Web 3.0 & Group Travel: Groople CEO Mike Stacy (Part 5)

SM: Please describe some of your team building experiences. Is your management team complete now? It seems like you’ve had a founder transition, and the company has already burnt a lot of capital. These are indications of problems with the team, normally.
MS: Yes, we’ve had some problems, but they were not with Founder transition. Our Founder had a great idea, and he was great at pulling a company together around the idea. He was also a great biz dev guy, hence we started off with a deal with Travelocity. Big win. And then, he wanted to move on and start another company.

However, I had to also bring in a new CFO and a new VP Marketing. I had to change the VP of Supplier Relations. Plus, I had to change the VP of Technology. All that takes time and yes, we had to tackle those challenges. The founder transition in itself was not very complicated. It was very smooth.

SM: I understand. Nonetheless, I have to admit, that the fact that your founder left the company makes me wonder a bit. He does stand the risk of getting washed out, or at least very significantly diluted, in later rounds. Unless, he hasn’t been already. Anyway, you do have an interesting opportunity in front of you, with a really large and interesting market. If you can execute, this could be a very exciting company. What are your key learnings from this journey? MS: What are some of your key learnings from this journey so far?

1. Make sure the company is well funded.

2. Get the right people on board. I think Marc Andreessen’s blog on this topic is one of the best I’ve read.

3. Set the overall vision for where you’re going, what success looks like and who’s going to be accountable for what and by when.

4. Keep your board informed at all times whether it’s good news or bad news. There should be no surprises at the board meeting.

5. Partnerships are great, but don’t rely on them solely to build your business. It’s very easy to excited about a deal with a partner who can bring a you a significant amount of traffic. However, you first have to truly understand the costs associated with any deal along with the true revenue opportunities. Don’t be afraid to walk if you feel you’re being taken advantage of our you and/or you don’t feel like you have a good rapport with the folks on the other side. Great partners see the big opportunity and have a shared passion in seizing that opportunity.

6. Read, Read, Read. From books to blogs to magazines, there is so much great information and ideas out there from extremely smart and articulate people. I really like the blogs from Marc Andreesen, Seth Godin and Brad Feld.

SM: Great advice! What are your plans next? MS: We’re launching a service for the front-end travel planning process, which we feel is very badly serviced. There is a good ad-revenue based opportunity to provide something that offers functions like evite, group discussion and messaging tools, calendar, Flickr, MyYahoo, etc. I will invite you for a beta test once we have that ready.

SM: Super. Good luck!

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This segment is part 5 in the series : Web 3.0 & Group Travel: Groople CEO Mike Stacy
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