and what you did wrong there.
I think you need fundamentally different people for a series A to series C D stage company than for a pre-IPO or 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 Get Your Guy 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.
You know managing multiple teams, managing organizations, doing roadmaps, and you know 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 at that stage of your life, those are not the same type of skill set.
So it's really about can you find these people who are strong, culture fits and who are right for your company at that point in time?
What are some of the other big mistakes?
Hiring the wrong type of people, maybe listening to the board too much, anything else?
Not 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 want to 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, you know, many, many years.
And you know he said you know on these type of innovation projects.
You know 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 going to be mediocre at all of them.
I totally agree with that.
I often see it with kind of founders who want to go into enterprise too early.
And I'm like, SMB is so much larger than you think.
Fuck HubSpot did it for 15 years.
You can too.
So I totally agree with you there.
Okay.
So we have those three learnings.
What happens then?
We've got 14 million.
That's probably like eight now.
We've laid off 30%.
We're refocusing.
Pressure's on because now you got to perform.
Absolutely.
And we did 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 our 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 I think six to 12 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.
Spark Capital was so impressed by us going through that rollercoaster of 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 going to do this.
We're not going to do that.
We'll focus on this.
This is my opinion.
This is where I stand.
Suddenly the VCs were like, yeah, we follow you.
You're right.
Instead of just saying, oh, this is a great idea.
We're going to do it.
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 what we were doing.
Series B is often said to be a very hard round.
You need to have a very clear proven model and it's kind of edging into the scale capital phase.
When you think about the Series B and getting Hyland.
How many meetings did it take to get the Series B together?
It was very easy because Hyland actually co-invested with Spark and those guys actually really liked each other.
And the partner who actually joined, from Hyland Fogel Mullen.
He sat down and I vividly remember when he invested.
He literally let us pitch for 30 minutes and then he pitched for 30 minutes.
So we were like, this guy is something special.
I had never seen that in VC before.
He showed me through his fund deck.
He was like, this is my strategy for the fund.
I wanted to do something for Europe, Highland Europe.
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 was a very easy one.
How big was the series being?
Series B was, I think, roughly 25 million, if I remember correctly.
Added, like, 100?
Yeah, a little bit less than that, but 90, 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 hard to raise that round.
So we have that, and we're now, like, totally looking great again.
We've got 25 million, we've got Hyland, we've got Spark.
The numbers are good.
Strategy's perfect or better.
What happens then?
We continue to just nail European cities.
How do you think about going broad versus deep?
Talk to me about that.
So from then onward, we basically rinse and repeat for a number of years.
And 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.
Why did you do the US?
That's an interesting one.
Big one to take hold of.
It was a big one to take hold of.
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 Tim Marcek 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 Feig, Andrew Sloto, some of which have worked at Airbnb.
Airbnb had tried experiences from 2015 onwards.
They had failed.
They had seen Get Your Guide 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 with that funding, our market, you know, went on to like a completely different stratosphere.
How did those meetings go?
People often talk about SoftBank where it's like 500 million in 30 minutes.
Was that how it went?
What was the experience like?
It 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 Get Your Guide.
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?
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, of course, because he could have just put his thumb down.
We had just worked on this investment for half a year.
This meeting of like one hour determines whether you get it or not.
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&L, surprisingly.
So he was literally looking at, okay, how do we value this business?
How can this be very profitable over time?
With marketplace investments.
I think he's much more financially oriented than with the deep tech stuff.
He's really going deep there, surprisingly deep.
He's actually really good at this.
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.
Don't be kidded 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 and PL, 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?
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, you know, 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 is really very visionary and at the same time, very grounded in the financials, both of that.
Wow, that's amazing.
Okay, and so you have this and you have that second half of the meeting.
What happens then?
You leave and you get a call from Jeff saying, hey, he liked you?
Pretty much.
We liked this.
Let's go make an app.
How big was that check?
Between SoftBank Vision Fund and Tim Mastek, we raised an aggregate of roughly 450 million 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 get your guide into what it is today, because just six months after we raised that money coveted so we would be bankrupt without that round, and so we have that.
What was the price of that round?
I think that was, at the time 15, 16 billion.
Did you feel the weight of that at that point?
15, 16?
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 was 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.
Okay, so six months go by, we have this honeymoon period, and then COVID happens.
Take me to that, the internal discussions there around how bad is this going to be?
And then how it transformed.
So in February 2020, we have this board 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.
You know if this actually spreads to Europe and the US.
And you know the naive, like you know, still very gung-ho founders that we were.
We said you know look, we've managed crises before.
We've had the Bataclan attacks in Paris in 2015, which hit us hard.
You know, we managed to survive and all of that.
We're going to manage.
Famous last words.
It took three weeks from that board meeting to us being at zero revenue, 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.
You get in a room with Tao and go, fuck.
The closest I can describe to the feeling that I had was having a car crash on the highway at 100 miles an hour, just straight on hitting a wall, basically.
You're almost like, my analytics must be broken.
For 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 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.
With these different pieces of information, I needed to build a picture of what the right solution was for GetYourGuide at the time.
And 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 them survive as well, if we're really agile, if we continue to build our product, 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 want to be that Sequoia after the COVID crisis.
So let's build that Sequoia now.
So where did you invest in that time that allowed you to come out stronger post-fire?
So we did a couple of 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 angel organization, and even beyond that, into management function.
People, on average, reduce 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, was the delta virus, like it was the benign virus, i think.
In early 2022, 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 2021 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 doubled 2019 levels.
Wow.
And 2021 was still half 2019 levels.
Was that quicker and more than you thought?
Yeah.
I didn't expect the rebound to be as forceful and as quick, but I did expect it to happen.
Can I ask, in mid 2022, when everything's starting to come back and oh, thank God, the world, it looks better.
How much cash do you have then?
We thankfully, because of 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 million, both from existing and some new investors.
So that was kind of like the reserve that we had on the bank.
For people that don't know, what's convertible debt?
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.
You know, 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 like 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 2023, which was like the first round.
Then we raised after COVID.
Can I ask, just before we move to that, do you advise founders then always take the money if it's on the table.
Yeah, you could look at your soft bank around and go, wow, it's ridiculous, crazy amount of money.
But no, actually it wasn't.
And it turned out to be incredibly prescient.
If it's there, take it or not.
I do think that founders can over-raise, particularly in the early days.
I told the story of my 2013 raise.
So I don't think founders should take too much cash to 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 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 need to do both at the same time.
You mentioned also earlier and I forgot to ask it to you you mentioned US VCs coming in, Spark in particular.
Do you think that brand name VCs are incredibly important for signaling?
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 you know there are many people at these different funds and I think the GP probably matters more than the fund itself.
Well, you know, I do think the brand name really does matter.
The GP probably even matters more.
You know what no one considers is that is this GP going to be here in 10 years?
Exactly.
And I promise you no GPs will be there in 10 years.
I promise you they will not.
95% will not be there in 10 years.
That's why most VCs are not rich actually.
It's because they're not there long enough for the carry to hit.
That's why you go with people who founded the firm because they're fucking stuck.
They're never leaving.
Exactly.
So Alex Finkelstein, the guy who wrote the check from Spark, and then also Fargo Mullen of Highland Europe they were both co-founders of their respective firms.
Yeah, they're never leaving.
Which I didn't consider at the time.
But there was genius for us, because they're still with those firms today.
They're still, you know, 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 a discount.
I've seen so many recently where people have led rounds at firms.
They go to another firm.
And suddenly, even if you're doing okay, you're not doing badly.
No one in that firm wants to do you because you're just orphaned.
It's the most dangerous thing.
Okay, so we have that.
World comes back.
We're like, oh, thank God.
We're now double pre-pandemic levels.
2023, then we raise another round?
We raise another round.
We never touched any of that capital because we broke even at the same time.
Wow.
Which is great.
Was that a special moment?
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.
We can do all of these great projects, we can do all of this stuff, but it is actually our own cash flow.
Is your cash flow enough to invest in innovation to the extent that you'd like?
Yes, today it is.
So if I were to ask you the question, if you had unlimited cash, what would you do?
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 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.
That's super interesting.
I can absolutely see that.
And so 2023?
Then we do go out and raise more, though how does that go And how much did we raise then?
Back then, we only raised an incremental 100 million.
We still had quite a bit of cash on the balance sheet.
Was this the convertible debt?
No, that was after the 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 of the one and a half billion from SoftBank.
So we raised at an up round compared to that.
Were you pleased with that price?
You've done so much better as a business, but the price is probably quite high from 2021.
It's a tough one to kind of match.
This is where you get into the whining of the CEO in a consumer internet company these days.
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.
I do think that, at the end of the day know, these valuations um, you know, 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.
No, that's fine as well, because ultimately, i don't need to sell any shares, right?
I'm going to be in this for longer.
And 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 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.
I told you, I had even debt from my parents.
Please tell me you paid them back.
Family and friends.
I offered.
They never wanted to.
And with the soft bang around, I said, you know, finally, I can pay you back.
But my mom said, you know, this is your inheritance.
Be happy.
Don't worry.
Like, we love you.
Look, I'm very happy ultimately that I did because that gave me another level of calm in the pandemic.
How much do you think?
Think it's 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 million is too much?
Probably on the upper end.
Yeah, i had a founder on the show the other day and they're like why would you bother, unless it's like 30 or 40 million?
You can't live life without 30 or 40 million.
And i was like oh, but that's the point, like you should not.
I was like oh, okay.
You should not get into that lifestyle, right?
So the way, I mean, like, also, like, for me, right, I put that money into MSCI World, right?
So, like, haven't touched it, right?
So, like, you shouldn't change your lifestyle.
I think that's the most important part.
Do you not think you should?
And what I mean by that is I might do change your lifestyle, do up level.
Being blunt now, I have the best food, which I never had, so I'm much more healthy.
I have the best gym, so I'm much healthier.
I have a PT.
I changed my lifestyle phenomenally, and my performance has gone up 2x.
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?
We're both in this world where it's, No, it's not my thing.
Not your thing?
No.
What do you advise young founders who are approaching that?
You invest as well.
And you see some founders where you can almost see them getting sucked into the vortex of tech power and influence and money.
And you're like, oh, that's going to lead you badly.
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.
Reinvest in success, seeing the next founder succeed.
You angel invest now today, correct?
Yes, I do quite a bit.
Okay.
How many angel investments have you done?
30, 40.
30, 40.
What's the best one?
I was, you know, just literally, like you know, with some pocket cash and some advisory shares in the seed round of Travel Perk, which was a big success.
So Avi Meyer, you know, is an amazing.
Love 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 then, 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 500K to 150K, somewhere 200K, somewhere there.
Got you.
How has investing changed how you think about operating?
Seeing 30 40 companies grow, build the founders within them.
How has seeing that as an investor changed how you think about operating?
Very much so.
Before investing, I thought there was just one way to be successful and that was the way how we built.
Get Your Guide, 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 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.
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 ever worry that you're soft, a little less empathetic.
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 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.
I posted the other day, if you want to win today, in other words, be 001 successful, you have to work seven days a week.
Silicon Valley has turned up the intensity and that is the new reality.
Do you agree with me?
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 Get Your Guide.
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 on If we were to push back in the nicest way.
You see, Jensen.
Jensen does not take a day off.
Very openly admits it.
When you look at the greatest founders, they still don't.
And we talk about sustainability.
I don't know.
I'm not arguing with you.
I'm more just like ideating because I totally... First five years, 100%.
There's just no debate, I don't think.
But when you build infrastructure you have the ability to be a little bit more.
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 and your strengths as part of that 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 Ek, 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 he likes to build.
And No, he actually, I think, said that he doesn't have anything on his agenda all day long.
So I think they're just like different ways of doing it.
Any founder is going to 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.
Do you think we have too many tourists?
I think there are a lot of people who think that being a founder is sexy.
There's so much VC money that they get funded and they kind of can start the life.
And so you don't get it.
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 lifestyle.
We don't become you.
And no, look, I think ultimately life is long.
And I do think you know, when I'm 60 70, I want to 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 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.
Listen, I want to do a quick fire on.
I love this.
So I say a short statement.
You give me your immediate thoughts.
Does that sound OK?
Absolutely.
So you can add anyone to your board that you don't have.
Who would you add?
Jeff Bezos.
He's been one of the most inspirational leaders for me and 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.
Will you have more 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.
Where has AI most impacted Get Your Guide 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 need to add a description and photos and take a hundred boxes at the meeting point and the tour itinerary et cetera, and now you just paste it in a URL or you upload a bunch of files and done.
It's huge.
And then the pricing and availability management and the AI insights on how you can improve your experience.
I mean, all 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.
I think that's actually massively important for tourists.
So when I come here to London, I want to see Arsenal London.
I want to see Chelsea, etc.
And we're just dipping our toes into that market.
There's tremendous interest also from these clubs, from these events.
Is that not a shit show going into the ticketing market?
It's such mafia.
Yeah.
We're not going into the core ticketing market.
We're going into the touristic part of the ticketing market.
Very different markets, 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, etc.
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...
15 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 complemented.
Where did your confidence hurt you?
Where 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 an option.
I think it hurt me in 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.
My brother just had a baby.
What's your biggest advice to a new parent on being a killer at work and also smashing parenting?
Yeah, exactly.
Don't do that.
Don't be too hard on yourself.
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 make sure that you find time for both.
At the end of the day, when we're 60 70 80, I mean, Get Your Guide will be a very important part of my life.
And I 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.
Is Get Your Guide your last job?
I think it will be very hard to have a job after that.
Final one.
What do you most want to be remembered for?
Like when people say about Johannes and the impact you had, what do you most want to be remembered for?
At the highest level, if Johannes had a massive impact on creating more human connection.
I think and that's across Get Your Guide 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 one theme, it is creating human connection.
Dude, this has been such a joy.
As I said, I'm a European.
I have heard so many wonderful things about you for so many years.
This was such a joy to do.
What an incredible story.
Thank you for coming on the show, man.
Thank you so much, Harry.
I mean, what an incredible journey.
The first two years, just five bookings, now $35,000 per day and a $2 billion valuation.
What an incredible story.
Huge thank you to Johannes for giving up the time today.
And if you want to watch the video, you can find it on YouTube by searching for 20VC.
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