“We’re a travel startup working through one of the biggest disruptions of all time” — Moonfish founder George X. Zeng
When I first started writing this series, the most important part of this project for me was to give early-stage founders an opportunity to share their voice, their challenges, and their hopes for the future.
Since the beginning of California’s shelter in place order due to the COVID-19 pandemic, our lives have changed drastically and impacted us all in different ways. While some entrepreneurs find themselves in industries that are growing and thriving in spite of these uncertain times, others might be facing the hardest crises of their lifetime. Startups in travel, hospitality, transportation, and many related industries are being hit the hardest and must adapt quickly in order to survive.
George X. Zeng is the co-founder and CEO of Moonfish, a travel technology startup and a resident of our Samsung NEXT Guest Program in San Francisco. Prior to Moonfish, he worked for four years at Facebook leading product and engineering teams in advertising technology. Before that, he led Groupon Southern China and founded a healthcare technology company. In a prior life, he worked in consulting at McKinsey and is an alum of Princeton and Wharton.
1. What does the current situation mean for you as an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley?
To state the elephant in the room for us — we’re a travel company working through one of the biggest travel disruptions of all time :-). It’s been a crazy experience navigating the dynamics of a pandemic (personally), disruption in our travel partners across the board, and managing the twists and turns of these implications for Moonfish from a people, product, growth, and monetization perspective.
2. How are you dealing with the situation on a personal level?
I’m naturally an extremely extroverted person, so staying at home is slowly driving me crazy :-). However, I’ve tried to manage this by spending more quality time with my wife and dog. I’ve scheduled VC “dates” with groups of friends to play board games, and with individual friends to catch up on life.
Surprisingly, I’ve found using video conferencing to interact with friends to be much better than I had thought.
3. How does this situation change your perspectives? — for worse and for better
One of the things we cared about from Day 1, and now I realize is more important than ever, is effective cash management.
For example — in the whole history of our company, we have yet to pay a single penny for office space/real estate costs. We got really nice, free office space from friends, investors, and startup programs — and the Samsung NEXT Guest Program has been huge for us. This has ended up making a big difference because real estate in San Francisco is so expensive. We haven’t paid for our Amazon Web Services costs; we got massive 70–100% discounts on our analytics service, payment processing services, etc. All of these savings have enabled us to weather the current economic environment far better than we could have if we weren’t careful.
4. What motivates you to keep going?
Professionally, I’m still looking forward to rolling out Moonfish across the entire world, and making it a product that is able to fulfill our mission of enabling anyone to travel anywhere. To me, that means being able to give people personalized recommendations on all aspects of their trip — from planning to flights, accommodations, and on the ground experiences.
On a personal level, I hope to create a great travel company, but I also want to contribute to the next generation of entrepreneurs.
I’ve had so many mentors, friends, and advisors help me in my entrepreneurial journey — that I hope at some point in my career, to be able to do the same.
5. What are you currently doing to help?
The most important thing we can do right now for our community and travelers in general, is to help them navigate this turbulent environment with objective advice, information, safety recommendations, and data.
There’s a lot of confusion amongst consumers in general. They’re uncertain about how safe it is to fly, what are travel guidelines, and what airline cancellation/change policies are. We tried to help our users in this front by outright blacklisting all deals on the Moonfish platform until after at least July; providing travel information for users, including the change/cancellation policies of all airlines; and providing real-time daily information on flight inventory and price changes, so people can have transparency on exactly what’s happening to flights and the travel industry.
6. What are you hopeful about in the future?
I’m hopeful that we collectively as a society will navigate the pandemic with minimal loss in life and minimal economic damage. Watching the response here in California, I’m optimistic this will come to pass.
For Moonfish and for the Travel industry in general — I’m hopeful that after it’s safe again, we can start a movement where everyone travels to different locations yearly and develop empathy for people very different from themselves. I grew up in Mississippi, and before I traveled, my world was very small. However — I went to Brazil and danced in the favelas of Rio; I went to Germany and drank beer in castles with raucous bands of Germans. I went to Phuket and laid on the beach under starry skies with new friends from Thailand. And I found that after all this travel, I matured and grew much more understanding of people different from myself. It’s very hard to fear or hate a country after drinking beer, dancing, and partaking in the hospitality of her people. I believe a lot of the fear and hate present in the world is a lack of this kind of empathy, and I hope to do my part to bring us together.
I’ll be sharing more founder responses over the coming days. If you are an early-stage entrepreneur in Silicon Valley and you want to share your story to inspire others, we would love to hear from you! Please feel free to reach out to me directly at fernanda@samsungnext.com
