Watch Technology as Medium, Not Content Online

Priceline started in the backwoods of Connecticut. It started in Stanford. Jesse Fink: In Stanford, yes. Steve Blank: So here we are. When did it start? Jesse Fink: We started working on it in '96 and we went out in '98. Steve Blank: So there were lots of interesting technology places in the Valley on the web then. So was Priceline just a better airline business or travel business? What was the entrepreneurial story? Jesse Fink: The idea behind Priceline was Jay Walker who was the core founder and the true entrepreneur. Jay put millions and millions of his own dollars into Priceline and did a phenomenal job and was working 100 hours a week trying to really make it a success. Priceline needed technology in order to work. It is a business model and it was technology enhanced, not driven by technology. We really were solving two problems. We were solving the airlines problem which is they had a lot of empty seats and they wanted to fill the empty seats, but they didn’t want to reduce the profit margin that they were getting at last minute from business travelers, and a consumer problem which was people wanted to travel but they really didn't want to pay the fees or the price that the airlines had. So what Priceline enabled to do and the technology behind it was allowing consumers the power to name their own price. If you remember the early days with William Shatner and still so much right now which is great, but name your own price. The internet enabled it to happen because, in fact, we actually conceived the business with paper. So one of the versions we had, this was 1995, was that we would fax to the airlines the consumers' requests for airline tickets. It just couldn't work. It couldn't work with paper. It couldn't work with telephone, so it was enabled by the internet. We really were not a technology company. We needed the net to provide the computing power, but really we're solving the consumer problem, and it was a busines...