00:05:50 · Adrian Weckler, Bobby Healy
[00:05:50] S2: Yeah. Pretty soon to join a video game company, Emerald Software, which is the company that made those IP titles with Running Man and Michael Jackson. And eventually though, you... And I'm skipping through a bit here because you've done an awful lot in your life, so forgive this summary and correct me if I'm wrong, but you veered toward travel tech. Yeah. A few years after that, you founded a company called Eland. [00:06:14] S1: VTI, actually, which it's a bit complicated, but the company was VTI, which was in Mexico City, and that was a particular product, and it was great, forwardwind, a good travel tech product. And then Eland was really another company that I created another product because we couldn't it was very difficult to VTI were perceived as a certain thing by airlines and by travel agencies. And if we tried to build a new product, which was a different airline product, middleware, more targeted airlines, and tried to put that under VTI would have clouded the strategy and the product and the brand. So we just created a whole different company. [00:06:51] S2: Was this in Mexico? [00:06:53] S1: Yeah. And Chicago. [00:06:56] S2: Were you being held up at the time? [00:06:58] S1: Yeah. Multiple times. We had 11 people working in Mexico. Every one of us held up at gunpoint multiple times. For what? For money, like people just robbing us, you know, white boys in Mexico, you know, we we stood out like, it was all a bunch of Irish guys writing code and going out, you know, and drinking and going to restaurants and stuff. We were sitting ducks.
00:06:58 · Bobby Healy, Adrian Weckler
[00:06:58] S1: Yeah. Multiple times. We had 11 people working in Mexico. Every one of us held up at gunpoint multiple times. For what? For money, like people just robbing us, you know, white boys in Mexico, you know, we we stood out like, it was all a bunch of Irish guys writing code and going out, you know, and drinking and going to restaurants and stuff. We were sitting ducks. [00:07:18] S2: Did you have much to give them?
00:07:18 · Adrian Weckler, Bobby Healy
[00:07:18] S2: Did you have much to give them? [00:07:19] S1: I mean, twice, I had police actually point guns in my face and take my wallet. Policemen. Like, Mexico was the Wild West. Is like Sicario. Yeah, was kind of... Well, they were paying, they still do. They pay the police officer $150 a month salary. So the police officer was expected to have a side gig, and an easy side gig is just helping people lifting their wallets. But still the best place in the world I live, outside of Ireland, is the place where I had the most enjoyment. It was difficult to do business there. It is, and it was and is still very corrupt. It's very difficult to do things unless you're kind of, you know, not going the straight path, and that I didn't like, you know, because you never knew what you were truly dealing with, but from living as a young man at the time, I was 21, I think, when I moved to Mexico, 22, because I'd been in France for two or three years before that, you know, the people, the culture, the food, you know, the family nature of them, it was really a good part of my life, you know. I wouldn't want my children to live there or go there, but, you know, I was very happy to be there, and it was a good springboard next door to America. Was kind of our beachhead into America. [00:08:36] S2: Your eldest is around that age now, right? [00:08:38] S1: 22, she is,
00:08:38 · Bobby Healy, Adrian Weckler
[00:08:38] S1: 22, she is, [00:08:39] S2: yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So... And I'm gonna fast forward a little bit here, but you you mentioned Eeland, but... And that was essentially a travel tech company as well, like middleware for airlines, Lufthansa, American Airlines, United, some big clients there, you sold that in 2003. And then the next big one, the one you bought into was the one that probably propelled you into the Major Leagues, CarTrawler, the Turley Brothers. You came on as CTO. That company got very big. I mean, that at its peak was worth hundreds and hundreds of of millions. You were Close [00:09:17] S1: to 1,000,000,000 at one stage. [00:09:18] S2: Yeah. And you were a fair... Fairly major shareholder Yeah. At the time as well. Yeah. I think sold equity a couple of times, but still, I think you were probably the biggest shareholder when that company was sold, the biggest single shareholder. [00:09:31] S1: Yeah. Was thinking private shareholder was, yeah, at the time. And and fun fact, I got wiped out to zero when COVID restructured us, you know, so I think that's a great lesson for everyone. They always take a few quiddits Because [00:09:43] S2: this was a company that was, you know, a car hire, it was all of these functions.
00:09:48 · Bobby Healy
[00:09:48] S1: Yeah. You would you would go to an airline, let's say it was, you know, British Airways or whatever, Virgin Atlantic, you'd booking your flight, and then there'd be suddenly three cars offered in Malaga, know, three car hires, and you'd say purchase, and that would be us. And we would take your £200 for your car hire in July for your holidays, and we would sit on your £200 for six months, and it would be ours. And then you'd rent the car, you'd go get the car, and then we would pay the supplier a month later, two months later, whatever. So we had what's called a negative working capital model where we were taking all the customer cash beautiful model, and like it doesn't work anymore, that model doesn't work anymore, but it all worked great. And we were, you know, over 1,000,000,000 in sales, billion and 0.5 in sales, I think, at the peak, 600 people. But it was like, I always say this, a ham sandwich could have built that business and made it successful. It wasn't a difficult business to build or to grow. And Mike McGurty, who is the CEO, is, you know, proper legend, proper management guy, knows how to grow a team, knows how to foster a culture, knows how to, you know, put discipline, commercial discipline, all that stuff. We were a very good team because I have none of that. And so I was tech strategy product, Mike was the CEO, but the actual business was you could build that tech stack in a couple of hours with AI now. I mean, I could literally point an AI at a car trawler website and tell it how the middleware works and say, give me that. Opus 5.5, you'll have it working industrial scale within the day.
00:11:23 · Adrian Weckler, Bobby Healy
[00:11:23] S2: Well, to be fair, that's a twenty year old, tech stack that we're talking about, twenty year old code. [00:11:27] S1: Yeah, correct. Yeah. So I [00:11:29] S2: can see how AI might, do that now. But anyway, so you're wiped out to zero. COVID comes along, the model, the travel gets [00:11:37] S1: All the cancellations came in, so we had to refund everybody. Suddenly, we're refunding six months of working capital, but the bills are still coming in from suppliers. [00:11:45] S2: So you took a major bath on that then? [00:11:46] S1: Yeah. Totally. Got zeroed. [00:11:48] S2: Right. Okay. But you had enough from It