Where it all began – The team (2)
This post follows a previous one, which you can read there.
Back at home in Lausanne, I literally spent 6 months speaking about the HouseTrip idea to everyone I met. I wanted to check that it wasn’t something I was getting excited about on my own, that it was actually something people needed. It was a great feeling and it gave me confidence that everyone saw a lot of potential in the idea.
Junjun and Arnaud
On the way I had of course shared the idea with my girlfriend Junjun who, to my great delight, agreed that we should both dedicate ourselves fully to the project after we would finish our studies in January 2009 (we were both studying hospitality and tourism management at the Ecole Hôtelière de Lausanne).
Uli
Uli
The next step of the project came in 2008 summer in Austin, Texas. Both Junjun and I were there for HITEC, a hospitality technology event, to represent our school. We noticed the presence of Uli Pillau, who is sort of a legend in the hospitality technology world because he was at the beginning of two of the largest companies in the field, Fidelio Software GmbH and IDeaS. Luckily, we had our laptop with us and on it was HouseTrip’s first introductory ppt presentation. We therefore jumped on the occasion and went to Uli, asking him if he had 5 minutes. He answered he literally only had 5 minutes – I guess that is what they call an elevator pitch – and we therefore quickly opened our laptop, took a deep breath and started presenting HouseTrip the best we could. We ended up speaking during close to half an hour: we had convinced Uli! One of the nicest individuals I have ever met, Uli – a German citizen from Munich – stayed close to the project ever since!
Dominik
Dominik
Another important step in the life of HouseTrip was Dominik, who was to become the 3rd member of the launching team. Dominik got immediatly convinced by the project: we were both taking entrepreneurship classes (our major) at university but we only remotely knew each other. One day, at the end of a class, we started speaking about what we would respectively do after school and I of course begun describing the HouseTrip project to him. I had not even finished my description of the project that he interrupted me: “It is brilliant, would love to join you!” And that was it: he really was in (I bet most of our readers don’t know and never worked with Swiss-Germans – Dominik is from Zurich – but once they give their word, you can count on it). Months after, we now work together everyday, 100% on the HouseTrip project!
Stephan
Stephan
At this point, we were three people on the team with a lot of knowledge about business, the tourism and travel industry but knew only little about developing a website.
In parallel, we were also looking for financing and in that context we went to Munich to meet with Keith Gruen, the founder of Micros-Fidelio who was introduced to us by Uli. Junjun and I had a very nice lunch with Keith in a hotel called “Anna hotel” and while we were describing him the challenges to find a good solution for the technical development of HouseTrip, he told us he knew someone called Stephan Wiesener who had started a company (Conject) and who had developed his own travel social network, Trekpilots.
We got in touch with Stephan with the intention to get leads on how to overcome the challenges we were having with the development. It was soon clear that Stephan had the right personnality, background and the right attraction for the HouseTrip idea: he has the perfect profile to be on the launching team, as HouseTrip’s CTO. Stephan has great experience and knowledge in development and the Internet: he did a PhD on semantics webs back in 1997, spoke at conferences next to Tim Berners-Lee and developed numerous websites and software. From little knowledge about website development, Stephan joining the team was a great leap forward!
