The Skyscanner CEO reveals some important tips that have helped grow his company into a US$1.75 billion business
2001 was an ugly year for the technology sector; the dotcom bubble had just imploded, scaring away investors and scarring many aspiring entrepreneurs. But Gareth Williams, then a software developer at Marks & Spencers, was unfazed. He formulated his idea for a travel search engine at an Edinburgh pub (after presumably downing a few pints).
That travel search engine was Skyscanner — a company, like Expedia, has become synonymous with travel bookings. It was acquired by Chinese travel firm Ctrip in 2014 for US$1.75 billion.
Gareth Williams was at Skyscanner’s Singapore office two weeks ago to talk about his journey in the company. e27 caught up with the CEO and Co-founder before the fireside chat to learn a bit about his values and insights, and how he applies them to his company.
On whether he ever expected Skyscanner to grow to this scale:
“I think we did see that there was a huge opportunity, I also don’t think we are a behemoth. We aim to be 100 bigger to provide a hundred times more value to travellers and suppliers than we do now. There’s so much travel going on now and there’s so much opportunity to assist better; not just in monetised ways. So I think we can have a hundred times greater impact than we do now.”
What opportunities does he see Skyscanner taking advantage of:
“In the long term, we want to be a personal travel assistant, to be entirely mobile phone or app-based. The other thing is, by partnering with Ctrip we can seek to learn from them and set ourselves the goal to be as successful as them in China and in the rest of the world.”
On whether entrepreneurs should aim big or scale incrementally:
“The tricky balance is having both in mind. The first thing I would say is that success doesn’t have to be defined by huge scale. If you want to achieve high levels of success, then it’s a tricky tightrope between ‘success is being better tomorrow than you were today’ and not losing sight of what that founding vision was.”
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“I think people confuse fundraising with success — but it’s not. Fundraising is a means to an end but it’s not success in itself.”
How he defines success within Skyscanner’s context:
“The very first metric that we measured was repeat users. This basically means did someone get enough value to want to come back? Nowadays, that is the retention part of Pirate Metrics. But it is as simple as saying: it’s what you built worth something to other people?”
How he approaches problem-solving:
“My favourite one is the counterfactual. Basically, you’ve got a problem stated as a problem and that normally comes down to some constraint that you got to try to get around. Now supposed that constraint was the opposite. Think about problems in the opposite way and it can lead to some crazy ideas.
For example, the waste product of CPUs is heat. Supposed that that was the objective of CPUs; so let’s build radiators out of CPUs.
Within our growth team, they are doing this all the time. Marketing is [traditionally] about how you deploy advertising budget to boost a product; whereas I think growth is how do I change the product to achieve my brand building and distribution goal.”
How he builds teams in different markets:
“Our approach is to have regional growth tribes — empower teams that can not only alter, fit and adjust products in each market but can also originate some new features that go on to become useful in other markets and join the global codebase. That means that all our offices got engineers, product and growth people.
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For example, deals was one feature that started in one market. A team there ran an experiment against photo content of destinations. They ran algorithms against our data and said ‘here’s an actionable thing to do.’ The deals feature then started spreading into multiple markets — although it was not something we had focussed on.”
On the poorest decision he made at Skyscanner:
“It was stopping to be involved in recruitment. The job of everybody is to be involved in recruitment. We have recruitment specialists but they need the engagement of the whole company; so that’s an important lesson for myself and the companies.
It’s about networking and being available if people want to find out about Skyscanner. Pretty much anyone in the company can set up a Skype call with Skyscanner if they are interested in learning more about the company and if it would be interesting to work at.”
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Image Credit: VisMedia
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