Recording of the Everything Marketplaces Group Chat #165 (7/16) with Steve Kaufer, who's Co-founder & former CEO of Tripadvisor. Tripadvisor is an early travel marketplace that’s scaled to now being one of the largest with over 1 billion reviews on their platform. Tripadvisor was acquired by IAC, merged with Expedia, and went on to IPO, which Steve led as the CEO until 2022.
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0:06 Intro
‍1:08 Steve's background
‍2:23 The founding story & first steps for starting Tripadvisor
‍4:22 How Tripadvisor built initial traffics, reviews, & started to scale
‍8:02 How Tripadvisor encouraged & rewarded reviews
‍13:38 How Tripadvisor expanded into new categories & markets
‍20:16 Building in competitive markets & defensibility
‍25:11 Learnings as both a private & public market CEO
‍31:58 An overview of Give Freely
‍35:18 Group Q&A on product expansion
‍38:22 Group Q&A on marketplace SEO
‍41:42 Group Q&A on the importance of speed
‍50:44 Parting marketplace advice
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Steve on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/kaufer
Tripadvisor: https://www.tripadvisor.com
Give Freely: https://www.givefreely.com
Mike (Yoroomie) on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/yoroomie
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You can also find this group chat in audio format as an episode on our new Everything Marketplaces podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also connect with marketplace founders & leaders from our group chats in the Everything Marketplaces community.