Travel Through the Lens of AI with with Booking.com CEO Glenn Fogel
Episode publishedPodcast: No Priors: Artificial Intellig...No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
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There is no such thing as a moat. There is no such thing as somewhere you're gonna be protected against innovation. Today, we have a competitive advantage on areas. Absolutely. But those can go away tomorrow. The only one to win long term is to continue to develop new services, new ways to do things. How can we do your business better? What do you need? Where you need more demand? Where are you hurting? It's so much more complex. Complex. If you think you're just gonna come in and do this business and knock away these very big players, I'd say you should really understand what the business is
Today on our priors, we're talking with Glenn Fogel, the CEO of Booking Holdings, a twenty something year veteran of the company who joined when it was just Priceline and worth a few $100,000,000 in the year 2000 and has since helped grow it to a $100,000,000,000 plus company with multiple massive assets across travel that are now being used in the AI era. We will talk about a variety of topics with Glenn that span everything from, the growth and changes that have happened in bookings over time, as well as his own career and perspective on AI. So, Glenn, thank you so much for joining us today.
Well, thank you very much for having me.
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.
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
Wow.
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.
Yeah. It's amazing.
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.
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