Guest: Adam Goldstein, CEO and co-founder of Hipmunk
Host: Arman Suleimenov
Date: December 8, 2011
Location: San Francisco, CA
Princeton Entrepreneurship Club
Hipmunk is the flight and hotel search engine which presents flight results as the visual timeline, sorts flights by agony, searches for hotels in the areas with many points of interests, and provides Amtrak train routes among other things. Time magazine named Hipmunk as one of the 50 best websites of 2011. The founders are Adam Goldstein and Steve Huffman (co-founder of reddit.com). Investors include SV Angel, Paul Buchheit (creator of Gmail), Matt Mullenweg (founder of WordPress) and Ashton Kutcher.
Questions discussed:
- How / when did you come up with an idea for Hipmunk?
- What was the process when coming up with the name?
- YCombinator experience
- ITA as the source content for search
- Is the main power of Hipmunk an outstanding user interface?
- Gantt charts for flights
- Hipmunk’s technology stack
- Why companies like Southwest don’t provide their fares to the flight search sites?
- Hipmunk as the multitransport search engine
- Hotel search around points of interest
- What Hipmunk was like when launched?
- What are the plans for improving the service?
- How does feature prioritization work at the Hipmunk team?
- Key lessons learned
- Favorite blogs and books
- Patents as the defensive mechanism from big companies which crush startups
- Any plans to own the booking part of the equation?
- What’s your vision for travel planning space and Hipmunk specifically?
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