David Litwak:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to how I got here mozilo and focus wires weekly podcast about innovators in travel and transportation. Today we’re joined by Alex flyer flyer was founded in 2013, by Alex and his co founders, Cyril and john. And they forecast future fair volatility through complex data analysis, helping you to build tools to extract signal from a world of noise. And I read that direct because it was a little hard for me to construct a, an explanation my own, which is why Alex is on this podcast to help us clarify that a little bit. But we’d like to start off every podcast the same way, Alex, which is to say first of all, welcome, but then to ask you to explain all everything that led to you. How you got here, I guess is in a nutshell.
Alex Mans:
Definitely. So in a nutshell, quick background, I moved to Silicon Valley about seven years ago, born and raised in the Netherlands. And I’ve always been a major aviation fan, lover, and geek. And I’ve always as I traveled, as all of us have seen the inefficiency and volatility in airline pricing. So originally, when the company was founded, we try to basically arbitrage that volatility by forecasting the price of airline tickets. And then, using that knowledge to help consumers save money, we initially build a set of products that would allow consumers to buy an option on the flight or to effectively short the flight by giving them a discount now based on knowing that the price would go down in the future. We distributed those products to sites like TripAdvisor, Priceline, kayak and others. But it was very, very hard to mask distribution, because consumer airline ticket sales is very low margin is highly competitive. And it is not a major priority to most of the players in that otas and MySpace. So what we did about three years ago, as we move closer to a number of airlines, we realized that that was a huge opportunity in the enterprise airline revenue management space. So we pivoted to business. And we took that technology and started applying it for the airlines instead of trying to arbitrage the airlines. So what we do today, we’re about 80 people, and we integrate over an airline’s data, we use a bunch of deep learning on top of that, to then forecast the outcomes both in terms of revenue and load factor, but also to strategy that will maximize revenue by the time the aircraft takes off. And what’s very relevant right now, given the COVID-19 situation is that airlines are managing their business in the back of a napkin, because any an old traditional forecasting methodologies based on this year versus last year are out the window. And context is key, I suppose about a very volatile climate, you need to use all this data to understand the context and forecast what’s going to happen and what decisions to make. And that’s exactly what we do at fire working with major airlines in the US, Middle East Europe, and Asia, and to help them make the right decisions using their data
Kevin May:
is kept here. Thanks so much for coming on the on the podcast this week. And take us back a little bit. How did you come up with the idea of the original original idea? And how did you meet your founders?
Alex Mans:
Yeah, so originally, again, like I traveled a lot, I’ve been traveling since it was quite, quite young. And when booking airline tickets, right prices are all over the place. That’s price competition between carriers. Prices are in some markets, very reactive and other markets not reactive at all. And I wanted to find out why is it that there’s so much volatility to pricing. And once I found out that there was actually a logic to the volatility tied to demand or events or competition, I realized that it shouldn’t be possible to forecast what those prices will do in the future. Having done more research on that found out about, you know, the farecast initiatives about 1015 years ago and then and I realized that okay, well, if we want to make a business out of this, we have to do more than just tell the consumer whether the price will go up or down, we have to try and you know, automate and productize this because you can’t really charge for a buyer Wade recommendation. So it’s one of the reasons why fac asked in the end didn’t build a viable product, they build a feature, right? So we built we took these forecasts, and we turned it into a product where we made it as simple as possible for the consumer. If you see a flight on Priceline on TripAdvisor, that was just a second button that says click here to lock this price. And all we need from you is your email address and your credit card info. I will guarantee you today’s price. So that’s basically how simple we made it and how we abstracted these forecasts into a physical product, leaving only the distribution at scale, of course to be the challenge for me.
Kevin May:
And founders question How did you meet your founders?
Alex Mans:
So I moved to Silicon Valley about seven years ago, I spend about three months in an acceleration program in the valley, trying to get to get get my bearings, understand how things work. Hear build a bit of a network. About six or nine months later, after the founding of the company, I met john Cyril, they joined the business. And we’ve been building out the business ever since Sarah left the company, after we pivoted from consumer to enterprise. See it more of a marketing background who’s in the marketing background? and john left the business more recently, he still.
David Litwak:
Yeah, so what I found interesting was what you kind of said, You started consumer. And on the arbitrage side, I’d love to delve a little bit more into why why you guys decided to make that pivot, because my first initial impression is exactly kind of, I think the conclusion you came to, which is that you are trying to figure out where the pricing is inaccurate. So you can arbitrage it. But there’s entire teams of people at these airlines who are trying to figure out how to make it as accurate as possible. Right. And like, it sounds like you eventually made the transition to helping them do that. Right. But I’m curious, why did you put like, what was your thought process behind why like what the business opportunity was there? Did you think was it as simple as you thought you could outsmart the airlines? When you transitioned from a consumer and doing the arbitrage play to helping airlines with the revenue management. At some point, you guys thought you could beat the airlines at their own game? Right? You thought that okay, well, we can figure out and do this more intelligently than the airline’s hence the arbitrage opportunity. What was your thought process behind that? And and when did you realize either you were wrong, or it just wasn’t worth it? I’d love to hear about that pivot.
Alex Mans:
Yeah, so I, you broke up again, a little bit, but I’m going to fill in the pieces as best as I can. So, like I mentioned before, like the product that we had, that allowed consumers to lock the price of an airline ticket, or get a discount today by basically arbitrage, today’s price versus tomorrow’s price. That product worked quite well, it was very easy, consumers loved it. The challenge in consumer, especially airline travel is that if you are a distributor and otas are a meta, there is very little margin in that game, right? Really, people are selling airline tickets in order to then sell you the hotel, right or some other higher margin product. The reality about like, like our challenges were while we were able to get distribution, we never could get enough distribution fast enough. So we grew the business quite a bit on the consumer products, but it’s very, very hard to get the distribution and the technology we build was very, very good at forecasting the future and forecasting demand and forecasting volatility. So as airlines learn more and more about what we were doing, airlines actually came to us asking about, can you use your technology to help us kind of level up our very traditional very old school methodologies of forecasting that we deployed today? So I would say it was a mix of a very challenging climate and consumer a travel distribution, right, especially an air mixed with airlines, understanding what we were doing, were hearing what we were doing, and asking us to come in and help them basically developer established a next generation of revenue management solutions.
Kevin May:
Did you? Were you surprised by how difficult the task was being a consumer facing brand, quite quickly after you launched? Or was it something that you realized over time,
Alex Mans:
so I think I think any travel entrepreneur will be able to tell you this, but in travel, it is the easy part is building the product, even building a differentiated product. That’s the easy part. The hard part is one getting distribution and to getting a distribution at scale, and three getting a distribution cheaply. Right, and that that’s always the challenge when you deal with consumer travel, whether you sell flights a little bit less with hotels, because the margins are much much higher. They’re so less with Airbnb, of course, because they have proprietary inventory. So the ones that tend to win and consume and travel are the ones that have an incredible distribution mechanism at a very low cost or eXtreme Scale distribution, or the ones that have inventory that has high margin or is unique to them. Right and, and the challenge is, is that when you resell somebody else’s product, but if it’s an airline ticket or whatever it is a derivative on the airline tickets like us, like what we were doing, you will find yourself that like you need to solve all those three boxes, right and check all those three boxes. And that’s it. is very, very, very difficult. And especially when you rely on otas and metas, to distribute your products, you are beholden to their speed of integration and their timeline and their roadmap. And if I put myself in the shoes off, you know, the xpdf of the world, the reality is, is that they mostly optimize based on where revenue growth exists, right. And that tends to be in improving hotels or adding activities or doing packaging, or doing that kind of stuff and on salary. And that that that results that like, you cannot build a startup and scale the startup, if you have to sit around and wait to end up at a, you know, top five position on the roadmap of a larger Oh, do I matter?
Kevin May:
Right, so another kind of related question. So there was the marketing element of it. In terms of the connectivity, you know, just getting into airlines or whatever, just, you know, back end distribution you were getting where you were getting your inventory from? Was there any of that? Because this is your first this was your first kind of role in travel? was any of that? Either confusing or surprising? Or a nasty mixture of the pair?
Alex Mans:
Yeah, so so I didn’t do anything in travel tech before. But and learning how to GDS distribution world works, that is something you can pick up fairly quickly, right? It’s fairly well documented, it’s been around literally for 35 plus years, right? So it’s not like it’s something brand new. So you very quickly learn about the Amadeus Sabre travel parts of the world, right. So getting up to speed, there’s a quick, I think the thing that most entrepreneurs in travel underestimate is there’s a huge gap between people’s interest to build a travel business specifically when it comes to flights and their understanding of how much money is in it. Right. And I think, and I think that that’s the piece you’ll learn rather quickly. And I think most travel startups that get into the space of selling flights, or selling similar flight related products, will be able to build a product will be able to ship that product. But then very quickly find out those challenges of the distribution and the scale and the cost of it. And the margins that go with it. So that that took some time, like I would say a year to really understand what those margins and cost profiles look like. And but that’s also why we quickly like within six months after starting the company, we pivoted it from direct to consumer to distribute their products to otas. And us, right, which really got us to grow the business. But then we hit the next challenge, which is getting enough distributions when you start parties by becoming a priority to them.
David Litwak:
I can, yeah, I can quickly restate that. So it seems kind of like transformation. Everyone was okay, let’s go to the otas. But there was a big additional transformation when you realize, well, otas are only marginally interested in in flights, because it’s kind of the lead gen for their hotels, so cool. Like they might work with you at your party number 10. Really? And then you realize, well, who’s party number one for airline? airline pricing, its airlines. And you basically moved into airline it is that a correct? You know, kind of understanding.
Alex Mans:
Be careful thing airline it because airlines it today still means mainframes in the basement. And and the code base that has existed for 20 years, right. So be careful there. I will call an airline enterprise SOS. Like, like, it’s Yeah, so that’s a big opportunity. Our airlines are surprisingly bad at accessing, transforming and keeping their data in a structured manner. They’re surprisingly bad at utilizing solutions, like the cloud, they are years behind on anything that’s even close to machine learning. Right. And then on top of that, they tend to be stuck in operational and thought processes that, you know, have been the same for 20 years. So it’s very, very hard for an airline to truly transform and we’re going to move into a new direction. And that’s the opportunity that we saw in trying to, to execute
Kevin May:
on that, on that kind of subject, Alex, I mean, are this I’m presuming there’s some airlines that are slightly more advanced than others. And it’d be great if you didn’t name names, but completely understandable if you don’t, those that are slightly more advanced than others. Why is that? Is it because they’ve grasped digitalization of their kind of business a lot quicker than others because they see it as a business opportunity or a technical opportunity.
Alex Mans:
I think when it comes to air, like airlines are more advanced in different areas. So not every airline is advanced in every area, an airline that is advanced and its ability to do more than them and pricing might not be very advanced in a way that’s never quite right. Or an airline that has very advanced and packaging and vacation type products might not be very advanced in the reservation system it uses behind the scenes, right. So it’s really a mix and no I don’t think any airline is truly you know, I bombed across all of these All these axes, when it comes to the area that we focus on, which is the kind of the data piece and the business intelligence and revenue management side, the reality is, is that in this space, there are only take all three or four, perhaps five vendors that are actively in the revenue management space for airlines, three of those Sabre Amadeus and pros we all know, have the majority of the market share, and they’ve been around for a long time. And if you look at their distribution, they are really distributed across geographies and airline types, right, you have the low cost carriers, you have North America, Europe and Asia, roughly how to how to cut is made and the what they provide is effectively the same, right? Obviously, a low cost carrier is more focused on a point to point network, a full service network carrier is very different from a full service like an a domestic carrier, like that. There’s a lot of like differences and a lot of different needs. But none of these needs like have been answered with a new type of solution in 20 years. And and so like, again, like a glove comes to like how advanced an airline is, it is like it is really more about the business processes they run than about the tools they use, because everybody uses the same tools. The only airlines to build our own in house solutions really are, you know, United Delta Lufthansa group to some extent. But everybody else uses the same underlying foundation.
Kevin May:
Yeah. Okay.
David Litwak:
So once I see if you can go a little more in depth on the machine learning part of what you’re doing now, obviously, I’m not expecting you to tell us, you know, your various Basie algorithms or something like that. But I also think, you know, being another Silicon Valley. Yeah. Yeah, well, being in Silicon Valley in Silicon Valley for seven years as I was, you hear the term machine learning and AI thrown around quite liberally. And it’s at the point where it’s almost eye rolling worthy. And I’d love to kind of just, you know, hear a little bit about how what exactly you’re doing and maybe as layman terms as you can get?
Alex Mans:
Yeah, yeah, so So I think the first thing to realize is that there’s a lot of AI and ml being thrown out there, especially also in the airline it enterprise SAS space. The reality though, is that your typical airline, it vendor only has access to the data that sits in the existing system of the airline of the system they provide. So if I’m the provider of the reservation system, I might have easy access to the schedule and the inventory and the bookings. But I don’t have access to a ton of data, right marketing, market share snapshots, at fairs, competitive schedules, competitive pricing, search analytics, distribution information about the GDS, or direct distribution. So the first step, if you want to do machine learning, or AI, well is making sure that you have a consistent, reliable store of the data. Right. So the very first thing we did, and it seems to be something that others have skipped, is we build a very, very extensive data platform that is 100% focused and optimized for what you typically encounter with an airline. And we build what we call a canonical data format that is common across all of our customers, right, so whether you’re a full service carrier with connecting flights or a low cost carrier, that is point to point, the way we basically structure that data to schedule, the inventory, or the fares or the bookings is the same across. So we’ve invested a lot of time and money into building a data platform. Having an incredible data falls firm with tons and tons of data both from the airlines reservation system and external sources and marketing tools the airline uses and merchandising tools the airline uses. Having all that data in a consistent, standardized manner, now allows us to really work with it. Now, when it comes to the AI side, we very much rely on deep learning. And the reasoning there is simple, especially larger airlines that operate in a very complex context, right like you You change your pricing and demand changes based on your price based on competitor based on your schedule based on connections based on weather based on events, like there’s so much context, right. And historically, the way an airline has managed pricing is basically they have a curve as to how they expect bookings and load factor to evolve. If they’re ahead of the curve. They raise prices, if they’re behind the curve. They’re lower prices. It’s kind of a pendulum they tried to stick to right now, especially if they’re with COVID-19, like before, and especially now these forecast curves are useless, they’re actively inaccurate, and they’re pretty useless, right? Because they don’t consider the context. And so and they rely on the analysts really to be making adjustments and moving leaders over time. Now what we do and the reason that we use deep learning is we can feed all that This data. So all these data sources that are not even being considered today and often not considered by the analyst, we can feed them into a deep learning algorithm or a set of algorithms. And what these algorithms do is they basically trying to understand and correlate to simplify it. All these different factors in order to come up with a forecast, a forecast or final revenue for a flight, a forecast the load factor, or more importantly, a forecast as to what pricing strategy to follow in order to maximize revenue, right, given context. And the reason why we haven’t lost a single customer because of COVID. And why our customers are doubling down in times like these on solutions like ours, is because of context, context has changed like never before. Competitors schedule, the demand, the capacity, the equipment times, everything has changed. And the beauty of deep learning is because it has the ability to correlate such incredible large amount of data and understand logic and relationships, you have the ability to even while data is very sparse, or even while the context has changed, you have the ability to make intelligent informed decisions based on all the data out there over the last three, four years. And what you’re seeing right now. And that’s a place where we outperform robots, our deep learning based methodologies outperform whatever has been out there and it’s out there before, like airlines are literally managing their business on the back of a napkin right now, most of the revenue management systems at airlines are turned off, analysts are manually setting the prices or manually managing the inventory against prices. That’s literally what we’re looking at right now. And that’s going to be true for at least 12 to 24 months or
David Litwak:
so. You mentioned COVID. And I was on a call with a fairly well known Angel veteran a lot, Gil, yesterday, he was talking about the different types of companies that are you know, either benefiting from COVID have to last through COVID I you know, we will travel again, but like we’re gonna need to get to this next year. And others that like, you know, might get a boost from it, but then it’ll quickly fall off. You know, once we get past this. Are you guys cleaning up now? When it comes to new clients, and do you think this is, you know, potentially a transformative moment and how airlines view? They’re their revenue management going forward? Or do you think that maybe once Coronavirus, and those go f star? Our systems worked well enough before the screw it?
Alex Mans:
Yeah, so I think we as a company eflyer. In this space, we have an opportunity to leapfrog but it’s out there like never before. Like, in every era, like many airlines we work with happened to be the airlines that are already quite thinking. And the reason why they work with us before COVID is because they realize they need something better going forward. Right? Because their strategy are the networks or competition profiles are changing. And they need to keep up right now even the airlines, what’s interesting is even the airlines the pre before thought they were fine. And the solutions they have suited them fine. And that reaching back out and saying, Hey, you know, this whole contextual forecasting and this deep learning and using our data, we might want to take a look. So the reality for us as a business right now is that not only our existing customer is fully on board and accelerating or wanting to accelerate the rollouts that we’re doing with them, we have a long list of customers reaching out to us simply because they are looking for new solutions, and they’re not getting it from their existing vendors. pressive
David Litwak:
happy that at least one travel company is benefiting from all that say, you know, the rest of us are having a hard time going forward. So I’m just gonna say something, Alex.
Alex Mans:
Yeah, just to be clear, obviously, like if you are in a business model, where you are reliant on your revenues reliant on passenger counts, right? Obviously, there’s an impact for everyone, even an enterprise SAS business hours. But for us, we’re really looking at this as we have the opportunity during COVID-19, to work closer with our customers and allocate every single resource we have in the company to building out our product to come out of this stronger. Combine that with the fact that we have a lot of inbound requests from customers, once we knew once we didn’t know, again, like we see this as a leapfrog opportunity for 2020. And, of course,
Kevin May:
Alex, so quite interested in your your investment, your fundraising strategy, and that kind of timeline of that over the years. And you’ve raised and forgive me if crunchbase is off base today. It’s one and a half million in 2014, which is not long after you launched. I mean, that was when you were a consumer facing one. I’m just curious because we’ve talked quite extensively about That period, when you were a consumer facing brand, what was the kind of what was the pitch at that stage? To get that kind of money was were you saying, okay, we’re gonna invest in the tech with this money? Or is it because marketing and distribution is so important and as a consumer facing knows where the money was gonna go?
Alex Mans:
Yes, I think the the, at the seed stage right when we were and I think there’s a funny story to tell here and that is, and I have to like you will see this in countries as well, but Jeb was acknowledged he ventures as an investor in our business. And it’s actually just funny anecdotal story where we were in a very small loft on Roush Street in San Francisco, and we were literally across from Airbnb was founded same streets building across from us. And I remembered at one day, Bonnie from JTV, visited our offices, this was even before Jdp was founded. And we explained what we were doing, and we were doing the consumer stuff. And we explained that, hey, you know, like, we built this proprietary product that was independently from the airline able to create value, right through options and on airline tickets. And by themselves, that was an interesting proposition. And if it was a differentiated product, it had a per unit cost and economics that was attractive, right? Forget the distribution for a second. So that’s really how we raised that money. But back then to go back to the anecdote, like Bonnie came in said, Listen, I like this, I like this product. And I can see airlines and otas, alike wanting to sell it. But like, what if we apply this to airlines, and this is two years before we even started pivoting to enterprise pricing? And so yeah, so to answer your question, we raised our initial fundraise is based on having a differentiated product that was extremely simple for the consumer had a good unit economics. And this was all prior to finding out how difficult getting scaled distribution was.
Kevin May:
Yeah. And more recently, you’ve you’ve raised the almost 20 million over the last two or three years. I mean, that’s, presumably because the investors have seen the value in the business to business side of the of the company since you pivoted I mean, there are others in the not specifically doing what you’re doing. But there has been a a clutch of airline software companies, startups that have come along in the last couple of years. And it’s almost it’s almost like a breath of fresh air for b2b travel tech startups that there is that money kind of coming into the into the ideas now?
Alex Mans:
Well, I think that there is a there are some differences in who’s coming into the space, I think, yeah, before COVID Airlines were very intent on digitally transforming, right, so every Digital Transformation Program and like some CIOs, you know, like, fancy project, and, and this was mostly driven by the fact that, you know, everybody in the C suite in an airline is very aware of the existence of machine learning and the existence of big data and the existence of the cloud, right, and lm sent an off user solution. So I think that digital transformation was very much driven by seeing other industries quickly adopt these technologies and getting benefits from it, or airlines not adopting them and not getting benefit, instead of doing the same thing over and over again. So this digital transformation programs drove a whole wave of like airlines buying and bringing in new technologies and startups. I think what you’re looking at now with COVID, and post COVID, is airlines are trying to figure out how to restructure their own organizations to be more capable and nimble and more in some cases, to develop the technologies in house. I’ve seen airlines started data science teams and data teams. And right, so you’re seeing kind of a shift. And let’s bring in startups to how do we establish ourselves to be more consistently innovating going forward? And I yeah, and it depends on what area you’re in. I think there’s going to be a heavy heavy investment in and sillery type services going forward. I think you’re you’re going to see a reduction in investment than anything that is in the long tail. Right, like anything under the long tail, you know, point 1.2% margin is going to be lower priority. And as many startups in that space, yeah. Yeah, but I think if you’re in the in the business intelligence, revenue management and salary, merchandising distribution space, I think there’s a big opportunity as airlines try and maximize their revenue and reduce their costs
David Litwak:
quickly, as what do you think will be in house and what will you think will be out as you just mentioned, that some people are bringing their data teams in house? I think something is important. Mozilla has noticed this. We have actually had a surge of new business interests as well for ground transportation tech because a ton of people who thought they might want to build this themselves have now gone Oh, well, we don’t have the time to do that shirt. We’ll use you now. And you No, but we did that was something that we were actually surprised that, you know, in the founding of our companies, like a shocking number of people kind of wanted to have some something in house, we kind of thought is probably not worth it. Like, do you think that, you know, this will potentially backfire? People go, Oh, yeah, you’re right. This is important. We want to build it.
Alex Mans:
I think it depends, like I can imagine if you’re in like a ground transportation space, like most do is like there is one component that is difficult for airlines. And that is like the supplier relationships and the connectivity into them, right? There’s a reason why GDS is and otas and metas are still around and growing in most cases. And that is because there’s a huge overhead involved with trying to aggregate information from many different places, right. So I think it is one thing for an airline to establish and want to use a better data infrastructure, it’s a whole different thing for an airline to, to now build solutions and products that might just, you know, dependent on their in house reservation system, but also require them to negotiate and establish connections with external vendors and solutions. And so I think, like, I think I think it’s a bit of a difference, I think, airlines want to be able to use tools like Tableau or Spotfire, or Power BI, right. So you’ll see airlines, they got a lot of licenses to tools like that, and, and trying to build up a data warehouse. To some extent, that’s definitely something you’re seeing. But I think that that’s the type of investment that airlines are making, I don’t think airlines are going to be investing heavily in building their own in house merchandising engines or distribution platforms are like, like that, that that that’s too risky and too big of a bet, I think, for airlines to take at this time.
Kevin May:
Yeah. And Alex, I mean, you drew our attention to it at the beginning there, there were three of you originally as co founders, it would be you kind of referenced why one of them left when you pivoted, because there was no need for marketing anymore. And it would be remiss of us not to ask you, you’ve had one leaf quite recently. So what’s been this strategy around the kind of the management of the company and you obviously you now find yourself at the top of it?
Alex Mans:
So I think a few things are important to say. So like when I’m when I moved to Silicon Valley six, seven years ago, right? I didn’t, I had never done business in the US. I didn’t know Silicon Valley works, or any of that, right. And john, coming in as, as my co founder early on, was one of the best learning experiences ever. I’ve learned so much from Java, how not to run a company, how to deal with operations, how to do business negotiations, you name it, right? So I think I want to I want to be the first and foremost, second, like we’ve spent six years trying to build this business, right? I think after six years, especially given COVID, right now, we need to position the company in a way where where we can not only survive, COVID did come out stronger. And we all jointly took a decision where given the fact that I spend a lot of time with our customers, I typically spend two or three weeks on the road, I’ve done that for the last three years building relationships with them trying to understand what they want and what they need. We’d rather made a decision that that it was good for me to try and direct the company going forward. And to be clear jostling the board. And again, I’ve learned a tremendous amount from him. I’m supported by an incredible executive team, an incredible director of engineering, a great head of product, and great operational people. So I’m not in this alone, nor am I in this any differently than it was a few months ago, my focus in this company as it has always been as the same. And that is product, customers, fundraising, and enabling our team, right that my role and my job hasn’t changed at all. As we go forward.
Kevin May:
Okay, last one, then reading is it’s for me. And did you do you in business? We are an entrepreneur in the Netherlands before you move to the Silicon Valley, or were you doing something else? No.
Alex Mans:
So So I, I finished high school when I was 14 or so I was going to study physics in Delft, Netherlands. But instead I decided to start a business. So I’ve been doing startup since I was 15. I’m 29. Now, I’ve been doing situps for about 14 years, six and a half seven of which in the US. So I didn’t go to college, didn’t didn’t didn’t study for this stuff. I really learned about how to do things not to do things to trial and error. And I think right now ended up with with flyer heavily driven by incredible interest in travel and in the travel space and wanting to do something technologically advanced and business opportunity with it so that that’s really kind of like a very, very different, very well thought trial and error based background. Okay,
Kevin May:
so definitely the last question this time then. So you’ve been an entrepreneur and both of those things. So tell us To wrap us up, then what is the one thing you miss about being an entrepreneur in the Netherlands? What’s the one thing you like, dislike about being an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley?
Alex Mans:
Okay, so I think let me let me start with the reason why I moved here and why it has proven to be the right decision. I think that Microsoft to the question. I’ve always tried and wanted to build things, right, build things, think big, try hard. And even if it means failure, and Silicon Valley has always been projected as this place where anything is possible, and where all the conditions are right. And the conditions being, you know, lots of smart people and incredible network effect capital to actually build the business. So I packed my suitcase came to Silicon Valley. And you know, we try my luck here. I do have to give some credit to Ali Reza over at plug and play, which is an acceleration investment program done in Sunnyvale and Silicon Valley. He saw me on some YouTube video back in Europe, and he said, Hey, Alex, you know, why don’t you come over spend three months with us. That was kind of a triggering moment for me to come here. And once I arrived here, I’ve quickly realized that all these like stories about the incredible network and the capital being available, and being in smart people being in every corner in a coffee shop on the street was actually true, right? I’m not saying that there are no really smart people in Europe, but the ecosystem there to support entrepreneurs is still very heavily developing. And everything tends to be a little bit slower pace. I don’t like to slow down, right? I had a friend of mine asked me last last Monday. Hey, Alex, how are you spending Memorial Day and I told her mom memorial day vacation days are great days to catch up and more. Right. And so like I, and the speed and the and the and the the the force behind Silicon Valley is something to be reckoned with. And I really enjoy, obviously there, there are limitations, right cost of living cost of employment. Those are huge risks and huge costs to startups. And I definitely think that there’s a lot of opportunity being created by these work from home conditions from COVID-19 going forward, as people get more used to that. But like just all the factors being right, all those components being available in excess. And Silicon Valley is something that really attracted me and kept me here. And and especially for a business like flyer, where it is extremely expensive to build the infrastructure to compete with these multibillion dollar Amadeus Sabre pros, companies in enterprise IT and having the the ability to, you know, to deal with long sales cycles when they’re lying, right? They’re Slow, slow to move. Like, I think Silicon Valley is the one place where we had those conditions to make it possible. And yeah, so that that is definitely the reason why I came here, the reason why I stayed and a bit of a contrast with what you will find in Europe, where the ecosystem is still very heavily developing, with the exception of some pockets of startups that are doing really well.
Kevin May:
Okay, Alex, man, that was great. Thank you. Thank you very much for being with us this week on how I got here.
Alex Mans:
Thank you so much.
Kevin May:
Okay, so thank you, everybody, for tuning in. This is how I got here. That is mosey on focus wise, weekly podcast, looking at entrepreneurs and innovation in travel, and transportation. You can find our podcasts on all the regular platforms, that’s Spotify, Google podcasts, and all the others as well. So iTunes were everywhere these days. So thanks so much, everybody, for tuning in. Thanks again to Alex. And that’s thank you very much from David and I will see you next time.
Alex Mans:
Thank you. Bye
Transcribed by https://otter.ai