David Litwak:
Hello, everyone, welcome to how I got here mozilo and focus wires, weekly podcasts about the innovators in travel and transportation. Today we’re joined by Bobby Healy, Bobby Hill, he joined the recently founded cartrawler in 2005 as CTO, and for those of you who don’t know, cartrawler connects business and leisure customers and online travel retailers with 2500, leading independent car rental agents, Coach transfers, rail networks and chauffeur drive services. Prior to joining cartrawler, Bobby founded eland technologies which he actually sold to Sita, where he remained as CTO until 2005. And after cartrawler, Bobby has founded a mana drone delivery service. So thank you for joining us, Bobby.
Bobby Healy:
Delighted to be here, David. Thank you.
David Litwak:
So we like to start all these interviews off the same exact way, which is to ask the same question of how you got here.
Bobby Healy:
Oh, so I stumbled, many times to arrive where I am. So first of all, I’m a programmer. still writing code. Love it. And so obviously I’m a techie. So though is I started my journey writing code for Nintendo right video games and writing video games is is great fun it’s it’s pushing the limits of hardware and software together and the actual game I could care less about but the technical journey and the learning and the accomplishment to build a game is really something I started when I was 15 years old, by the way, I should say more educated and uneducated Irish man best type. And anyway, role code, started a little video games company myself and called doodle book designed wrote a bunch of games really very successful games and made no money whatsoever. So success being Billboard Top three in the US for you know, a couple of couple of big games, made no money, and I also like to make money so I actually went to work from the day before. That was 20 years old in the south of France, and that was when Amadeus were both what a puppy. There was, I think 70 people in Sophia antipolis when I went there and it was great you know consultants gay writing code, Amadeus and join the life in the south of France, the province our lifestyle got used to that but then God got quiet and I was bored with the pace you know as great accompanies Amadeus are amazing what they’ve accomplished, too slow for a young and entrepreneurial type. Like me, I was wanting to do something better. I was wanting to build my own thing. So I founded a company in Mexico City of all places called VTi, which is a travel agency desktop solutions. So it’s basically a GDS replacement desktop. And for Latin America that went really well. Forward wind 12 years I sold that businesses either I had moved back to Ireland at that stage so the business to see the hundred 50 people at the time, but it didn’t do quite well, post 911 even it was still going well so to see that spend two years would see that as chief evangelist, which is where I learned how to bullshit the most and, and I did really enjoy it even though seat is perceived as a, you know, not the most innovative businesses I was, you know, so the Intune became the software part of the innovation part. So I enjoyed that. And it was it was good last life. And then cartrawler had been founded and I was looking for a new gig and cartrawler was really was just a website renting cars, it had its own physical cars with wheels, steering wheel, all those things. And it wasn’t really much but the founders had gotten a contract with a company called holiday autos which you know, gave them access to car rental content around your They didn’t know what to do with it didn’t have any tech to monetize that didn’t have a website even really. And they were looking for a tech guy, you know, the way I was looking for a tech guy to write an app for them, they that’s what they thought I was. And so I went in there with a very simple strategy was the pages great content, which is car hire, which is turns out a very wide margin product, which I couldn’t believe actually the unit economics car and take my, at the time I had 20 of the world’s largest airlines, my customers for eland and to take those customer relationships and a great product that I know that they’ll want build a middleware for it and, and a really nice thought leadership platform to get to the market to influence and to create this whole concept of ancillary revenue, non air ancillary revenue, which to the layman sounds really boring, but it translates to very important revenue for airlines time, group cartrawler. That’s a long story go on forever about that. But cartrawler was very simply very successful, because of the timing that we enter the market was a perfect timing, really nice simple strategy executed very well with a strong team. And that took us 14 years and we went through a number of private equity investment, leveraged buyouts and nice things like that. And then I stepped about three years ago, I had the idea for my current business, which is manna and a drone delivery business flying hamburgers at 80 kilometers per hour through the air delivered by autonomous drones. And here we are.
Not too long ago, waffle too much. I
Kevin May:
know that was that was an unusually six interview, Bobby. Hi. Thank you very much for joining us on the show. I mean, there’s lots of things to start off with there. But let’s go right back and I was struck by something that you said about, you know, you you ended up here in the south of France with Amadeus But it was too slow for you, can you? Can you identify what was something that they could have done to speed things up that would have kept you there for a little bit longer?
Bobby Healy:
Nothing. A big company cannot provide the direct connection between the person and the results that a small company can provide. And Amadeus are great, even then they’re a great company. And they treat their people so well. And they’ve managed to get to over 2000 engineers or something. And it’s still a really good culture of getting things done. And innovating, just, you know, I’m not different, by the way, I’m just a small company guy, and I was the small company guy, I want to write the code. I want to sell the code to the customers, I want to have the strategy I want to own it all. And no company of scale could do that. And and what I first thing I did and Amadeus was that a product called pro DOS, this was back in ocpm days and then a DOS version of that, you know, Text screen based. And I wrote this really cool window emulator. It made the, you know, when you logged in it made the screen bounce, you know, flip over, which is very difficult to do on a PC with shitty hardware. And not something though that, you know, the consultants from Arthur Andersen would understand. And I got a rap on the knuckles for that. And the rest is history.
Kevin May:
So what would that bouncing screen who would have been the uses for that then without being agents? Oh, yes.
So is that just you
Bobby Healy:
know, it’s like, well, I mean, sometimes, sometimes the Zoomer doesn’t know what the consumer wants, right? And in this case, the logon screen is the most boring thing you could fucking imagine. Right? It’s on every screen on every application you use. You tell me how many login screens bounce, none. Amadeus would have been the first in the world for balancing login screen. And they it’s their loss. It’s their loss.
Kevin May:
Indeed, what could have been, I suppose is
Bobby Healy:
what can I say? It’s the company’s shifting
Kevin May:
into a but you referenced your age at the time Bobby, we said you’re in your early 20s I think
Bobby Healy:
I was nine games
Kevin May:
until 18. If you’d been for you must be
Bobby Healy:
22 they guess?
5151 and a half.
Kevin May:
Okay. So, you know, if you if you if you rolled up Amadeus now as a 51 year old do you think you would be slightly more accepting of your perceived notion of their speed now?
Bobby Healy:
Now, you full
Kevin May:
vigor thing that you just didn’t like, or was it? You just as you said, Just now, probably your kind of entrepreneurial spirit
Bobby Healy:
to know even even then I was diplomatic about it. I didn’t throw my toys out of the pram and I did what I was told. And, you know, I always I would always try to push to make things better, and I saw some nice problems for them cool stuff that actually they did want. But what I know I mean even even now 15 year old Bobby still looks now at an aircraft and I look at I write my own code to analyze you know, accelerometer data and I try to say well why don’t we go to you know these props instead of those props and you know, like in my team is 2637 people in mana now I’m the one pushing on on innovating and like, and it’s full of young people it’s Old Glory young people know it’s, it’s a personality defect, I think.
David Litwak:
So, you know, Bobby want to rewind a little bit, you know, is when you founded cartrawler you said something that I kind of had to chuckle out was that you took these 20 airline relationships and just sold something that I feel like, like it’s probably it’s never that easy, right, like with airlines and and getting them to do much of anything. So obviously, you guys succeeded, I think if I remember correctly about 100 airline relationships. So clearly, you persevered and made it made it But I’m kind of curious if you could tell us a little bit more about how you actually managed, I think, convince some of the most risk averse partners out there, and probably the longest enterprise sales, you know, like cycle to work with you.
Bobby Healy:
Yeah, relationship, David. So, first of all we knew we were doing in terms of technology. So we knew their systems better than they knew their systems. We don’t forget our previous life. I mean, my tech team, were building these very commerce websites and middlewares for airlines. So so we knew their systems better than they did. And they understood that we knew that because we were good at it, I would say communicating that to them. And so they felt safe on at least that we knew we’re doing technically and we weren’t going to be under estimating that we knew what a PNR was, and like basic stuff like that. So that’s part one. And then part two, was I always come back to the route from our code for cartrawler and for on the tutorial is not all but the perfect route market for business like cartrawler was taught leadership. So what that means is and you’ve seen it, both of you have seen it, me on stage talking about stuff, right? I’m an expert in, I did a TED talk on autonomous cars. I know nothing about autonomous cars. And it’s just been entertaining being the technology evangelist, look at me, I know I’m talking about I know what you should be doing next. And giving them ideas and, and reasons to want to talk to you. And that works really well. And then so you have an open door to go in and talk to them about Okay, well, let’s, we know how to solve this problem. And here’s what will solve this problem for you. translates to, and so I never found that difficult. And from the day I started, which was August the 12th 2005. We had our first airline signed in less than a year, and a lot Polish airlines. And we were building the platform as we were selling the platform. And that’s the nice nice thing about being a tech Like programmer founder is the you can be saddling while you’re writing the code, and so long as you’re able to deliver, and you’re in control of ultimately that the words say the level of ambition, that version one, and that the customer is in sync with that and understands that they’re the BT user, I think that’s the way to build the product because you’re actually building it with customer. And you’re not just getting the perfect product out of it as a result, but so is the customer getting exactly what they want. And then from our previous business, we had understood that in order to satisfy the moods and the whims of different enterprise customers that all have their own view about what’s the right way to do things and you know, want an input into a product. And we we anticipate that ahead of time and in every conversation we had with them. And everything we build, we either build flexibility into the product to you know, satisfy them all or we control the company. preemptively so that we were able to have one set of code for our customers. And actually one of the things that no one ever believes, and it’s absolutely true is that code we wrote 1314 years ago, is still at the core of the cartrawler middleware. We got it right the first time, we never had to rebuild it.
David Litwak:
Well, we have something else in common then Bobby, other than just both running ground platforms. I also our first deal was also with a lot Polish airlines, and we closed it an elevator and unfortunately, the head of ansley revenue was drunk and didn’t remember it the next morning. So I was at a conference, and we were thrilled to have lot polish and then yeah,
Bobby Healy:
the National carrier. They were great partners. Great. They’re a great partner. But yeah, it’s it’s uh, yeah, they’re a bit like the Irish I suppose. Yeah. Well, yeah, there’s a healthy amount of pay no more on that for all those Polish people in the odd.
David Litwak:
But yeah, so I mean, it’s, it’s interesting what you said about controlling the conversation or building inflexible into the product because I do think that I see all these big enterprise guys, I once you know, met the guys that do a lot of public transit ticketing and they had 17 different systems for 17 different, you know, public transit agencies, and they hadn’t thought about any sort of Central redundancies. I mean, it’s impressive that you have literally all of your original code is at the core still going.
Bobby Healy:
It’s very simple system, though, David. I mean, at the core of it, it’s all Java, which makes it nice to keep things clean. And, but but it was, it was very simple design principles. And and, and I always, this is my line, the display should never blink, that was the rule, the display shouldn’t blink when we’re running, right. And what that means is, you need to have a direct connection between between what the what the output is so in our case, a messaging system to the hardware. So if the lights blinking, it means that you’re relying on disk, right, if you’re relying on disk is not designed the system properly if you’re going to be messaging middleware, so that like those very, very Simple technical principles guiding the way we design the code. And like it’s not, it’s not rocket science it at the heart of the cargo system. It’s very pure and simple, concise code base. And then you can layer stuff on top of that functionality. So we will have a pricing system or the sort biasing system, you know, all these different systems and connectors to user interfaces, but at the core of it, it was simplicity, personified, and, and I’m proud of that, but that’s, you know, good programmer should be, but it’s what’s nice about me or the advantage I have is that I’m also able to sell that to, you know, to the market to the customers and the technical side of airlines and our bigger partners that resonates with them.
David Litwak:
Yeah, no, certainly. So, you know, it’s also interesting, you’re talking about, you know, pitching these airlines and what resonates with them. I feel like for the last you know, nine years and Mozilla has been in existence, this idea of like every airline should be the Amazon of travel, you know? Yeah is kind of like a, you know, almost become a joke these days and, like, you know, I think some, you know, particularly like airasia and Ryan are guys like that do a better job than others. But, you know, I feel like you wrote a, you mentioned it earlier a, a wave of interest in ancillary revenue, feeds to car rentals and everything and, you know, tell us about that change in mindset on airlines and how you were able to take advantage of it. That’s
Bobby Healy:
well noted, David. You know, when we started it, airlines were starting EasyJet, we’re actually I think the pioneer and maybe Southwest but EasyJet certainly had built this concept of non air on salary. And it was it was clear, very clear they hadn’t arrived at the trade sorry, Jet was very clear that airlines are starting to think about how else can we make money like we have 20 million passengers a year 30% of our on our website with a credit card making a $300 purchase They’re selling them as an unprofitable seat. So that idea of selling more stuff to the same customer base was pretty obvious, right? But then you say, Okay, well, who does that really well with Amazon, my recommendation engine, so you steal that Halo and you bring it over and put it in your own head. And you say we can make you be the Amazon and that that was that allowed us to really simplify the message to what we are two people. And that and that’s actually just good marketing, I think a good positioning. I was on a pitch thing, plug and play pitch just earlier on today. There’s 25 companies on there, and I listened to all of them four minute pitches, and I don’t know what 90% of them do still. And we were able to say we’ll turn your website into the Amazon of travel by just one line script. Add every product you want. Bang you know, keep it simple and strong. So yeah, we we certainly Rob that Halo and then Ryanair, and Lots of others did the same thing. But the truth is, and you may know this, there’s still airlines a piss poor job of monetizing their customer base. And there’s still a long way to go and be honest with you. And Kevin, you like this one? If they don’t do it, Google will
Kevin May:
never be inevitably inevitably going to come down to your lifelong career long affinity for for Google the search engine. So and it’s interesting, because I mean, for many people, whether they’re journalists or industry, people that attend conferences, you are synonymous with cartrawler. And we’re always the, I guess, the frontman for it. Is that how did that come about? Because you know, you are, you’re a founder, someone who came in in year one, and you were the CTO, but you weren’t the CEO. I mean, what how did you find yourself in that role, where you were always the person on stage cracking jokes, making people laugh, or being very smart. At the same time about it.
Bobby Healy:
And so that’s that’s branding as well. I mean, the company was really run by myself and Mike McCarty, it was Mike as the CEO, Mike is in a very stable genius. He’s a, he’s a, he’s an accountant. He’s prudent, he knows about structure. You know, and he’s he’s a really really smart guy and a good friend of mine as well. And, you know, Mike and me kind of ran the business together but we also knew that look, if you want to sell a tech product be tech right and microphone stand up the tech who lives no computer hit him in the head. So I’m good at selling tech. I’m good at that. All at last right. And, and that’s, that’s part of it. It’s about branding image and your company is a personality and it’s either going to be some stupid, shitty logo that means nothing to anyone or a person. And that person, you know, kind of in my case, You know, with me, but I also lead the company from a strategy point of view. So as my work on this, what we’re doing next, this is not just technically how we’re going to build it, but this is not just what the customer is going to want. But this is how we’re going to tell the customer, that’s what they’re going to want. And so I think that’s important for a business to lead with, like a tech business, to lead with a tech person that’s evangelizing as well as making other decisions because it’s real. But if I look at bigger companies to do that, they send out a more polished version, right? With won’t curse as much. But also won’t be really connected with the strategy or the product of the company. It would be just someone that’s really good at talking like they the people that Google reload, let’s call a spade a spade, and, and small companies need to do better than that. So like, David, you’re going mozilo right. And there’s lots of others that I think it’s imminent. Part of the message and the kind of personality of the company to do that. So I didn’t run the company. I ran it with Mike, I find it very difficult to manage a large company. I don’t have a structured mind and I’m CEO manner. Now. God help man if I have to scale it.
This isn’t going out public anywhere. Is it? I have investors
Kevin May:
know your secret is safe with us and right. Okay, focus, focus wire, of course. Right. Okay. I’m interested in also from those early years as a startup and into the kind of the 2010 as well, I mean, you’re an Irish company or cultural was an Irish company is an Irish company. And we’ve had a probably a disproportionate, sadly, number of founders that we’ve spoken to on this that are from the valley and from the US. I mean, how did you find trying to break into the travel tech world
Bobby Healy:
being an Irish startup? And well, I mean,
Kevin May:
I would say that technic technology was has to speak for itself? Of course. Yeah. But there are so many other things that often count for you or count against you based on your geography perhaps.
Bobby Healy:
No, absolutely. In this in the case of cartrawler was never an advantage because we were always profitable. So we never needed to raise money. And we bootstrap that. And we were very quickly generating cash. So we never needed to play that valley thing. And now the problem with the valley is just the cost like, like, you know, to run an operation, the valley is probably five times the cost on the operation in Dublin and seven times the gospel in Wales and so on. The talent is talent pool is concentrated good in the valley, but 10 years is terrible. And the average tenure until I until I left anyway, or went non exec cartrawler was seven years of our tech people. Like we didn’t lose tech people. And unlike if you’re a programmer, you know the story. You cannot lose programmers the road code because you may as well just throw out the code, no programmer worth their salt is going to come in and maintain some else’s code, they’re always going to want to be rewrite and re architecting. And in the valley, you have churn, like you’re doing well, to keep someone for 18 months. in Dublin, you’re keeping someone if you as long as you treat them well, and you give them interesting work. You keep them as long as you want. And that makes software more resilient and it makes your product more flexible. Believe it or not, it’s funny, dynamic
Kevin May:
testing on that. It’s just just a second follow up on that one, David. I mean, it’s it’s interesting how you’ve kind of framed that because, you know, you aren’t the only of cartrawler wasn’t the only up and coming tech company in Ireland anyway. I mean, Google move there in the Facebook had stuff there. Their data collected and the travel tech company inside their data legs is in the box servers and all those kind of folks actually retain retain the programmers and the other stuff that you had we What were you doing to as a company culture perspective. To to kind of keep them there, apart from maybe paying them obscene amounts of money.
Bobby Healy:
No, we’re not we didn’t, you know, I mean, like, we didn’t really have stock options to play with, we didn’t really have a ton of cash. Like we wouldn’t overpay and you just keep them. keep them happy. Like I mean, programmers always want to work on interesting things certainly programmers have. So you could you could almost calculate by age, right is a right 20 year olds want to play with the latest SDK is the latest version of that. And, and 40 year old onwards, they’re quite happy so long as they get to make architecture decisions, and to write your better code and mentor people. And then the ones in the middle could go either way, right? And it’s just like, we never What am I? Our top size, I think we’ve got 100 people in engineering cartrawler I knew all their names. Most the time I knew what they were working on. A lot of times I was fighting with them over how to build it or what to build with and all that stuff is about, you know, how impressive is it for a new programmer to come in to a company And have the founder or at least someone like me, going up to their desk, you know, pushing them aside and saying, show me what you’re doing. And let’s talk about this and looking at the code and asking questions and getting involved. So that’s about I think that’s leadership. I think I do that well with tech teams. And that’s how you keep people keep engaged, keep them really feeling that they are responsible for the outcome. And like I said, I’m a programmer, not just not my first rodeo leading programming teams that works. But that’s really difficult to do at scale. And once you get to a certain size, that’s more and more difficult to do.
David Litwak:
So you you mentioned that I know that the thing about churn being less than Ireland and something mozilo also realized from a early age of in nine years distributed and it’s now the trendy thing to do post Coronavirus. But, you know you the cartrawler name means something And travelled. But I’d say it means just as much in the Irish tech industry. And I remember, you know, a couple of times I think I came to visit you or dialects or something and Ireland and mentioned who I was going towards, and the cab driver knew who you guys were. And yeah, and, you know, maybe, you know, the funny thing is mozilo actually has a Irish entity technically, because you guys have done a really good job trying to recruit, you know, foreign entities to open up offices there. And, you know, we’re one of them on paper, at least, you know, how do you look at what the Irish tech scene has evolved, like in the last, you know, 10 years
Bobby Healy:
and it just, it hasn’t evolved at all it’s kind of culturally it’s the same. It’s quite a sober I realized the Poland involved there but it’s actually quite sober tech industry. We’re not mad for flash hairy or we don’t talk in Silicon Valley unicorn terms of tall. It’s really quite a I won’t say conservative. Yeah, but it’s just basically, you know, like, just kind of don’t make some cash, maybe try and sell your business work hard. And there’s a lot of bullshit, right? Which, which I actually like I’m probably the biggest bullshitter on this fitchett and cartrawler is true, it’s scale. The biggest, you know, the biggest success hack success probably in art and then in the travel space and possibly, and you know, at all. So we’re obviously well known and we make a bit of noise and the reason we make a bit of noise is for hiring right? We want to get all the best people always to make noise. But there’s not like if I look at San Francisco coming like you guys coming over I would say to any company, listen to this. You should be in Ireland be better off in Ireland. And tax advantages are unbelievable. If you’re a foreign company, our government to a really good I would say awesome the Israelis you know are delicious. In the world of getting and attracting talent and indigenous companies to come in, we’re not great at fostering indigenous companies, we’re getting a lot better. But it is a really, really nice environment, tone of talent, a great place to live, and shitty weather, which is perfect for productivity.
David Litwak:
So, that’s I had I wanted to actually segue the conversation to something and I’m just gonna end up being a very short answer to the question if it would, depending on if you’re allowed to talk about it or not. But to you know, a something had happened with another Irish company that used to work with Ryanair. And you guys walked away from at least part of that deal. I remember. And, you know, Ryan, there’s a Taurus litigious, and I forget if they sued you or sued someone else. I think they sued everyone at this point.
Bobby Healy:
I think we’re actually the only company that they didn’t Sue because I know I’m like a little leery is
David Litwak:
really there you go well, so you I
Bobby Healy:
dark alleys. And Ireland
David Litwak:
so you know I, what I found interesting about that is is you guys clearly decided to walk away from you know, what is your theoretically the biggest deal in the industry right? And I you know I’ve had my own dealings with Ryanair where they tried to like me to pay them for my product or something ridiculous like topsy turvy with us ended up with us walking away so I can I can guess half your answer but I maybe you could elaborate a little bit more on what goes into a decision like that. When should a startup literally go This isn’t worth it for us. You know, we have no fish to fry. Yeah,
Bobby Healy:
yeah. I mean, like I advise startups and I always tell them they’ll get excited about sign Ryanair a bad sign. Ryanair, I say if you do that you’re dead. Right? Their scale and their complexity. And all of that volume does you no good because you know rightly so. Mike Larry leaves nothing on the table, no bread crumbs. He has a Hoover every time you leave your office to Hoover up any coins. your pocket and but that’s not to say they’re not a great customer because they push your boundaries in terms of functionality, data, SAS and all that stuff. So, you know, I would say we got as much out of the Ryanair deal as Ryanair did, because we got to evolve our product with the most incredible data sets, and, and functionality, we got the build and test on the fly with the biggest airline in Europe. And, and hats out like for me, if you’re a sufficient scale where you can take on a loss making deal and get something out of it in terms of product development, then that’s worth doing. And that would have been our view of it. And I like there have been more than others not our best ever customer and in terms of how we evolved the product, it’s they were turbocharged customer for us. So you know, not for small companies, for big companies to want to really stretch take a stretch, though the work dealing with iOS failed and they’re also entertaining I mean, you know, it’s a great client to have who don’t mind, you know, getting roared at screen that and all that stuff. But they were great, you know, like their tech team were the fastest airline tech team we’ve ever worked with. And they were most receptive to try out things. And, and like if we wanted to have a daily or a weekly iterative cycle on their native mobile app, they were up for that, you know, if they told it squeeze an extra 10 basis points, you know, of something they referred. So that’s very valuable. But then at some point, when you get to where we were, at certain scale where you can fight for to fire customers, they say, and sometimes the marriage isn’t beneficial for both parties. And if that’s the case, not saying that’s the case with Ryanair, but if that’s the case, you should always look at the impact on all levels of any particular customer and Unless Unless it works. multiple levels. And sometimes it’s better either not to take that customer on or you might need to walk away from.
David Litwak:
So, at what point are you taking it from the other direction? Right, like you said, like, they’re one extreme in terms of hoovering up every dollar and you know, there’s other people like, like, Walmart has a notorious, you know, I, you know, kind of bidding, you know, deal where they pressure you down and obviously Amazon Jeff Bezos says the thing about those while your margin is my opportunity or something, yeah, but like, you know, at what point does it become Pennywise pound foolish because I’ve sometimes seen, you know, airlines or otas or other people go, Well, we can squeeze this little bit out, and then they they scare all potential partners away who can’t make any money, they build it. And then like, I’ve seen certain airlines enter or certain otas on their second or third iteration of like, transfers projects, like mozia. And it’s kind of you know, you’ve probably wasted a lot of money here trying to squeeze that extra point one, you know, that extra 10 basis points out of it, you know, yeah, yeah. I don’t know. Like, you Have you thought about that? Like, like, yeah,
Bobby Healy:
yeah. So like we don’t have any customers that that I would say abusers, you know, but I would say like that we have suppliers and other side Don’t forget we have just like you we have a ton of suppliers and the other side and we squeeze them and but we don’t try to make it a lose win situation. And I think in the end you have to be a good member of the community, everyone has to, you know, have a reasonable margin. And I don’t agree with squeezing anything to the end, particularly bringing in a small startup and squeezing them to the end. I don’t agree with that. But But you could, you could say equally culpable would be the board’s and investors and some of these small companies that are just, you know, looking at the the sexiest big opportunity rather than thinking about it. You know, the all the facets others you know, so Yeah, look, it just it just depends, but I certainly wouldn’t take the zero margin approach. I would like to think that, you know, when I do retire, that everyone will come to my retirement party and not hate my guts. There are certain individuals, they’ll be pretty fucking lonely at their retirement parties, and I don’t want to be one of them.
Kevin May:
Okay, and what I found quite interesting, having I pretty much started writing about travel tech at the same time as cartrawler was born so you know, my my journey and learning about the industry and the people in it. It’s kind of mirrors it’s a car trawlers and maybe you’ll come you’ll you’ll correct me on when the date was or the period was, but it was certainly probably going back four or five years where you, you whether it was you personally or whether the company started looking very vociferously about Google we talked to, you know, we referenced this a little while ago. Now, some would say that perhaps given you know, Google is always an exit for somebody, it may well have been an exit for you. Why? What was the thinking behind being so vocal about your anger about Google? Was it just frankly, because you were pissed off with them? Or was it that you just get something else in it? Because there was a, it’s a fair thing to say, Bobby, that you did suddenly, kind of switch on that you suddenly became very vocal about Google. I mean, I put up until November of last year, your interview with me a couple of years ago at the Focusrite Europe conference where you went on a write whole rant about Google was our most popular video to date, unfortunately, nice,
was a rather interesting guy called chamath, who I interviewed last November, the focus of our conference, he kind of blew you out of the water on that one. But until that moment, you were Yeah, he was pretty good. But and I go back to that point, I mean, there was a turning point where you suddenly became mister Yeah, I’m gonna work about this. Google whenever I get the opportunity,
Bobby Healy:
yeah, correct. So nobody was willing to speak clearly about what Google’s game was in travel industry. None of the platforms, as in the conference platforms, everybody was given Google to see mistakes, because and rightly so that sells tickets, right? You get the Google travel guys up. Everyone wants to go see that. And it’s always the most packed part of the event. So, but no one’s challenging them. No one is questioning. Why are you mister tech giants with your, you know, at $220 billion of avatar doing looking at the travel industry? What’s your plan here? I found it quite interesting, not traveling at all. But I found quite interesting their relationship of Expedia and Priceline. And just from a strategy point of view, I was interested in tracking that but I was blown away by how, in fact by the absolute vacuum of tough questions that were being asked and then I find that that Google are screening questions and they’re refusing to be interviewed in a two way thing, and they refuse to debate and refuse to get. I just think that’s super unfair. And I think they bullied the whole industry into one way message and terms of strategy. You know, it’s pretty clear to me what it is like Jesus Christ as nobody, it is so obvious. And then on the other side in search of a monopoly, the regulator’s Doom sweet FA about it. Meanwhile, they’re poor. In my view, they’re poised to do some major damage to the potential for innovators to innovate. And what I mean by that is that, you know, I’ve startup businesses, you know, and I invest in other businesses, and I advise venture capitalists and private equity on their potential investments on their existing portfolios. And at the same time as all these things were happening, I’m noticing that investors are starting to say, well hang on a second. We’ll Why won’t Google do that? That’s the question. So if you see a bit of innovation, they rarely go to, oh, well, why wouldn’t Google do that? In other words, they think that if Google are interested in that space, it’s not investable space. For me, that is an abuse of a monopoly position to extend market dominance into adjacent segments, which in Europe is against the law. And that is what they got fined for. But yet no one in the travel industry is challenging them. And I asked so many times to debate them on the stage or to, you know, contribute to the questions, whatever, you know, no way can you do that because they’re so influential in the travel industry, any b2c business is afraid of them. I know b2c businesses, as you Kevin, that have been knocked out of business through SEO punishments that are that are really existential, and you have this giant on one side once entered the travel industry as a vertigo. On the other side, they control the face of it. That’s a b2c business. And luckily for cartrawler, we’re not really a b2c business, so I have nothing to lose. And then the other part is most of the airline executives that, you know, I would know that I work with because their customers or whatever reason, they want to talk about this behind closed doors, but they want to talk about it. And so therefore, selfishly speaking, I’m very happy to add my voice that I had to talk to them about and to help them understand that and to maybe plot where the where the thing could end up. And that actually serves my needs as well because it brings me closer to the airlines. So it’s thought leadership. And yeah, I still feel very strong about it. I think that they need a much bigger challenge from the industry. Finally, you know, Barry Diller finally spoke up about it and said that they should be broken up. But But before that, Derrick khosrowshahi said nothing, he congratulated them that continued success the whole time. Mark, okay. Behind the same never, never an industry challenge and price line are happy to buy the customers because they’re the in the dominant position. So price line are the only ones that continue to continue to win by Google’s monopoly. Everybody else loses.
David Litwak:
Yeah, so actually elaborating on that a little bit, I drew Patterson of jetsetter in room 77 wrote an article about a month and a half, two months ago about how traditionally otas benefit from recessions because little small little hotels get finally decided, well, I’m running out of money better get as much traffic as possible, and go sign up. And how actually this time around, it’s looking like Google’s gonna be willing to benefit over the otas. And I don’t want to butcher his his op ed. But the theory I think, if I’m remembering it correctly, was that, you know, the, it’s more efficient just to directly link and also, many of these otas has stopped advertising. You need us on Google and Google doesn’t have to pay for those those eyeballs. You know, I’m curious how do you see this playing out like over partly postcode, but it’s also regardless of covered over the next five to 10 years around, you know, these it’s vertical search versus horizontal search, right vertical searching and Priceline booking and yeah versus horizontal and Google and you know, do you have any hope that the vertical guys will win out? Or do you do like without legislation actually,
Bobby Healy:
I think they I think they can thrive but I think it’s a it’s a, it’s consolidation, so there’s no opportunity for any small entrant zero opportunity. And the medium guys ultimately will coalesce into bigger medium guys. And ultimately, they get acquired by by Priceline, or Expedia or whatever. But there’s it there’s a world where there’s direct hotel powered by Google, which will be 60 70% of the world. And then there’s a raster to be aggregated by Priceline and Expedia and the reason that will exist is because they do fulfillment. They do customer service which is needed and I think because of the fragmentation in the hotel industry, that’s always going to be a need and and again, if you ask anyone in private in Google, you know how they view the travel industry it’s very simply, they don’t believe in the value of aggregation they don’t believe unless you add value physical value somewhere along the chain, you should be directly bypassed by Google that’s their view. So therefore makes a lot of sense what they’re currently doing particularly in flights and but as much in in hotel too. Funnily enough in car har. They haven’t really been that active they may be the should be firing monopoly. I go into car right now that they haven’t and, and again, there’s a happy bloody conspiracy going on here between Google Priceline, Expedia. Everybody else loses but so long as those guys who have rocked the world well, at some point, Google or To change the direction of the goal and then that point becomes when when the margin has eroded so much or starts to really get affected by and center is the page margin comes down so much and loyalty disappears, which will. What happens then? Well as Google expands once that once their market headroom or silence or market penetration has is saturated, and the margin within that penetration has maximized, the only way you can grow your business and this is a business that still grows at nearly 20% annually, like to unbeliever. So where do you go next? Well, you bypass the intermediary and you go straight to the owner of the product, and there’s a much wider margin down there. And they’re already doing that and they’ll continue to do it. So for me that story that I’ve been talking about for I don’t know, four or five years, it hasn’t changed still happening and when they get broken up. Not not quickly enough to save the small guys in the trash. industry.
Kevin May:
I’m glad that it was four or five years because that’s what I had in my head today. That’s how long you’ve been talking about it. So yeah. And I feared that we would have very little time to kind of move on to this last little phase. And we’re very conscious of everyone’s time. And those that are listening on the audio, the podcasts in a couple of weeks from now, behind you, there is what looks essentially from the picture like a starship Enterprise, but it’s actually a drone from your new company, which is manner, can you just give us a sense of what’s the thinking behind leaving what you had to go into rationally being the CEO of a new company, a very fairly nascent type of technology. And briefly if you can just talk to us about the stuff that you’ve been doing around the COVID because that was particularly interesting and brilliant.
Bobby Healy:
Yes. So online food is 300 and $50 billion industry. Uber Eats delivery of grilled pork, you name it, it loses money on most transactions, because the cost of Bring in that product from the base to the customer is about $6 50. So it’s a shitty low margin industry that’s growing like crazy and very, very large. And so I, at some point I came up the idea of well, you can use drones to carry products within two or three miles of a store or a restaurant, and you can do very cheaply. So I put a team together, and I invested in myself, I built a drone concept drone that worked. Then I expanded it, I raised a raised $7 million, the business we have now an aviation grade really industrial drone that will carry two to four kilos at about 80 kilometers per hour that you know across a 50 square kilometer catchment area, maximum delivery time of three minutes and at a cost of $1. We can carry everything from everywhere to everyone at speed in a scalable way. So like this thing is by far bigger than cartrawler anything I could imagine just the virgin space of last month. delivery is so big, and regulations are starting to open up to allow us to do this. And we’re running now in Ireland, small town are in 1000 people, and we’re delivering, we’re obviously delivering convenience store and all these other things. We’re also delivering prescription medicines so you can get a video consultation with your doctor. Your doctor then can base on that issue of prescription electronically, the local pharmacy, the pharmacy gets that and we fly it from the pharmacy directly to the customer to the patient’s house. And it arrives again within three minutes of being dispensed. It’s a circus, it looks like a circus. It’s entertaining, but it’s as practical as it is entertaining. And it is without a doubt as crazy as it sounds. There is going to be no road based delivery in suburban and rural areas. It after five years. It’s just so much better.
Kevin May:
It’s perhaps ironic that you’ve gone from ground transportation into air transportation. Finally after all these different iterations in
Bobby Healy:
my career, we might plug it into cartrawler guide people around.
Kevin May:
What’s this basic, okay, and we’re right up against time now. So as always, it’s a pleasure for me to talk to you, Bob, we learned from David and I, thank you very much for appearing on how I got here and being so insightful and entertaining as always. Thank you.
Bobby Healy:
Very well. Nice to see you.
Kevin May:
Okay, thanks. Thank you, Bobby. And thank you everybody for tuning in. This was how I got here. This is mosey on focus wise, weekly podcast where we talk to the innovators and entrepreneurs in travel and transportation. If you’ve come to this randomly, you can subscribe to how I got here on Spotify, Google podcasts, iTunes, all the usual places. leave us a review. Leave us some feedback. We’d love to hear what you think. But that’s all from us for now. We’ll see you next time. Thanks so much.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
