“Make learning your superpower and Google must do the right and smart thing”
Making learning his superpower, lobbying Google for relief and thinking about the accelerated decoupling of the world – those are the things that have been keeping Tao Tao, co-founder and COO of GetYourGuide, busy through Covid-19. In addition to, of course, saving the business he co-founded with three of his college classmates 10 years ago.
Through that process, he’s proudest of the fact that they haven’t had to lay off any staff because “solidarity is a real thing”.
In this wide-ranging conversation, in which we also learnt his mother is his superhero, Tao Tao speaks about how his immigrant upbringing has fortified him for life, the lessons he’s learnt through Covid-19, what he would say to students if he were to give a commencement address and how Google must do the right and smart thing by the industry.
Here are some notes:
• On change being a constant
“The most seminal experiences that I’ve had in my life were usually about change, where the entire environment changes. That has built in a bit of natural curiosity, a little bit of restlessness, the drive to travel and experience the new.”
• On learning as a superpower
“The key is to make learning your lifelong superpower. This is the only sustainable competitive advantage you can have as a person, when you have a startup, everything that you have is inferior compared to the competition.”
• On knowing yourself
“Knowing yourself is a type of learning that I think is equally important, especially so in business when it comes to strategy, and leadership. There’s this famous Art of War quote –if you know the enemy and know yourself, you don’t fear the results of 100 battles. Leadership is all about being the most authentic version of yourself. And that starts from knowing who you are and accepting who you are.”
• On the accelerated decoupling of the world and his generation’s challenge
“You have the decoupling of the financial and real economy – this is not a financial crisis, but our response has been a financial one. You are seeing market rallies like never before even while millions of people are unemployed, how’s that possible? You’re seeing decoupling of the well-educated and non-educated – folks who can work from home and those who cannot. You have decoupling of the developing and the emerging world – social distancing is not possible in many parts of the world. That is the generational challenge. And if people can contribute and solve this problem, I think that will be a great responsibility to take upon.”
On building bridges and travel’s role and privilege in it
• On building bridges
“I think building bridges is going to be a critical, critical piece. And the travel industry is in the business of building bridges. Travel has the responsibility and privilege to be a part of building these bridges.”
• On lobbying Google for relief – eight German OTAs have asked the tech giant for flexibility in how it enforces payments
“What we’re asking Google is to be a responsible ecosystem player. Currently they’re being unreasonable in asking for full payment … Google has the resources to share in the burden of these cancellations as well as helping companies restructure the remaining payments. We think it’s the right thing to do – if you take part in the gain, you should also share the pain.”
• On how this is not the worst crisis for the company
“If you think about it, in the first four or five years, we didn’t even know if we have product market fit. So you don’t even know if you have a reason to exist. Whether you deserve to exist as a business, that is a very different level of uncertainty from when will travel recover. We know it will recover. It’s just a question of time. Obviously, this is not a great time, but it’s also far from the worst time.
• On his mother, his superhero
“She always said that as a parent, you cannot control the outcome of the achievement of your kids, the thing that you can control is the happiness of your children. And so she was always optimizing for that.”
• Featured image credit (Tao Tao): GetYourGuide
