Bah, not a huge surprise given how brutal the travel tech industry is, but they remained my fav travel site - seemed to often find fares that were missing off google flights or other competitors. Loved the U/I too. RIP.
It's brutal because of lack of easy access to data, and more importantly, the ability to create bookings. IATA NDC API's should theoretically change this and get around the GDSs but I'm not holding my breath.
I've had a number of travel startup ideas but all were held back by access to data.
Booking has made money off travel hand over fist this past decade. It's highly competitive, sure, but for a reason since hotels pay massive premiums to these websites to drive sales.
Hotels have less of a monopoly on travel than airlines. Plus most hotels are franchised, so the brands don’t have an incentive to lower commissions paid as they still get their royalties from gross revenue, and it all comes out of the hotel owner’s pockets.
If nothing else, he held his equity for long enough to only get hit by long-term capital gains taxes. (per wikipedia, in canada, that's half your typical tax rate).
Yeah, a lot of big bay-area and boston funds now have NYC offices too. General Catalyst - mentioned as being based in Cambridge in the article has an office on Lafayette street in NYC now with a couple of partners in it. This has changed the funding game more than the homegrown VC's (USV, as an example).
Depending on their workloads, running their own datacenter(s) might save them millions a month. I know it does in my own case. That said you give up flexibility for the $ savings. They may think the additional flexibility is worth the cost differential at this point.
I believe we expect moving to the cloud to be more expensive than running our own DCs as you suggest, but I don't believe that takes into account any 'wasted developer time' you might factor into this.
I believe we started building this platform when AWS was very new, and hadn't seen a compelling reason to transition from it to the cloud until now. There's a couple of posts with more details behind our decision to go to GCP, but primarily it was to leverage their data tooling.
My guess would be more along the lines that people who walk/subway are generally more fit than those who take a car everywhere. NYC doesn't have a lot of fat people in general. (though it's worse than it used to be)
