Viator: Rod Cuthbert

Clicking a button to book vacation tours might feel normal today, but Rod Cuthbert helped create that future through his company, Viator. Founded in the early days of the internet boom, Viator emerged almost by accident from a failed partnership with another company. As online booking grew, Rod correctly predicted that travel agents would become outmoded, and began working with local providers to help travelers book anything from skip-the-line tours of the Sistine Chapel to cooking lessons in a Thai kitchen. Viator was purchased in 2014 by Tripadvisor for $200 million–and remains a top virtual destination for anyone headed to a real one. This episode was produced by Devan Schwartz with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. This episode was edited by Neva Grant, with research by Olivia Rockeman. Our audio engineers were Robert Rodriguez and Gilly Moon. You can follow HIBT on Twitter https://twitter.com/HowIBuiltThis & Instagram https://www.instagram.com/howibuiltthis and sign up for Guy's free newsletter at guyraz.com http://guyraz.com/. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

  Our presenting sponsor today is Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Every founder on this show started with a hard question. Not the marketing plan, the 2 a.m. kind. Is this idea any good? Am I the one to build it? Should I quit my job? Anthropic got built the same way. A public benefit corporation founded on one hard question. How do we make sure AI goes well for people? So they asked over 100,000 people their hopes and their fears and are publishing what they find, even the uncomfortable parts. Me? I've got my own hard question about AI. Here it is. If everyone has access to something that can help them write the business plan,

• 0:46Guy Raz?

  build the prototype, analyze the market, maybe even come up with the idea, what separates the people who actually build something from everyone else? I don't have a clean answer yet, so I've been sitting with it with Claude. There's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/hibt. We get support from U.S. Bank. A question I love asking founders. What's the one decision you almost didn't make? The one that changed everything? Because it's never the obvious stuff. It's never, I decided to start a company. It's the small, boring, Tuesday afternoon decision you barely remember making until you realize it's the reason everything after it either worked or didn't.

• 1:32Guy Raz?

  Say you're 18 months in. Business is growing. You've got expenses coming from six directions. Gas for the van, office supplies, your phone bill, team lunches that are actually client meetings, and you're putting it all on whatever card you grabbed in year one. You're not thinking about it. Why would you? You've got bigger problems. But here's the thing. Path A, you keep going like that. End of the year, you're sorting through statements, trying to figure out what went where. You've left hundreds, maybe thousands, on the table in rewards you never earned, money that could have gone back into the business. Path B, you pause and get the US Bank Triple Cash Rewards Visa Business Card. Now, you're earning 3% cash back

• 2:16Guy Raz?

  on gas and EV charging, office supply stores, cellphone service, and restaurants. You pick up an extra $750 cash back as a bonus. And you've got a low APR on purchases and balance transfers for 12 months while you're scaling. Same business, same expenses, two completely different outcomes based on one small decision. Visit usbank.com/business to learn more. The creditor and issuer of this card is US Bank National Association, pursuant to a license from Visa USA, Inc. Some restrictions apply. If you travel often, you'll want to hear about this unprecedented offer. For the first time ever,

• 3:00Guy Raz?

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• 3:45Guy Raz?

  or bring a guest to the Delta Sky Club. Make every trip feel more rewarding with the car that upgrades your travel. Apply today at delta.com/cardsocial. Offer ends November 4, 2026. Minimum spending requirements and terms apply. Flights are fulfilled as flight certificates valid for Delta Comfort or Delta Maine to select domestic destinations. Book 21-plus days in advance. Up to $80 per person and taxes and fees apply. Other restrictions apply. When I pull up to a gas pump to fill my car, I'm not thinking about chemistry or engineering. I'm thinking about getting in, filling up, and getting on with my day. And it reminds me a little bit of the founders I talked to on this show, because the best

• 4:27Guy Raz?

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• 5:22Speaker 01

  In a surreal set of circumstances, a couple of weeks after we took control of the business, somebody broke into it overnight and stole the servers that ran their operations. So we had bought this business. We'd paid millions of dollars for it. It was doing tremendously well. We were very excited. It literally disappeared overnight. It was just gone. There was nothing there.

• 5:59Guy Raz?

  Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 6:11Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Rod Cuthbert made it easier for tourists to book day trips, cooking lessons, and hot air balloon rides by creating Viator, a multimillion-dollar travel brand.

• 6:26Guy Raz?

  Over the summer, I took my family to Italy. One morning, we went to a website where you can book experiences, and we signed up for a pasta-making class at someone's house. A few hours later, we drove up an old dusty road outside a Tuscan village, only to be greeted by a menacing-looking dude covered, literally from the neck down, in tattoos. One of the tattoos was of a Glock 17 dripping with blood. Another one read "thug life." Needless to say, I was not excited. In fact, I looked at my wife, wondering, "How in the hell are we going to get out of here?" But, as they say, "Never judge a book by its cover."

• 7:10Guy Raz?

  Because four hours later, when we finished making fresh pasta, an amazing bolognese sauce, and a delicious tiramisu, me and Chef Dante were hugging our goodbyes and exchanging numbers and promising to visit each other again. It was truly one of the highlights of our visit to Italy. And it happened easily and seamlessly because of modern technology. Back when I visited Italy as a student in the 1990s, those things only happened if you were lucky. Now, there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of different companies that offer up these experiences in places around the world.

• 7:50Guy Raz?

  It could be a bicycle tour through the Dutch countryside, a helicopter ride over Las Vegas, or a flamenco show at someone's house in southern Spain. And one of the biggest, and really the first, company to offer these things up was Viator.

• 8:07Guy Raz?

  Now, today, Viator is part of the TripAdvisor family. They acquired it in 2014, and it's estimated that Viator now accounts for up to 40% of TripAdvisor's revenue. So, to say the least, it's a pretty successful brand. But it wasn't always that way. In fact, it took many, many years for Viator to actually make sense to consumers. It was built by a team out of Australia led by Rod Cuthbert back in the late 1990s. Now, before that time, it was really hard to pre-book tours and experiences and even get tickets until you actually arrived at your destination.

• 8:47Guy Raz?

  And so Viator, leaping on the nascent World Wide Web, saw an opportunity to change that. But by 2005, Viator was running into serious cash flow problems and almost went under. Rod Cuthbert spent months trying to raise money in Silicon Valley, but a chance meeting with one investor would prove to be a lifeline, which we will get to. Now, before Rod started working on what would become Viator, he was a web designer for travel agencies in Australia. He actually grew up in Tasmania, the island off the southern coast of the country. And for as long as he could remember, he knew he wasn't going to stay.

• 9:29Guy Raz?

  And more importantly, he knew he wanted to see the world.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  It's probably true to say that some people paint the story of their life on a really small canvas. They're happy to stay close to home. And others just need a bigger canvas. They want to explore. And I always wanted to explore, so it just made sense to me to get on a plane and leave at the earliest possible opportunity.

• 9:57Guy Raz?

  I think you were around 17 when you really, basically, packed up and left. And that was essentially the last time, I think it was 1975, that was the last time that you lived in Tasmania?

• 10:09Speaker 01

  Correct. I've always had brothers and my mum until recently, and so many cousins and friends. So, many reasons to go back. But I haven't lived there since 75.

• 10:21Guy Raz?

  I guess you... You were a high school dropout, not, not, I don't mean this is in a disparaging way, like, you know, to tar you with this brush, but you dropped out of high school, right?

• 10:33Speaker 01

  I did. My, you know, we were coming up to the end of year exams in year 12, what you would call the senior year of, of high school, I guess. And my dad died towards the end of the year and I, I sort of, I have to admit in looking back, I, I kind of used that as an excuse to just not finish all the exams. I just didn't see that they were going to be important to, to whatever it was I was going to do next. I wasn't going to go to university. I'd made that decision. So I didn't complete my year 12 exams and after Christmas I packed a bag and got on a plane and there I was in Melbourne.

• 11:13Guy Raz?

  So what did you do? I mean, when you get there, you're 17. I mean, did you go wait tables? Like, how did you earn a living?

• 11:21Speaker 01

  Tables comes into it. I didn't wait tables. I coached table tennis.

• 11:25Guy Raz?

  So you were like a serious table tennis player?

• 11:29Speaker 01

  I, I was a serious table tennis player. I was in the Tasmanian junior team and, and I had aspirations to, to do more and those aspirations lasted about three weeks as I spent more and more time competing with the locals in, in Melbourne, I realized I was never going to make the cut.

• 11:50Guy Raz?

  They were just way better?

• 11:52Speaker 01

  They were just, well, they went way better. Yeah, they were. They were way better.

• 11:56Guy Raz?

  Well, I've seen really good ping, I mean, like, you gotta put that spin on it and you've got to like, you know, twist the paddle and I mean, it's, it's no joke.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  I mean, if I played you, Guy, we could play all day. You may not win a point.

• 12:10Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I know.

• 12:12Speaker 01

  That's just the reality.

• 12:14Guy Raz?

  And that, that's what would happen. You come to my party, we'd all be playing ping pong and you'd ruin the party because you'd crush everybody.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  I wouldn't ruin your party, Guy. I'd, I'd play left-handed. How's that?

• 12:24Guy Raz?

  That's okay. All right. Very generous of you. Okay. So, but basically the, the, I guess the ping pong thing fizzles out and, and then the next thing you do is apply for a job doing, I guess, something in, in computers. How did you get into that?

• 12:40Speaker 01

  So I wrote in application of a job that I saw in the paper for a computer operations role. And my qualification was that my dad did this job and I occasionally went in there. I got an interview, I got the job and there I was, I was a computer operator. In the time of mainframes, there was no PCs. At this time, there wasn't even mini computers. It was just like huge rooms with raised floors and lots of air conditioning and disk drives and line printers. It's a very different world.

• 13:13Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And from what I understand, I mean, this kind of launches the next kind of 10 years of your life, working, I think primarily eventually in sales, right? And, you know, and because this is the beginnings of the, what would become the sort of the PC boom, the personal computer boom. And you would go on to work for DEC, Digital Equipment Corporation, which was a huge PC maker back in the day. And that's, and I think you ended up staying there for several years, right? As a sales rep?

• 13:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. In 84, I think, 83, DEC released their personal computer. And my job at the time was to find dealers in Melbourne to sell their personal computer. It's called the Rainbow. IBM and Apple had released their machines and, you know, the market was abuzz with this new thing, PCs. And I just couldn't find enough dealers to sell this thing. They're just, you know, we were not going to be able to get this product to market. So I approached a couple of my buddies at the office at DEC and said, you know, we should do this ourselves. You know, let's find some money, beg, borrow or steal, go to the bank, let's open a location

• 14:33Speaker 01

  of our own. So that's what we did. We started a business.

• 14:36Guy Raz?

  Selling PCs, like a shop?

• 14:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, selling PCs. We quickly got an Apple dealership as well and an IBM dealership. And Guy, honestly?

• 14:48Speaker 01

  All we had to do was open the door.

• 14:51Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  Turn on the lights and open the phone because in those days.

• 14:54Guy Raz?

  It was a shop open to the public. It was just a, anybody could go in.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  Yep, anybody could go in and we did sell to some home users, but typically they were architects or engineers or schools or commercial operations, accountancy firms, et cetera, et cetera.

• 15:11Guy Raz?

  Because PCs were not cheap in 1983. This was a significant investment.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, anywhere between five and $10,000 for a sort of basic setup. And you haven't got a printer yet, so you need to spend some more money. But people were excited. You know, whilst a lot of people were ignoring it, there were many people who were just so excited. They saw the potential.

• 15:34Guy Raz?

  All right. So you're, you're doing this for a while and, and I guess you eventually, after a few years, you guys sell the business.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:42Guy Raz?

  And then after doing a few, a few other jobs in computers, you wind up taking a job with, with a company called On Australia. And this is important because this will eventually lead you to what you would go on to create. But, but this was from what I understand, it was like the Australian arm of, of Microsoft, of Microsoft's MSN network, right?

• 16:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. So at, at the time that that sort of web explosion was happening, Microsoft decided to launch this network in Australia. For various reasons, they called it On Australia. I got a job there and I was there for a few months and I was probably pretty bad at it. Maybe I didn't like my boss. I don't know. Maybe I was out of my depth, which is, that's probably the right reason. But in any event, they decided to fire me.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  It happened that the day before, a guy had come in, his name was Peter Fox, and he'd come in to talk about things that he wanted to do.

• 16:45Guy Raz?

  He was interviewed for a job, job or he was?

• 16:49Speaker 01

  No, he was a content creator.

• 16:50Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  He had a background in television and production.

• 16:54Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  And he had a bunch of ideas, none of them very well formed, but I liked him. And I thought, oh, we could do something with this guy. Well, it turned out we didn't do anything with him because I got fired the following day. So I'm sitting at home thinking, what am I gonna do? And I thought, you know, I'm gonna go see that guy that I met and talk to him about doing things, but not on the Microsoft network. Let's do them on the web.

• 17:20Guy Raz?

  And tell me, what was his idea that you heard that was so interesting to you?

• 17:25Speaker 01

  To be honest, all his ideas were pretty dumb at the time. But he was a really good guy. I just thought he and I could work together and we would find a niche. It just seemed so obvious that the web was going to be important.

• 17:41Guy Raz?

  And then what do you do? Do you call him and say, hey, Peter, you remember I met you yesterday on Australia? I just got fired.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. So he had this background in television production, but he didn't understand software. He didn't understand, you know, tech. So I went in and saw him, we had coffee, and we agreed pretty much on the spot to, we each put some money in, I think $30,000 each. On Australia had given me a terrific payout. They were generous. They gave me six months' salary when they fired me. So I had the capacity to take some of that and put it into this new venture. We had no idea what we would do, just that we would build websites.

• 18:27Guy Raz?

  Okay. So basically, you were gonna make websites for companies? You were gonna be like a web-served designer for other companies? That was the idea?

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Exactly. And we, at that time, were happy to build a good, small business. That's how we started.

• 18:43Guy Raz?

  All right. So you guys call this Fox Interactive, after Peter Fox, your partner?

• 18:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. It seemed like a logical name, and because it was a service business, building websites, it didn't seem really important that we have a snazzy name that people remember. It's just like, okay, let's go with that.

• 19:01Guy Raz?

  Okay. So you guys start this business. And from what I've read... You basically developed like a specialty pretty early on where you would build websites for travel companies. And I think this was around like 1995. And you know, and I guess a lot of companies started moving away from printed brochures, right?

• 19:20Speaker 01

  Yes, it was a major cost to them producing these physical brochures. So the idea of moving their brochure production onto the web where they had complete instantaneous control if they wanted to change price. If, for example, one of the hotels that they were using in Hawaii backed out, or for some reason, they couldn't put their customers in there anymore. They wanted to take that off. They could do it instantaneously. In the brochure, it's there till next year.

• 19:49Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  So it was very attractive to travel companies to move on to the web.

• 19:53Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  So they would show us their brochure and they would leave it in our hands. And at that time, pretty much no matter what we did, you know, it looked better than what they had before, which was nothing.

• 20:07Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  And in the back of our minds, we saw that bigger things were going to happen in travel, you know, transactions were going to start happening. You know, travel really lends itself to sale on the web because there are no physical goods. There's lots of product description and images required. It's just the perfect thing to sell online. So we had that in the back of our minds. We just didn't know how we would get there.

• 20:31Guy Raz?

  So this is what you're doing. This is what Fox Interactive does. And I guess around 1997, you made a hire that would turn out to be fortuitous, a woman named Jill Hazel. And she had worked for Sabre, which is a huge, it was, I think it still is, a big sort of travel technology company. Because I remember, I used to work for a company and all the internal travel was done through the Sabre interface that we had to use. You couldn't go to Expedia or any, you had to use Sabre. And you guys hired somebody from Sabre to come work for you. Was this person based in the US or in Australia?

• 21:11Speaker 01

  In Australia, Sabre had a very big operation in Australia. Half of all the travel agents, I think there were 4,000 agency locations in Australia at the time, so probably 2,000 of them used Sabre, which meant that if there were four actual agents in each agency, there was probably 8,000 agents every day booking flights and hotels, you know, dozens of flights and hotels every day. And every booking Sabre were picking up, you know, five or $10 in fees. Sabre was an amazing business.

• 21:44Guy Raz?

  So you get, you hire this woman Jill, and I guess, and she comes to work with you, and I guess, pretty soon after she arrives, she says, hey, I hear Sabre is looking for a contractor to work on a, on a project for them. Tell me, tell me what, what you found out.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, Sabre were not, you know, they were not silly. They knew that the web was going to really impact their business. So they couldn't move airline or hotel bookings over to the web quickly, but they, they landed upon the idea of, of what they called ground content. In other words, sightseeing, tours, attractions, the Eiffel Tower, tickets, that sort of thing. They knew that there was a lot of that out there, and there was no way for travel agents to easily book it. So they wanted somebody to build a web solution that they could then market to their travel agents, and that would be their first step into the agency locations. And it was, it was a good idea.

• 22:50Guy Raz?

  So tell me what you and Peter started to think. I mean, did you think, hey, let's pitch them on some, on, on, on working with them?

• 22:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, we, Jill made contact with them and said, look, we've got a lot of experience at Fox Interactive on building websites for travel companies. We know exactly what is required. She, she really sold us. There was no particular reason why Sabre, based in Dallas, Texas, should contract with a company in Sydney, Australia. There were, there were plenty of people in the northern hemisphere that could do this, but they sent some of their people down to meet with us, to talk about the contract.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  And lo and behold, we won it. And you know, the winning of it was, it was kind of easy in a way. At the time, I lived at Bondi Beach. I don't know if you've been to Sydney, but Bondi Beach is sort of iconic.

• 23:45Guy Raz?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  And it was early in the year and it was, it was one of those, um, after work, we went out to dinner and dinner finished at about eight thirty and the sun sets like nine or something like that. So the sun was very low in the sky. This doesn't sound like a business story, does it? But it is. We, we went for a walk from one end of Bondi Beach to the other, uh, the, the, the two women that had come out from Sabre and we, yeah, they took their shoes off and, and were just walking in the shallows. It was really beautiful. It was clear to me that they, they developed an emotional attachment to Sydney. Uh, they

• 24:30Speaker 01

  really loved it. It's a world away from Dallas.

• 24:33Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  And we got the contract. And whether, whether they gave us the contract because they really wanted to come back to Sydney because they really loved it, or because they thought we were the best, I don't know.

• 24:46Guy Raz?

  So the idea, what they wanted you to build, it was, it was sort of a way to help travelers pre-book tours when they go on vacation, more or less?

• 24:59Speaker 01

  A way for travel agents, uh, who've got, so you know, Guy Raz goes into an agency and says, hey, we're going to go to Paris. What can we?

• 25:08Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  What can, what can we do? And they say, well, let's book your flight and let's book your hotel. And now, you know what? You really should, um, see the Eiffel Tower. There's a terrific restaurant up on top. Let's book you a ticket for that. And

• 25:21Guy Raz?

  Jules Verne at the top. I want to go there. Michelin two star.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  You may also want to go and see the Moulin Rouge, the cabaret.

• 25:29Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So I don't know if I, I don't know about that. I don't know. Okay. All right. Sure. Okay.

• 25:34Speaker 01

  All right. Let's, uh, let's get those booked. So that's what they wanted.

• 25:38Guy Raz?

  By the way, I did go to the Moulin Rouge once. Somebody took me there, uh, as one was a student, a friend's parent. This is in the mid nineties and not worth it. So I'm just saying, just not worth it. Don't waste your time. All right. Keep going.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  That is a very personal choice, Guy.

• 25:55Guy Raz?

  Keep going, I just wanted to do a public service announcement for our listeners.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 26:01Guy Raz?

  They, so you basically, a travel agent, this is crazy, because they were so critical to travel at the time, and not no shade to travel agents, they're still critical, but you know, you don't need them as much. But then, really, they were just booking your flights and your hotels?

• 26:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, they weren't able to book the on-ground activities that you often would want to do when you get there. But there was also another more fundamental reason why they weren't doing it, and that is that the operators, say the Moulin Rouge, or the Eiffel Tower, et cetera, you know, if they get a single booking from a travel agent, is he ever going to pay them?

• 26:40Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  The client has paid the agent, has the agent paid the operator? That was the key question. The operators would have to follow up and follow up, and it was difficult in those days for an operator in Paris, for example, or Rome, or wherever, to follow up with an agent in, you know, Sydney, or San Francisco, or wherever.

• 27:02Guy Raz?

  Saying, where's my money?

• 27:04Speaker 01

  Exactly. The difficulty was just going to be building a system that was easy for travel agents to navigate and find what they wanted, get the booking to the operator, and get everybody paid and happy.

• 27:16Guy Raz?

  Okay, so you guys, you guys are building this thing, and you actually finished the project. And from what I understand, you and Peter, you fly to Dallas, this is where Sabre is based, to present this completed project, to show, to show them the project. This is in 1997. You arrive to Sabre headquarters. What happens?

• 27:41Speaker 01

  Sabre was a large corporation, and like many large corporations, occasionally they do layoffs. The CFO says, we're top-heavy, or whatever. We pulled into the car park, and we immediately realized that there's something odd happening. There are security guards in the lobby of the building, and there are people standing around the lobby with cardboard boxes, and they're crying.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  And it took us a few minutes. You know, nobody wanted to talk to us really. It was a very emotional time. I mean, it was traumatic for the people involved. It was shocking for us.

• 28:26Guy Raz?

  You realize pretty soon after you get there that all these people are being let go. You just see people walking out with cardboard boxes, you know, the contents of their desks.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's what was happening. Multiple hundreds of people were let go in this particular layoff. It turned out that the people that we were dealing with, they weren't let go, but their division or their group was disbanded. They had simply dropped the idea of this project. It wasn't going to go anywhere.

• 28:58Guy Raz?

  Wait, so wait, hold on. How did you find out? You're coming there to present the project that they hired you to do. And how did you find out that they don't want it anymore?

• 29:11Speaker 01

  We knew the names of various executives up the line. And we just kept calling the switchboard until we got through to one of them, who told us, well, have you heard of collateral damage? That project of yours, that's collateral damage. We don't want it. We don't need it. You are welcome to do whatever you wish with it.

• 29:37Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, how collateral damage turns into a $200 million company. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

• 29:53Guy Raz?

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• 30:35Guy Raz?

  The agents bring speed and scale and people bring taste, judgment and control. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com/built for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com/built. Rules and restrictions may apply. AI isn't just opening new business opportunities. It's changing the way businesses get work done. The questions they ask, the decisions they make, the routine tasks they can hand off. That's the idea behind NetSuite Next, the next generation of NetSuite with AI woven into the tools your business already relies on.

• 31:20Guy Raz?

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• 32:05Guy Raz?

  If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, get NetSuite's free business guide, Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work, at netsuite.com/built. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com/built. netsuite.com/built. Stripe is built for whatever comes next because the pace of change has never been faster than it is right now. New business models, new currencies and new expectations for speed, reliability and scale. Stripe builds financial infrastructure that helps businesses start, grow and operate globally. From payments and billing to fraud protection and cross-border payouts,

• 32:49Guy Raz?

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• 33:24Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 1997, and something slightly surreal has just happened to Rod Cuthbert, the travel company that hired him to help launch an online booking service, has just said, nope, forget it. We're in the middle of layoffs and we can't do this project anymore. By the way, were they going to pay you for it?

• 33:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, they had paid.

• 33:50Guy Raz?

  Do you remember how much they paid you?

• 33:52Speaker 01

  It was around 100 grand.

• 33:54Guy Raz?

  All right, so they're like, and we're going to pay you for it. We're dropping it. Oh, and by the way, if you guys want it, you guys can have it. It's yours. You can keep it. You can do whatever you want with it.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  It was, it was kind of an unbelievable situation to be in. We were developers. We weren't operators.

• 34:14Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  And, and they said to us, if you want, you can go out and do this thing yourself. It's entirely up to you.

• 34:21Guy Raz?

  So you basically had developed this technology to enable travel agents to book experiences for tourists. And now it was yours because you had done it on, on behalf of Sabre. They own the IP. And you got it for free. You didn't have to pay for it.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 34:38Guy Raz?

  I mean, a gift that falls into your lap. So, but, but I'm curious. I mean, initially, were you, was that your response? Were you guys like, oh, my God, this is amazing? Or were you more like, huh, this isn't good because now this relationship's over with Sabre?

• 34:55Speaker 01

  Although the idea of selling tours and activities on the web wasn't ours, it was absolutely Sabre's idea. We very quickly warmed to it. We could tell that there was a terrific opportunity in this business. The, the one difference was, we didn't like the idea of selling to travel agents because we thought that travel agents were going to disappear. And on that point, we were absolutely right.

• 35:20Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So you decide that you guys wanted to make this a standalone website, basically? Because it wasn't going to be back end, a back end product to, for somebody else. This, this was going to be the product.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. We, we decided we'd build a consumer website. So we conceived of an online travel agency that was very focused just on tours, activities, sightseeing, experiences.

• 35:47Guy Raz?

  All right. And you named it?

• 35:50Speaker 01

  Well, we didn't have a name. So we, it took us all of about 48 hours, I think, to, to work through that. But it was important that we have a name because Fox Interactive Media wasn't gonna work.

• 36:03Guy Raz?

  That wasn't gonna work, yeah.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  I'm not sure why we, we hit upon the idea of looking for the name of a saint, but we did. We, we, we thought it would be good to explore the name of all the Catholic saints. That's a strange thing to, to admit.

• 36:21Guy Raz?

  Who's the patron saint of travel again? Is it Christopher?

• 36:24Speaker 01

  I think it's St. Christopher.

• 36:26Guy Raz?

  Yeah, Christopher, right? You could call it St. Christopher.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, that doesn't ring well. We went to the State Library of New South Wales, which was near our office. And they had a book called The Book of Saints, published in 1921. And according to the lady behind the counter, nobody had ever looked in it. It had never been checked out. It was dusty. Um, we opened it up. We looked through the list and, and there's Viator, which is the Latin word for traveler. And we knew aviator, aviator is an air traveler. We quickly checked the, uh, the domain name. The domain is available for like 25 bucks.

• 37:07Guy Raz?

  Viator.

• 37:09Speaker 01

  Viator.

• 37:10Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  Probably, probably Latin speakers would have said, we are tour, but Viator sort of, you know, it, it's easy off the tongue. We thought people would remember it. So we went for it.

• 37:25Guy Raz?

  So, all right. So this becomes the name, but did you have enough capital to actually launch a business and, and, you know, to actually have the infrastructure behind this website to, to turn it into a business?

• 37:39Speaker 01

  We had, just prior to, uh, this occurring, we had raised a couple of million dollars from a Sydney-based venture capital firm who agreed with us that there was a lot of potential in the web. Uh, the partner, John Murray, like us, wasn't sure exactly what we were going to do, but he was confident that, that there was enough depth in this marketplace that something was gonna pop. So he took a risk with a couple of million dollars.

• 38:08Guy Raz?

  Got it. Okay. So you, you've got this brand and tell me how you start. I mean, essentially, I think you launched this in early 98 or maybe late 97. To, to, to any fanfare? I mean, I remember Expedia, but I don't remember Viator entering the, the world. So how did you get attention for it initially?

• 38:34Speaker 01

  Well, the travel industry has conferences and there was a conference called Focusrite that had popped up to focus on the, uh, on the online travel space. And we went along and Rich Barton, who I know you've spoken to.

• 38:50Guy Raz?

  Mm hmm. Yep. Creator of Expedia and Zillow.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. So Rich Barton gave a talk about where they were going to go with the Expedia product, what, what that was going to look like when it was fully formed. And one of the things he said was, We don't just wanna be able to sell you a flight to Fiji, for instance, and a hotel in Fiji. We wanna sell you surfing lessons in Fiji as well. We wanna sell you the Eiffel Tower ticket.

• 39:17Guy Raz?

  He was saying this in nineteen ninety-eight?

• 39:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I approached him after his speech and I said, what are your plans for doing that? Because, you know, we can maybe help you. And, you know, we didn't have surfing lessons in Fiji, I can tell you, but I was confident we could get them.

• 39:36Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  And he said, okay, we'll give you guys a chance. So our first bookings actually came not from viator.com, but through a white label that we did with Expedia.

• 39:50Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  And that quickly grew to many other white label sites who sort of underwrote the business with the early bookings whilst we were figuring out how to attract customers directly to our own site.

• 40:04Guy Raz?

  So people could go to those sites, Expedia, Travelocity, et cetera, but really, you guys, Viator, was powering the bookings?

• 40:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, we ended up with hundreds and hundreds of affiliate partners who would have a link on their site that said, you know, book tours and activities with us. And if you clicked on that link, you'd go over to a white label site, which had their logo, but it was really the Viator site. But they drove the traffic to it.

• 40:33Guy Raz?

  I wanna just take a rest for a moment and ask about Australia as a, you know, as a place from which to launch this. And the reason why I raise this is because Australia is a small country. I think the population is smaller than California's, but it has a massive penetr... like, there's a huge, like, travel is a huge part of the culture, right? Like, a majority of Australians have passports, for example, compared to Americans, who I think still less, fewer than fifty percent. Australians travel. They go, they spend a lot of money on travel.

• 41:10Speaker 01

  It is, it is part of the Australian psyche.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  To travel. It was terrible being in lockdown during COVID for us and there was a lot of revenge travel afterwards. But yes, international travel is sort of core to the Australian being. And it was easy for us to find people to join our company who had worked for companies like Qantas or Lonely Planet, for example, you know, international brands that are well-known.

• 41:40Guy Raz?

  And at the time, I mean, essentially, you know, you were sort of like Airbnb before Airbnb, right? You essentially, you were a platform for people to offer experiences, I guess.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. When we started, you know, there were group tours and double-decker hop-on, hop-off tours and museum tours. But there was no, for instance, chocolate lover walking tour of Paris.

• 42:08Guy Raz?

  Cooking class, croissant making in someone's apartment.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  Right. Or a bike tour of Gaudi architecture in Barcelona, or a Sunday morning Harlem gospel walking tour. These things all emerged over the following years and they emerged because, to a large extent, they knew, people knew that they could put that product on Viator and we would bring it to the marketplace.

• 42:38Guy Raz?

  And you guys would get a commission, what, fifteen, twenty percent, something like twenty-five percent?

• 42:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, twenty-five percent was was pretty normal. An average per person price on, you know, a walking tour or a cooking class or whatever it was, might be a hundred bucks. And we would buy that from the supplier for seventy-five bucks.

• 42:57Guy Raz?

  All right. So you so you really start kind of in the background, white label.

• 43:04Guy Raz?

  How was, I mean, how was the growth of the business? Because from what I've read, it it was relatively slow. And in the first, let's say, five to seven years, I mean, I think you got, I read that by 2005, you got around about thirty million dollars in gross bookings, which obviously isn't your profit. But you were having financial problems, right? What was going on? Tell me what was going on.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  Well, in a venture backed business, you're always hiring for the next growth phase. So you're not focused on profitability. You're focused on how many customers can we attract? Because there's going to be a lifetime value associated with that customer. And you, in the back of your mind, you know that you're likely to have to go back to the marketplace for another round of funding. It's a tight rope that you walk and you can, it's, it's easy to make mistakes. You know, projects that don't generate revenue quite quickly enough, you know, can, can mess your cash flow up.

• 44:12Guy Raz?

  Um, and, and, and meantime, I mean, you had originally done sort of this white label thing for Expedia, but from what I understand, Expedia, pretty soon after just kind of started their own thing, similar, similar offering, right?

• 44:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that didn't, that didn't bother us. That's sort of standard. We knew that from the start, that they would sort of pick the eyes out of what works. So they see, for example, that, you know, a particular tour in Rome is really selling well, so they send one of their people in and they contract that directly. And that was fine because we were constantly, by this stage, introducing new things. And we also had new white label partners who were picking up that volume, plus our own direct business. So they played their role.

• 44:58Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Tell, tell me about September 11th, because September 11th was both the biggest disruption to the travel industry up until COVID, of course, 20 years later. But it was also, what I didn't realize, it completely transformed the industry in ways that would benefit businesses like yours. How, what, what happened?

• 45:22Speaker 01

  Well, uh, I was in the US at, at the time, so I have a direct personal experience of what happened. I was in New Orleans, uh, with a colleague from the company. Nine 11 happens, all flights in the US, all travel is stopped. There are no planes in the air. Everybody who has a booking is on the phone to the airline, to the hotel, to the car rental company. Clearly, their phone systems melt down. It's just impossible to get through to anybody. They can't staff up quickly enough, they can't add enough phone lines, it's just complete mayhem.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  Some of those companies had invested and had sort of fledgling websites and were able to direct their customers to go to the websites, to find information, connect with them, change their booking, whatever it was. So people who hadn't previously attempted to do anything related to travel on the internet found themselves going to American Airlines, or Delta, or Marriott, or Hilton, or whatever. And they liked it. They liked what they found, they liked not having to be on hold and listen to that music for forty minutes.

• 46:44Guy Raz?

  My god, yeah.

• 46:45Speaker 01

  And certainly, the companies realised, this is scalable. You know, we can handle millions of interactions with customers in an hour, whereas on the phone lines, we can handle, you know, at the most, thousands of interactions in an hour. So for the online travel industry, there was this strange perverse effect of nine eleven, which is that it literally put a rocket under the industry.

• 47:12Guy Raz?

  Okay, so, but, still, the idea of booking experience, so, I mean, people start to migrate to the web, and I mean, it was slow, it was still like, this was a kind of a niche crowd still at this point.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  Indeed, it was. We were definitely early. I mean, I'm glad that we started the company and were doing what we did, when we did.

• 47:41Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 47:41Speaker 01

  But there were some underlying things that were happening at a societal level that helped us. And one of those things was that, and if you think back, you can probably remember this, that people started talking about the importance of experiences over material things. You know, it's, it became less of he who dies with the most toys wins and more of, you know, what have you done? You know, when you went to Barcelona, what did you do there? Did you come back with a T-shirt and a snow globe? Um, or did you do a bike tour of Gaudi architecture? Did you see the Sagrada Familia?

• 48:25Speaker 01

  Did you learn anything? And, and we played a fairly key role in this, which was changing the nature of, of the way, uh, sightseeing tours operated. We've talked about the fact that it used to be, you know, a, a bus with thirty or forty people and a woman, a, a guide anyway, with a, with an umbrella, uh, flag on the top and you would follow them. And, and it just was the case that a lot of people looked down their nose at that and said, I just don't want to do that. That's not me. I'm not going to be part of a group of forty people. So we had a, uh, a product manager, her name was Dominique Exman, a young Australian woman

• 49:07Speaker 01

  who, who was managing our, our key European locations. And she was in Rome, talking to one of the, the tour operators we worked with there about the Vatican Museum, which is one of the most, perhaps the most important tourist attraction in Rome. And I don't know if you've ever been there, but you can stand for four or five hours in a line. Yes, you can. Waiting to get in. Yes, you can. And, you know, Dominique said to herself, you know, these guys, a lot of these guys, you know, they come here on an EasyJet flight or a Ryanair flight, they're here for two or three days and they're spending four hours in the Italian sun, waiting to get in there.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  That doesn't make any sense. So with the tour operator, they approached the Vatican, the church, uh, and said, what if we, uh, did this thing that we'll call skip the line? What if we charge these guys three times as much, but you let them straight in?

• 50:11Speaker 01

  And the Vatican, they're commercial, the church.

• 50:15Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 50:17Speaker 01

  They saw the value in three times the revenue per person. And they were quick to let us experiment. So we came, we came up with this idea.

• 50:26Guy Raz?

  Of skip the line tours?

• 50:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, smaller groups with a guide. Instant access.

• 50:34Guy Raz?

  And this started with the Vatican Museum and the Sistine Chapel?

• 50:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, it did. So Dom said, okay, this works. Let's go to the Colosseum, see if they'll buy it.

• 50:44Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  They were into it straight away. And Eiffel Tower, you know, everywhere, major attractions.

• 50:52Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And, and it's amazing, right? It's a great innovation, the skip the line idea.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  Exactly. We actually took it further. I think it was the Vatican's idea, you know, we've got the guards in here 24 hours. If you'd like to bring groups in outside of normal hours, of course, we'll need to charge more. So you, you get these two, these sort of pricing tiers, which is, you know, where it's just your group. Like literally, you are the only eight people in the Sistine Chapel. Well, you might pay $600 for that.

• 51:27Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  But believe me, there are many, many people that will pay it.

• 51:32Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And, and listen, hey, you're right. So did that kind of move the needle for you? Did you start to see, you know, an explosion of bookings at that point or, or still not quite yet?

• 51:46Speaker 01

  It definitely moved the needle. It wasn't an explosion, but our other product managers saw what was happening. And so

• 51:53Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 51:53Speaker 01

  we took the idea of small group tours, skip the line tours,

• 52:00Speaker 01

  basically premium touring.

• 52:03Speaker 01

  And we propagated that around the world. And what that meant was, the most important thing was, the people who had previously looked down their nose at the concept of a sightseeing tour. We're now saying, hold on, I could do this. And it's not sightseeing like my grandmother knew sightseeing. It's, it's sort of modern. It's cool. It's fun.

• 52:29Guy Raz?

  Okay. You've got an innovative product, innovative offerings, but you're really too early still. From, and, and I'm not blaming you. I'm just blaming the, the forces of the world, right? Like, because from what I've read, even though you did about a hundred thousand bookings in two thousand and five, you guys were, you guys were close to, to the end. You were like, well, I can't think of the, the cliche for some reason. My brain isn't working, but you were, you didn't, you were near death from what I gather in two thousand and five. Is that, is that right?

• 53:03Speaker 01

  Well, that's an emotional term, Guy, near death.

• 53:07Guy Raz?

  But I mean, you were running out of cash. You were running out of money.

• 53:11Speaker 01

  No, it's a very accurate term, actually. What, what startup companies tend to say is you've got a short runway.

• 53:18Guy Raz?

  You had a short runway. You were, you were walking a plank off of a pirate ship.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. So what you do is you go out and you raise some more money. Maybe you've done a series A and a series B, so it's time for a series C. So let's put a pitch deck together.

• 53:33Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  And let's make a list of, of venture firms that have, that have looked at travel and invested in travel before, and let's go, let's go pitch to them.

• 53:42Guy Raz?

  Just to be clear, could you do this in Australia? Could you, was there, was there money in Australia to do this?

• 53:49Speaker 01

  Uh, no. The, the venture capital market in Australia was still quite nascent.

• 53:54Guy Raz?

  You had to go to the US to get the money, basically.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:58Guy Raz?

  And, and so this is around two thousand and five. And I guess you hire this, this guy, Barry Seidenberg?

• 54:06Speaker 01

  Well, Barry is also a lady's name.

• 54:10Guy Raz?

  Oh, I'm sorry. Barry's a woman.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:13Guy Raz?

  Oh, forgive me. Okay.

• 54:14Speaker 01

  Barry had been the VP of Marketing at Preview Travel, which along with Expedia was the first ever, the first two online travel agencies. And that was a very successful business.

• 54:25Guy Raz?

  And she was based in California?

• 54:28Speaker 01

  Yep, in San Francisco. So it was perfect. She had a team of people that she could bring in, but we needed to raise some money. So we, we put a pitch deck together and we hired a car and headed for Sand Hill Road.

• 54:47Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, Rod eventually wins over one investor with a story that kind of sounds like the setup to a joke. Danish prince walks into an Australian bar. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

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• 56:47Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2005, and even though Viator's growing, it's having serious cash flow problems. So Rod flies out to Palo Alto and starts doing meetings with venture capitalists.

• 57:05Speaker 01

  We saw, I think, 15 to 20 firms, and it didn't go well. We had lovely meetings with them, but the meetings always went the same way, where it would end by the partner saying, "I really enjoyed meeting you guys, love what you're doing, let me talk to my partners and I'll come back to you next week."

• 57:29Guy Raz?

  So nobody was saying to you in the meetings, "Hey, this idea just sucks," or "This isn't for us," or "We don't really see this panning out."

• 57:36Speaker 01

  Generally speaking, they were diplomatic. They just thought it was too early to do what we were doing, and they were right about that in many ways.

• 57:45Guy Raz?

  How much were you looking for at that point?

• 57:49Speaker 01

  Between $5 and $10 million. Five with follow-on would be great. Great companies who visit 50 or 100 venture capital firms before somebody finally says yes.

• 58:06Guy Raz?

  Sure.

• 58:07Speaker 01

  So we knew those stories, and we knew we really only needed one investor to believe in us. We just couldn't find that investor.

• 58:14Guy Raz?

  But you were pretty confident you would.

• 58:17Speaker 01

  Well, we grew less confident as the weeks went on. And then a friend in the industry mentioned that he had heard of a relatively new investor at Carlyle Ventures, part of the Carlyle Group. And we went and did our pitch. I think it was about the... The twentieth person, he was certainly the last person we spoke to.

• 58:42Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 58:43Speaker 01

  And the meeting ended exactly like all the other meetings ended, which was that, you know, I've I've really enjoyed this. I like what you guys are doing. I'm gonna talk to my partners and and we'll talk again. It didn't sound any different to the previous meetings until we uh we went to leave, we stood up.

• 59:02Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 59:02Speaker 01

  And I picked up his business card.

• 59:04Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 59:04Speaker 01

  And his name was clearly Nordic. His name is Alan Tigerson. So I asked him, I said, are you Danish?

• 59:13Speaker 01

  And he said, yep. And I said, well, I'm Tasmanian.

• 59:18Speaker 01

  And he looked at me quizzically.

• 59:20Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 59:20Speaker 01

  But I could tell he sort of knew what I meant by that. And what I meant was,

• 59:28Speaker 01

  Prince Frederick, the Crown Prince of Denmark, had a couple of years before married a commoner, a young woman from Tasmania by the name of Mary Donaldson.

• 59:38Guy Raz?

  Now Queen Mary of Denmark.

• 59:41Speaker 01

  She is indeed Queen Mary of Denmark, and she's born two sons and a daughter. She's she's more popular than Prince Frederick. I think most Danes would tell you. Uh but they had met during the Sydney Olympics. The Danes are great sailors. Um their sport was over. They were out at a a pub in Sydney, a pub called The Slip In one evening. Mary was there with a girlfriend. Um they met these Danes who they had no idea that he was royalty.

• 1:00:12Guy Raz?

  She did not know he was the Crown Prince?

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:00:16Guy Raz?

  This is like a Disney movie.

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  It is. It is completely a Disney movie. And I can tell you that that most Australians and certainly most Tasmanians absolutely love this story. We're so proud of her. And I said to Alan, I said, do you want me to tell you about it? And I think Danes, you know, largely are monarchists. They they they they they love their royal family, perhaps a little more than the Brits do. And he sat down and we spent fifteen or twenty minutes uh with me telling him.

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  You know, in detail what had happened and how it had played out. And it's, it's, it's a wonderful story. As you said, a fairy tale. But the important thing is that we spent more time with him. And I think that turned out to be really important. Venture capitalists will often talk about the fact that they invest in people as much as they do in ideas.

• 1:01:15Guy Raz?

  So you were just kind of shooting the breeze with them after the meeting was over, talking about the queen of, or the princess of Denmark and your Tasmanian connection.

• 1:01:25Speaker 01

  Indeed.

• 1:01:25Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  Mary saved us, man.

• 1:01:27Guy Raz?

  That is a, that is a hail Mary, Mary.

• 1:01:30Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:01:30Guy Raz?

  I mean, and, and a very, very loose connection.

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. He asked if I knew Mary and I said, no, but my cousins went to the same school.

• 1:01:42Guy Raz?

  Ah.

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  You know, it's Tasmania, it's small. Now, I, I didn't mention that they had gone to that school 25 years before Mary. But I, I felt that that was a sin of omission that I would be forgiven for in the long run.

• 1:01:58Guy Raz?

  Okay. So, so you have this chat with them. You leave and then.

• 1:02:03Speaker 01

  He does call the following.

• 1:02:05Guy Raz?

  The following week or day or?

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  Week.

• 1:02:07Guy Raz?

  And he says, okay, I'm in?

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  Well, they never say that.

• 1:02:10Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:11Speaker 01

  They say, come back and meet the rest of the team.

• 1:02:14Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So how much do they, okay, so they, they invest and, um, and did you guys raise the five or six million you were looking for?

• 1:02:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, they put in six million straight away.

• 1:02:24Guy Raz?

  They, they put in six million. Okay.

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. And John Murray down in Sydney put in some additional funds. So we were, we were sort of off to the races. And they were really terrific to work with. We really had a great relationship. Alan was very involved in the business. In fact, soon after making the investment, he, on the grapevine, I don't know how, because we didn't know about it, he told us that there was a company that was kind of like our business called Look Tours. It was a, an online travel agency focusing on tours and activities, but only in the Las Vegas area. And they, they did really good business. They were almost as big as us at the time and just from.

• 1:03:08Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  Las Vegas, so. You know, tours of the Hoover Dam and the Grand Canyon and all the shows, the Blue Man Group and Cirque du Soleil, all that sort of stuff. They had a real lock on that business. It was a single owner and he wanted to sell and Alan introduced us and helped us negotiate and we bought that business. Right. It turned out to be a really important sort of rocket for us. It was a great business, but in a surreal set of circumstances, a couple of weeks after we took control of the business, somebody broke into it overnight and stole the servers that ran their operations. Wow.

• 1:03:52Speaker 01

  In those days, pre-cloud, there was no Amazon or Google Cloud, many companies ran their web businesses on hardware that they had literally in their- In the building. Correct, and that's what Look Tours did. Sadly, they kept all of the backups in a box that was sitting on top of the servers. And when these servers were stolen in the middle of the night, the backups of all of the code and customer records, et cetera, et cetera, were stolen as well. So we had bought this business, we'd paid millions of dollars for it, it literally disappeared overnight, it was just gone.

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  If you went to Look Tours on the web, there was nothing there. So, okay, so this company kind of collapses. It disappears. Disappears. Which was a shock, and what on earth do you do in that situation? So Alan, actually, from Carlisle, he flew out there as well, I was, I think I was in Paris at the time, I flew back, you know, the staff are in shock, what do they do? So Alan was really good, he said, "Don't focus on doing a post-mortem here, just get the business back up and going." They managed to, over the next few days, rebuild the website from, you know, using

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  the Wayback Machine and, I don't know, a whole bunch of methods that they came up with on the spot, they got the site back up and going in about four or five days. It was, though, quite surreal, it turns out that the US Secret Service have-

• 1:05:39Speaker 01

  Responsibility for financial crimes that involve credit card details. They couldn't figure anything out. There was phone taps, the analysis of hard drives. There was all sorts of things were going on, but they never figured out who had decided they wanted to kill our business. A mystery remains.

• 1:06:02Guy Raz?

  Wow. All right. So now, I mean, but but in in terms of of other growth opportunities, I mean, how were you acquiring users?

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  Because we were the first and there wasn't any competition, we were able to buy advertising and also get organic traffic relatively easily. But conversely, not having competitors was not great. When you've got competitors, you know, they bring customers into the market as well. And those customers, you know, look at their website and then a percentage of them will say, well, who else does this? What are the competitors that I can look at? So if there's other people out there who are also doing marketing, that's good for you as well. There was nobody out there who was marketing tours and activities. There

• 1:06:54Speaker 01

  were people selling it, like Expedia and Travelocity and others were selling tours, but they weren't marketing. They were marketing hotels and flights.

• 1:07:03Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  We were the only one doing the marketing.

• 1:07:05Guy Raz?

  All right. You are ostensibly the CEO, but 2010, your time at Viator comes to an end. What what was going on?

• 1:07:18Speaker 01

  That's, you know, the the board meetings became very different after Carlisle came on board. It was less about the sort of big picture strategy and it was more about spreadsheets and more about gross margin and and things that weren't really my sort of core expertise. I was less comfortable and I was not really adding a great deal of value because by this time. The direction of the company, what we did, was completely set in stone. So my ability to add value was, you know, it sort of, it had sort of run its course. Um, you know, the company becomes almost like your family, so you don't want to leave it.

• 1:08:03Speaker 01

  But I also realized that, you know, Barry did a much better job of this growth phase than I did. And we got on really well together and I was very happy to leave the business in her hands. Wasn't really happy to leave, but, but I got comfortable with it.

• 1:08:19Guy Raz?

  All right, so, so you are out of the picture, but you did retain some equity because you had basically founded the company.

• 1:08:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I retained enough equity to have a great deal of interest in the company's future.

• 1:08:33Guy Raz?

  Yeah, because up, up until that point, you probably were paid a salary and it was pretty decent, but you, you had not, it did not make you rich.

• 1:08:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, it's a really interesting point, though. Um, I remember talking about this to my mom when she was alive. She, she died in 2013, just before we sold the business. And whenever we talked about the company, uh, I would say something like, you know, well, we'll probably get an exit in the next couple of years. And she's like, exit, exit, what's this exit business?

• 1:09:04Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:04Speaker 01

  You know, you've got a couple of hundred employees and you're paying them salaries and you've got all these happy customers and presumably the, the people who are running the tours, they're happy with you because you're paying them. Isn't that what a business is all about? And it's like, you know, that's, that's a really good point, right?

• 1:09:21Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:22Speaker 01

  That we'd achieved tremendous success without an exit, but, but still you have to have the exit.

• 1:09:28Guy Raz?

  And, and there would be an exit, of course, which we'll get to in a moment. Um, but, but first I want to ask you about what you did after you left Viator, which, which is, I think around 2012. Because, um, I guess you became the CEO of another travel company called Rome to Rio.

• 1:09:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:46Guy Raz?

  Um, and, and you were there for, for several years, for how, how long were you there for? Maybe seven or eight years?

• 1:09:53Speaker 01

  Twelve till eighteen.

• 1:09:54Guy Raz?

  Yeah, so, so about six years. And, and you were running them, you were the CEO of that business.

• 1:10:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was really, uh.

• 1:10:02Guy Raz?

  And it's based in Australia?

• 1:10:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, based in Melbourne, two software developers who were at Microsoft in Seattle. Uh, they were senior developers, really smart guys, and they came up with this idea for a journey planner, essentially, that would tell you how to get from any place on the planet to any other place using any form of transport. That's a very hard problem technically, um, and people just loved it. Anyway, I met them when it they were working on, you know, the sort of first beta. And that's what they were good at, but they didn't know how to raise money or sort of start the company. Uh, so I helped them do that.

• 1:10:45Speaker 01

  We raised money very quickly and we, uh, found ourselves an office and, and we got it launched.

• 1:10:52Guy Raz?

  Um, when I think about, well, about four years after you left, Viator was acquired by TripAdvisor, it's now owned by TripAdvisor. We've had, Steve Cowford was on the show, the founder of TripAdvisor. Um, first of all, you had met him, I think 20 years before, you know, at some conference. And he took, you, you found out about his idea, this idea that he's going to make a website based on, on, on customer reviews, right?

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I had met Steve, I think the year before, and then there he was again the following year at the Focusrite conference. And he told me that, uh, they were going to pivot to a new model, which was based around user reviews of hotels and restaurants. And I looked at him, I said, man, you are smoking dope. That is the dumbest idea I have. Who cares? Who cares what Joe Blow thinks of the Marriott in New York? It's like, I want to read a professional reviewer. And he smiled and said, I think it's gonna, I think it's gonna work well. How wrong could I have been?

• 1:11:55Guy Raz?

  Yeah, he was on to something, but, but for a long time he wasn't. I mean, for a long time they struggled.

• 1:12:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, they did. It's been it's been a really interesting business to to watch. And they certainly had the eyeballs to make the Viator acquisition work.

• 1:12:11Guy Raz?

  This is four years after you're out of the business. Anyway, they acquired Viator for reportedly for $200 million.

• 1:12:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:19Guy Raz?

  And you were, I mean, I think it's a pretty good outcome, but but I guess that some people in the industry who had similar kinds of businesses like Viator were not happy about that because they thought a Viator sold for too little, that it was worth more.

• 1:12:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's easy with hindsight to look back and say, 200 million? Wow, that's that's really low. And, you know, I spoke to Alan just the other day and John, and we all agreed it would have been great if we'd held on to Viator for just a few more years, tossed another $20 million into the bucket and turned it into a billion dollar exit. But at the time, everybody made money. I think Carlisle made eight or nine times their investment.

• 1:13:04Guy Raz?

  Wow, nice.

• 1:13:06Speaker 01

  It was life changing for me. It was life changing for many people.

• 1:13:11Guy Raz?

  Yeah, no question about it. So it is, I mean, it's part of TripAdvisor now, still under the Viator, you know, sort of name and stuff. But what's your sense? I mean, I just as kind of an outsider, I think it's a pretty good service. I know that you're not obviously not involved, but what do you make of it? I mean, do you think that it it's still true to the original vision of what of what you had for it?

• 1:13:37Speaker 01

  I think it is today. In fact, it's tremendously successful business today. They'll do, I think, over $4 billion in gross revenue in 2024.

• 1:13:47Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:13:48Speaker 01

  And it is largely true to what we built when when we started. It's it hasn't deviated very much.

• 1:13:56Guy Raz?

  And, I mean, do you do you ever use it? Do you have any reason to use it?

• 1:14:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I use it all the time.

• 1:14:04Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:14:05Speaker 01

  Let me share with you one of the things that I learned from researching what academics were talking about. Because there are a number of academics who study at the intersection of travel and happiness. Why does travel make people happy? The travelers who are happiest, it turns out, are the ones who plan ahead and book things in advance. When you book a tour or a resort or whatever it is in advance, the sky is always blue, the sea is always green, the drinks come on time, the tour guide is really interesting, everything goes really well in your anticipation of that event.

• 1:14:50Speaker 01

  You go and stay at the resort and you take the tour, etc. Things are probably, you know, the weather might be terrible, the guide may be difficult to understand, whatever it is, it's not perfect like you imagined it. But later on, when you remember your experience, those two things, those two memories, the ones you had in the anticipation phase and the ones who had, were the ones that you had when you actually were experiencing your vacation, they get mixed up and you tend to gravitate towards the rosy of you, of your vacation, if you planned it in advance. People who do things at the drop of a hat, who decide, you know, on a Friday afternoon,

• 1:15:33Speaker 01

  let's fly to Manhattan for the weekend, and then they book their activities in the lobby of the hotel the next day, they don't get the value of that. So I'm always encouraging people to, to plan ahead, book in advance, because your mind will play this excellent trick on you, where, you know, the really positive anticipation memories will eventually take over from the actual reality, which may not have been 100% but hey, that's life.

• 1:16:03Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And, I mean, when you think about just the journey that you've made from Tasmania to, you know, founding a pretty significant tech company, I mean, it's a company that a lot of people know, millions of use, as you say, will do $4 billion in revenue this year. It's quite, it's a quite impressive story. And so I wonder how much of where you got to you attribute to the grind and the work and how much you think had, just has to do with... Luck or timing or just good fortune?

• 1:16:37Speaker 01

  Well, I know plenty of people who work really, really hard and I'd never claimed to be a hard worker. I don't really have any specific skill that I can work hard at. But things did, I guess, work out pretty well. And I do often think, you know, how did that happen? I guess luckily or coincidentally, serendipity, whatever you want to call it, I took a risk at the right time. What is luck? You know, it's, you've got to get out there in the world. I get frustrated with companies that are inward looking that think that the answers are back at head office or, you know, their team's going to be able

• 1:17:20Speaker 01

  to figure everything out. I'm always telling people to go out and, and sort of interface with the world. Go to conferences, go talk to your clients, go talk to potential clients. Just be out there. Don't stay home. And if you're out there, I guess luck can find you.

• 1:17:39Guy Raz?

  That's Rod Cuthbert, founder of Viator. By the way, Rod now sits on the tourism board for his home state of Tasmania, Australia. And a travel tip from Rod, if you're overseas and want to learn about the inner workings of a place, do what his wife does.

• 1:17:56Speaker 01

  My wife likes to go to the supermarket and spend ages looking at all the varieties of cheese.

• 1:18:03Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 1:18:04Speaker 01

  And surprisingly, a lot of people like doing that.

• 1:18:06Guy Raz?

  Mmm. I always do. Always go to supermarkets. I got so obsessed with pistachio Nutella in Italy. I was just buying it wherever I saw it. And I was like, man, I need more of this in my life.

• 1:18:19Speaker 01

  Come to Tasmania, we'll eat Vegemite together.

• 1:18:22Guy Raz?

  Oh, I like Marmite, so I think I'd be open to that.

• 1:18:25Speaker 01

  Vegemite is a step up from Marmite guy.

• 1:18:28Guy Raz?

  Sure, some people in the UK would have, take issue with that. But I'm with you. I'll be, I'm open to it.

• 1:18:33Speaker 01

  All right.

• 1:18:34Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And as always, it's free. And if you're interested in insights, ideas, and lessons from some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, sign up for my newsletter at guyraz.com. This episode was produced by Devon Schwartz with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Olivia Rockman. Our audio engineers were Robert Rodriguez and Gilly Moon. Our production staff also includes Kerry Thompson, Alex Chung, John Isabella, Chris Messini, Carla Estevez, Catherine Seifer, Sam Paulson, J.C. Howard, and Elaine Coats.

• 1:19:17Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.