How I Raised It with Avi Meir of TravelPerk

Nathan: Hi. Welcome to another episode of “How I Raised It” produced by Foundersuite.com. Today I have Avi Meir of TravelPerk (www.TravelPerk.com) coming to us from Barcelona. How’s it going?

Avi: I’m great! How are you doing?

Nathan: Pretty good. Where are you from originally?

Avi: I’m from Israel, from Tel Aviv.

Nathan: That’s awesome. And what led you to Barcelona?

Avi: I actually moved here for business school and we kind of decided to stick around. It’s an amazing city and has a really nice balance of professional opportunities, but also great quality of life. My wife and I decided to stay here, and actually our two kids were born here, so I guess we are really a part of the community now.

Nathan: That’s great. I’ve been there — years ago, not since I was in college, which feels like forever ago, but it was a fun town for sure.

Avi: It’s changed a lot. I wasn’t here before we moved here 9 years ago, but apparently it was a completely different city. They reinvented the city, in a way. Super interesting, it’s a startup in itself, right? I mean, that’s interesting.

Nathan: Yeah, cool! Well, I do want to talk about the Barcelona startup scene and its funding scene. But first, let’s actually just start off with what TravelPerk does. What do you guys do?

Avi: We fix business travel. Business travel is a $1.5 trillion industry globally and it’s really not working the way it should. The two categories that companies can choose from when they have to send their employees around the world for business do not work. So the first category we’re talking about is using a travel agent, like the American Express of the world. And when I speak on stage, I always ask people: “When was the last time anybody here used a travel agent for vacation?” Then, unless you go on a very niche trip, like a safari trip somewhere, people don’t need physical travel agents anymore. It sounds obvious, but they book online. So why is it that we, as companies, ask our travelers to use travel agents? It’s clunky. It’s expensive. They charge high fees because they are service-based companies, rather than product or technology-based companies, that have limited inventory. It just doesn’t work. That’s category number 1. And the second category is giving up and saying: “Just go and book anywhere you want.” This is called unmanaged and that’s 60% of that $1.5 trillion I mentioned. Unmanaged by definition gives you access to good inventory because you have the entire internet at your hands, but then you waste time comparing 12 websites on average. As a CFO, you lose oversight of the company by not knowing what people spend and why, and what the other options were. You really have to choose between two bad categories. I have to expand a bit on our background as a founding team, we came from Booking.com before, so from the consumer side of travel. And we thought to ourselves: “Why can’t business travel behave like consumer travel? Like leisure travel.” And that’s what we’re trying to do — to fix it in a consumer way.

Nathan: Interesting. Is it a markup on the cost of the travel or is it more of a subscription model? What’s the business model?

Avi: We actually have the same business model as leisure travel websites, meaning we are getting a commission from the supplier. Mainly from accommodation. Hotels pay a commission and we’re getting a piece of that. It’s not a markup but just a part of what you pay. Let’s say you pay $100 bucks a night to the hotel, I’m getting some of that as revenue. That’s the main revenue stream. We also have Premium and Enterprise accounts where we have guaranteed SLAs and easier payment terms. Basically, companies can pay at the end of the month against an invoice and get credit from us. Then we charge for that on a per trip basis.

Nathan: Gotcha, cool. Is it just in Europe now? You guys are based in Spain, or are you global?

Avi: We are globally minded. We have customers in practically every continent of the world. That being said, we are focused on Europe at the moment. We opening offices, now, in London and Berlin to expand within Europe. But by the nature of the beast, this is travel. Even European companies travel a lot outside of Europe, so you have to be everywhere. You have to have a solution that works globally.

Nathan: I wanted to get to the backstory or the genesis story. You touched on it already. You guys were a couple of founders from Booking.com. Was that like Orbitz or in the same category of Do It Yourself price comparison? Or was it something different?

Avi: So I had a startup before called Hotel Ninjas, where we did software for luxury hotel management and we sold that to Booking.com. Booking.com today is the largest online travel agency for accommodation. They’re selling millions and millions of transactions every day. They’re part of the Booking Holding Group, which used to be called the Priceline Group. It’s the same group as Priceline, Kayak, OpenTable, RentalCars.com and a few other companies within online travel on the consumer side.

Nathan: So with Hotel Ninjas, did you raise money for that or did you bootstrap that to your exit?

Avi: We bootstrapped it. It was a very small business at the time of acquisition.

Nathan: Interesting. So let’s talk about raising money! It looks like you guys have raised quite a few rounds. Maybe give me just a summary of how many rounds and how much you guys have raised.

Avi: Many rounds! It feels like a lot. We raised a seed round, an A, B and C round, so 4 rounds in total.

Nathan: And when did you guys start? So how long has this been in business?

Avi: We started in 2015. We raised a $1.5 million seed in early 2015. We invested our own money there too, so $300k of our own money and the rest came from angel investors. Then we pivoted, and after the pivot we raised the following rounds.

Nathan: Let’s just go a little deeper into each one. So the angel round, was that Spanish angels? Were these Israeli angels? Were these just people you knew around the globe? What was the makeup?

Avi: Actually we didn’t have any Spanish investors. That’s a great investment in Spain, but we really had global ambitions that they wanted, and we didn’t want to be number one in Spain. We keep saying that we are a global company that happens to be in Barcelona because… Why not? But we don’t have any focus in Spain, not in customers, not in employees. English is the official language in the office here and 80 percent of the workforce is from outside of Spain. So it just made more sense to raise from investors that have these kinds of more global states of mind.

Nathan: So you had global ambitions from the beginning. So how did you put together this angel round?

Avi: It was the usual friends and family. I hope we didn’t have the third f — the fools. We have very smart investors. So friends and family — these are mainly business connections. And then we did have one early stage VC also in the angel round. So we had a fund called LocalGlobe out of London, and it was founded by Saul and Robin Klein who are partners at Index — they were the first partners of Index in London. They left Index to create this new fund called LocalGlobe. We were very fortunate to have them early on. We were actually, I think, the first investment they did out of the fund. They took most of the angel round and then the rest was mostly small tickets from friends and family.

Nathan: And did you have a product in the market at that point, or was this pre-product?

Avi: It was pre-product. Not a good one even.

Nathan: Then let’s go to the Series A, it looks like that was about an $8 million series A. I see some of these names I recognize — Spark Capital, Felix. Who led your Series A? And any stories about putting that together?

Avi: Yeah, it’s actually an interesting one. So Spark led A, Felix actually joined in the B. So the A was Spark and Sunstone. Sunstone is a VC here in Europe, based in Berlin and Copenhagen. So the story of that is actually interesting and I think it’s hopefully one of the first learning points that your listeners can have from our story, in that we didn’t look for the round. We didn’t go and do a roadshow and we didn’t pitch it. The way it worked is we have a very close advisor to the business, a guy called Johannes Reck who is a CEO of a very successful company called Get Your Guide here in Europe, out of Berlin. Johannes started as an advisor, and now he’s actually a board member and invested also. And one of the first things that he told me is: “Don’t stick with investors. You have enough money” — we had just raised 1.5 million — “Focus on building a product, focus on building an MVP and getting the source customers”, which was great advice. So I listened to him, and then one day he calls me and says: “Hey Avi, I told you not to speak with investors, but you have to speak with this guy”. And I went: “Okay, I’ll speak with him.” And the guy was Alex Finkelstein from Spark in Boston. So Alex and I speak, we connect really well with a video call. And then he says: “Do you mind if I come over next week?” And I’m like: “What, do you have a trip planned or…?” “No, I just want to meet you.” So, okay that’s interesting. And Alex is a Senior Partner at Spark. So when he flies over from Boston to Barcelona, this means business. So we took it very seriously, obviously. We spent a day with Alex, my Co-Founder and I, and we didn’t have a product. Or a very basic product, I would say. So it was mainly around getting to know each other as individuals, that was the main point. And I remember working, it wasn’t like today, today’s a rainy day here in Barcelona unusually. But it was April in Barcelona, which is very nice and sunny. So we were walking down the beach by the ocean and just talking about our vision for the company, where do we think we should go, how big it can be. And during this walk, and a few beers were involved as well, he said: “How about you come to Boston next week and we’ll give you a term sheet.” And I couldn’t believe it, it sounded too good. Spark is a great fund. Look at the success story they had, it’s amazing. I mean I should probably not mention too many portfolio companies, I don’t want to offend everybody else, but Twitter was an early stage investment for them, when they were only a handful of people there. They invested in Cruise, that was sold to GM for over $1 billion only 8 months after they invested in their A round. So a really great portfolio of companies — Trello, Stack Exchange, etc. So they are A player VC and getting invited to go to Boston as an official partnership was a really great opportunity.

Nathan: So what do you think it was? It almost sounds too good to be true, right? This guy talks to you on Skype or whatever, and then comes over and you guys are walking down the beach drinking beers and you know, that leads to a term sheet. Did he have a thesis about the travel space and he identified you? How did this actually happen?

Avi: So firstly, Alex is a very smart travel investor. He does in other verticals as well, but he has a few great investments, including at least one unicorn that he invested in the early stage, and Get Your Guide. So he’s a very experienced and smart travel investor. I spoke with him about it, so I’ve some notion of what he had in mind. Basically the way he looked at it was: if you assess all the risks that there is in an investment, you could have a product risk, or market risk, or team risk. We had an interesting idea for a product, the initial product. So of course there is a risk, and we scaled the product, and we built the next version. It’s some kind of risk, but we show that we can build at least the first version and get people to use it. At the time, I think we had maybe 10 customers — 10 companies using us — something like this. Today we have 1500, just to give you a scale of magnitude. Around 10 companies probably using us, maybe less. So MVP with an initial product market, not really product market, initial users let’s say. So the product risk was minimal according to him. The market is huge — we’re talking about $1.5 trillion — there is no question about the market. People will travel for work in the foreseeable future, unless Elon Musk comes with tele-transportation, or whatever technology that kills air and hotel industries. This is here to stay. So if you look at all the risks — product, markets, competition, etc — the only real risk that we had at the time, and to a certain extent we still have today, is execution. And that’s an interesting risk to have because it depends on you. It’s about the quality of the team and about the quality of execution and strategy, and it’s just like that. It’s a very clear proposition, solving a real pain point. Nobody likes the way they travel for work. We’re solving a real pain in a huge market. I think a great team that we had already then, for sure has become the team we have now. So he saw all of that. And he was like: “That’s interesting”. And that’s the kind of deals that VCs are dying to find.

Nathan: Yeah, that’s good. And this actually syncs up a little bit with a similar interview I had yesterday. It was a big market, and a team that had done things before. And again, there was an execution risk, but with some proof of concept, and that seemed to be a good sweet spot for these investors. They were a very different story. They were making an ecommerce platform for plus size women, but the team had been in fashion together at Gilt Groupe. They had a big market, hundreds of millions of women, and that was enough for the investors. Alright, let’s go to the next question. So, that was Series A and then from there, was it just building product, scaling and progressively raising more? How did you know when to raise the next round?

Avi: It’s a good question. The thing is our B and C looked kind of like the A in the sense that we got an introduction for an investor. At each of the rounds, we were not actually about that. We were not looking to raise, at least not very actively. Always open to speak with more people, but we never actively went there and did the roadshow. And almost the same story actually — just meeting great investors, seeing that we have the same ambition and vision about the product, and about the market. And then deals just kind of shaped out of that.

Nathan: In the Series A, you had Johannes sort of as the catalyst or initiating this to the introduction to Alex Finkelstein. At the B and C, was it Alex saying “Hey, let me connect you to a couple guys. I think you guys are ready to talk to them”? Or was there some other catalyst?

Avi: Yeah, it’s always introductions. And this is, I think, very important also to note. It was always intros from people from the network. If I’m not mistaken, we have two colleagues in the Round B. I think one of them was actually Johannes again, and the other one was LocalGlobe, our seed round investors. And then for the Series C, it was also another introduction from an existing investor. Always intros was the catalyst for the beginning of the conversation with the lead investor.

Nathan: Did you ever run a process and really get out and shop the deal around? Or was it a couple of introductions, term sheet and get back to business?

Avi: No, it’s actually a bit unusual, but in any given round we never pitched it to more than three funds.

Nathan: Interesting. This is a different strategy than most of the folks I’ve talked to. Do you ever feel like you didn’t go on enough dates with investors, if you only talked to three funds per round? Or did you just have a good feeling about the ones you did talk to?

Avi: You always have the thought: “Maybe I could’ve got a 10% higher valuation, but I think it’s also very important to make sure that you have a strong fit with the investors. It’s not only about valuation, because it’s a partnership. It’s the partnership that you just cannot unwind, right? I mean, you think about partnerships, like business partnerships or even marriages, there are ways out legally. This is the one that you look at an SDA, and there isn’t a way out, you cannot ask the investor to step down and take his money and go away, it just doesn’t exist. The cultural fit, or the ambition, and how we see the business values — your values as a person and their values as people — I think all of it is extremely important and probably more important that a valuation, within a range of reasons.

Nathan: Well we’ll maybe touch on that because I think that’s interesting. So a lot of these calls, we’ll talk about almost building the funnel and how people did that. You didn’t have to do so much work on building the funnel. So how did you sort of map your business values, or what sort of business values were you really trying to optimize for?

Avi: I approached it the same way I approach hiring. So I interviewed the investors the way I interview a candidate, and you ask in exactly the same way. So you ask them to give you an example and a few stories, three examples, two reference calls about them, which is also very important both for candidates to join the company and also for investors. I think that’s something that entrepreneurs are always very shy about — due diligence on your investors. And I don’t think we should be. Let’s not forget that in the equation of raising money, we are the ones who are deciding who to buy from. We are buying cash and we’re selling equity. And if you have a good company and you are able to get term sheets, if you can get one term sheet, you can get two and three and four. So it’s up to you to decide who to buy from, and you have to do your diligence. You cannot just go into a partnership without knowing who you’re talking to. So I just interviewed them the way I interview a candidate, and then I do reference calls and we regroup as a team, and talk about the investor and try to assess if they’re the right fit for us.

Nathan: Do you have one or two interview questions that are your favorite, or that you find really uncover good stuff?

Avi: So I think there was one that is great for all kinds of interviews — asking about failure and how would they handle failure. So: “Do you have an example of when you failed, and what you learned from it, and how you approach that?” Because companies, especially startups, will go through good times and bad times and I’m trying to assess how this person will react if we have a quarter of missed growth, or we lose an important team member within the company. That’s a more general question. Then specifically for investors, we as a team have a very strong willingness to create a big independent company here. So to assess fit, we just ask it straight: “What if we get an offer to sell the company for $400 million in the next 12 months, what should we do?” So imagine if somebody just invested at a lower valuation than that and I tell them: “Exit in 12 months at $400 million,” because I want to see if they are in it for the long term, like we are. The obvious answer should be: “Hell no!” Why would you sell for $400 million if you can create a $100 billion company? It’s a no-brainer.

Nathan: Interesting. So you’re using that to gauge whether they’d be in it for the long term. I can see other founders using a question like that to gauge whether the investor would maybe block an exit, because this is one of these conflicts.

Avi: Yeah, but I want them to block an exit at this size. So that’s actually something very important for us. I want to have a round, especially the board, but also investors that are not on the board, I want them to push me to say no. We shouldn’t fool ourselves. I mean as a founder, especially in early stage, getting an offer to sell your company for 400 million, this is a life changing amount of money that we’re talking about. My grandchildren’s grandchildren will never have to work again. And this is Spain, so this is a lot of money. So it’s actually better at that round, I want them to block us. I want them to really put up a fight. Because it will be tough for anybody to say no to this kind of money. And I want them to be there and say: “What are you talking about? Didn’t you say that you’re going to build a multi-billion dollar business. Why are we talking about selling for 400 million?” So it’s actually by design that I want them to be like this.

Nathan: But just to play Devil’s advocate, that’s all great if things continue to go up and to the right, and everything goes well. But maybe you miss a quarter, a couple quarters, and then you better raise more money. It’s usually the founder that suffers the dilution and the protective provisions, and the VCs are protected because of the term. So I mean, does that factor in? This is more of a bigger question, but any thoughts on that?

Avi: We’re not in a safe line of business. If I wanted “safe,” I would go to work in a bank. Actually no, not anymore, even banks are not safe. This is a risk and you have to factor it in. I definitely have it in mind. If we have a down round scenario, this is something that is part of the game. As long as you understand the rules of the game, I think it’s fine. The issue is if sometimes you don’t understand that. So, of course, that’s a risk.

Nathan: Okay, good. A couple of other questions here. I notice when looking, if PitchBook is correct, you did the Series B in May 2018, then a Series C in October 2018. So it looks like the fundraising has got faster between rounds. Any strategy on that? Are you in a market that has a lot of competitors? Is this like a horse race to gain market share or is there any deeper strategy?

Avi: So, it’s a great question. Yes, the thing is — business travel, the whole market, is now transforming. It’s a $1.5 trillion beast that woke up. The opportunity, that almost didn’t exist five years ago, now is so clear. The way we see it is that we are now in 2005. This is the year where so many things moved around in leisure travel — Booking.com got acquired and there was a spin off a few years before that of Expedia. All of these changes in leisure travel that ended up with three big players, Booking Holding Group, Expedia Group and now Airbnb is obviously growing very nicely. And of course, more and more smaller players. This is what is about to happen in business travel. So we’re going to see in the next 10, 15 years, probably 2 or 3 groups that will dominate business travel. You don’t have a $100 billion company in business travel, you do have in leisure travel. Booking Holding Group is now roughly a $100 billion in market valuation, Expedia is smaller than that, but it’s still a very big business. The same is about to happen in business travel, so this is what everybody’s realizing now. And those like us that have a 3 year, almost 4 years now, head start against everybody else is the reason why we are able to raise more money and blast our growth rates, and our vision about things. The idea is that this is a land grab. A lot of companies that are not using any business travel tool today, will be using something in the next five years and this something should be TravelPerk. This is what we’re going for and hence the importance of going fast, and you need to raise more money to go even faster.

Nathan: Looks like Spark is in the US, but a lot of the investors are European. You had DST, which is Yuri Milner’s fund. He’s kind of an interesting personality. What was it like pitching him? How’d you get connected with those guys?

Avi: So to be precise, this is Yuri and his partner Tom investing personally, this is not DST. Their check book doesn’t contain checks small enough to fit our $44 million round. We know Tom Stafford, based in London. So we know him through, again, introductions and he was the one who introduced us to Yuri. It was probably one of the most interesting and intense pitches I’ve ever done in my life. Yuri is, I don’t know if you know, but he’s actually a scientist by training, and is also extremely smart and a very interesting guy. It was longer than the average pitch, and we almost didn’t talk about the business. And this is what he was trying to do, and that’s why I liked it so much, because he was trying to assess me as a person and I was trying to assess him as a person. I think after the conversation, we realized that we just like each other as people and we decided to do business together.

Nathan: Interesting. Just for kicks, do you remember one of the topics you guys talked about?

Avi: I think the main one was ambition, and what’s your goal? And Yuri and I share the same belief that the work-life balance is a bit of a misconception. If you really want to build a huge business, you really have to dedicate your life to it. And I think this is something that both him and I see eye to eye on.

Nathan: Good segue, I wanted to talk about building a startup in Spain and raising money in Spain. It almost seemed contrary to what you just said about ambition and everything, to build it in Spain. Because I think of Spain as your holiday destination. Why are you there? And what’s the startup scene like in Spain?

Avi: I’m in Spain because I moved here for business school and my wife said that we are staying here, and I listen to my wife. I learned that very young. And it’s a great destination for talent. So this is one of the hacks that we have in Barcelona — we are able to relocate people from anywhere in the world. We have people here who have moved from the valley, we have people who moved from any place in Europe, we have people who have moved from the Middle East, from Asia, and it’s just a very easy destination to move to. Especially when you’re young and are interested in doing a 2 to 4 year adventure, and maybe stay and maybe not. And so we have a lot of smart people that moved here for that adventure. The startup scene is actually becoming really interesting. It was kind of nonexistent. There are a few early success stories which were basically national champions in Spain. Privalia is a famous one, it’s a fashion ecommerce website, acquired by Vente-Privee. Trovit, Budget Places, you have a few online successes. Social Point is another one, it’s a gaming company. All of them in the range. So relative to Europe, it’s a nice success, talking about a range of $80 to $400 million exits. So these are nice ranges for Europe, they’re not as impressive as the valley. That was the previous generation, and now you have a new generation of startups that are more global and less thinking about Spain as the core market. Just to name a few — Badi is a great startup here, it’s an app to help people find roommates, created by an extremely smart young entrepreneur. Glovo is another one, it’s an everything delivery app, doing amazingly well, they’ve just closed I think another round of more than $100 million. And expanding extremely fast to South America, and I think Africa they mentioned last time in a press release. So yeah, a few of these. It’s not as vibrant as the valley for sure, it’s not as vibrant as Tel Aviv or even Berlin yet, but definitely up and coming. It’s definitely beginning now for a new generation.

Nathan: Is the startup scene concentrated in Barcelona or Madrid, or is it spread around?

Avi: So you have Madrid and Barcelona as the two hubs. Barcelona has more direct investments and more VC money flowing into it, especially from foreign investors and Spanish investors. And I think just by absolute number of startups, Barcelona has more than Madrid, but definitely Madrid has a few interesting startups as well. So these are two hubs that exist in Spain. There’s one company in Valencia that I know of, so Flywire is half in Valencia and half in Boston. And the rest of the city is a more holiday destination, rather than startup destinations.

Nathan: You mentioned, and I think this was kind of fun, the hack is to get people to move to Barcelona. Can you recruit there and what’s the talent pool like? And what’s the work ethic like of local talent?

Avi: So local talent exists. I’m hiring great people, especially engineers, designers, but also all roles. It’s never easy, I don’t think it’s easy in any place in the world to hire great people. And for the great talent everybody’s fighting for. And as I said, we do have some competition in terms of other startups, and also bigger companies. Local talent is great. You have a young generation of engineers and designers and product owners that have traveled, that have worked abroad, and came back with these notions of thinking about a startup in the right way, I would say. Not as a lifestyle business, but really as scaling a business to a very big size. So we’re doing the education ourselves for sure. And actually we don’t have an issue around work ethic. I think it’s maybe outside of the big city. I’m not Spanish, I don’t know exactly if it’s a true stereotype or just a stereotype, but I don’t see it in Barcelona that much.

Nathan: Good, okay, great. Any tips for any Spanish startups that are, up and coming? Maybe at the earliest stages, raising seed, Series A, just to navigate the scene?

Avi: I would say start global day one, think big. Don’t try to be number one in Spain, try to be number one at least in Europe, if not globally. And don’t be afraid to be ambitious, I think there’s a lot of shyness. I think something that everybody can learn from Americans, especially from the valley, is being extremely bold with statements, even in the early days. People start, where there are three people in a garage and they talk about being number one in something, globally. And I think this kind of ambition is crucial to create your startup. You cannot be anything less than that in your ambition.

Nathan: Yeah. Good. And then I guess just in general, navigating the European, venture scene, it sounds like almost all of this started from introductions. But any thoughts and tips of just raising money in Europe, any advice you would give?

Avi: Yeah, so at the moment there is a lot of money and a lot of opportunities and great investors have raised big funds and are looking to invest. So there isn’t any kind of liquidity issue right now in the market, especially early stage. Not that I see, and especially not in Europe. It sounds tough and I think a lot of first time entrepreneurs, especially if they never raised for their startup, are a bit confused about how do you get around to getting introduced to investors, but it’s not that difficult. I mean at the end of the day, as I said, you have a product that the investors are really, really interested to know about. Their job is to find good companies and deploy as much capital as they can into this company. So don’t be shy about asking for introductions then use your network and if you don’t have a network, build your network. And if you don’t know how to do it, well that’s your first task as a founder, and you have many other challenges in the future. So nobody said it’s easy. By the way, my first recommendation is do not start a company, come and join my company. We need great people. And if you’re really, really, really crazy and you still want to do it, and you don’t listen to my advice, then you should really not give up. It’s difficult to create your network, it’s difficult to get introductions, but that’s, I think, the best way to approach it, especially in the early stage.

Nathan: I think that’s good advice. And this is also a pattern I’ve heard on a lot of these interviews. I’ll ask the founder where they built that network and a lot of them intentionally went to work at a startup that was on a growth trajectory, partly just to build the network before starting their own. So I think that’s a longer term hack, but it’s a good hack actually.

Avi: And here’s supporting evidence for what you just said. I sold my first startup to the Priceline Group, Booking Holding Group they’re called now. Currently the CEO of the group is an amazing person called Glenn Fogel. He’s a legend in online travel. He bought Booking.com for not a lot of money, I think it was something around $100 million and this asset is worth north of $80 billion now as a group. So he’s arguably the best M&A person for sure in travel, but maybe in history, I’m not aware of all M&As that happened. I know Glenn, because he came to meet us in my previous company where I was an employee. So I joined a startup as an employee, I met Glenn, we kept in touch, and then I called him when I was looking for investors in my startup. So to support what I just said, if you don’t have a network, a great way to build your network is join a company that has investors and you can meet the investors. In a company like ours, we are very happy for employees to join the board meeting, present something. We do dinners where people from the team are invited to meet the investors and the board members. It’s a great way to me to build their network for sure.

Nathan: Yeah. Oh, that’s great. Very good. All right, well I will let you get back to building TravelPerk. Anything you want to plug, promote, open job reqs, discounts, deals, anything happening that you want to call attention to?

Avi: I think it’s a great service to your listeners, if they travel for work they need to know about TravelPerk because we are a way better solution than whatever they have. So if you’re listening to this and you’re traveling for work, get in touch — www.travelperk.com. Or send me an email at avi@travelperk.com.

Nathan: Avi@travelperk.com. Could a startup with four people use it or is it more enterprise?

Avi: Well actually we’re focused on small and medium size businesses, so startups are a great customer for us, and we are a great solution for them.

Nathan: That’s cool. All right, this is great, fun, fun stuff. Congratulations on raising multiple rounds and the growth — 1500 companies. Pretty cool. So good stuff, we’ll look for you after your next round. How’s that sound?

Avi: Sounds good. Hopefully it will be more than six months from now because we need to focus on building.

Nathan: All right, sir. Thank you very much. Have a nice day.

PS if you’d like to watch the interview with Avi, click here: https://youtu.be/M0ANilIDP_U