Travel Through the Lens of AI with with Booking.com CEO Glenn Fogel

00:01:16 · Glenn Fogel, Elad GilPlay from here

[00:01:16] S0: Well, thank you very much for having me. [00:01:18] S1: Yeah. So you've had a really interesting career. You know, you went to Wharton, you went to Harvard Law. Along the way, you worked in, I think, the MIS program at Morgan Stanley. I'd love to just hear a little bit about your early background and how that led you eventually to booking.com and eventually Booking Holdings.

00:01:37 · Glenn FogelPlay from here

[00:01:37] S0: Sure. I can do that. So real short, I came out of work with Green Finance, and now I end up at the back office in MIS. My first job is putting tapes on a drive in a data center of IBM thirty eighty fours and the discs that went and and the tape drives and put the put the tapes on on the drive. That's where I started. There's an operator. Actually, being an operator of a mainframe, very different. Nothing that you prepared for that in college for that. And I then become you become a developer, and you but I basically learned that this is not a career for me. I should do something else. And all the people I knew, undergrad and were and were going off to investment bank and made all this money, and I thought, fuck. Try to do that, but you can't go. I've now gone down one shoot, and you can't just jump out of that one to go become an investment banker. So I said, oh, I I agree to finance warrant, Harvard let me into law school, so I'll do that because that's another route. I did that, and I end up getting a job on Wall Street as a banker. I did that for till '95 till 1995. And then the bank was bought by another bank, and they fired all the bankers almost, not every bank. Fired most, including me, but not everybody because they fired everybody because they well, they fired everybody. But they didn't fire everybody. So you there was a there was actually some people were picked to stay. That was not one of them. That that's pretty bad. So a real good lesson, though, having been fired and knowing what it's like, that is something that I've kept with me throughout my career about how to do it right and how to do it wrong and understand what goes through the other person when you tell them that I'm sorry, but there's no longer a room for you here and this is not the place for you to be. And I I really learned that firsthand being on that side of the table. And so now I'm unemployed, And my father had just died, not that long before this happened. My father's died, lost a job. My grandmother died, and he and the dog died, which was kind of sad. And I'm like, what do want to do with my life now? My young thirties, I'm alone, I'm saying no, whatever. And I said, you know, I always wanted to write a book. So I start writing a book, I write a novel, I get it done, and now I'm going try and get it published. And it's not really self publishing, man.

00:03:59 · Glenn FogelPlay from here

You weren't doing it on your own. You're trying to get some agent to pick it up. And I was introduced to a woman as a a blind date girlfriend. And I think she was a lawyer, but I'm sorry. I don't know. They said, well, she used to work at Random House as an editor. I said, oh, I'm very interested in how you did the And so we have a date, and the book never gets published. But I do end up marrying her and have two great kids and has wonderful life. But while I was trying to get the book, you know, an agent to be interested in it, eventually, she said, you know, if this relationship's gonna go forward, you should get a job. I said, damn. Boy, I should. I didn't wanna go back to banking. And I said, I don't know. And a friend of mine from law school was a senior type person at Morgan Stanley. And he I told him, look. Amy says I have to get a job. How do thought? She said, well, we have this trading position here that you could do. I never traded anything in my life. He said, don't worry. You'll be fine. It's like, okay. So I end up being head trader for a guy named Barton Bay. He's kind of a Wall Street legend and stuff. I do that for a number of years, but I just don't like it. It's not that ex it's just not for me. And that's when the Internet was really taking off that first real explosion. You know, the Internet boom. That's late nineties. So 1999, I started trying to interview, I think, well, I got some skills. But when I was an IT person, I got that. And I know a little bit about corporate development because being a trusted banker, and I started interviewing the only real company on the East Coast at the time of Internet, you know, abilities was Priceline. And they had a job for corporate development. It was perfect. So I get an offer from them, but I said, wanna wait. I wanna wait till I get my bonus for 1999 when it gets paid at the February 2000. So I go and I get my bonus check out, ready to start. And that's when, of course, that's when the Nasdaq peaked. Thereby having gotten long Internet a week before when the Nasdaq peaked and stopped. And it it proved that I shouldn't be a trader having just Mhmm. The wrong way. And, know, Priceline has its difficulties after that. Our stock went from where we were when we went public, we in a week or so, we were 30,000,000,000, which back then was real money and that meant something back then.

00:06:21 · Glenn Fogel, Elad GilPlay from here

And by the time I joined I joined after the I you know, few months after the IPO, when I joined, we're probably down about 15,000,000,000. That's now, you know, February, March of 2,000. In nine months, our market cap is now down to just a couple of 100,000,000. [00:06:36] S1: Wow. [00:06:37] S0: And our stock is now trading at a dollar a share. We're gonna get delisted because it's dropping below a dollar a share. But stick with it. We do a reverse split to make sure we don't get delisted. So it goes to $6 a share. I stay, and I've been there twenty seven on my twenty seventh year. Wow. And we went from that that now reverse split $6. And in last summer, we came very close to $6,000 So over that Yeah. You know, a little more than a quarter of a century, up a thousand times. And, you know, market cap was peaking around 180,000,000,000. Remember, it's a few 100,000,000. [00:07:13] S1: Yeah. It's amazing. [00:07:15] S0: It's been a good ride so far, but of course, you never stop. Every day is a new adventure. Every day is you gotta a big headline in the Feet when I had an interview with them, I said, gotta fight for a customer every day. [00:07:27] S1: How do you think about this the lessons from that Internet era in terms of the current AI wave? Because we're seeing this massive shift in market cap.

00:07:27 · Elad Gil, Glenn FogelPlay from here

[00:07:27] S1: How do you think about this the lessons from that Internet era in terms of the current AI wave? Because we're seeing this massive shift in market cap. [00:07:37] S0: You think like this is a an explosion of new things, so all these would cover everything just like in the late nineties. The optimism of technologies. I thought everything was gonna be wonderful. But then you get a little bit of the backlash coming backlash then too. Now you I guess it's just it's just bigger than it was then. The numbers are much bigger. The issues at hand are much bigger, the pluses and the minuses. So but I do see a lot of parallels. [00:08:07] S1: Yeah. Because, you know, when I look at it right now, some companies clearly have enormous revenue bases. You know, OpenAI and Anthropic are rumored to have 30,000,000,000 to $50,000,000,000 in revenue run rate each. And, in parallel, see companies that are extremely highly valued, 10,000,000,000, etcetera, that don't necessarily have even revenue yet. And if you look at the Internet era, I think it was something like four fifty companies went public in 'ninety nine, four fifty went public in the first few months of 2000, maybe 500 went public before that. So you had 1,500 companies of which, what, two dozen are left at most? Maybe. The other fourteen eighty are gone. And so do you think the same thing will happen to the AI set set of companies? Do you think something different will happen? Like and those aren't IPOs, by the way. Those are the very strongest or perceived to be strongest companies. Right?

00:08:07 · Elad Gil, Glenn FogelPlay from here

[00:08:07] S1: Yeah. Because, you know, when I look at it right now, some companies clearly have enormous revenue bases. You know, OpenAI and Anthropic are rumored to have 30,000,000,000 to $50,000,000,000 in revenue run rate each. And, in parallel, see companies that are extremely highly valued, 10,000,000,000, etcetera, that don't necessarily have even revenue yet. And if you look at the Internet era, I think it was something like four fifty companies went public in 'ninety nine, four fifty went public in the first few months of 2000, maybe 500 went public before that. So you had 1,500 companies of which, what, two dozen are left at most? Maybe. The other fourteen eighty are gone. And so do you think the same thing will happen to the AI set set of companies? Do you think something different will happen? Like and those aren't IPOs, by the way. Those are the very strongest or perceived to be strongest companies. Right? [00:08:56] S0: Right. Well, I I I wouldn't wanna even guess at what the ratio of success to failures will be this time around versus that time versus any other time when there was incredible boom. And, you know, if we go over the last hundred and fifty years, there always been these kind of springing further back. Yeah. Speculative booms that create tremendous innovation, people coming in just both money and people. I mean, California, you know, the forty niners, I mean, everybody's running off to the hills to gold, and it was gonna rain. I'm sure there were a lot of companies selling axes and hammers. [00:09:37] S1: Yeah. Auto boom, same thing. We've seen