- In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady talks to Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel about being fired, and rebuilding.
- The big story: The Fed didn’t do anything—and everyone loved it.
- The markets: Fears assuaged (mostly).
- Analyst notes from JPMorgan and Wedbush on Nvidia, and Convera on Canada.
- Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning. In February of 2000, Glenn Fogel joined a then-hot startup called Priceline to do business development. “I quit my job as a trader in the last week of February of 2000 and a week later, the Nasdaq peaked in the dot-com boom,” Fogel says in the latest episode of Leadership Next. Within a year, the stock price dropped from $300 to less than a dollar. “Even my mother thought the company had gone bankrupt.”
But Fogel stuck around, and with an eye for smart acquisitions, helped Priceline grow to become Booking Holdings, a $23 billion-a-year Fortune 500 travel company housing brands such as Kayak, Booking.com, OpenTable, Rentalcars, Agoda, Momondo, Cheapflights, and Priceline. He became CEO in 2019 and has since navigated pandemics, wars, disasters, and travel glitches beyond his control. But for a guy who suffered a debilitating stroke at 17 and graduated from Harvard Law School with honors less than a decade later, it’s just part of the journey. Here’s a bit more about how he thinks about business and life:
On being known as an M&A genius: “Somebody said once, ‘So you basically built the company through M&A.’ So, we bought Active Hotels in 2004 for $165 million, and we bought Booking within less than a year, in 2005, and that was $135 [million]. So $300 million. And that was 20 years ago, and that company is now worth about 90% of the entire $160 billion market cap. So during that 20 years, it wasn’t M&A, we bought a company that had a few hundred people, that was losing money. It’s kind of like, you really can’t say, ‘Well, you built the company through M&A.’”
On spotting growth opportunities: “Well, how big is the market? So, again, nobody really knows. And you pick numbers from anywhere, but I like to round off to the nearest trillion, so you could round it all to, let’s call it $3 trillion. Let’s do easy math: Well, if we were $150 billion instead of $160 [billion] now we have easy math. So that’s only 5% of the market. I said, ‘How about we get some more share of that $3 trillion market?’ Which we’re doing. So, for example, back when we started Booking.com it was only doing hotels, and we only did hotels for a really long time. In 2019, we start selling flights because we want to build this connected trip, this vision of putting it all together. So last quarter, the fourth quarter, is the first quarter we sold more airline tickets than the entire Expedia Group. And attractions is growing very nicely. Ground transportation. And of course, what I really want to do is make sure that we can put OpenTable as part of the whole thing. Because I know I do not need to spend any money on consultants: I am 100% certain that every single person who travels is not eating at home.”
On facing obstacles in his career: I was a banker at Kidder Peabody. Kidder Peabody was owned by GE. GE got tired of it, sold it to Paine Webber. And Paine Webber really only wanted the retail brokers, so all the investment bankers were pretty much let go. I say pretty much because not every banker was fired, just most, and so you couldn’t really get away with, ‘Well, they fired all of us.’ That’s a real bummer when you get let go. And if that had not happened, I’d probably still be a banker.”
On the travel advice he always follows: “Never check a bag, ever.”
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
