GetYourGuide CEO & Founder, Johannes Reck: The Wild Story Raising $450M From Masa and Softbank

I would have not raised as big of a series A. Looking back, I think it was too much dilution. What did change was that suddenly, I felt like a celebrity. That was the moment when I made the biggest mistakes. If you have a Sequoia Capital or an Index or a Spark Capital on your cap table, the reality is that your next round will be so much easier.

Ready to go? (upbeat music) Johannes, dude, it is so good to make this happen. I have been a fan and follower from afar for a long time. So thank you for joining me, man.

Thank you for being here.

Now, I would love to start with the beginning, 'cause I hear that Get Your Guide is actually the result of great friendship. It's you and Tao coming up with an idea from university together. Can you just take me back to you and Tao sitting in a room together, deciding you were gonna start a company together?

Yeah, totally. So this is actually 2007, 2008. Um, you know, Tao and I were both students at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. He was doing physics, I was doing biochemistry and neurobiology, so something very remote from online travel. And, uh, we both led a student delegation to Beijing in China, uh, at the time. And I made a pivotal mistake in that I booked my flight ticket a day early and arrived in Beijing, uh, without the group. And, you know, I was trying to, you know, do stuff then in my hotel room, I logged on the internet, you know, I was, like, going on Google trying to find things to do, going to the Beijing Wall and, like, doing something with the day, and I couldn't find anything, I was stuck in the hotel room. Next day, Tao shows up, you know, he, he shows me the city. Um, you know, we go and see, um, the Beijing Wall, the Great Wall, you know, we have Beijing duck, you know, in the hutong. So it was, like, a really special day. And, um, you know, from that epiphany really of, like, having seen the, the city through the eyes of a local, someone who speaks the language, we went back, um, to Switzerland, to ETH, and said, you know, "We have to build a website. We have to build a community for people, uh, so they are able to do that." A- and we did that. And, like, the prequel to, to Get Your Guide was, like, we were building a travel community for everyone to be a guide. No one actually used that, you know, I think we had 100 guides at the-

'Cause that's what I read. I read that you pivoted three times before you found real product market fit.

Totally, it was terrible. So-

So what was the first iteration?

First iteration was literally a peer-to-peer websites for guides. You know, s- small, like, untold story is we also considered doing something, uh, like couch surfing at the time. So, so homes and we, you know, we thought, you know, "No one is gonna stay at someone else's home." So, like, you know what, discarding that idea. You know, someone else in San Francisco picked that up, uh, very successfully. And then, you know, we went to guides and we're like, you know, gui- like, guiding is such an important thing in travel, so can't we bui- build a community of guides? But we're thinking this, you know, from the lens of the student. We didn't do any market research or anything. So we built a social network, only 100 students signed up. Most students don't have time to be guides. And we, we had, I think, three to five bookings in the first two years of our prototype. Three of which was my mother because she took so much pity on us students. (laughs)