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

I would not have raised as big 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 Sequoia Capital, Index, or Spark Capital on your cap table, the reality is that your next round will be so much easier.

1. Start Episode

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, because I hear that GetYourGuide is actually the result of a great friendship. It's you and Tao coming up with an idea at university together. Can you just take me back to you and Tao sitting in a room together, deciding you were going to start a company together?

Yeah, totally. This is actually 2007–08. Tao and I were both students at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. He was doing physics, and I was doing biochemistry and neurobiology, so something very remote from online travel.

We both led a student delegation to Beijing, China, at the time. I made a pivotal mistake in that I booked my flight ticket a day early and arrived in Beijing without the group. I was trying to do things in my hotel room, so I logged onto the internet and went on Google, trying to find things to do in Beijing—something to do with the day—and I couldn't find anything. I got stuck in the hotel room.

The next day, Tao showed up and showed me the city. We went to see the Great Wall, had Beijing duck in the hutong, and it was a really special day. From that epiphany of having seen the city through the eyes of a local—someone who speaks the language—we went back to Switzerland, to ETH, and said, "We have to build a website. We have to build a community for people so they are able to do that."

2. “We Had 5 Bookings in 2 Years. 3 Were My Mum.”

We did that, and the prequel to GetYourGuide was that we were building a travel community for everyone to be a guide. No one actually used that. I think we had 100 guides, because that's what I read. I read that you pivoted 3 times before you found real product-market fit.

Totally. It was terrible. So, what was the first iteration?

The first iteration was literally a peer-to-peer website for guides. We also considered doing something like Couchsurfing at the time. For homes, we thought no one was going to stay at someone else's home, so we discarded that idea. Someone else in San Francisco picked it up very successfully.

Then we went to guides and thought, "Guiding is such an important thing in travel. Can't we build a community of guides?" But we were thinking about this through 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. We had 3 to 5 bookings in the first 2 years of our prototype, 3 of which were from my mother because she took so much pity on us students.

3 to 5 bookings in 2 years, and 3 were your mother. God loves your mother. Mothers are brilliant, aren't they? But what were you doing?

Completing our degrees. We were still at university at the time, living honestly off very little money. The great thing about it was that we could fail. There was no problem in failing.

Even more so, it was just a lot of fun. We didn't really do that to build a company, even at the time. It was more, "This is a great space. We want to build a really successful web product." Facebook was going viral at the time, so those were the days of Web 2.0.

We were really working at night, to be honest. We were studying throughout the day, and then at night we'd do this.

3. “I Asked My Parents to Remortgage Their House for a Pivot”

There's a common mantra that if you want to win, you've got to go all in. Respectfully, you had the nice landing pad of being at university. You were working alongside it; you were doing both at the same time. You didn't leave university to do GetYourGuide.

In a similar way, I was at law school when I started the show, and it wasn't actually that risky. If the show didn't work, I'd just carry on being a lawyer. Luckily, the show worked, and so I could drop out.

My question to you is: Do you think you have to be all in, or can you build it alongside university and see what works?

No. Respectfully, you have to be all in, and we had an all-in moment. The first iteration of the product actually failed, as I told you. Then we had to go out with the second iteration.

With that second iteration, we were done with our degrees, and we really needed to try to make this work because it was clear you couldn't just do this on the side. You really need to sign up supply. You need to build an online marketing function, and you need to do online marketing.

At that point in time, we really needed to go full-time with a prototype that was unproven after 2 years of failure. In a weird way, it was a very stressful moment. Even worse, I needed to go to my parents and basically say, "Hi, you need to fund me for another year after university. Can you please put a mortgage on your house and fund me?" There was no seed capital available. No one would give a bunch of students money at the time for an idea that wasn't proven.

What gave you the conviction? Respectfully, you had 2 years of it not working. Where did you get the conviction to say, "Hey, parents, remortgage the house, fund me—it's going to work"?

Honestly, I have no idea, looking back. I think the best thing that happened to me at the time was that I had this group of co-founders that was really strongly and tightly knit after 1½ to 2 years of doing this prototype. We just really got along so well, and it was so joyful to go to work every morning with them and create something.

It was really more of a gut feeling that this was the right thing to do. It just felt right, more than anything else.

The way we operated at the time was really by being in this deep tunnel. I once met the great race-car driver Nico Rosberg, a Formula 1 champion, and he said, "When you go and race, you look at the road. You don't look at the wall, because if you look at the wall as a race-car driver, you're going to hit the wall. Stay focused on the road."

That's very much what it felt like at the time. We weren't even considering failing. For me, failure was nonoptional. It wasn't a valid option. We would stay the course. We'd win this.

I love that, and Nico is a fantastic dude in person. I do want to go back to that. You said to your parents, "You know what? Fund me for another year. This is going to work." What happens then?

What happened was a miracle, because we signed up the first couple of suppliers and got very lucky with a few of them.

How did you do that?

Literally cold-calling and going to people. I remember traveling to Salzburg and signing up the hop-on hop-off bus tour. It was very random. There was no CRM or anything like that, right? It was very much, "What looks good? What's nearby? Whom can we address?"

4. The Vatican Tour That Changed Everything

We got very lucky because we got a very good tour agency that did tours to the Vatican very early on. The Vatican is one of the major sites in all of Europe, and no one had sold the Vatican online at that point in time.

I still remember the day when they went live and suddenly the bookings started to tick in. Then we had more and more of these types of experiences. We signed up Madame Tussauds, the London Eye, Merlin Entertainments—so many suppliers that had never sold online. For them, it was very foreign even to think of online bookings in 2010.

Then the revenue just came, and we were growing and growing. I think we did something like 500,000 in net revenue in the first year, in 2010—commission revenues, more or less profitable—but we didn't have any cash because we were just living off the mortgages from our parents.

We were constantly looking into the abyss, and that was also the first time when I realized there was actually seasonality in travel. It goes up in the summer, and then in November it really goes down. So, for the first 1 or 2 years without any type of VC funding, we were literally going bankrupt every winter and needed to somehow survive.

So, it’s very tough in the early years. Take me through that. We’re starting to see relatively good early numbers, and we’re profitable enough. At that point, you must be getting inbound from VCs.

No, no. This was 2010 and 2011. There was basically no venture capital scene whatsoever in Europe. The biggest problem was that we didn’t have a US original that we were a copy of.

I remember I was talking to Oliver Samwer at the time. We had started to relocate some of the staff from Switzerland to Berlin because Switzerland was just too expensive for us to survive in our bootstrap mode. He looks at me and says, “What’s the equivalent here in the US? You had the copy of what exactly?”

I said, “There is no exact copy. We’re trying something new here. Experiences marketplaces don’t really exist right now, but I believe it’s the future of travel.”

He said, “Do you want to join Rocket Internet, or do you want to work on your own startup?” I said, “I’m going to work on my own startup.” He said, “Okay, thank you very much. See you.”

That was really the spirit of the time. It’s very hard to recollect because things are so different today, but we couldn’t raise funding.

How do you feel about the Samwer brothers? I know it’s like a bombshell, but how do you feel about the Samwers at Rocket? Part of me is like, “Amazing—this birthed the ecosystem.” Then part of me is like, “God, it’s a bit of a dodgy way to go about innovation, just blatantly ripping off American consumer trends and selling them back to them.”

I think the 3 of them are incredibly smart dudes, and I think they created the Berlin ecosystem single-handedly.

You really think that, is it?

It is. I never did business with them, but I must say that without them, GetYourGuide probably couldn’t exist.

Wow, that’s amazing. It’s interesting for me, obviously not being in Berlin and not seeing the firsthand impact that they’ve had. It’s super to hear.

Okay, so there wasn’t a VC ecosystem. We’re going through this seasonality where suddenly it’s, “Oh, shit, we’re going bankrupt once or twice every year.” When did we start to raise money? When was your first VC meeting?

The first VC funding was from Brent Hoberman, who invested a small seed check alongside an outfit called PROfounders out of London.

Sean Seton-Rogers?

Exactly. That was actually really weird because I got a sponsored ticket, I think through some lottery or something, to go to LeWeb, which was a big startup conference at the time. Brent was on stage, and I couldn’t raise VC funding. We had this business that was constantly going bankrupt but growing really fast.

I hit Brent up after he was on stage and said, “I’m in travel. You founded Lastminute.com. We should talk.” He said, “Okay, interesting. Here’s my business card.”

I picked up the business card, wrote him an email—just a cold email, basically—and he said, “Come and see me in London.” I don’t even know whether he really knew who I was or what I was doing.

I remember I went to see Brent at the Made.com offices. This was probably 2011 or 2012, and I had to wait 4 hours to get a 10-minute meeting with Brent. I still vividly remember the meeting, and I think he does too.

It was basically, “This is what we’re doing. We’re creating an experiences marketplace. This is the next biggest thing in travel. It’s the last big greenfield. No one has conquered it.”

Brent looked at me and said, “I made 1 pivotal mistake at Lastminute.com. I had the opportunity to buy Booking.com at the time, as a seed-stage company. I still regret that to this present day. I’m not going to make that mistake twice. I’m going to invest in you.”

That was the moment we got our first funding, really, and the rest from there is history.

How much did you raise then?

It was $1 million.

At what price?

I think at a 5 million or 6 million pre-money valuation.

5. Why VCs Rejected GetYourGuide 100+ Times

So you did very well. Wow, $1 million at $5 million or $6 million. Okay, fantastic. But that wasn’t the first VC meeting. I heard that you got rejected 100 times.

Yeah, I tried to raise capital, but we got rejected everywhere because, again, we were not the copycat of anything. We were first-time founders. No one likes to invest in travel. This is a very weird industry for a lot of people in Silicon Valley.

For the people I met in the US, most said, “Move over here, or we’re not going to give you funding.” I said, “No, we’re very happy in Europe. We don’t want to move to the US.”

What advice do you have for founders who are on their 50th meeting with VCs and it just doesn’t seem to be hitting? It doesn’t seem to be resonating. To what extent are you like, “Go back to the drawing board. It’s your story; you’re not resonating,” versus, “It’s just a game of numbers. Keep going”?

It’s very hard to compare the days back then to what we have today. I think the constant is that you have to have tremendous tenacity. You will have to pitch 100 times, and it will only work once, maybe.

What’s different is that you can refine your story and your product-market fit so much more these days, and you have a much bigger community of mentors and best practices—all of which I didn’t have at the time. I didn’t have anyone to talk to who had done that before.

I think that’s really the big difference that I would lean into today. Lean into the ecosystem and get the help that is out there, because today there are so many people who have done it before, who have learned the lessons, and who can help you succeed.

So we raise this $1 million at whatever $5 million or $6 million, or whatever the price was. What happens then? That’s our first bit of money. Where do we go and double down, and how does that change?

From there on, we continued with our bootstrapping mode, but with a little bit more money—so, not going bankrupt all the time, which was positive.

What Brent actually then did was pretty much immediately set up a meeting with a bunch of VC funds in the US. That referral from him as a proven travel entrepreneur made all the difference. Suddenly, we were starting to get meetings, people got more interested, and there was just a much better reference for me as a first-time founder as well.

Ultimately, there was a partner called Alex Finkelstein at Spark Capital who took a very keen interest in GetYourGuide. He was like, “No, this is interesting. There’s something there.” He led the Series A in 2013, and that was really the moment that GetYourGuide transformed.

Where was the business at that point?

6. “I Regret Our Series A — Too Much Dilution” - The $14M Series A That Nearly Killed the Company

The business was doing somewhere around $2 million in net revenue at that point and growing, I think, 2–3x year over year.

Got you. And your blended take is around 10–20%?

25%.

25%. So it’s doing around $8 million in bookings. Okay, got you. And he led the Series A? What was the Series A?

The Series A at the time was actually very big by European standards. It was somewhere around 14 million as a total Series A, at, I think, a 30–35 million pre-money valuation.

Wow. Actually, that’s quite a lot of dilution. How do you think about dilution and advise founders on it today?

I would not have raised as big of a Series A. Looking back, I think it was too much dilution. Ultimately, it all worked out because if you’re in the company for long enough, there are also founder re-ups and all of that.

Personally, I would say it didn’t matter, but I do think you should manage dilution. Otherwise, you end up with problems with your employees and with your other investors. Also, the share of early-stage investors just gets too large, which might be a problem later down the road.

Fortunately, at GetYourGuide, we got all of that fixed over the years, but I do think that, at the time, it was a little bit too much.

I’m going to get in trouble for this. Do you think founder re-ups are fair? I mean it in the nicest way. As you said, with hindsight, you would not have raised as much and not diluted as much. It’s like me as an investor going, “Oh, my bad. I paid too much. I want a better price now with 3 years of data down the line,” and then me wanting a better price.

Well, no. I agreed to that, and that’s the deal.

Totally. I don’t think that you should walk that back. You cannot correct mistakes. I’m just seeing so many founder re-up packages now, and investors are getting screwed. It’s like, why are we getting screwed? Do you know what I mean?

Totally. No, look, I think the founder incentives that you see, first and foremost, should happen after a longer period of time.

If I look at myself, I think the first founder incentive package that I personally was awarded by the board happened after a decade or so—much later. Then there are a lot of market best practices and standards. If you’re a more mature company, an investment bank can come in and benchmark that against peer companies, and then it works out.

At the end of the day, at that point in time, you get awarded as a founder CEO, or as a founder management team, for the work that you’re doing in terms of driving share price for shareholders over the next decade.

Totally get you. Okay, so this is the Series A, and that’s a US fund leading. Being a European company, that’s a big moment. How does that change the company?

It completely changed our life because, at the time, the Series A was very large in terms of total quantum.

So we had a lot of money, and very few U.S. VC companies were investing in Europe at the time. We went from being a nobody to a superstar literally overnight.

Could you feel that in the ecosystem, in people's presence, in how they responded?

100%. I think the only equivalent, at a much greater scale, happened in 2019 when we raised from SoftBank Vision Fund—that massive round. Those were the 2 defining rounds of the company, but with the Series A, it was really going from being a complete nobody to someone who was very present on the startup radar and in the scene. We could hire completely different people.

I must say, though, that was the moment when I made the biggest mistakes, in hindsight, in building the company. We almost lost the company after raising that Series A round.

What were the biggest mistakes that you made in that period?

First and foremost, we listened way too much to the VCs. We were these young founders who didn't have a clue, and we completely lost our way, going to board meetings literally looking for advice on what we should be doing in our strategy instead of pushing for the strategy that we saw working in the day-to-day.

That's interesting. What did the VCs want you to do, and how did that compare to what you would have done if you'd followed your gut?

They had a much longer-term vision around, “Hey, you should build SaaS products for your vendors. You should do multi-market. You should go into all of these new customer segments and all of these new supply segments.” Most importantly, you should hire all of these senior people to do all of that.

That's about the worst thing you can do as a Series A company without proper management experience. It's much better to stay very narrow and go very deep, continue to drive the growth that you're seeing from the core customer segments that you have, and do much less but do that much better.

We were going way too broad, hiring a bunch of people who were completely wrong for the stage of the company. There were no culture fits, and growth then started to really calm down while expenses spiraled up like crazy. I remember, about a year after raising that Series A, I needed to lay off 30% of the company and completely rejuggle GetYourGuide to refocus us on the core.

Did you do that quickly enough? Sometimes you can leave it quite late.

Thankfully, I did it quickly enough, and I got incredibly lucky. At the time, a person who wasn't very well known in the European startup ecosystem—it was probably one of the most successful European founders of all time, Kees Koolen—called me up.

One Friday night, I was watching Netflix with my wife. We were sitting there, and he called me up and said, “Here's likely Kees Koolen.” I obviously knew him because he was the founder and CEO of Booking.com. He said, “Look, Johannes, I left Booking.com. I've heard about your company. I think you're onto something. Give me your numbers.”

I ran him through the numbers. He was like, “Give me every cohort and every kind of supplier.” It was just really going deep on the first call. By the end of it, an hour and a half in, he said, “This is interesting. I'm going to be in Berlin tomorrow morning at 9:00 a.m. at your office.”

This was Saturday morning, and the next morning at 9:00 a.m., I was there. Kees was there, and he went to the meeting room with me and to the whiteboard. He basically mapped out the entire journey of where he saw value and where I saw value, and asked a ton of questions.

It was literally like being in the room with the Jedi grandmaster for almost, I'd say, the full day. Then he left and said, “I'm going to come on board. I'm joining the board of directors, and I'm going to personally invest $1 million in the company.”

That was incredibly pivotal because it happened exactly at the point in time when I was laying off 30% of the people and needed to reboot the company. At that point in time, I had someone alongside me who had done this before and who was a really good mentor. That truly transformed me.

I told Kees (likely Koolen) 2 or 3 years later, when the company was a success, that I probably learned more from him than from my dad.

7. Recruiting Netflix’s Head of Growth Nearly Killed Me

When we look at those bad hires, what do you wish you had known then that you know now about what makes a good hire and what you did wrong there?

I think you need fundamentally different people for a Series A to Series C or D-stage company than you do for a pre-IPO or public company with billions in revenue. I see it today, being on the other side of that: people who are incredibly effective at Netflix, Meta, Google, or even GetYourGuide today are not the type of people who really thrive with a 30- or 50-person company, where you still need to continue to refine that core product-market fit.

The way you manage and do things is so different because you're in the weeds every day with the team. You need to ship stuff, and you need to be really opinionated about what's going on. The muscle that you have later on around managing multiple teams, managing organizations, doing road maps, and creating more structure in the organization—which you need at some point, otherwise things don't work anymore when you're at a certain scale—those are just fundamentally different skill sets and typically also different types of people.

Oftentimes, VCs mix these 2 phases. You really need to have these very entrepreneurial people in the early days who, by the way, often don't work out in the late days when you're going public and at that stage of your life. Those are not the same types of skill sets.

It's really about whether you can find people who are strong culture fits and who are right for your company at that point in time.

8. “I Hired All the Wrong People – Then Laid Off 30%”

What are some of the other big mistakes? Hiring the wrong type of people, maybe listening to the board too much—anything else?

Not having a really tight strategy. Founders typically think that they have way more capacity than they really have. You need to be really tight on what the core thing is that you want to be doing, how you can deliver value to customers, and how you can obsessively focus on that.

This is really the core lesson from Kees and Booking.com: don't do too much. He told me that at Booking.com, they had looked at experiences for many years. On these types of innovation projects, people had to go to the innovation department. The innovation department had 1 person, who was himself, and it was called the “no department” because he was always saying, “No, go and refocus on the core.”

Typically, people underestimate the runway that they have with their core products. Really improving that, achieving product-market fit, and scaling that over a longer period of time is much more valuable than doing 10 things that are all sexy but that you're going to be mediocre at all of them.

I totally agree with that. I often see it with founders who want to go into enterprise too early, and I'm like, SMB is so much larger than you think. HubSpot did it for 15 years. You can too. So I totally agree with you there.

Okay, so we have those 3 learnings. What happens then? We've got $14 million. It's probably like $8 million now. We've laid off 30%. The pressure's on because now you've got to perform.

Absolutely, and we did perform. The beautiful thing was that we had a lot of really good people in the company. Instead of hiring expensive new execs, I just promoted the best people in the company, which was the best thing I ever did, and gave them responsibility. Although a lot of them were very junior for their jobs, they were incredibly motivated and they were in the trenches, so they knew what was going on.

We refocused the company really on our core segments of attraction tickets and guided tours, and just the core European capitals. We weren't looking worldwide as we did after the Series A. We just looked at Rome, Paris, and London, and we acquired all of the supply there.

There was no big magic, but suddenly demand was coming back and growth was coming back. We were going back to more than 100% year-over-year growth at much better unit economics, and just 6 to 12 months after that, we could raise a really good Series B.

What was the Series B?

The Series B was co-led by Spark Capital and Highland Europe. Spark Capital was so impressed by us going through that roller coaster of dropping off a cliff, reshaping the company, and bringing Kees Koolen in that they said, “Hey, you guys are clearly onto something. You're doing this right.”

This is, by the way, another piece of advice for a lot of founders: we gained so much more respect when we went against the board and said, “We're not going to do this. We're not going to do that. We'll focus on this. This is my opinion. This is where I stand.”

Suddenly, the VCs were like, “Yeah, we follow you. You're right,” instead of us just saying, “Oh, this is a great idea. We're going to do it.” Really shaping the opinion of the board and the investors is something that I learned during that period.

That also helped us afterward to raise the subsequent rounds because we were so much more opinionated about what we were doing.

Series B is often said to be a very hard round. You need to have a very clear, proven model, and it's about edging into the scale-capital phase. When you think about the Series B and getting Highland, how many meetings did it take to get the Series B together?

It was very easy because Highland actually co-invested with Spark, and those guys really liked each other. The partner who joined from Highland, likely Fergal Mullen, is a tremendously great guy, and we had immediate product-market fit with him.

He loved GetYourGuide, which was a customer. He sat down, and I vividly remember when he invested, he literally let us pitch for 30 minutes, and then he pitched for 30 minutes. We were like, “This guy is something special.” I had never seen that in a VC before.

He showed me through his fund deck. He was like, “This is my strategy for the fund. I wanted to do something for Europe—Highland Europe—but I had just come back from the US, and it was really about creating that ecosystem here in Europe.” So, we felt it was such a good connection. That was a very easy one.

How big was the Series B?

The Series B was, I think, roughly 25 million, if I remember correctly.

At, like, $100 million?

Yeah, a little bit less than that, but 90–100 million.

Any lessons on that, on price dilution? Because we're still in a safe zone here, aren't we, in terms of not crazy prices?

No, it's still—I mean, those were also still the days when there were no crazy prices. That only happened from 2015–16 up to 2021. For us, that was an easy one because we had such a strong comeback. It was one of the easier rounds that we had raised.

But what really made the difference was that we had a strategy and a good team—not a team with big CVs, but a team that was really on to it. It was entrepreneurial. There was hustling every day. Lastly, we had the traction and the numbers to prove it.

To what extent do you think Series B is traction versus story?

It's all in the numbers. From Series B and C onward, if you don't have the numbers to prove it, it's very hard to raise that round.

Fascinating. So, we're now looking great again. We've got $25 million, we've got Highland, we've got Spark, the numbers are good, and the strategy is perfect, or better. What happens then? Do we continue to nail European cities? How do you think about going broad versus deep? Talk to me about that.

From then onward, we basically rinsed and repeated for a number of years. We were obviously growing our supply base, growing the demand base, expanding into more European countries, and doing a little bit in the US. It was basically rinse and repeat.

Why did you do the US? That's an interesting one. It's a big one to take hold of.

It was a big one to take hold of and, to be honest, we probably did it prematurely. If I could go back in time, that's another lesson for a lot of founders: I would not have gone as early. I would have done more in Europe. I think we would have had even more growth and more profitability.

But we did a little bit in the US. It wasn't detrimental, so we weren't overextending ourselves, and we were building a good foothold there. All of that led up to raising a massive round from the SoftBank Vision Fund and likely Temasek in 2019.

How did the SoftBank round come together?

At the time, there was a small team there with likely Jeff Housenbold, likely Ted Fong, and likely Andrew Leto, some of whom had worked at Airbnb. Airbnb had tried Experiences from 2015 onward, but they had failed. They had seen GetYourGuide as clearly the innovation leader in the space, and they were like, “This is a big market. We just raised this massive Vision Fund. Let's put some dollars behind it and make that market a reality.”

To be honest, the Vision Fund, in a way, actually did do that. With that funding, our market went onto a completely different stratosphere.

How did those meetings go? People often talk about SoftBank where it's like $500 million in 30 minutes. Was that how it went? What was the experience like?

It was not with us. I think that group of people, which was doing marketplace investments at the time out of San Francisco—they invested in DoorDash and they invested in GetYourGuide—were much more like traditional growth-equity investors who were very metrics-oriented.

It was a very deep diligence process. Ultimately, while I did get to meet Masa, it was just 1 meeting along the road of raising that investment. It was very much a growth-equity investment process, so there was nothing crazy about it.

Dude, how was meeting Masa?

Very interesting. Interestingly, Masa was very—

Okay. Was it in London, or—

No, it was in his private home in San Francisco. He had this incredible painting of Napoleon right behind him, which I still vividly remember. This is kind of funny.

Were you nervous?

I was very nervous. Of course, he could have just given us a thumbs-down. We had worked on this investment for half a year, and this 1-hour meeting determined whether we got it or not.

But Masa was a very friendly person. He's Japanese, so in a way he's very calm and gentle. He was surprisingly interested in the P&L. He was literally looking at, “Okay, how do we value this business? How can this be very profitable over time?”

With marketplace investments, I think he's much more financially oriented than with the deep-tech stuff. He's really going deep there—surprisingly deep—and he's actually really good at this. I was surprised because you have these stories of Masa that he's just this crazy person, but he's actually a really good financial investor as well. So, don't be fooled by all the headlines: he knows what he's doing.

The second part of the meeting, apart from the financial traction, the KPIs, the P&L, and all of that, was really about the product vision itself. To give him credit, he was already completely on to AI in 2019. He was like, “How is AI going to transform this? How do you think about the UX of the future? How can you build an app that is much more personalized and much more engaging?”

“How can you embed virtual reality in there? For instance, finding the meeting points, or even being in the Louvre—how can that travel experience transform?” He was really very visionary and, at the same time, very grounded in the financials. Both of those things.

Wow, that's amazing. You have this and that second half of the meeting. What happens then? You leave, and you get a call from Jeff saying, “Hey, we liked you”?

Yeah, pretty much. “We like this. Let's go and make it happen.”

How big was that?

9. The $450M SoftBank Deal... Then COVID Hit

Between SoftBank Vision Fund and likely Temasek, we raised an aggregate of roughly $450 million at the time. We did take some of that capital to buy out earlier shareholders, so not all of that was primary.

Do you think that was the right decision? It's a lot of money. Do you think you needed that much money?

For us, it was the decision that ultimately made GetYourGuide into what it is today, because just 6 months after we raised that money, COVID hit. We would have been bankrupt without that round.

What was the price of that round?

I think that was, at the time, $1.5–1.6 billion.

Did you feel the weight of that at that point? $1.5–1.6 billion?

No, not really, to be honest. At that time, I was already so used to tremendous amounts of pressure and being at the helm of this company.

What did change was that suddenly I felt like a celebrity. You were going into rooms and everyone was trying to please you. All of the VPs of the Googles and Metas were calling me up, and all of the VCs in the world wanted to have a meeting. They were suddenly speaking of you as if you were the greatest and smartest person on the planet.

That's when I ask: Do you believe the hype?

To be honest, I had too little time to really reflect on that, because 6 months later we were managing the biggest crisis in the history of online travel. It was such a brief honeymoon period that, to me, it was very surreal looking back.

But I did learn the hard way that when you're down, none of these people call.

Six months go by. We have this honeymoon period—a great period to have—and then COVID happens. There was this 1- or 2-week period where it was like, “What is this coronavirus?” Take me to the internal discussions around how bad this was going to be and how that transformed.

In February 2020, we had this board meeting with SoftBank and likely Temasek. Obviously, they're Asian funds, and they were already seeing what was going on in Asia, where you had lockdowns and everything. They were saying, “We better build some contingency plans if this actually spreads to Europe and the US.”

The naive, still very gung-ho founders that we were said, “Look, we've managed crises before. We've had the terror attacks in Paris in 2015, which hit us hard. We managed to survive and all of that. We're going to manage.”

Famous last words.

It took 3 weeks from that board meeting for us to be at zero revenue. Literally zero. I was going on the website. I think there were maybe 15 bookings a day, down from tens of thousands. There was no one on our website. I looked at Google Analytics, and there was just no one. There was no traffic.

We had 600–700 employees. We had no revenue.

What do you do? That's a really good question. You get in a room with the team and go, “Fuck.”

The closest I can describe the feeling I had was like having a car crash on the highway at 100 miles an hour, just straight-on hitting a wall, basically. I was like, “My analytics must be broken.” For 2 or 3 days, I felt like, “This is surreal. This can't happen. This can't happen to me.”

I did this for more than a decade, and this is just not right. I felt like, no, the world is not right. There’s something wrong in the world right now. But then I quickly turned into a mode that, in retrospect, I describe as being the surgeon. I tried to put myself outside of the car and the car accident and just said, “Okay, everything is broken. The car is completely destroyed. The patient needs to survive. I need to help the patient survive.”

So I put my strategy hat on and thought about what the potential scenarios were from there, and how I was going to survive—and not only survive, but also thrive after this crisis. The good thing was I had a lot of cash in the bank. The bad thing was I had a lot of investors who basically called me up and said, “You have to lay off the entire company immediately to save all of the dollars you have on the balance sheet, and then afterwards we’ll rebuild.”

With these different pieces of information, I needed to build a picture of what the right solution was for GetYourGuide at the time. Nils, the CFO, and I all huddled in a room for multiple days to work out that crisis plan. In hindsight, thankfully, I think we made all of the right moves at the time. Number one was not to listen to the investors who wanted to lay off the entire company, but rather to focus on different scenarios for how long this crisis could take and how we could build a company that was actually prepared for the rebound.

10. The Sequoia Tree Mindset: Grow Through Fire

Already in March 2020, we felt that this was a massive crisis, but there was also a tremendous opportunity in it. We had the cash in the bank, so if we were the first ones out of the gates afterwards, if we did really well by our suppliers in the interim and helped them survive as well, if we were really agile, and if we continued to build our product, we could be a much better company coming out of this pandemic than going in. That was really the mindset that we took.

That same week, I sent an email to the entire staff and told them about something that I had learned a year or two earlier when I did a tour with my wife, Anakha, through Sequoia National Park. One of the interesting things about the big sequoia trees is that they actually grow after wildfires. When the park is devastated, the biggest trees grow because they have nutrient-rich soil after a wildfire and full exposure to the sun.

I said, “I want to be that sequoia after the COVID crisis. So let’s build that sequoia now.”

So where did you invest at that time that allowed you to come out stronger post-fire?

We took a couple of very extraordinary measures. First of all, we came back with that vision and target picture to our entire organization, particularly the engineering and product organization, which was the majority of our expenses on the people side. We told them, “We would love for you to reduce your salary, but we’ll give you shares as compensation. So if this actually works out financially, it will be great for you, but you’ll need to take the short-term hit.”

What happened was magical. Our product and engineering organization, and even beyond that into management functions, reduced their salaries by more than 30% on average in exchange for shares. Some people in leadership went down to an 80% salary reduction, I kid you not. It was crazy. It was such a testament to their belief in the company.

For a lot of the other operational staff, there were these short-time labor measures in Germany and elsewhere, where the government would actually cover some of the cost. With these types of measures, we could go very deep into the pandemic and only had to cut marginally. Ultimately, throughout the entire 2 years, we only had to lay off roughly 15% to 20% of the staff. Not a single engineer, not a single product person, despite being at zero revenue for more than a year afterwards.

What happens then? We start to see the borders open up and we start to see the world come back, because—I don’t know, in Germany, quite how it worked for you, but in the UK we had the summer of opening up before the winter of closing down again. You had the same?

We had the same. So Europe, unfortunately, was a disaster for 2 years. We had spikes again where people did some domestic experiences and some domestic bookings. There was some travel going on. Some hope came back.

That was the hardest part: the hope coming back. As a CEO, you want to energize the company, but you also want to be careful and not give them false hope. That was really difficult. 2021 was slightly better because the US, where we had built up a presence at that point in time, already had a very robust domestic market. That was actually driving a lot of the demand in 2021, but we were still 50% below 2019 levels.

We were still severely depressed, and we were still burning through oodles of cash every month.

What are the board saying to you at this point? You’ve not listened to them. You’ve not cut the team. You’re burning through oodles of cash, and consumer demand is not coming back.

It goes back to the lesson of 2013. I was so opinionated and so straightforward as to say, “This is the path that we’re going on,” and the entire company was behind me. People were sacrificing more than 30% of their salary. We had not a single person in senior leadership leave the company. There was such sheer determination that they did trust me.

At the same point in time, I did cut expenses wherever I could. In territories where we felt COVID was not going to come back anytime soon, we cut people. We cut all of the SaaS contracts we didn’t need. We really went down and turned every dime in the company.

They did see that, and they also felt that at that moment in time it was the right thing to do: to rally behind the leadership and follow the plan. Obviously, we also had alternative plans if things had lasted even longer. But I said, “This is the plan that we’re going to follow,” and we should focus on that.

Knowing all that now, what did you not do that you wish you had done?

To be honest, and I don’t want to praise myself, but we did all of the right moves during COVID in hindsight. This is not because we knew what was going to happen. A lot of it was also luck.

I think the thing that really helped our plans was the recovery then, after a virus I think was more benign, in early 2022, when people were storming back to travel. Suddenly, there was complete over-demand, and we had kept all of our supply. We had even struck better deals with suppliers during the pandemic because they needed to have more revenue.

Everyone was switching to online channels during the pandemic because people were getting so used to online bookings. Having rebuilt the product, fine-tuned all of the kinks that were there before, streamlined the supply base, negotiated better contracts, and established more direct contracts with all of the major suppliers, attractions, and theme parks in the world, we were coming back insanely fast.

Did you really see the numbers just go?

From late 2021 to March 2022, we grew 10x. It was crazy. Then, in all of 2022, we had already doubled pre-pandemic volumes.

So wait, when did you get back to 2019 levels?

Literally in 2022, when we were double 2019 levels.

Was that quicker and more than you thought?

Yeah. I didn’t expect the rebound to be as forceful and as quick, but I did expect it to happen.

Can I ask, in mid-2022, when everything’s starting to come back and you’re thinking, “Oh, thank God, the world looks better,” how much cash do you have then?

Thankfully, because of all the measures, we still had plenty of cash. We did another thing during the pandemic that actually helped us quite a lot: we raised some convertible debt on top of that. We raised roughly 100 million, both from existing and some new investors. That was the reserve that we had in the bank.

For people that don’t know, what is convertible debt?

Convertible debt basically means it’s a note that converts with your next equity round at a discount to that price.

The only thing that was not so great was that the moment we came back, the equity markets went down like crazy. It was this completely weird world where everyone in 2021 was celebrating in tech. It was the boom year of tech. We were deeply depressed. We were saving the business. We were nowhere.

Then, in 2022, we had this massive year, growing super fast. Everything was working out, but no VC money was available because they were all working on saving their portfolios. For most of their companies, it was really doomsday at the time. It was a very interesting dynamic.

We actually held off raising more capital until early 2023, which was the first round that we raised after COVID.

Given all that, just before we move to that, do you advise founders then to always take the money if it’s on the table? You could look at your SoftBank round and go, “Wow, it’s a ridiculous, crazy amount of money at the time.”

But no, actually, it wasn’t, and it turned out to be incredibly prescient.

If it’s there, do you take it or not?

I don’t think there’s a general rule. I do think that founders can over-raise, particularly in the early days. I told the story of my 2013 raise, so I don’t think founders should take too much cash too early. I often advise against that.

But fundamentally, if you have traction, if there is a big market opportunity, and if it’s clear that there will be plenty of competition later down the road, make sure you raise the capital and make sure that you go fast.

But the tricky part is to maintain the discipline of raising and then not overspending in your own organization, staying nimble, and staying focused, right? So you need to do both. You need to stay incredibly focused on building out your core customer segments and your core value proposition, and then you ultimately need to outgrow your competition. You need to do both at the same time.

Okay, fantastic. You mentioned earlier, and I forgot to ask you about it, that US VCs were coming in, Spark in particular, and you were suddenly able to hire great people. Do you think brand-name VCs are incredibly important for signaling?

Yes, I do. I've seen that time and again, also with my personal investments. If you have Sequoia Capital, Index, or Spark Capital on your cap table, the reality is that your next round will be so much easier.

I wouldn't take anyone at a discount. I would actually have a competitive process, and then I would really look at the GP. I think that's very undervalued because there are many people at these different funds, and I think the GP probably matters more than the fund itself.

I do think the brand name really does matter. The GP probably matters even more. Then I would ask, “Is this GP going to be here in 10 years?” No one considers that. I promise you, no GPs will be there in 10 years. Ninety-five percent will not be there in 10 years. That's why most VCs are not rich, actually: they're not there long enough for the carry to hit.

That's why you go with people who founded the firm, because they're fucking stuck. They're never leaving.

Exactly. Alex Finkelstein, the guy who wrote the check from Spark, and likely Fergal Mullen of Highland Europe were both kind of co-founders of their respective firms, and they're never leaving, which I didn't consider at the time. But that was genius for us because they're still with those firms today. They're still crushing it, and that's a very important consideration. So I would take a discount for that. For these types of people, I would take a discount.

11. “We Went to $0 in Revenue in 3 Weeks”

I've seen so many recently where people have led rounds at firms, then they go to another firm, and suddenly, even if you're doing okay—you're not doing badly—no one in that firm wants to do you because you're just orphaned. It's the most dangerous thing.

So when the world comes back, we're like, “Oh, thank God, we're now double pre-pandemic levels. Thank fuck, 2023.” Then we raise another round. We raise another round. We never touched any of that capital because we broke even at the same time.

Wow, which is great. Was that a special moment?

Yeah, totally special, particularly after the pandemic. We were at scale at that point in time. Fast-forward to today: we're now 5 times the size of pre-pandemic, we're profitable, and it's a very different company. Suddenly, we can invest our own cash flows into innovation, right? We can do all of these great projects, we can do all of this stuff, but it is actually our own cash flow.

What I realized is that your cash flow is enough to invest in innovation to the extent that you'd like.

If I were to ask you the question, if you had unlimited cash, what would you do?

Give it back to shareholders.

No, there's nothing where you're like, “Oh, I'd invest super into VR or AI personalization of content”?

Naturally, there are always areas to invest in. If I had an idea where I'd say, “We absolutely have to do this, and we can't stomach it from our own cash flows,” I would go out and raise that capital and do it.

But the reality is, when you break even and you start to grow your EBIT, it's a wonderful constraint, in a way. You're much more disciplined about investing your own cash, actually. That is an important lesson I wish I had learned a little bit earlier as an entrepreneur, because very often we're investing and hoping for the best, and we don't cut these projects when they're not really working. Again, we dilute our focus. The beautiful thing is, if you're a profitable company, I feel it actually forces you to focus a lot more.

That's super interesting. No, I can absolutely see that. Okay, and so in 2023, you did go out and raise more, though. How did that go, and how much did you raise then?

Back then, we only raised an incremental 100 million. We still had quite a bit of cash on the balance sheet.

Was this convertible debt?

No, that was after the convertible. So we converted the convertible debt and raised some additional capital back then.

What price did you do that at? It was on top of the $1.5 billion from SoftBank.

We raised at an up round compared to that.

Got you. Were you pleased with that price?

It's a hard one. You've done so much better as a business, but the price is probably quite high from 2021, so it's a tough one to match.

This is where you get into the whining of the CEO in a consumer-internet company these days. We all feel that we're very undervalued compared to a lot of other AI or even SaaS businesses, but the reality is, it is what it is. At the end of the day, these valuations will expand, and sometimes they will contract, and you need to build a really good business.

I very much empathize now with Jeff Bezos, who said, “Willing to be misunderstood.” I think you need to invest for the long term, and then maybe the valuation will be slightly below where you would personally want it. That's fine as well, because ultimately, I don't need to sell any shares. I'm going to be in this for the long run. We're profitable, we're investing, we're growing like crazy, and the numbers are amazing. They're better than they've ever been. I'm pretty sure that, over time, the valuation will take care of itself.

Can I ask, did you sell secondaries?

I did sell secondaries, thankfully, in 2019 as part of the SoftBank round, which was actually very helpful. I was very averse to selling secondaries before that, and I had a very hard time.

Why were you averse to it before?

Because I felt I wanted to be all-in, and I felt like that would show that I'm not 100% committed to the company anymore. I was really wrestling with myself over whether I should be selling or not.

I told you, I even had debt from my parents.

Please tell me you paid them back.

Family and friends—I offered, but they never wanted me to. With the SoftBank round, I said, “Finally, I can pay you back.” But my mom said, “This is your inheritance. Go be happy. Don't worry. We love you.”

I'm ultimately very happy that I did, because that gave me another level of calm in the pandemic.

How much do you think is a reasonable amount to take off?

For founders, it depends a little bit on how big the company is and how mature it is. I think a couple of million bucks is probably the right thing if you're at a mature company. I don't think that you should be taking too much off the table. It shouldn't be enough so that you can retire forever and never need to work again. I don't think that's the right amount.

Do you think $10 million is too much?

It's probably on the upper end.

I had a founder on the show the other day, and they were like, “Why would you bother unless it's $30 million or $40 million? You can't live life without $30 million or $40 million.” I was like, “Wow.” But that's the point: you should not get into that lifestyle. I was like, “Wow, okay.”

So the way I look at it—for me, I put that money into MSCI, so I haven't touched it. You shouldn't change your lifestyle. I think that's the most important part.

You should have some. Do you not think you should? What I mean by that is, I might change your lifestyle and up-level it. Being blunt, now I have the best food, which I never had, so I'm much healthier. I have the best gym, so I'm much healthier. I have a PT. I changed my lifestyle phenomenally, and my performance has gone up 2 times.

Okay, let me rephrase all of these things. Totally fair, and I do that as well. You should not live the lifestyle of all of your paper wealth being liquid. I think that's what a lot of people do. They even take loans against their paper wealth and all of that.

So don't do that. Don't get the private jet. Don't go to the most expensive resorts. Don't hang out with all of the crowd that has that level of wealth, and don't delude yourself. That's what I'm saying.

Totally get you there. Did you ever find that tempting?

No, it's not my thing.

It's not your thing. No. What do you advise young founders who are approaching that? You see some founders where you can almost see them getting sucked into the vortex of tech, power, influence, and money, and you're like, “Ooh, that's going to lead you badly.”

I don't think you'll be successful if you look at the most successful founders in Europe. You look at Pieter van der Does, you look at Miki Kuusi from Wolt—all of those people are very grounded. They're super smart, they've been working on their companies for a long period of time, and they don't get eaten up by their success or by their wealth.

In fact, they reinvest a lot of this into the startup ecosystem, which is the same thing that I'm doing. I don't think hanging out with that type of crowd or living in that world brings you joy and fulfillment.

What brings me joy and fulfillment personally is seeing the next founder succeed.

Reinvesting in success, seeing the next founder succeed. You angel invest now today, correct?

Yes, I do quite a bit.

Yeah. Okay. How many angel investments have you done?

30 or 40.

30 or 40. What's the best one?

I was just literally in the seed round of TravelPerk with some pocket cash and some advisory shares, which was a big success. Avi Meir is an amazing—love him—fantastic, amazing CEO. I was early on in Trade Republic, which is an amazing success, and next to Revolut is probably one of the best ones. There are also lots of smaller SaaS companies that are growing really fast.

Love that. Did you have a strategy going into angel investing?

No. The strategy is investing behind great people and business models that I really enjoy, and also in spaces where I think I want to learn.

So it wasn't a consistent check size.

No, it was somewhere between $50K and $200K, somewhere there.

Got you. How has investing changed how you think about operating? Seeing 30 or 40 companies grow and building the founders within them, how has seeing that as an investor changed how you think about operating?

Very much so. I had a couple of learnings, I think, from being an investor that really changed my worldview. Before investing, I thought there was just one way to be successful, and that was the way we built GetYourGuide, because I saw how that worked. I had such strong beliefs, and I was such an opinionated CEO. I was so opinionated and deliberate about building our culture, our operating model, our strategy, and all of that. I felt there was just one way to do it.

Take Trade Republic, which is a very successful fintech company, probably one of the most underrated companies in Europe. They're absolutely crushing it, and the founder is great. But in many ways, what he's built in terms of culture and operating model is 180 degrees different from what I've built. I would not make the same decisions at all in many instances, but he's very, very successful.

What decision did he make that you would not have made the same way?

He's centralizing all of product under him. Basically, every product review runs through him. He has a culture that is much, much harder and more focused on hustling than we are.

Maybe, to a degree, you might call it less empathetic. Do you ever worry that you're soft?

What I learn from this is that different markets deserve different cultures. We're in the business of selling experiences. We're in the business of hospitality. We're in the business of unlocking unforgettable memories for our customers.

The way we have to build our cultural DNA, by its nature, has to be different. It needs to be a little bit softer than at Revolut because we're serving a different type of customer. The employees who join us will also have very different motivations and personal needs from people working at a fintech company or people working at a SaaS company. It's really about how you can build a culture for your market and for your customer base.

I posted the other day that if you want to win today—in other words, be 0.01% successful—you have to work 7 days a week. Silicon Valley has turned up the intensity, and that is the new reality. Do you agree with me?

This is a very tough question because any founder who's built a successful company will remember that they did work 7 days a week. It does happen. I don't know of any founder personally—none of the ones I've backed, and certainly not me—who has not been absolutely obsessed and worked insane hours.

At the same point in time, I think the danger with general statements is that it's not always the same throughout the entire journey. Clearly, I would not expect people to work 7 days a week at GetYourGuide today, and I don't work 7 days a week anymore. In fact, there comes a time when working too much can actually destroy your startup as well, because after a time, it's much more about sustainable growth and sustainable working hours at very high intensity and at scale.

Today, I'm much more focused on pushing back in the nicest way.

You see Jensen Huang does not take a day off and very openly admits it. When you look at the greatest founders, they still don't, and we talk about sustainability. I don't know; I would describe it differently. I'm not arguing with you—I'm more just ideating, because I totally agree that, for the first 5 years, 100%, there's just no debate, I don't think. But when you build infrastructure, you have the ability to be a little bit more—

I don't know the exact routines of the different CEOs. I think as a CEO, you need to see yourself as a system, ultimately, and you need to build up your own capabilities and your strengths as part of that system. You need to understand what you're uniquely qualified to do and what you can do differently from anyone else in the organization. That's particularly true for a founder CEO with all of that history and context.

For me, what that means is that I have a strong spike in strategy. I think I've built a really successful business because I've made the right bets and my intuition is very good. So, for me personally, I need to take some time off to actually brainstorm, talk to people, understand where we are, review the numbers, review the metrics, refine the strategy, and bring that back to the company. That's my unique position and my unique role, and I structure my day exactly like that.

There are other people—likely Daniel Ek, for instance, is probably one of the world's best people at product. For him, it's really a lot about introspection and understanding what product types he likes to build. I think he actually said that he doesn't have anything on his agenda all day long.

I think there are just different ways of doing it. My agenda is still very full because I'm very systematic about getting the insights, building the strategy, being on the front lines, doing customer service rotations, understanding the customer, and constantly enriching myself with a greater level of immersion in our data, our customers, and our suppliers. I want to understand the entire cross-functionality of the business, but I don't think there's one single answer.

At the end of the day, going back to what's the right quantum of hours that you invest, any founder is going to be in the business anyway, all the time. If you're not thinking about your business all the time, you're not doing something that you love, and then you won't be successful anyway. Any founder thinks about it all the time.

Do you think we have too many tourists?

I think there are a lot of people who think that being a founder is sexy. There's so much VC money that they get funded, and they can kind of start the life.

You don't get it.

Yeah, and that's, I think, the point where we need to be careful with ourselves and make sure that we have a sustainable lifestyle. Ultimately, life is long, and I do think that when I'm 60 or 70, I want to look back at my life and make sure that I've spent the time in the right way. That means I will want to have built a very big business, but my lesson has also been that you don't build that in a year or 2. You build that in decades, and you need to sustain that pressure and have that high level of energy over decades.

12. US vs Europe: Why European Founders Are Tougher

How do you do that? That's a question I ask myself quite a lot. I've completely changed my own lifestyle because of that. I do a lot more sports, and I spend more deliberate time with my family and my kids, for instance, because that actually helps me sustain it. That is the antidote.

I've got a company now, a great company that's raising a Series B in Europe. They've just gone to the U.S. from Europe, and they've just raised a little bit and have meetings in Europe. Now they're out in the U.S. raising, and they're like, "God, the difference is just insane in terms of Series B investors and how they think and how they operate." Would you say that you had a vastly different experience between European and U.S. investors?

I had mostly U.S. investors, so I didn't have many European investors. I can't really speak too much about the European experience.

You had European engagements, though.

We had some European engagements. We had some European investors. I think the biggest difference is that U.S. investors have had much bigger home runs, and that relieves a lot of the pressure.

Take Spark Capital, our Series A lead. The deal after GetYourGuide was Oculus Rift, right? Palmer Luckey. We were basically off the hook a couple of months after they made the investment in us because the fund was already returned. Afterwards, Wayfair was in the same fund. The fund got returned another time, and if GetYourGuide returns it another time, that's great, but that's icing on the cake.

I think that creates a completely different dynamic. VCs in Europe don't have that, and that allows you to think much bigger because your early-stage investors don't feel the same pressure.

I'd say the bigger point on the U.S. versus Europe is that I think we have the same ambition level among the founders in Europe and the U.S. I think it's BS, to be honest, when people say European entrepreneurs don't work as hard or aren't as ambitious. I've heard Peter Thiel and others say that, but I think that's BS, to be honest.

I think people here, on average, have a much tougher time because it's much harder to raise funds. It's much harder to build a business across Europe than in the US, where, when you raise funding, the addressable market—everything—is much bigger. I think where we have a big difference, and that's where we need to catch up, is just the overall flywheel of having had successful VCs in Europe that have raised bigger and bigger funds and, also—and that's very important—having the talent density in the different startup capitals of Europe.

If I want to hire, let's say, the next chief product officer at GetYourGuide, it's almost impossible to do that in Europe. I need to go to Silicon Valley because the density of people who have done that scale, served tens of millions of customers a year, and built a business with a 10 billion-plus valuation just doesn't exist to build the structures, processes, and everything to do that.

13. “Germany Spends €100B on Pensions, €7B on VC – It’s Insane”

Do you think Trump and a less stable America make it easier for us to bring talent to Europe?

Totally. I think that's why both of us are so committed to Europe. I think that's the Eureka moment of Europe. I think we need to seize that moment, and I wish we had the landscape and the leadership to do that.

I mean, if I were in charge of Europe—and you know this, that was going to be my question—this is completely unrealistic, but let's just assume for a moment that's true. I would say: pump up venture capital funding to match US levels. We spend 50 billion a year in VC. In Europe, the US is north of 200 billion. Why do we have that gap? It doesn't make any sense.

Just to give you another number, Germany subsidizes its broken retirement system every year with 100 billion, right? But we have 7 billion invested in VC and 100 billion subsidizing the retirement system. That doesn't make any sense. That's not the future.

I would push back on that and say we have way too much money in European venture. We have so much money that your executives are getting emails from VCs encouraging them to leave GetYourGuide and start companies, with executives saying, “Hey, I'm not leaving. This is a weird VC rumor that I'm leaving.” And I disagree with you, Harry.

I agree on the seed and Series A and all of that territory. Yes, probably there is enough capital—maybe, I don't know—but when you look at the GetYourGuide stage and our last couple of rounds, we had to go around the world. It is harder to raise as a European company, and that's where the big rounds happen.

I get you. So you were saying Series C, D, E, pre-IPO, and then even public.

I mean, how can a German company go public in Europe? It's impossible. And if we go public, it's only with American funds.

Well, you're not going to list in Europe.

We haven't decided that, but the reality is, regardless of where we list—

Sorry, I'm not being a journalist here, but how could you?

It's very difficult because we don't have the pools of capital here. That's the problem. We don't have these pools of capital pre-IPO, and we don't have these pools of capital post-IPO. So that's what I mean: we need to invest a lot more in innovation. It's not just about the next seed round. It's really about scaling these companies, making sure that they stay in Europe, and making sure that they continue to innovate and build in Europe.

We need way more budgets for innovation, and that ultimately comes with a lower cost of capital, which means higher valuations for growth-stage companies, and that means more money for these companies. So I agree with you that, when you meet in the middle, at growth, I totally agree with you there. I get you there.

Okay, so more money at growth for companies in Europe. Agreed. Next, as the prime minister of Europe, what I would recommend here is that we should attract talent like crazy right now. We've got the entire immigration debate in Europe, and it just kills me because we have the wrong debate.

Of course, we cannot have all the refugees in the world migrate to Europe. We need to solve that problem. Agreed. But why don't we spend that airtime now discussing how we get the greatest minds in the world to Europe? Because that's going to make the best team ever, because they're all going, “God, the US is a shit show.”

100%. I would go so far as to say anyone who relocates to Europe with a computer science degree or joins a tech company should get massive tax benefits. I don't know—5 years tax-free, or no taxation on stock options, whatever it is. Bring them over.

We can't compete with less capital, a more scattered European landscape, more bureaucracy, and less talent. It's not going to work, right? So we've got to solve the talent part. And the great thing is, we can turn our weakness into a strength because everyone wants to live in Europe. Everyone I talk to wants to live here. They want to live in London, Berlin, Munich—you name it. We're a very livable continent. People love to be here, so let's make sure that they come.

That's such an incentive. Okay, you do tax incentives for great, talented people—whatever that is. By the way, I recommended that in Germany and got shut down immediately because people said, “This is not egalitarian. We need to pay the same taxes everywhere.” But I think it's so misguided because we have such a progressive tax system. It's not egalitarian.

14. 90% of Our Team in Berlin Aren’t German. Here’s Why.

The problem, though, is if you look even at the old industries—Volkswagen and Mercedes, et cetera—what do they need? Brilliant software engineers. They need the next people figuring out autonomous driving, right? So we need that level of talent.

And Harry, at GetYourGuide, 90% of our employees in Berlin are not German. Most of them don't even come from Europe. Because the reality is, with demographic change, we don't have enough people here. Even if I wanted to hire only Germans, I couldn't do that. It wouldn't be possible. We don't have enough, and 90% are not German.

That's astonishing. 90% are not German. Is there anything else you'd do to attract great talent? I love the tax incentive for software engineers. Anything else that you'd do?

It sounds very sad, but actually, making it easy and removing the red tape and the barriers. So we hired a CTO from Netflix last year, likely Gaurav Agrawal, an amazing guy. He was the guy who led all of growth at Netflix, which was very successful, and was at Meta before—a tremendous résumé. He's Indian.

For him to get a visa to come to Germany after he had signed a job contract—this guy makes a lot of money—took him 6 months. Why? Because he had to go to the consulate in San Francisco, and they only take appointments 2 times a week, and they've been booked out for the next 6 months.

So I literally had to call up the foreign office in Germany to get him an appointment in San Francisco so he could bring his paperwork—literally the paperwork—because he can't send that anywhere, so that he could get the visa and migrate to Germany. I kid you not. If you make it that hard, it's no wonder that we don't have a tech ecosystem in Europe.

Okay, make it easier. Anything else?

I think, lastly, this comes to the nuts and bolts: you need to have a really functioning society. I'm actually really concerned about the far right in Europe, because that will be a huge detractor for these types of people.

I'm sorry—why? Has the AfD kind of been diminished or reduced?

No. It's stronger than ever. I understand why Germans or Brits are very upset, because we have all of that red tape. We have these stories that I just told. But the problem is, if we turn into nation-states and if we turn into these very nationalistic things in Europe, then ultimately we will detract the people that we really desperately need right now.

So I think having a really functioning civil society—and that ranges from good education systems to good hospitals, good roads and infrastructure, to people actually engaging and loving Europe again, to be honest, and advertising it—is something that we need. And I think, frankly, in Germany, we've done a terrible job at this over the last couple of years. We've had a really good brand for a long period of time. I think we've really tarnished our brand over the last couple of years.

How do you think you've tarnished your brand?

I think today, when you think of Germany, you just think of things that don't work, and social media has just spiraled that up so much. I think the UK is a little bit in the same spot after Brexit. So, to be honest, I think we need to turn the page and be much more optimistic about our future.

Whether we're able to reinvest in energy, innovation, and technology the way that we need to, fast enough—fundamentally, our governments are totally ill-equipped.

Absolutely.

But I think that's going to be the challenge for our generation, Harry, to do that. I think if we don't display that level of optimism, if we don't believe in Europe, if we just look at the US and are like—

My question to you is: would you ever go into politics?

A lot of people have asked me that. I think the biggest contribution I can give to Europe right now is to build a really big company.

Would I ever? I always say the same thing: Fundamentally, if the power structures are broken, we don't have the time. China and the US are accelerating away from us faster than ever before. So what I do is donate to a bunch of different political parties across Europe. I support young politicians.

I don't know whether politics is the only thing that's broken here. I think a lot of it also has to do with the education of the people. Politics is ultimately a reflection of what people think and what they want. So I think it's really upon us, also as leaders in technology, to bring that progress closer again to the people.

That's why I try to speak out about this type of stuff as much as possible, and try to educate, even if you get blowback like I got with the tax incentives. I don't give up. I continue to try to make that the point, and I try to do that in a way that is as inclusive to these people as possible. I feel like if more of us do that on a continuous basis, ultimately things will change because we have a very loud voice from the younger generation, which is very dissatisfied.

I don't know what it's like in the UK, but a lot of them in Germany actually now vote for right-wing or left-wing parties. We need to make sure that they understand that they can still shape their future. At the same point in time, I think we need to build up the empathy from the older generation, which is the biggest voting bloc, right? They have the power to change things to ensure that we have, again, opportunity for the young generation in Europe.

Do you think we're going to see the concentration of capital toward a few people and wealth inequality like never before? We're in these kinds of rarefied airs. We both came from the same conference, where everyone's loaded and everyone at the top is just getting so much richer, and the group will get smaller and smaller while the rich will get richer and richer, as blunt as it sounds. Does that not worry you?

I think in Europe, much less than in the US, to be honest. I think that's again something that's quite positive about Europe. If you look at Germany and many other European countries, our Gini coefficient is actually quite healthy overall, and we have a ton of redistribution.

15. Quick-Fire Round

So I don't think that redistribution per se in Europe is our biggest problem. I think it's rather how we choose to invest that money. If I'd sum up my claim here, I'd say we need to invest more in the younger generation, not just in the older generation. Ultimately, we'll need to make sure that the older generation understands that that's the right thing to do.

Project Europe. Well done. Project Europe.

Listen, I want to do a quick-fire round. I've loved this. I say a short statement, and you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?

Absolutely.

You can add anyone to your board that you don't have. Who would you add?

Why?

Obviously, Amazon.

But what would you like to learn?

He's been one of the most inspirational leaders for me in how I built the company. I think for most people in marketplaces, and I think just his level of rigor and thinking about the customer and about building the business, would be amazing to have on the board.

Will you have more engineers or fewer engineers in 5 years' time?

We'll have more, but a lot fewer than we thought we would add. In other words, we'll gradually grow, but I think the productivity gains from these engineers will be massive.

Where has AI most impacted GetYourGuide today?

On the supply side. The supply side is completely transformed. It used to take, I think, days to upload a product because experiences are so complex. You need to add a description and photos and tick 100 boxes for the meeting point and the tour itinerary, etc. Now you just paste in a URL or upload a bunch of files, and done. It's huge. Then the pricing and availability management and the AI insights on how you can improve your experience—I mean, all of that is pure magic.

What supply do you still not have that you would love to have?

I would love to go deeper into what we announced this year, which is shows and events. I think that's actually massively important for tourists. When I come here to London, I want to see Arsenal and Chelsea, etc. We're just dipping our toes into that market. There's tremendous interest also from these clubs.

Is it not a shit show going into the ticketing market? It's such a mafia.

We're not going into the core ticketing market. We're going into the touristic part of the ticketing market—a very different market, with much higher margins. People love to spend on hospitality tickets, and that's something that the clubs also love because they get the true fans, they get to build their brand internationally, and at the same point in time, those are people that spend much more when they come to the games or the shows, etc. So it's a different part of the market that I think is very interesting and is going to grow a lot over the next couple of years.

Who's been the most impactful angel? Forget your guy, Kees, as I described.

Kees Koolen.

Kees? Amazing. Totally get that.

How have you most changed as a CEO when you look back over the last 15 years?

I've become a lot more humble. I do know my deficiencies and the things that I get wrong a lot more. I really was very, very self-confident when I started the company, which really helped us survive and, I think, grow over the first 5 years. Today, I'm still very self-confident, but I also understand much more how I need to be complemented.

Where did your confidence hurt you? Where did it help you?

I think it helped me in just having the sheer stamina and energy to drive the company forward time and again, and not take failure as an option. I think it hurt me in that I don't think I was as inclusive as I could have been. I think that has hurt innovation to a certain degree at times.

My brother just had a baby. What's your biggest advice to a new parent on being a killer at work and also smashing parenting?

Don't do that. Don't be too hard on yourself. You will not be a perfect parent, and that's fine. You also won't be a perfect CEO, and that's also fine. Find your balance. I think balance is the most important thing when you're a parent and you're growing a tech company and you have that demand on you.

Really make sure that you find time for both. At the end of the day, when we're 60, 70, 80, GetYourGuide will be a very important part of my life, and I will want to make sure that that is as successful as possible. But at the same point in time, I think my kids will mean more than anything else in the world.

Is GetYourGuide your last job?

I think it will be very hard to have a job after that.

Final one: What do you most want to be remembered for? When people talk about Johannes and the impact you had, what do you most want to be remembered for?

At the highest level, if Johannes had a massive impact on creating more human connection, I think—and that's across GetYourGuide and the product we sell, but then also the topic of Europe and recreating the future of Europe. If I would put that under one theme, it is creating human connection.

Dude, this has been such a joy. As I said, I'm a European. I've heard so many wonderful things about you for so many years, so this was such a joy to do. What an incredible story. Thank you for coming on the show, man.

Thank you so much, Harry.