02:48:31 · John Tennant, Healey Cypher, John Coogan
[02:48:31] S4: that. Appreciate [02:48:32] S3: that. You, Jordy. Pulled in some debt and equity. And, yeah, it's it's all about growth. You know? Yeah. I think travel has produced some really good returns for venture. You know, you [02:48:43] S4: think about [02:48:43] S3: Airbnb, Expedia, Booking. It's crushed. People don't think about it. Travel's, like, 10% of global GDP. It's $11,700,000,000,000. [02:48:52] S0: Wow. [02:48:52] S3: And often when you think of travel, especially in the corporate setting, you gotta think of like, whatever. Your EA is booking you a flight. [02:48:58] S0: Yeah. [02:48:59] S3: Turns out 60% of corporate travel is stuff involving groups. Yep. It's like an off-site or an SKO, and and especially in today's day and age, we're finding the demand for group travel is the most it's ever been. Some fun facts. One, most people are exceedingly less trustful of Zoom meetups. They wanna be people people in person. Most AI companies now are hiring event teams. Like, it's one of the first hires because it turns out for scaled AR businesses, events are, like, one of the number one demand channels. And so as you looked at group travel, we were kinda like, wait. Wait. Wait. It's this massive part of travel, and it's so anachronistic. Like, if you wanna if you wanna, for example, book over 10 hotel rooms, you literally can't do that online. Did you know that?
02:48:59 · Healey Cypher, John Coogan, Jordi Hays
[02:48:59] S3: Turns out 60% of corporate travel is stuff involving groups. Yep. It's like an off-site or an SKO, and and especially in today's day and age, we're finding the demand for group travel is the most it's ever been. Some fun facts. One, most people are exceedingly less trustful of Zoom meetups. They wanna be people people in person. Most AI companies now are hiring event teams. Like, it's one of the first hires because it turns out for scaled AR businesses, events are, like, one of the number one demand channels. And so as you looked at group travel, we were kinda like, wait. Wait. Wait. It's this massive part of travel, and it's so anachronistic. Like, if you wanna if you wanna, for example, book over 10 hotel rooms, you literally can't do that online. Did you know that? [02:49:43] S0: Yeah. It's crazy. We run into this Yeah. Run into this a fair amount of times just with the small team traveling. Like, it happens. I don't know if you saw that block party that they had. The or, like, showed up in their earnings because they spent so much [02:49:56] S1: on travel. Like 68,000,000 or something on [02:49:58] S0: one trip. Of the craziest stories. [02:50:00] S1: On one trip. [02:50:01] S3: No. This is this is real. Like, I was at this conference, and the then president of Brex walked over to me. He was like, hey. [02:50:07] S0: Yeah.
02:50:07 · John Coogan, Healey Cypher, Luca Ferrari, Jordi Hays, John Tennant
[02:50:07] S0: Yeah. [02:50:07] S3: Are you Huey at Boompop? And I was like, yeah. But who cares, man? Like, you're the president of Brex. Like, I'm nobody. Yeah. He goes, no. No. Guess what the second biggest expense category is for all of our companies after payroll? And I was like, no way. He goes, it's group travel and events, man. [02:50:22] S0: Yeah. [02:50:22] S5: I was like, [02:50:23] S3: holy shit. So it it's on the rise. It's crazy. [02:50:25] S0: Yeah. So talk through the actual product experience. How do you and then and then how do you actually make money? Are you just taking a fee on top of whatever is booked? Is that the secret? [02:50:37] S3: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So so The product is pretty rapid. [02:50:40] S1: Secret to success? [02:50:41] S0: Or or I mean, it could be like seed based. [02:50:43] S1: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. [02:50:45] S3: Turns out you should buy low, then sell high. [02:50:47] S0: Yes. This is good. [02:50:48] S3: This is good. I like it. Heard heard it here, folks. Yeah. So it's it's simple. You talk to our AI agent. You give it a simple prompt. You're like, yo. I wanna do an off-site within whatever, a two hour drive of LA [02:51:01] S4: Yep.
02:51:01 · John Tennant, Healey Cypher, John Coogan
[02:51:01] S4: Yep. [02:51:01] S3: A budget of this, 50 people with some cool fun outdoor activities. What should I do? And it looks at millions of data points. It looks at weather, seasonality, hotel pricing, what you've done, what your guests like, and then it puts together a couple of really good options. Like, here's Joshua Tree by the minute of what you do. Sure. Here's Pioneer Town you haven't heard of. You should go there. Here's Montecito. Go there. And then if you like it, you just say, hey. Cool. Do it. [02:51:23] S0: Yep.
02:51:23 · John Coogan, Healey Cypher, Stacy Rasgon, Jordi Hays
[02:51:23] S0: Yep. [02:51:24] S3: The AI will then go out. It'll reach to the vendors. It'll negotiate for them. Look at the contract. It'll book them for you. It makes an agenda. It even makes your website in a couple seconds, keeps it live. And when people RSVP, my favorite thing is everyone gets a text message. All your guests get a text, and it's from the AI on the phone. Mhmm. And so over text, it's like, yo. How can I help? And you can say, hey. Like, how do I get to the hotel? It's like, take an Uber, you idiot. Like, oh, okay. Or like, who else is landing right now? And it's like, oh, well, Jordy and Kuggan land around this time. If you wanna share an Uber, and you're like, oh, that's awesome. So it's it's like this corner of travel, which is so big, and it's all these random joint solutions, like point solutions, and we decided, let's just put it all into one place where it's super easy. Our ultimate vision is very simply, we want to be the default way the world gets together. I'm sure you guys have seen all the you know, I saw Chesky on on Yeah. EBPNN, I think it was last week. Like, we got a problem, guys. We have a real problem. I mean, people are lonely. They're not getting together. I don't know if you saw this study. Back in the seventies, it was eight out of 10 high school seniors said they would party twice a week. Now it's one in 10. Like, that's a problem. Party. [02:52:30] S6: That's where you party. Red [02:52:32] S3: alert. Red [02:52:34] S1: alert. We don't even know how to party in this country anymore.
02:52:34 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan, Healey Cypher
[02:52:34] S1: alert. We don't even know how to party in this country anymore. [02:52:36] S0: We don't. That's right. That's right. [02:52:38] S3: That's right. So that's how it works. [02:52:40] S0: Yeah. And then, yeah, it's [02:52:41] S3: it's it's a simple SaaS model. You pay a very low amount, and then we make money from the hotels. [02:52:46] S0: Oh, okay. Cool. Cool. [02:52:47] S3: Yeah. All the money in travel turns out is in hotels. Yeah. It's not in flights. [02:52:51] S0: Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. Are you so so we we were thinking about taking the team to f one, and I ran something through ChatGPT. Hey. Build a whole thing. Couldn't get to a place where we could just build it. Didn't really didn't really hit the goal. But are you worried about some of the agent to commerce being a headwind, or can you turn AI and ChatGPT into, like, a tailwind and actually, like, more of a top of funnel for you?