Fresh from Skyscanner's £1.4bn acquisition by Ctrip, Gareth Williams fields the question the financial press kept asking: why not hold out for the moonshot? His answer reframes the whole thing, arguing that a lasting tech ecosystem in Scotland needs not one giant but twenty unicorns and a hundred smaller startups beneath them, and that the acquisition simply sets the conditions to grow a hundred times bigger.
In conversation with Mike Butcher, the Skyscanner founder ranges across the company's next act as a trusted personal travel assistant, why China's consumers are five years ahead in how they actually use software, and his conviction that tech risks becoming the next Wall Street unless it takes data and duty of care seriously. He's candid, too, on why he kept the company in Edinburgh rather than chasing Silicon Valley, and closes with his sharpest piece of advice: read incessantly from the source, because trends take fifteen years to spread and the real edge lies in seeing them first.
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Now one point four billion pounds, I mean, it's not very much really, is it? It's To Ctrip last year? I think they got exceptional value. You I'm I'm of course joking, but there was actually we were chatting about this earlier. There was actually some very interesting criticism in some financial press about, know, could have gone bigger, could have gone for 100x, you know, the comparison with, say for instance, you know, Facebook buying WhatsApp for nineteen billion, you know, twenty seventeen, a billion is sort of chump
change these days. Of course, I I jest, but what do you say to people who say, well, why didn't you go for the the moon shot? Why didn't you go for, you know, an enormous amount? Or raise more money and keep going, etcetera.
Yeah. I don't think raising money is always correlated to going for the moonshot. It's it's one thing. The other thing, I think, order to get a European Google, you've got to have two hundred companies of two orders of magnitude smaller. And so if we want that in Scotland, then we need to have or if not a group, let's say that a one hundred billion dollars two hundred billion dollars company in Scotland, then we need to have twenty or more unicorns in Scotland.
And then we have to think about if we want twenty, then how do we create the environment that there's a hundred, you know, a hundred million dollar Internet startups in Scotland. And then it becomes a matter of, you know, you're not relying on individual people.
I think the additional factor is, you know, to get to a series a was, I think, about five years Yeah. For us. So you've got the elongation of time. As hard as anyone's prepared to work, it can be quite intense over a long period of time.
But you've very you've always played your own game really, haven't you? You've always really been incredibly independently minded about things. I guess, know, what would you stick two fingers up to people who would say you hadn't done got enough? Well, I think the main thing is we're not finished.
We've actually set the conditions to be and fate will play its part, but we've set the conditions to be one hundred times larger than we are currently in terms of impact and indeed in terms of revenues. And I think we're well set up for that with a great partner and the partner could have been the stock market that has its own issues as well.
So it's people that are joining now, I tell them we've done the boring bit of getting five billion quoted itineraries organized each day. We're actually doing the really fun bit, which is how do you create a personal travel assistant that is on your phone and always providing value.
That's actually, that's where it gets interesting. I to actually unpack that a bit more but I want to also ask you a little bit more about that acquisition process because you met James Lang, one of the c trip founders of Jameson, the CEO, a few years ago, right, before all this sort of started happening.
What was the kind of dance as it were before you guys signed the paper? Well, I think I first I first met them about four years ago at or three or four years ago when just after Sequoia invested. And I think one of the reasons that Sequoia were interested was at that point, I was saying the future is to be found in Asia as at least as much as it is to be found in the States, and I think that's becoming ever more true over time.
And so he facilitated a meeting one time that I was in China, and we we had dinner and round the round table. But it was just really interesting, and it was one of several meetings I had. But we stayed in touch and when the pressure for some sort of event which, by the way, the primary factor was team in Skyscanner, some of whom had been involved for ten years or more, and I was known as two years Manjana Gareth.
Two more years and then we can look at some sort of event, I think I'd stretch the credibility of that for a little while. So Was there pressure from was there you know, there pressure from shareholders? There was, but I think the main thing was my main priority was, team and my cofounders, and that sort of thing.
Right. How is it is there going to be some sort of integration with Or how independent will you be operating while you're operating? We are operating independently. We're essentially the marketplace within which Ctrip can expand their offering from China to the rest of the world.
They do twenty different verticals ranging from ferries to rail. I think they sold three hundred million intercity rail segments just in China last year. So they're incredibly successful in China and it's understandable that they would want to see what's involved in replicating that success outside of China.
And we expect it to be quite synergistic. A marketplace depends on great content and offers and they'll gradually scale out their ability to offer it to different markets all around the world. But as a marketplace, we're independent and we list their competitors and we list the suppliers direct as well.
So you said that you want to create the world's biggest online travel brand. Entrusted. Most trusted. You know, there's you know, people perceive online travel as, you know, buy, you know, package tour or airline flight or whatever. There's that and then there's maybe slightly more interesting things such as adventure travel or whatever, but what does it mean to be a big travel brand and what does it mean also to move the needle to where it's going to be or in the future?
You talked about something, I was reading about how you're talking about something called post travel engagement. What is this? So there's a few parts to that. I think the first thing to say is if you take every aspect of travel, it sort of adds up to ten percent of the world's GDP.
Stuff that happens outside your hometown or your home city and people involved from conferences, tourism, business business travel. So serving the information needs of that will just occupy us forever in a practical sense. Now within that, unusual in online travel that we don't see the route to growth as being fundamentally advertising.
The lower the frequency you do something, the more you're likely to become highly skilled at digital marketing. We've always seen and wanted to be a software company that builds the best product we can possibly do, and our very first metric was repeat visitors.
So in order to succeed in what we want to do, we need to find a way in which we're providing value many days of the year. And for frequent travelers and for people who are dreaming about leisure travel, there are all these opportunities and sewing it all together in an itinerary that has status, plugging in the booking engine of every single travel provider in the world, so it's native and branded as that travel, whether it's Haggers Tours around the corner or whether it's Expedia or indeed Ctrip.
And all of that you can then build wonderful software experiences where you have the context that allows you to go, your flight is delayed and you're going to miss your connection, your Skyscanner membership allows us to rebook it right now. Do you want us to do that?
That's where it's fun to start thinking about how you make the your phone an essential assistant to the travel, whether you're traveling for work or or for leisure. Are you talking about travel all travel or are you talking about human movement? I mean, would you go down down to a granular level like commuting or city mapper?
No. I I see us as being focused on when you are traveling away from where you Right. And what you do around that. And I think that's the area. I mean, you know, that's that will take a lot of time. But does that also include what you what you do when you you are at that destination?
To an extent, absolutely where you're going to stay, what are the restaurants that suit you near to the hotel that you're staying in. I should be able to say into my phone, Two days in the Barcelona office next week. Everything else should be proposed to me by an agent I trust, and I can adjust it if this week I don't want to travel on a Sunday.
But everything authentically mobile means no thousand research search results. It means it's doing it entirely in my best interest. And it has a sort of, I suppose, you know, you could throw around words like artificial intelligence as well. Yeah, clearly. Although, as you're indicating, simply asserting those two words is easier said than getting useful results out of.
But actually doing various forms of machine learning and artificial You've your numbers are really amazing. You know, a hundred and fifty eight million in revenue, forty percent forty four percent surgeon revenues. You've got That was in 'fifteen. That was in 'fifteen. Oh, this is these are yeah, sorry, these are older figures.
Well, how many staff have you got now? Five hundred plus? Eight fifty. Eight fifty. So you've built a big machine. You've got the to some extent, there's still kayak out there. You've still got the Expedia's and the Trivago's, different business models obviously. Who is the big behemoth?
Is it Google Travel or Google's Google Hotel Finder kind of thing? Do you feel any you feel like they're going start breathing down your neck at some point? I think the greatest existential challenge comes from the verticals, the people who own either the software platform or the hardware that essentially want to own your attention for the greatest part of the day.
And their choices over which verticals to balustrade their horizontal offering the greatest threat. I think there's two things in very top level terms we can do. One is we can make sure that we are entirely not entirely after travellers, our second priority is delivering value to real world businesses that fly planes, keep you safe, make hotel beds.
The horizontals tend to be great extraction engines of the real profit extraction engines of the real world and that can therefore ally us to the industry. So to sum it, you're going into bat for the travel industry as opposed to the don't implication Google isn't?
Correct. Yes, and I think the way we express it internally is traveler first, end supplier second, us third. Not us nowhere, but us third. The other thing I think that will come up more in time, not so much now, is integrity around how you treat personal data.
And so we're making sure that as we get into a more authenticated or logged in personalized world that we're very purposeful about what we will and won't do or even will allow our software to do when it comes to personal data. I don't think that's an advantage for us right now, but I think it will be in the future.
Will we we in the future, will we have Amber Rudd talking about end to end encryption on on Skyscanner? I hope so. Well, why, by all means, right? Let's not get into that conversation. Oh my god. What's, you 're technically owned now by a Chinese company.
What do you find interesting about China and how they do things there in terms of and also in terms of technology? I think it's been tempting in the past to view China as a unique exception to the trend of history and particularly to the trend of technology and consumption of the Internet.
And that's just something I don't believe. I think the Chinese consumer is right now using software patterns and those apps are manifesting in QR codes on restaurant tables and all sorts of different ways. They are doing things today that we will use natively in five years' time.
And I would encourage everyone here, if you're choosing a summer holiday, go to Hainan in South China and do some observing yourself. Irrespective of what that means for the future, you can see the future. Who is it that said the future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed?
William Gibson apparently. So we always assume that it's in San Francisco where that future is already here. And in terms of the best software development practices, I would tend to agree. In terms of how people are using software, I don't agree at all.
They're that far ahead, you think? Yes. Oh, WhatsApp is still playing catch up in just huge ways. Well, WeChat is you can order taxi, book restaurants, order the food, whole work. Split payments. Split payments. It's Venmo, Uber, in WhatsApp, all in one application, isn't it?
Yes. And any large company never seems to willingly restrict itself, so it's they would like to do that. Do you think that's partly down to culture in the sense that things developed their way partly because of Chinese culture? Or do you think do you think the Western audiences would like an app that did all of that?
That's the direction things are going in. You're already seeing, albeit split in sometimes into groups of that, but you're seeing a reduction in the number of companies that you're using. When you start bringing voice and augmented reality into things, you'll see a convergence of use cases, I believe.
Do you think we're moving towards more of a bipolar world between China and the U. S? How is that going to affect technology do you think? So I think the just hugely critical problem is one percent of Chinese people can speak English, and way less of Western or rest of world can speak Chinese.
So there's just a giant moat of lack of knowledge sharing, not only in that way. But that means that if you can understand what's going on in both Silicon Valley and on the East Coast of China, as a start up, you've got a head start.
And there are ways to do it. There are books written about Alibaba, for instance. I learn things from Alibaba and I learn things from Amazon and for different reasons. It's out there. Sometimes it has to be interpreted. You know, someone's writing a summary in English.
I would advocate traveling there and trying to understand trends that are happening there. You've talked about where's the European Google, but in a way it sounds to me like you want to become the European Google. Would agree? Well, I think we have an opportunity to have a hundred times greater impact than we do today.
I don't know where that takes us. But equally, it's not a it just comes back to the journey. It's no different than if you've got your first paying customer and you're saying, well, suppose we had ten customers, what would we do then? Wouldn't that be good? We're in the same situation.
And there are some downsides, but there's definitely some upsides from when we had one customer as well. Do you think, sort of, just interested in your view of sort of the political environment or at least the industrial implications of the political environment with Brexit.
Do you think how is that going to affect you? Is it going to affect your company? Is it going to be harder to attract talent? It is already harder to attract talent, unfortunately. And yes, that is a shame, but it's a reality of the situation.
We're fortunate to have officers in main mainland Europe, and so but overall, you know, it's when, you know, when when we were very small, people used to always say, what if Google do this? And say, you can't do anything about Google death and taxes.
And it's a bit it's a bit like that. You can't do I personally can't do anything about Brexit, Google death and taxes. So I'd rather sort of get on with it and leave it to the eloquent or not so eloquent speakers on debating the topic.
You're sort of gonna root around the problem effectively, aren't you? If it's I care about engaging in the things I can affect. Fair comment. We were chatting earlier and you said to me that you said you think that tech is the new Wall Street. What do you mean by that?
I think there's a there's a problem. I remember having a a cartoon on my wall in London after university, and it was of a geeky guy talking to someone at a party and said, I'm an accountant but it's probably not as interesting as you think.
And I'd crossed off accountant and put coda and put it up on our flat. I think things started that way and there was this sense of community from tech. There's something important here that the rest of society doesn't fully understand. You look back at the history of modern Wall Street and it was the same if you've seen the film The Big Short.
It started off with backroom people doing this weird financial instrument thing. And then it became a thing where loads of money gets made, loads of power accrues, and then all of a sudden you roll forward twenty years and somehow the largest Internet companies, and we're at risk of appearing the same, start to look or be perceived by the general population just in smallest hints of the way that banks, investment banks, are seen around the world.
And I think that's a real risk and will lead to a backlash. As I said earlier, people don't care about data privacy that much on average and as a rule. But I think that's going to change at some point. I'd rather be ahead of that by us doing the right thing in advance.
Do you think that what you're implying is that it's beholden on big tech companies now, and you are now big tech company, you were before and you definitely are now, it's beholden on those organizations to have some duty of care are you saying, is that what you're saying?
Yes, and it's something ten years ago I didn't really think about much at all, But I think we do. There's a blog called Ben Thompson who writes a blog called Strathecary and he wrote the day after the Trump election something along similar lines which is these mass Trump voters looking with a steely eye at at Silicon Valley and and elsewhere.
And there's something in that that I haven't fully developed, but I'm kind of paying attention to. Yeah. I mean, yeah, we could talk about that for ages. You talked about tech technology as a community. Obviously, there's a great technology community here in Edinburgh and in Scotland.
What do you and you've been a fierce advocate of keeping Skyscanner here. I'm sure there were siren voices saying, why don't you why don't you lose the company and yada yada somewhere else? What what's what's qualitatively different about having your company based here and and run here?
I mean I think so the motivation, I think, is in two directions. One is a contrarian nature, I suppose. And therefore, if I remember thirty years ago seeing some gilded fifteen year old in the dot com sort of pomp and on the Sunday Times magazine, and it was like, here's what you do.
You move to Silicon Valley. You do this, do that. And it was like, well, I've got then I was saying, I've got no idea how you can get a promise of ten million dollars by squiggling on a napkin. It just was so alien.
And so there's a contrarian sense of, well, damn it, we're going to do it here anyway. But I think the other aspect is if we're only making significant business taxes in like ten locations around the world, I mean what kind of society is that going to produce?
If it's in a couple of places in China, a couple of places in the States, a couple of places in the U. S, then we're essentially going to be net consumers of tax revenues as a local society pretty much everywhere in the world.
So there's an element where the sort of distribution of the production of the Internet economy as opposed to consumption is seems quite relevant. But I think the other aspect is it gave us time to learn what we were doing as well. And I think we have a really strong culture and we have a long period of growth ahead of us.
And I think it would have been more of a **** or bust roll of the dice if we'd been located in Silicon Valley. And probably with who we were as founders at that time, it probably would have been bust. So I think we're in for whatever reason and whatever fail failings initially, it was better for us to to develop organically, I suppose.
Organic would be the the word. So being outside of the But now things hot spots, shall we say, wherever those hot spots are or at least being outside of sort of the nuts, the craziness of say the valley gave you that opportunity to, you know, build your own cult cult the cult word culture comes up a lot.
Yeah. And I mean, things are very different in Edinburgh now. The dot com bust happened and sort of laid waste. Well, I mean, it decimated any Internet activity in Scotland at the time. So it was quite a lonely experience. And when Edinburgh Informatics started Tech Meetup.
Was sort of a small band of nutters sort of getting together as it were. Now I think the community and the environment and the group of people doing start ups is fantastic and if it was ten times bigger there would be a loss, a certain loss of open engagement and helping of your neighbors.
So that will no doubt come in time, but I think it's to be treasured at the moment. You've been very successful. Do you get asked a lot for advice by founders? What advice do you give them? The first one that I have a single story, I'm not a multiple entrepreneur, so treat any advice with caution because I'm well aware the huge amounts of happenstance and luck involved both in the successes and the failures.
But overall I would say my top one is read incessantly from the source and the source can be found in many places. Trends take fifteen years to spread. I'll use a couple of examples like sagging where jeans were down. That took fifteen years to spread worldwide from the very first group that started that trend.
And the same for Californian English. Well, if you think of Frank Zappa's song Valley Girl, if any of you are old enough to remember that, That form of speaking was fifteen years and then I started interviewing graduates and they were speaking with the same accent.
And fifteen years to adopt continuous deployment is just your debt or go to some somewhere that a sector that doesn't require high product skills. So you the beauty of the Internet is it is there for you to find. You just have to know that what you're being told personally isn't necessarily the source, and you have to go find it.
You don't think trends and cycles are speeding up because of the the pace of technology adoption? Yeah. Undoubtedly. But as long as you're not at the leading edge, you will be squeezed out of the most interesting areas to participate in. You're you're a keen skier apparently?
Used to be a keen skier. Right. But you also like playing chess and you love drawing. Apparently, you're a bit of a bit of a an artist. Sculpture. I can sell you a small piece for fifty pounds. It's the Fantastic. When I started in meetings, my goal was for actually, this wouldn't qualify, but was was for strangers to buy something for however much.
And and I've been working on, you know, developing a style that that someone would choose to own, which is still a work in progress. Would you what do you sculpt? Sculpt wise What do you make? Do do you paint? Well, sculpting wise, I've, like, done an apple core and a head and the usual things when you're learning, doing courses.
But, it's mainly drawing and and painting. Apparently, you're Doodling. You're you're an inventorate drawer and dooder? Yes. So I'm developing a new art movement called Highlighterist. Highlighterist. What's finally, are you excited? Are you passionate? Are you still hungry? Or is that a very cliche thing to ask?
That's talking about emotions. Are you not in a very emotional person? That classic British thing, I think, boiling away under a mask of I am because it's fun. Know, the the idea so the thing I assert in the company is that understanding unstructured input around travel plans and everything around travel is an eminently solvable problem and we're working on solving it at the moment.
And that's fun. And it relates to interests I had at the beginning of Skyscanner. Didn't have to do it but I remember taking the HTTP referrer string, the thing that comes from a referrer, and examining if there was a search term in it and then setting the select boxes so that the user didn't have to do that themselves.
That was the same interest then around unstructured input. Just now I get to do it as the pointy haired boss rather than coding it myself. Do you like being the pointy haired boss? No. Well, I'm ambivalent. The way I ended up being it was none of myself, Bon and Barry, the three founders, wanted to be the CEO, which I think is reasonably healthy state of affairs.
In the end I said, well, look, guys, I want to be CTO, but I don't want some idiot telling me what to do, so I'll be the idiot. Well, Gareth, it's been great talking to you. Thanks very much for coming. Thank you, Mark. Thanks.
