More Bootstrapping: VirtualTourist.com Co-Founder J.R. Johnson (Part 1)

VirtualTourist.com is a Web 3.0 travel community where users and locals share real travel advice and experiences. It is a source of unbiased, user-generated travel content and a premier resource for travelers seeking an insider’s perspective on their upcoming travels. Real travel tips, reviews, and photos are provided by a community of over 1 million users, bring real context to travelers as they plan their next journey.

SM: Let’s start by going back to the beginning. Where does your journey start?

JJ: I was born in Manhattan Beach, California but raised in Westlake Village, a middle-class suburb on the Ventura County/L.A. County border. After high school I went to USC, where I studied business with an emphasis on entrepreneurship. After USC I took a year off before I went to law school.

SM: Why did you study entrepreneurship? Was there a history of entrepreneurship in your family, or was it just something that captured your imagination?

JJ: I have always been interested in entrepreneurship. When I was a little kid I was always doing different things. In fourth grade I found a supplier that made Styrofoam airplanes. I rode my bike down to his factory, which was not too far from my house. I bought a bunch of them, took them to school, and sold them for $0.50 an airplane. Entrepreneurship has always been in me, but not my family. My dad was a lawyer.

SM: You went to law school after USC. Was that to follow in the footsteps of your father?

JJ: It was. My grandfather was a lawyer, my dad is a lawyer, and it was predetermined for me. I went on to law school knowing it was a great education and a nice safety net. You can always get a job as a lawyer, even though I knew in my heart I would be starting businesses. I finished law school in two and a half years.

SM: What year did you graduate?

JJ: I graduated from USC in 1993, and from law school in 1997. I did law school at SMU in Dallas, so I came back to California and took the bar here.

SM: You came back to California in time for the Internet to take off.

JJ: It was getting started. I was not completely into it yet, but It was something I was reading about and seeing these cool things happening. I was working as a lawyer for a law firm, and they sent me to Germany in early 1999 to speak at a conference of startup companies in Germany. There were a couple of hundred people in the main hall of a brewery, and I gave a talk on going public and raising money in the US so these German entrepreneurs could have an idea how things were done here. Afterwards, one of these guys came up to me and told me about vTourist.com, a website he had, and he wanted to talk to me more.

We hit it off pretty well, they were both students at a great university. I had traveled a bit in college. In the spring of 1991 I did a semester at sea, where I went around the world. That was my first real exposure to world travel. I was thinking back on that experience as I was talking to these guys, and one experience I had in India really popped out. The ship pulled into Madras [now Chennai] and we were scheduled to go up to see the Taj Mahal. We were only there for a week and did not have a lot of time. The first night we ran into this traveler from New Zealand who had been drinking and he would not stop talking about Darjeeling and how it is the greatest place in the world. We thought it sounded great, so me and my buddy scrapped our trip to the Taj Mahal and went to Darjeeling. It was really the coolest experience. To this day it is my fondest travel memory hands down, and it came about because of a random, chance meeting with a stranger. That is how we came up with this idea of building a user-generated content platform to enable others to share their travel experiences.

This segment is part 1 in the series : More Bootstrapping: VirtualTourist.com Co-Founder J.R. Johnson
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