Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to when you started this company. What did you do to get this off the ground? Rakesh Gupta: The first thing was to figure out, with some level of clarity, what space are you going to go after. As our dear friend in Omaha, Warren Buffett, always says, “There has
Sramana Mitra: What happened to that company in the end? Rakesh Gupta: That company became part of a large corporation. It’s still part of Reed Elsevier. They still have whole group called Reed Travel Group (RTG). Sramana Mitra: How long did you stay at Reed? Rakesh Gupta: I was there for three years. Sramana Mitra:
Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to 2008. You decided to do this vertical solution for the travel agency. Who were the first customers that you went after and who bought into your value proposition? Charles Mi: The first customer we went after was US Airways, partly due to the personal relationship that Layton has with
Sramana Mitra: What happened to that company? Charles Mi: We lasted for three and a half years. It was a very interesting idea, but we didn’t really discover the business potential. We also tried to make different things at a time instead of focusing on one thing. We were doing three different products at the same
Sramana Mitra: Where are the opportunities to do new and innovative companies in this whole space? Keith Anderson: There’s at least a couple of ideas that spring to my mind. There’s always a diffusion of technology over time from the very high-end to the broader mainstream market. Think of technology that originated from the Department of
Keith Anderson: Prices are really a key driver of that ultimate decision to buy from one retailer versus another. The manufacturers of course are wary of deflation. They don’t want a race to the bottom. They introduce policies like minimum advertised price (MAP). MAP policy is a policy that retailers and manufacturers enter into voluntarily.
Keith Anderson: Besides exactly matching products, one of the fundamental, but not obvious ways we add value is through the matching of products that are not exactly identical. There is just one example—private label products, which are the products that the retailer sells under their own label or a private brand are often positioned as
Sramana Mitra: Let me see if I’ve got this. You help retailers with pricing information and you help manufacturers optimize their channels through these retailers. Is that a good summary? Keith Anderson: That’s a great summary. The retailers also care about assortment. We can also help them, very efficiently, identify products that they don’t carry and