Just a couple of weeks ago, Hopper shook up the OTA space by announcing their new vertical – Hopper Homes. It’s no secret that vacation rentals and short-term rental accommodations are here in a big way and Hopper Homes is on a mission to bring price transparency and flexibility to the space.

In today’s podcast, we’re so excited to be joined by the Head of Hopper Homes, Susan Ho.

Listen in to learn about Susan’s unique journey into the short-term rental industry, Hopper’s acquisition of her former company Journey, her astounding and unique experience raising VC funding, and what’s to come for Hopper Homes.

What makes this episode even more amazing is the fact that our very own co-host John is also Senior Business Development Manager for Hopper Homes

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Cute Bunny Disruption With Featured Guest Susan Ho

This is Season 2 and episode 10. This is a special one for me. I’m pretty excited. We have an amazing guest who happens to also be someone that I work with day in and day out. We are pretty excited to go ahead and kick this off. Is there anything new for you?

There are always lots of things going on. Nothing crazy in the world going on. 2022 starting strong. Lots of good momentum going on and fronts. It seems like everyone’s digging in and getting to work and getting our lives back-to-order travel. Looks like it’s picking up. I’m rolling with the momentum.

The biggest news is more of everyone coming together as a what are the shows going to be. There seems to be Book Direct Show in Miami. Amy Hinote came out talking about all of the different shows that she’s putting on. She has got 5 or 6 different regional shows and then plus the DARM Conference. There are some big things going on with regard to that. Susan Ho, Revenue Leader for Hopper Homes, thanks for joining us.

Thanks for having me. I’m glad I could finally make it.

We are going to talk about Hopper. We have been in the media. There are a ton of amazing things that have been going on, but I want to go ahead and I know our audience wants to learn a little bit more about who is Susan Ho.

How did this person who has no background in the vacation rental industry end up running a division of a company that is building out its presence and vacation rentals?

How did you get into this space because it wasn’t just Hopper?

We are to going to go ahead and explore your resume. It’s intriguing. How did you stumble in? Why Hopper? Why vacation rentals? What put you here?

I was running a travel concierge company for about seven years called Journy. The whole premise of Journy was using tech and machine learning and AI to essentially democratize luxury-level trip planning services. Instead of having to spend $10,000, $20,000 to $30,000 plus on a trip to be able to get somebody to custom design it for you, our customers could pay $25 or $50 per day of their trip.

If you have a 4-day trip, you pay $100 or $200 for us to plan everything for you. The difference between the two pricing tiers is at the higher price, we take care of restaurant reservations for you. We give you live 24/7 chat access to your concierge. If you are like, “I’m running late for this reservation. Can you let the restaurant know?” You can chat with us, and we will take care of that for you in a real-time. That was the premise of the business. I raised a little over $4 million of venture capital funding for that company. We were doing very well. We were growing nicely, then the pandemic happened. That was a rough time.

I remember Japan was our biggest market and was the most popular destination that we planned trips for. I remember February 17, 2020, on that cruise ship in Yokohama Bay. We had mass levels of cancellations from Japan, and then it spread to Italy, which was our second biggest market, then to Greece which was our third. It was a cascade effect from there. I’m sure many companies in this space can relate as well before people started realizing, “Staycations are a thing. I can travel domestically.” Things started picking up for this segment. We pivoted. we got two rounds of PPP funding to try and survive. It came to a point where we said international travel is not going to come back anytime soon, and writing on the wall.

I have a team to protect. I have a team of people whom all left great jobs and great opportunities to join me in this crazy dream that I had. My job was to make sure everyone else still had a job at the end of this. I ran an entire acquisition process. I ended up getting offers from Hopper and two other one other large OTAs that everyone’s familiar with, but I’m not allowed to say the name of because I signed lots of documents, and then another large traditional media company in this space that is also a very high brand recognition, but I can’t mention it.

Hopper was the best opportunity. It was a company that was innovative and growing quickly. Where I and the team were promised a lot of autonomy in how we work. You have seen how this plays out. We are able to set our own roadmap. We are able to say, “Here’s what’s important to this market. If this is what we want to get done, we can do things our own way,” which is great compared to some of the other OTAs in this space that is very rigid in their approach.

I want to back it up a little bit prior to you getting into Journy and what made you make that decision prior to us coming to the show, we were talking about things that you did in your past. You can look at your LinkedIn page and see that you were one of the co-founders of Fashion Week at Penn. Now you are seeing that you are coming into a concierge travel space, but you didn’t wake up overnight and be like, “I’m going to go here,” or did you have a love of travel? Did your love of fashion and lifestyle bring you into that space? Tell me a little bit about that.

I always love travel. When people ask me the question, “Where are you from?” I’m like, “Are you ready for this?” I was born in China. I left when I was three years old. I lived in Tucson, San Francisco, and Portland, Oregon. When I was eleven, I moved to Shanghai. I was at Shanghai American School, an international school there for two years then I went to a boarding school outside of Boston. I flew back and forth 3 or 4 times a year. By the time I hit college and I was also flying back 3 or 4 times a year. I probably racked up $500,000 in frequent flyer miles. If somebody was like, “Let’s go meet in Paris this weekend,” I’d say, “I have a free flight. I can do that,” which is completely ridiculous for a college kid.

That is how my love of travel came about. The idea for Journy started my second job out of school. My first job out of school, I went to Wharton undergrad, I studied Finance and Marketing. I was at the Boston Consulting Group. I was a consultant. I was a 22-year-old kid telling CEOs of billion-dollar companies what they should do with their business. if you wonder where I get my swagger from, that’s where.

The next job I took was at an eCommerce design fashion startup called Fab.com, which was in the heyday of Flash Sales Guild Group and Rue La La, Zulily, and all of these companies were coming up around the same time. Fab was probably the fastest-growing one of them all. The company raised $350 million plus and tanked it all in two years. That was a wild ride.

While on the upswing of it, I was there from about 100 to 700 employees. At the height of the company, I was 25 years old managing a team of 120 people across New York and Berlin that I had hired out and built. There was a period when the CEO came over to my desk and said, “You have to take a vacation in the next three months or be fired.” My response is, “Do you know how much I have to do? I had to do much work to clear my plate to be able to go on vacation, much less have time to plan my vacation.” I went with a friend of mine from college. She’s an investment banker. She’s in the same boat. She’s got zero time to plan this vacation.

We are able to book our flights and book our hotel, but we land in Buenos Aires on our trip to Argentina. We ended up spending fifteen hours in our hotel room on crappy Wi-Fi trying to figure out what to do and where to go. We ended up in a restaurant surrounded by American tourists and three different nightclubs surrounded by sixteen-year-old boys, which was not how we pictured our one big vacation a year going. Coming back from that experience, it was like, “I’m an internet-savvy Millennial. We had some time to research and plan, but not very much. We have some disposable income, but why is it that I couldn’t get a high-quality vacation where I felt like, ‘I feel rested, recharged, and culturally stimulated.’ Why was that difficult?”

Me being an ex-consultant, I started looking at the market and saw you either have on the one side these super luxury level experiences where the reason somebody can spend that amount of time with you is that they are gaining a 10%, 15%, or 20% cut of the $1,000 a night hotel that you are booking. That’s how they can compensate for the time that they are spending or you get something cookie cutter where you spend not that much money, but you are on a bus with 20 to 30 other people and there wasn’t anything in between.

A lot of the work that I’d done on Fab.com was around using technology to automate very manual processes. After Fab.com, I consulted for a startup called LearnVest that also was using tech to democratize financial planning services. They could offer financial planning services to the masses, to people who aren’t millionaires. That was all done through technology. I saw an opportunity to apply the same strategy to the travel planning space, and that’s how Journy started.

Once the Journy started, did you have a viable product to go ahead and sell? How long did it take to build the team up? How many of those early team members are still with us on this? We will talk about that here, but I’m curious about when did you go to the market? Journy is here, but when did you take it to market? What did it look like at the beginning compared to when it was acquired at the end?

I started taking it to market pretty much on day one. When you are in the startup space, everyone talks about this lean startup mentality. The whole point of the lean startup mentality and building out an MVP or minimal viable product, which is exactly what we have done in Hopper Homes. The whole purpose of doing that and launching as quickly as possible is to validate your riskiest assumption. When I first started Journy, my riskiest assumption was, “Can we plan a quality trip when I have never spoken to this person on the phone or met them in person? We go back and forth over email. Are they going to trust me to plan it for them? Are they going to go on the trip and take the recommendations?”

I planned the first 60 or 70 trips by myself. Just me alone working and trip planning, sending out emails to friends, “Who’s got a trip coming up?” They will let me plan. People started coming back from those trips and raving about them and seeing how great they were. My next risk case assumption was, “Will people pay for it?”

I built the first version of Journy’s website. I learned HTML, CSF, and how to code. I spent some money putting Google ads against this landing page where people were searching for keywords like custom trip planning services. You’d go on the site and then click get started. We pretended like we had the product, but we didn’t have the product. It would be like, “Thanks for your interest. We are launching this product soon. If you were interested in hearing about it, put your email.”

I knew if I couldn’t get at least 2% of people to even give me an email address, they sure as hell were never going to give me their credit card information. That is the riskiest assumption that I had to test number two. Sure enough, about 5% of people put in their email said, “There’s something here. There’s enough to continue.” I got an engineer friend of mine to help me build out a Stripe integration where we started getting paid to do trip planning.

We charged $50 per trip plan because it was the easiest thing to do. We didn’t want to calculate the number of trip days or things like that. Somebody could have paid $50 and I planned a ten-day trip for them. That’s insane, but I did that. That was the point in which I felt like there was enough of a proof point there to go out and raise VC funding. I took maybe a few meetings over the course of a month and we raised $600,000.

We talk a lot on this show about raising VCC, raising money, and the struggles. Did you run into any struggles as a person of culture? Did you run into any issues with getting funding because you are a Chinese-American?

I ran into issues because I’m a woman. Let’s talk about that. Women get this all the time where we are looking at having to have series A-level metrics to be able to raise a seed round. I close in $600,000 was a precede, and then we built out the proof points for the product then I went out and I pitched probably 100 VCs in 2016 after we launched the mobile app and we built the whole backend database for Journy and all the concierge trip planning tools. At that point, it wasn’t enough. I didn’t spend enough money on marketing.

Who knows, but there’s certainly the sentiment amongst female founders and in the venture capital funding space where a woman will need series A level metrics to get a seed round and will need series B and C level metrics to be able to raise a series A. There’s certainly that pervasive sentiment in the space, whereas a man can show up with a great PowerPoint presentation, vision, and this huge market potential that they pitch and get funding.

The reason is the struggles that he, Anthony, and some of our others with diverse backgrounds are being recognized as viable and it’s hard. It’s terrible.

I feel like it’s a broken record. We all know about it and we talk about it in a back circle. It speaks to what you said. Certain people can go in and their business plans are taken for what they are when we go in and this isn’t something native to Anthony. We have learned through this process what people go through and through conversations with diverse founders, women, or other people of color, what they have had to go through.

It’s less about the quality of their business or their ideas, and more about the other things that they have to hear and adhere to and present to be taken seriously within that space because there’s a certain demographic that doesn’t have to do that. They can come in and everyone’s focused on what their product or idea is. If it’s a good idea, you walk in the room and they are like, “What are you two Black guys going to do about this?” We have heard that from someone up your way in programs that we have been in.

I’d seen that firsthand. At one point, my cofounder and I were on a show produced by Apple called Planet Of The Apps, and we had Gary Vee as our mentor advisor. Gary was also mentoring another company run by a Black founder. It was a comedy company. It’s like Tinder for comedians where you would see a comedian and then you are like, “It’s not funny,” swipe left, or you can keep watching and then you can see more stuff from the same comedian. Their engagement numbers were apparently crazy insane. You and I can imagine how engaging a product like that could be. When they pitched, the VC at the end of the show, the VC was basically like, “I don’t believe your numbers.”

That is completely crazy. I faced the same thing. I had a venture capitalist and my partners tell me, “I like you, your background, and the idea of the business, but you are never going to make money doing this. The economics is never going to work.” I knew exactly what their objections were. Over the course of 2016, 2017, and the beginning of 2018, I ended up raising an extension of my pre-seed round at the same terms to raise another $300,00. This was right when at the end of 2017, I hit rock bottom. I was doing this Planet OF The App show. The producers were flying into LA and then an investor said, “Come in a day earlier. I’m throwing this event. You will meet a bunch of investors.”

I have the producers change my flight to a day earlier, but then I realized, “I have a hotel for the next night, but not tonight.” At the end of 2017, I had $50 in my bank account because I put everything into my company. I maxed out every credit card that I had. I was about to cash out my 401(k) to be able to float the business a little bit longer. I remember meeting with one of my then investors at the time whose advice was, “It’s not going to get any worse than this.”

Great advice. He was right. I ended up connecting with an investor at that event. It paid off. We raised $250,000 from that investor and another $50,000 from another angel. I hunkered down. I knew that this was the only shot that was left. We 5X the business that year. We ended up getting 60% to 70% positive gross margins on the trip planning fees because I knew that this would scale. I knew that at some point, “We were planning 700 trips to Japan in a given year. If you are going to Japan and you are going to Tokyo for the first time, you are traveling with a family of five, maybe you have celiac disease, or you have got some dietary restrictions.” We already had half a dozen trips for people who had similar preferences and similar needs.

Our trip designer could use that as a starting point for your trip. We made it so that our one Japan trip designer could plan 200 days of custom travel in 2 days of her time. That scales. That works out. I was on a mission to prove everyone wrong. By the end of 2018, I went out to SF. I had 9 meetings in 2 days. I had a term sheet on Friday, another on Monday, and then Wednesday. Every one of my investors said, “This is the fastest that we have ever seen around close.” I knew I had to be super over-prepared. Every objection that they had about the business back when I pitched in 2016, the time 2018 rolled around, I had fixed.

I don’t think people understand. You talk about it and it sounds like it’s this linear thing that happens one after one, but there’s much that goes into that.

Yet knocked down over and over again.

There is a lesson in perseverance.

Seven years is a long time. Most people will call it quits after about two years. I don’t like being wrong. I don’t like when people tell me I can’t do something.

Let’s fast forward to the pandemic. Your shit is not working because you can’t go to Japan. No international travel’s done. Your Journy is not a viable domestic option. No one needs to trip planning to that extent.

We tried that. It’s, “Do you want to go to a national park? Everything’s available online in English. You can figure it out. You got this.” Whereas you want to go to Japan. It’s, “Do people speak the language?” “I’m not sure.” “How do I even make a restaurant reservation when there’s no open table?” “I’m not sure.”

You pitch out there. You are looking for acquisitions. The main reason is you have a vested interest and a responsibility to your team that you have built and that believes in you, what you and your cofounder have built up here. You chose Hopper, but what exactly does that mean and how did that start? That was five months before I came on board. Tell us about that and why Journy for Hopper.

We started in May 2019, but we had inked the deal a few months before. When I started to tell the market that we were interested in an acquihire process, one of the engineers that we had interviewed to be head of engineering for Journy, we turned him down because he didn’t align with our tech stack and it would have taken him a long time to get onboarded. He ended up joining Hopper and was a lead engineer at Hopper.

When we were checking in during the pandemic, I told him where we were. He connected me with Dakota, the Chief Strategy officer at Hopper. We very quickly kicked off a whole interview process for myself and the key members of the team. Hopper pretty much very quickly made the decision, “We want to bring your team on board.” It was the fastest smoothest process ever.

Any company in the travel business out there, if you are looking for a quick exit because you are running out of money soon, and Hopper put together this deal quickly, they have done it where a business was running out of money and wasn’t going to make payroll by Monday. By Friday, they ink the docs to get everybody to start on Monday. They get a great team on board. Hopper will say, “The biggest constraint to this business growth is great leadership and great talent.” my team came with myself, my head of engineering, my head of ops, my cofounder, our customer service manager, and then an amazing designer. We started with five people.

Big shout-out to the original Hopper Homes team.

Later on, we had three engineers who also joined. Those three engineers said, “As an engineer, you have one bajillion opportunities. We trust you guys and Journy, but we don’t trust Hopper yet. We are not sure.” After a month of us joining Hopper, we said, “Everything that they promised us around having ownership or the resources to build out this team and this vertical the right way, we are getting that.” Within a month, our senior iOS engineer, a backend engineer, and then another front-end engineer leader all joined and return to the team. That’s huge.

Even though we had no background in the vacation rental industry, Hopper’s mentality is we are going to hire smart people. We are going to bring on smart people, and we are going to trust that they are going to break something down into first principles and figure it out. I maybe only knew about a month before we joined Hopper that they were thinking about having us work on vacation rentals.

For those who don’t know, and maybe it’s good for us to go a little bit into Hopper. If you look into Hopper, you see Goldman Sachs. There’s this idea that the big bad companies that are coming into the VC area or space. Talk about how is that affecting your guys’ experience with Hopper. It is a big bank. They hold a lot of weight and muscle, but also a lot of experience and resources. How has that been and is there influence felt with what you guys do in your experience?

I can’t speak to that. I’m not in those conversations. That’s probably a question for the CEO for Dakota, the Chief Strategy officer. I do know that there’s a huge push within Hopper to want to maintain our own independence. Technically, Hopper could potentially IPO now, but we don’t want to IPO as a small-cap company on tech company on the NASDAQ, where a large investor could concentrate ownership and then start to tell us what to do. That’s big. That’s not what we are looking for. That’s all I can say about that piece.

To expand, but not to expand, the different parts of Hopper being there are flights, hotels, cars now homes, and there’s also Hopper Cloud. We all work very independently. We are siloed into different pieces. A lot of our focus is, “How do we go ahead as in Hopper Homes and put out the best possible product?” We obsess and Hopper obsesses over our customers. That is part of our thread of who we are here at Hopper. By obsessing over our customers, we have the ability to go ahead and understand what the vacation rental market means.

Everything is about working backward from what the customer wants. When I came on board, it was not, “We are going to enter the space and throw our hat in the ring like another competitor.” It was, “How do we break this down? What do people not like about chopping for vacation rentals? What’s challenging for them in the market?” When we looked at our customer base, so much of it was frustrations around the price not being transparent enough, around it being hard to compare prices or know that you are getting the best deal. The second most pressing issue was around the cancellation poll, unclear, and confusing. The payment policies are inflexible.

Those were things that Hopper is great at. Hopper is great at pricing. We see and have done this in other verticals as well. We will multi-source inventory so that we are making sure that we are giving you the channel at which it is offering the absolute best price for you. You can trust that you should always book on Hopper. The only reason not to book on Hopper is that you like to pay more. That’s one of the key parts of our strategy. The second part then is around, “How do we address the cancellation payment policy flex piece?”

You see all of the FinTech products that we have launched in air and hotels. All of this gives the traveler peace of mind to protect their investment in travel. We have canceled for any reason, and insurance and air change for any reason and insurance. In hotels, we will price our own free cancellation rate on top of the hotel’s lowest non-refundable rate.

If you want to get your money back and cancel last minute, you get 80% of your money back in cash, or 100% percent back as Carrot crash or Hopper credit. Imagine applying that model to the vacation rental space where cancellation policies are 30 to 60 days. An owner who has a few properties are going to be out a ton of cash if somebody cancels last minute. Those policies are pretty set. For that owner, what Hopper pricing free cancellation policy does is it allows you to enjoy the upside benefit of increased conversion rate without taking on the risk. If the customer ends up canceling, we pay you out in full as if the customer did not cancel.

That was a tidal wave. We were talking about the news. When that dropped, the conversations going on within the industry. People like Andrew from Rented said, “This is the biggest thing since Airbnb brought renting rooms to the market.” It’s huge. Anybody who is a manager and from the manager side of the business is not used to a platform building rules that work for them. It’s usually like, “If you want these bookings, you got to take these rules regarding cancellation in others.” This blows that up.

Now you see something that’s a value add. I’m not selling the product, but we are talking about the concept. It is something that’s very beneficial to managers within the space because it does insulate those businesses. As a manager, when I lose bookings, that hurts the bottom line. That hurts my owners, my business, and the ability to run my business. That’s crazy.

I don’t know how much you are going to get into that, but I hope it’s successful and others follow suit because I think that will give the industry strength and the ability to move on and the ability to mitigate the risk that we all know happens. Life happens with people cancel. If you don’t have to keep getting the short end of the stick, that’s great for the business.

We are still in the MVP stage and there’s a lot of work that we have to do to catch up on the experience that some of our competitors have built, but we will do that very quickly, given the speed and the cadence that we have been working far. In terms of what we launched in homes, that’s about four months of development work. We did that in four months.

Those are very early days. Everything that Hopper does is intentional. It is so much about working backward from a desired outcome and how do we move quickly to test the key assumptions that matter. There’s a lot up in the air. With this product, what is the cancellation window look like? Do customers want and will pay extra for a 24-hour policy? Is a 48-hour or 1-week policy enough? These are all potential questions that we are going to be asking as we roll out this product.

To piggyback off of that, those questions need data to back them. As reservations come in, this MVP product that hopper is pushing out is exactly that we need reservations and more data to go ahead and calculate those risks. What does that look like? I know that when I came on board, I came on my first day as I met Susan in San Antonio at VRMA International. It was October 2, 2019, which was crazy. That’s the second time I have done that. My first day at the track was also at Firm International two years prior.

I spent my first two and a half months interviewing property managers, asking them, “I now work for an OTA, that dirty word, but that necessary evil. How do we build an OTA that doesn’t suck?” We have taken all this knowledge and put it in thoughtfully, an amazing team behind us, and we are working on here and putting in a pretty significant product. Was that a record for months from development to release internally?

It might have been. We want to move quickly. We want to be able to start getting data as early and as soon as possible so we can shape the proper direction of the product and not operate blindly. Something that John was alluding to is that we have dedicated resources within Hopper to not try to approach the space in the best way possible. Many of the other OTAs in the space were, “How do we fit this into our hotel’s business model?” It was very intentional for Hopper to have a completely separate team or their own resources, headcount, engineers, data scientists, and product managers who are working and dedicated to this space.

One of the things that came up in all of our chats and conversations with property managers is how important and key a smooth onboarding process is. We are building and investing in an onboarding portal to make that a smooth process. We have very lofty goals in being able to say, “You can get your properties live on Hopper within this certain period of time, like within less than an hour.” These are some of the loftier goals that we are working towards in this space to make it that we are the best OTA to work with.

What can you talk about with regard to where Hopper Homes is going? You started alluding to onboarding and stuff like that. Internally, we are building out a significant onboarding team. We are putting a lot of resources into account management, but where do you see Hopper Homes in a year from launch with regards to say market share and where we are going in the future?

It’s early, but if you look at our hotel’s business as an analog for what could be possible within homes, we are doing over $2 billion worth of travel. For the first time, more than half of that is no longer just care. A good chunk of that is the hotel’s business, which is less than two years old. You can do the math on how big the opportunity is for homes. We are already seeing that for homes.

The Hopper customer, given that the customer is younger, more Gen Z and Millennial. This is a group that is twice as likely than the average traveler to want to book a home over a hotel. When we survey our customers, we know 40% of them prefer a vacation rental home to a hotel. Only 35% have said, “I prefer a hotel to a home.” If you think about these numbers and where the hotel business at Hopper is now, you can put two together and see how big our ambitions are for this space within a short period of time.

Going back to something we were talking about the use of technology. We look at the vacation and the short-term rental industry has not always been at the forefront of technology and using technology for its business. I see it from a different aspect something that you said earlier when you were talking about your experience at Journy in using technology as an equalizer. Bring travel to a broader audience to make it more affordable to allow this experience to be not just for those of means or wealthy, but for family and other people.

How do you bring that mindset into what you do at Hopper and how will that help you translate not to Millennials and others, but as you enter into the vacation rental space that isn’t very heavily Millennial? It’s a mixed bag. They are there but you also have people who are still not used to booking on websites, or OTAs or don’t like OTAs in that space. How are you using technology as a strategy to make that an option for them?

It’s about solving the problems for them that matter. We look at some of the products that we have in air and hotels where we will say, “If Hopper tells you to book this flight right now because we think the price is right,” and this is Hopper’s bread and butter of the business, we are 95% accurate at telling you, if your flight price is going to go up or down. We say, “If we tell you to buy and you buy, we will include auto price drop protection for free.”

It’s the same thing on the hotel side. We will include price drop protection where, “if we detect a lower price for this particular hotel, we will rebook you. We will let you know so you can rebook at the lower rate.” That’s huge. That’s something that is going to get people to book with us versus anywhere else because of the process of having to do that manually, imagine for your customer and you know that the market works this way, your second calendar reminders for yourself or what have you. That’s harder to do in vacation rentals where the inventory is unique and you have this one particular home. That’s why for the vacation rental side of the market, we are much more focused on something like cancellation rate cancellation policies or even flexible payment policies.

You mentioned Millennials and Gen Zers as being Hopper’s biggest demographic. What about some of the stuff we are doing and Hopper’s doing with our Hopper Cloud? How does that balance out? You and I both know that we have 70 million downloads of the app and millions of daily users of the Hopper app, but what are some of the other things that are available that we are going to be bringing to the Hopper Home side?

Very early we have seen how we have started to distribute some of our products through Hopper Cloud to other major players. If you go to Kayak.com, you will see Price Freeze as a product. That’s powered by Hopper. You can potentially see that some of our other unique inventory and things like that are unique product offerings that we have at Hopper could potentially be of interest to the Hopper Cloud customer base as well. That’s something that’s growing. It’s an early business, but it’s part of our future strategy to think about what are all of the potential things that Hopper does well that we could potentially partner with somebody on and expand the distribution for.

The Gen Z and Millennial customer base is such a great area for a lot of property managers to focus on, given that you mentioned that typically the market is the much older customer, but when we have something like the variance of Delta, Omicron, or every cycle of covid that’s happening, that younger traveler is the traveler that’s still traveling.

Whenever we see that there’s a spike that’s happening, Hopper is gaining share in the market every time it happens because our traveler sees that, “Flight prices are down. I’m much less risk-averse and I’m going to go and travel.” It’s a big part of why Hopper doubled our revenue in 2020 despite COVID. It’s a great customer base that’s incremental, that hedges for some of those periods in which your typical traveler may be a little bit more conservative and wary about traveling.

What’s important to remember is the word Millennial used to be a scary word for those in business. I don’t even know how old a Millennial is, but it’s not as young as I think in my head. I think that we need to change the internal definition of what say homeowners and property managers, I might think of the word Millennial and think, “Those are people in their 30s.” That’s exactly who we are looking for.

These are people that are starting families or have a small thing. It’s something to think about. You talked about growth here. I want to go ahead with something that was pretty crazy. We did another raise. It was G1 raise. When I came on in October, we were at a $3.5 billion valuation for Hopper. In 4 or 5 months, we are up to a $5 billion valuation. We talked about being happy with private and staying here and there’s no rush. We could go, but there’s no rush to go to a public offering. What does that lift do for Hopper and where do you see and how that affects where our trajectory?

A big part of it is we want the public number valuation of Hopper to accurately reflect the true value of Hopper. The reason we want to do that big part of it is being able to attract talent. When we bring on talent, people get stock options in the company. That’s a big part of why you might join a start-up because you want the shares and you want to share in the upside, but they need to be valued properly and peg properly to the market so that we can attract the absolute best talent. A big part of it is around that. Hopper cares a tremendous amount about the employees and makes sure that our top performers are compensated well.

A big part of that is ensuring that publicly our valuation is reflective of all of the growth that we have seen in the business. We 2X the business in 2020 and 4X in 2021. That should be reflected in the valuation. Our last valuation at $3.7 billion was a 3X in an eight-month period of time. We have done even better than that. I think that’s what you are going to see. We are competitive when it comes to hiring the best talent. If you pass our interview bar, we do everything we can to make it so that comp is not the reason that you choose to go somewhere else.

I’m glad you brought that up because I read something on LinkedIn that I found absolutely fascinating. Amazon is announced that it is raising its salary cap for upper-level VP-tiered employees to $350,000 a year across the board. The number that was astonishing to me was in 2021 they lost 50 VP-level people within that company. I know Amazon’s huge, but that seems like a very high level when you are talking about upper-level management VP-level positions to lose 50 of those. What does that say about your work culture? I’m sure they had stock options and other things. We are seeing this talent crisis. Money is not the only consideration now.

You also have a work-life balance. You want a culture that respects that you have a life outside of work. I say to our team as well, “Put yourself first. Put your family and your health first. We are doing important work here, but we are not curing cancer.” There needs to be that perspective, otherwise, people get burnt out. It’s no secret that a lot of the employees at Amazon stay for maybe a couple of years and get completely burnt out. They earn some stock and they get that upside and then they leave. That’s not what we want at Hopper. We want people who are in it for the long haul. We want people who are around for 4 to 10-plus years. That’s the ideal. We are committed to creating a great work culture around that also we care about compensating our team fairly.

The whole team is the reason I’m here. I’m compensated well and taken care of. I love this team. It was the vision. It was the coming in early to help build something and to be a part of something that’s truly amazing, not just an amazing opportunity, but something groundbreaking in the VR space, which that’s where I’m never leaving. The vacation space is 100% my vested interest and it was like a great marriage for me. I came and I said, “Their vision, core, and then the nucleus of what they are building here is pretty special. I need to be a part of that.”

It has to be deliberate. Companies are going to have to address their culture moving forward, especially with these talent crises everyone’s talking about. It’s a good thing because it’s going to allow people to recalibrate because if you don’t do these things deliberately, the machine will run towards pushing to the max. If you don’t do these things, if you don’t put these breaks in place, people will run themselves out. They will run themselves to death. We have seen that over the past decades of what our work-life expectations have been.

Especially with the pandemic, the time that people used to commute and maybe it took them one hour to commute to work and back. I saw a survey that asked people, “What did you do with that hour?” Most people said, “I ended up working. I didn’t take that time for myself. I ended up putting it to work.”

Susan, thank you so much for joining us. Is there anything you’d like to leave our readers with?

Come work with Hopper Homes either as a property manager or come in and throw your hat in the ring and apply.

We appreciate you. We hope to get you and/or some of our other upper executives on an update to see where we are at and where we have done.

Keep setting the bar.

Important Links

• Hopper Homes
• Journy
• Fab.com
• Kayak.com
• Vintory.com/nobsFree