Full Transcript – Jake Peters – Wild Business Growth Podcast #311

This is the full transcript for Episode #311 of the Wild Business Growth podcast featuring Jake Peters – The Modern Travel Agency, Fora Co-Founder. You can listen to the interview and learn more here. Please note: this transcript is not 100% accurate.

Jake Peters 0:00
Booking hotels is really interesting.

Max Branstetter 0:17
Well, hi there. Welcome back to the Wild Business Growth podcast. This is your place to hear from a new entrepreneur every single Wednesday morning who’s turning Wild ideas into Wild growth. I’m your host, Max Branstetter, Founder and Podcast Producer at MaxPodcasting, and you can email me at to save time with your high-quality podcast. This is episode 311 and Amber is the color of Jake Peters energy. He is the guest this week, and he is the co founder and chief product and technology officer of fora, the modern travel agency. Fora, F O, R, A has all sorts of cool tools, cool tools, which is tough to say, that make it flexible and awesome and entrepreneurial for today’s Travel Advisor, as well as really, really cool, cool, cool tools and perks for travelers and the suppliers or hotels. In this episode, we talk how they make that golden triangle work, Jake’s approach with technology and how he balances three young children, two startups and some AI bedtime Stories. It is JPP, aka JP, enjoy the Sure. Oh, alrighty, we are here with Jake Peters, the chief technology and product officer, AKA C PTO, AKA C-3PO. Shoutout George Lucas of Fora travel agency, travel advisory, that’s shaking up the game. Jake, thank you so much for joining. Thanks so much for joining. If I could talk, how are you doing today?

Jake Peters 2:07
I’m doing well. Thanks for having me. It’s

Max Branstetter 2:09
really a pleasure to be here. Yeah, yeah. Of course, of course. And going to talk all things travel, but before that, and before we get into travel tech, let’s start with just tech. You’re someone who’s very familiar with technology, everything from it to everything non it. You can tell the extent of my technology, but it and stuff. Yeah, it and stuff. What was it from whatever mystery age that first got you interested in the world of tech?

Jake Peters 2:38
That’s a good question. I mean, if I really, you know, it was, I don’t even know when it started, like plugging computers together. My dad worked for himself and had computers, and we were, we had early, early Max and, you know, I was, like, the unofficial for some of some people here may remember, like, Apple talk cables. They were like two feet long, and had like, a big box on them with like, two inputs. And so to make a network between two Macs, you had to have, like, 30, like, of some distance. You had to, like, string together these cables. So like, that was my first job, like, plugging cables together. I didn’t build my own computers because we were a Mac family, so you couldn’t, like, build your own computers because Max came pre built. So I sort of missed that. But from an early age, I started programming and playing with things and and then it just, I had, like a dial up modem, and was on the internet using, like a terminal account. And, you know, in the early 90s, and it just sort of kept going from there. And then it was easy in the 90s, it was a little bit like more low key than now. And, you know, even though I was a teenager, I was in the Boston area, and you could write companies and say, hey, I want an internship, or I’m interested in working for you, and people would hire you to do things. So I had these really early experiences during high school working at internet companies doing all sorts of stuff, from Customer Support Services at a dial up ISP to I worked at Harvard, like in their internal team that managed the network at the university. So there were, like, eight of us, and they have a huge distributed network across all of Harvard and all the teaching hospitals there, and there were only eight people that managed all of the core routers. And so I was there were three interns that summer, maybe, plus the eight people, if I’m remember correctly, and it was an academic environment. So they’re like, Jake, you take the seat in front of the keyboard plugging into like these, you know, very expensive Cisco routers and OC 48 like, fiber cables to, you know, really fast connections. And they’re like, Okay, Jake, like, type this, type this. And so because it wasn’t a corporate environment, we really got to learn that was fun. And then at that time, I was also studying computer science at Penn and, for example, going back and taking, like, a graduate level networking class, like I already knew. I didn’t know all the queuing theory math, but I knew queuing because, like, I had done it on real routers that previous summer, or something like that. So. So I think in the 90s, if you were into tech, you were able to get exposed to a lot of really serious and cool things at the same time. And then I realized after that, I didn’t want to go I taught myself at a program, I studied computer science, and I looked around at the workplace, and I wanted to sort of do something that was more applied to jobs at that time for me, being just a coder were not as interesting. And I was also interested in sort of how the technology was used in the business. So now you’d say this is product or a whole sort of, you know, now you can be an engineer and be like, more on the front lines. Back then it was like you’re an engineer and you’re very much not on the front lines. And I wanted to be involved in use with users and customers, and like the actual mechanics of the business. And so I went into consulting, where my technical background was really useful, and then my career sort of got started that way.

Max Branstetter 5:51
So So you were thrown into the fire with multiple Ivy League exposure, learning and working. And I think coding is obviously so important, it continues to be so important. You were like a super coder early on. Just to give a snapshot of today, how often are you actually doing the coding these days?

Jake Peters 6:12
Zero, yeah. What’s COVID? Yeah, I wish I don’t know it’s a slippery slope, because I really like so what I think is really powerful is the fun. For me, it’s like the building of things, and there’s really nothing more satisfying than putting stuff together and running it for the first time and seeing it work and actually seeing the thing like the hello world come up on screen, or, you know, something much more complicated, if you start going down that path, what would happen is I’d be neglecting the other parts of my job really fast. I’m not doing that. It’s also hard. I’m a little behind on like, how the team is thinking about process. You know, we have a large team now, and so there’s process, there’s reviews and pull requests and things like this, and me just going in and doing something quick is kind of not the best way to collaborate with that team. So I realized this in my last startup when I was like, going in and just making changes in the very early days. Like, please stop doing this. We like, know you can do it just like, tell us what you’d like us to do, and we’ll do it. Like, write a ticket. And I was like, Okay, I got it. I don’t know, maybe at some point I always say this, like, at some point when I have more time, but there’s never more time. So I find that if I’m doing something, the best value that I can create or add to the team here is helping communicate or clarify issues or talk about what we’re building or connect dots. For people, it’s not like sitting there with my headphones on encoding.

Max Branstetter 7:37
So you like building things. So let’s get to something pretty big that you’re building. So let’s get to for a really, really cool travel company that’s doing stuff a bit different. How did you first hear of what would become fora, yeah, I

Jake Peters 7:51
actually have the email from and we’re

Max Branstetter 7:54
gonna read you how you’re gonna hold it up. We’re gonna dictate it here. No, just,

Jake Peters 7:57
oh yeah, dictate it. It was 2021, we have, there’s three co founders of fora, the other two, Evan and Henley, came up with this idea of they come from the travel space, and so this was their creation. I’ve known Evan for 15 years now, when we both lived together abroad, and then we both ended up back in in New York, and we were both founders, and we would sort of meet every quarter or so at the local diner and just like, have eggs and complain about, you know, stuff that only founders can, like, sympathize with, and just, often, a lot of people issues, and just get advice from someone who really doesn’t know your company or yourself. It’s like, really useful to do that. And then we sort of stop for a bit, family, kids, life, whatever. And in 2021 we both were looking for new things, and we reconnected. And we’re talking about a whole bunch of different opportunities. He was doing this with other people too. I was doing this with other people too. One of the things that came up was between him and Henley were was for I went away for a couple weeks with family and came back, and he’s like, I need to tell you about this opportunity. And I thought he was joking, like, literally, I probably said, like, You’re joking, because some context there is, he had just come out of, like, a kind of tricky situation with his previous travel company. It was the middle of COVID, like, travel. Why travel? Now, you know, and travel agency specifically, I was like, You gotta be kidding. And then when we talked through the opportunity in about 20 minutes or so, it just clicked. And I realized, okay, this is actually something quite big. There’s a real opportunity here. And it was almost reinforced by the fact that I didn’t understand it at first. I think that’s one of the attractive features of this. And after my last startup, I realized the thing I wanted to do was there was sort of two things. One was build in a really, really big market, having built in a smaller market before, it’s easier to swim downstream, and you have more room to maneuver, and you can be really successful. You could build a massive company. You don’t have to take over the whole market, you know, travel, something everyone does, for the most part. And people, no matter what are. Any money on travel. Like in good times and bad times, maybe they dial it up, dial it down, do different things, but people need to travel. The other thing was, I have a little bit of, you know, I have a little add in me and or maybe a lot, depending on how you know me. And I was really nervous coming out of my last startup, like, deciding now what I wanted to do for the next many years. Like, I was kind of secretly hoping we could found something that was this would be, like the last job I have, like, we’re going to build this for the next 20 years or and I’m just keep doing it. I was looking around at blockchain stuff and other kinds of things. I really like cryptography. I like smart contracts. And I’m like, is this what I really want to commit myself to. And so when this came up, we talked a little bit about what we’re building from the tech side, but there’s like, 75 things to build here, and so it allowed me to kind of exist in this permanent state of, like, add, I don’t have to make a choice because we’re building a CRM tool, we’re building workflow tools, we’re building FinTech tools, we’re building a booking platform. We have integrations with so many different people. There’s like, you know, traveler focused websites, there’s advisor focused websites, there’s eventually supplier focused websites, like, there’s so much surface area to the product that we’re building. There’s, it’s also like, there’s a whole under the scene, stuff about a huge data component to what we’re doing. There’s AI opportunities, and we’re pushing forward on that a lot. So it was kind of like, okay, you can just kind of build everything back to this thing. You sort of made a joke about that, the Ivy League thing. It’s, I think it comes from the fact that I studied at Penn with two degrees, you know, in business and engineering. And the joke about that was that I didn’t know like which I wanted to do. I mean, I probably would have, if the MNC program at Penn hadn’t existed. I probably would have pursued a degree in computer science solely. But I really liked the business side of what I studied also. And like that program allowed me to not have to choose, just like coming to fora sort of allowed me to not have to choose what I wanted to work on. I could work on everything. Yeah,

Max Branstetter 11:53
that sounds like there’s everything and more to work on. But yeah, it is. It’s crazy exciting when there’s an opportunity to just tackle, like a giant meatball like that, like an industry that’s been around for a while but is due to have some changes to it. So for like, the travel industry, what? What is it about like 2021 or looking back to the 10 years before that, what is it about the travel industry that was just like, ripe for disruption?

Jake Peters 12:18
That’s a great question. So we think about Fora. We talk a lot about this better equation in travel, which, if you visualize this equation, it’s like a triangle, where you have travelers, the travel partners, or people, say suppliers. But for tactical purposes, you could think hotels, cruises, the actual people providing the hospitality. And so you have travelers, suppliers and advisors. There’s stuff that’s ripe for change in each of those areas. Let’s just talk about advisors first, because that’s sort of where it starts for us. We’re a platform for people to become travel advisors. So the pandemic was majorly disruptive to the workforce, so many people left the workforce. It also was a time for people to reevaluate their priorities and think about what they wanted to do. And we knew there were specifically women who were displaced in the workforce. And Henley, our other co founder, and you know, really, like our primary co founder, in many senses, was has been a Travel Advisor for her her whole career, basically since college. She saw this with her clients, where she was actually started this process of having two of her clients kind of become their own travel advisors in her company. And these were women who were returning to the workforce, who were displaced by work in the pandemic, or kids. And we realized there’s like actually a larger opportunity here to bring people back into the workforce and provide meaningful opportunity for work, for people who want to be travel entrepreneurs, that’s the first thing. And there are other host agencies that welcome people in as new people to the industry, not so much at the luxury level, where we play, where you have preferred partnerships with the top hotels, and you’re a virtual so agency, you know, and not one where it’s really affordable, we have a real strong sense of community, and we have a really robust training program, and we like help people become the Travel Advisor that they want to be in a really proactive and meaningful way. We knew there was this opportunity with advisors on the traveler side. There’s definitely this sense of overwhelming amounts of information out there when it comes to travel. Like, I think, I don’t know how many years ago, but a little bit of time ago it was nice. Like, you could go online and get some recommendations, and now it’s like, you search for, like, best restaurants in Paris. It’s just like, you know, like, there’s so much information, there’s so many restaurants. Like, are you on Instagram? Are you on Tiktok? Like, who are you listening to? You have three nights in Paris to make a choice. Like, I mean, I know Paris really well. My wife is from there. I We spent a lot of time there. I could give you 100 restaurants to go eat. Like, this is not helpful. Like, you know, it’s like, how do you then choose? So if you said to me, where do you want to eat in Paris, I would say, Well, let’s talk about what you’d like to eat. Like, where are you staying? What do you want to do? Like, is that the primary. Activity of the night. Or is it like, you need to eat and then go do something? What kind of meal you’re looking for? Are you with kids, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, do you want to be cramped in, like, a spot with young people and it’s loud? Or, like, my parents would say, No. Like, that’s the last thing they’d want. So, like, the vibe is really important. And from that, I could say, Okay, I think you should eat it. Like, these five places. We could swap in some things, but like, let’s, let’s see what’s available for your three nights, right? And that’s actually helpful. So I think if you’re a traveler, you can, there’s many people who have access to people who know things in in friend groups. There’s this person that’s, you know, the sort of traveler, like expert person, and so people are looking for recommendations from people that they know, versus, like, going online and doing the research themselves, even though that’s possible, it’s like, it doesn’t with a this, like, plethora of content, like, doesn’t help you narrow that down. So I think on the traveler side, people are looking for personal connections to recommendations. On the supplier side, hotel side, the industry has really changed over the last 20 years, with the rise of the OTAs, which are online travel agencies, which is inherently a weird name for a website, but you got to go back and be like, there were these travel agencies which had stores, you know, you’d go into them, and then, like, Expedia came up, and people were like, what’s this? And they’re like, Well, it’s an online travel agency. So people call them OTAs, Expedia, kayak booking. There’s been a lot of consolidation. There’s ones in foreign countries now, they’ve really changed the relationship for hotels to distribute their content by forcing you know, they have all the power, essentially, for hotels, and I would include, to some degree, Amex and chase as cardholder programs, which are mostly booked online, into this as well. And they’ve been able to really jack up commissions, so it’s very expensive for hotels to distribute through those channels, but they do get a lot of volume. And so it’s like this, like, love, hate relationship, like, you need those travelers come through OTAs, but they’re paying a lot for OTA customer acquisition, and OTAs are spending a lot to acquire travelers. So like, booking.com you know, before the pandemic was, I think the top, if not one of the top, spenders of all the companies with Google in the advertising space. And you see, like, if you go around Europe, you see booking.com in Google Maps, like everywhere, from a hotel perspective, in the agency space has gotten really fragmented as all these individuals started like little boutique agencies. Now, if you’re a hotel and you want to sell through travel agents, you have to come to New York and spend a lot of time going around and wining and dining travel advisors, and you have lunch with six people, and it’s like, how do you know that those six people are the people that are going to move the needle for you? And so we wanted to sort of combine the best of both worlds, like the scale of the OTA, but with the human touch of the, you know, Personal Travel Advisor with with good data and things like this, and help hotels and cruises and other people distribute through a sort of modern travel agency to reach the consumer. So that’s that. That’s the triangle.

Max Branstetter 17:53
Appreciate the what is it? Trigonometry? Lesson, no, geometry.

Jake Peters 17:58
Geometry,

Max Branstetter 17:59
yeah, what is, what? Oh, trig is sine, cosine, all that stuff. Yeah,

Jake Peters 18:03
yeah. Triggers, well, I mean, these are related things. And, you know, if you take the, if you sort of take the triangle, and you, you know, you like, flatten it, you have, you know, the traveler, advisor, supplier, so that’s like the relationship. But you know, then the traveler arrives and checks in at the hotel, the triangle closes, and now you have a direct relationship between the traveler and the hotel. There’s like as the advisor, you’re not there, you’re not like on site, making sure that the experience is going well. You have to trust that the travel partner that you’ve booked for your client is doing a good job providing hospitality and its services. So there’s definitely a real partnership between these three sides that it takes to make the travel happen. And if you sort of visualize this triangle, we’re in the middle providing this platform for this triangle to exist, just like other host agencies are, but maybe not with the same tech, maybe not with the same scale in the same community. And

Max Branstetter 18:54
this is why I brought a protractor, compass and ruler for this conversation, just in case we got into the numbers and math terms. But your approach of like, kind of starting with the advisors first, and focusing on like, what can we do to like, make this the best possible experience? To like, get people back into the workforce, to get people who, like, want to work and travel in some form, and want to give travel tips and records to people, I feel like that’s really smart, and it’s part of this growing trend. I’ve seen some other entrepreneurs I’ve talked to of like, making sure that your team has flexibility, like we just had on Cara Bogner, who’s the co founder of top tier lessons, which is like, episode 306 a new business that’s made possible by n i L and college sports, where she like matches college athletes with parents who want sports lessons for their kids, and like, their whole business is built on, like, look, you’re a college athlete. Like, you can set whatever hours you want, like this can be as part time as you want it to, but there’s that constant flexibility there. So, like, it works. For everybody, and it sounds like, to an extent, that’s kind of similar to what you know, the flexibility that for provides, as well for travel advisors, is kind of like making it your own thing. It’s almost like you’re, you’re running your own business, energized by fora.

Jake Peters 20:13
That’s what it is like. And there’s sort of a couple examples there. I mean, one is, I mean, technically, it’s you’re, you’re your own contractor, you’re on travel entrepreneur, and we host you on our platform. And so other agencies will host you on a platform without tech. It’s like a platform like, what does a host agency do? It provides you with relationships to suppliers so you can get perks and great rates. It supplies you with the ability to collect commissions, and which is way more difficult than it needs to be, and something that’s plaguing the whole industry, actually, but we collect commissions and we pay them out to our advisors, and then we also, at fora, have this platform, like, literal, like website platform, where you log in and we give you workflow tools and a booking platform and other kinds of things. It’s kind of like compass was for real estate agents, where you essentially have, you have many legacy real estate agent host companies, essentially. And they may or may not have a website for you to log in as an agent, but none of them were as sophisticated as compasses was when they developed it. I have friends from Penn who worked there on their like platform team. And I was always like, what are these people doing? Where are there 50 engineers building this website for Compass real estate agents? And then I saw the platform, and I’m like, Oh, this is this is amazing. And I would be lying if I say we didn’t take inspiration from this, where you have your clients and you have integrated marketing, and it’s like, hey, these people haven’t reached out to you in a while. You should reach out to them. We’re definitely sort of building in that direction. And I think real estate was one of these careers that people went into. So you have a lot of women, especially, returning to the workforce, saying, You know what? Like, my corporate job is over. I don’t want to go back to being an accountant. I’ll be a real estate agent. But it’s a little bit more complex. You have to have licensure, you have to get you have to pass tests and exams. And then the one thing that’s interesting about real estate is you don’t really get to define your geography or your hours, like, it’s very much a local business, and so on Saturdays, you’re doing open houses, right? Like with a Travel Advisor, we sort of have this joke, because I love when people are our advisors. Our tooling for advisors works on mobile phones, and so I get advisors sending me videos in themselves all the time using our portal, like, you know, at the pool in the Amman and Turks and Caicos are like at the bar while they’re waiting for their friends that are like, making bookings and responding to clients. It’s very much something that you can do embedded into your life wherever you are, and you don’t have to be, you know, like in if is in your town on Saturdays showing houses, you just need access to your computer. So it’s kind of like the modern day. I’ll go be a real estate agent. And I think we knew there was this segment of people, because we had it, as I mentioned before, from Henley’s clients who were, I always feel like it’s a dangerous game to give ages, but let’s say, like late 40s to early 60s, like returning to the workforce, women who wanted a new career. But we also, I think one of the things that fora that surprised us was how quickly we moved beyond that segment to men and women retiring from jobs who never left the workforce, looking for, like, their third or fourth career that was gonna take them to the end, you know, and not to be grim about it, but like, sort of last job, right? That they could kind of keep doing forever, because all you need is a laptop, a phone, and like those people had made money, and so they’re traveling themselves. It’s like it fits with their lifestyle. But what was also surprising was we found all these people who were 25 to 35 who, like, worked at Google, who were lawyers, who were doctors, who really people who you’d expect to be 100% busy, but we’re also planning a lot of travel for themselves and their friends and their family and like, they book stuff like, you know, their grandparents want to take all their cousins and the mid level generation away for for festive period or for the summer. And it’s like someone has to plan that. And so they were doing it anyways. Now they can do it as an official Travel Advisor, and get access to the Travel Advisor things, rates and and perks and commission and additional community and knowledge, and so they could become, officially that person who’s going to do this every year for their family and their friends. We’re really surprised by this growth. And then we find that people, we have a lot of people, who are ramping up to do this because you don’t make a ton of money in your first year as a Travel Advisor. So any agency that says you have to come full time, you’re basically saying, Okay, I need someone who can earn no money for the first year, year and a half while they’re building their Travel Advisor business, which limits the diversity of the people that can enter the business. Because you’re saying like, that person has a savings already, or they have a spouse that’s earning a lot of money, or they have some way of supporting themselves while they ramp up at fora. We say like you’re a professional. You can be a professional Travel Advisor for as many hours as you want. You can ramp down your career, ramp up this other one, at your pace, and eventually. Make a full switch. And so we have a lot of people in our community that are in that process right now, and it’s really fascinating to see people who are like, you know, I’m gonna do this over two years, and then six months in, they’re like, I just told 10 people I was a Travel Advisor, and then those 10 people told two more people and two more people, and now I have 100 clients. And it’s like, wow,

Max Branstetter 25:18
I could do this a whole year earlier. By the way, this at the time of this recording. It’s around Halloween season. It’s spooky season. So feel free to be like, as grim and spooky scary as you want. So any reference is totally cool, which is why I’m dressed as Casper. No, I’m just, if

Jake Peters 25:34
you had been here next Thursday, where I have meetings in the office, I’m like, we have a we have, like, a partner coming in. And I’m like, Just FYI. We’re all going to be in cost.

Max Branstetter 25:42
The extra spooky. So So there’s so much like, care and detail focus, focused on, like, making this an awesome experience for the team at fora. How do you then make sure that flows through to make like, the best experience possible for actual, you know, customers that use fora,

Jake Peters 26:01
we don’t, in HQ, have total control over the travel experience with each advisor, because each advisor is an independent operator, like a couple things. Our goal is to make it so that our advisors have access to the best information possible, so that they can plan the best trips, just the volume. Like, when we were smaller, I used to read all of the advisor commentary back and forth. So we have this, like, very active community that’s constantly discussing stuff. And there’s this question of, like, Okay, I want to go to Europe one year, and I want to go to South America when I’m one year, and I want to go to Asia the next year. Like, do I need to switch travel advisors? And the thing is, from, from a client perspective, the most important part of the relationship with the Travel Advisor is that the Travel Advisor knows you. It’s very hard to for the advisor to get to know you as a person, your preferences. They’re a little bit like your financial advisor or your your therapist. Like, it takes some time to build this relationship, and they need to know when you say things that you don’t really mean, because a lot of it is like telling, like the client will say, I want to go do this. And they’re like, No, you don’t like, No, you don’t like, I’m telling you actually what you’re actually want to go do, because I know you. So the thing that advisors make advisors successful then, is that they can share information about destinations. Because if you know me, and you’re my Travel Advisor, and you book, you haven’t booked the thing that I want to go do, like the Galapagos Islands, there’s hundreds of advisors here that are experts on the Galapagos Islands, and people are really more than willing to share all of that information with you, and so we have a whole setup with our community and WhatsApp groups and other ways for advisors to chat about that stuff, so that you could get smart on the different cruise options to the Galapagos Islands. Or what might I want to do an Ecuador combining with the Galapagos sounds and, etc, etc. What’s the best way to fly there? But you know me, and you know that, like, I’m not going to want to do more than two days on a boat, or I’m not going to want to do like, you know, this thing, or I have my kids, or, you know, like this, and are too little to do this other thing. And so you can sort of easily provide a great experience for me by marrying the community information together with your knowledge of the client. And so our goal is to create systems and tooling to make that happen in a very seamless way, because not every advisor knows everything. It’s just even at smaller host agencies like anyone who tells you they know everything is lying. And there’s a very famous advisor. Her name is Valerie Wilson. She’s very emblematic of the industry. She has grandkids already. I mean, she’s not new to the industry. I’ve been at trade events where I’m, like, standing next to her, you know, talking to a hotelier who’s like, with his little table and stand presenting hotels. And she’s asking, like, you know, questions and learning about these hotels. So there’s never it’s one of my other passions is wine. And I say this a lot about wine, like, there’s, I have friends who are like, winning awards, like best sommelier in the world kind of thing. And even they have more information to learn. You can never know all the information. And so I think when it comes to providing client experiences that are really impactful, it’s like, how do you get access to all of this great information in the most efficient way possible? Because there’s always more to

Max Branstetter 29:01
learn. And I have one more VC on the hot seat question for you. No, but okay,

Jake Peters 29:06
I love doing the Q and A, yeah, of course. But that’s the thing about being the third co founder. Like my two co founders do like the kind of prepared remarks, and then often don’t go to those meetings. And then they’re like, Jake, they want to do like the Q and A with you on the tech stuff. I’m like, I’m ready.

Max Branstetter 29:24
You’re like, the utility infielder, outfielder, ready for anything. But on the tech side, like, I know there’s a whole can of worms you can open with tech but just like, high level, what is like an endeavor that you and the tech team at fora did, and was, like, a big focus that you think has, like been the biggest driver to the growth of the company so

Jake Peters 29:47
far. It’s definitely the booking platform. Booking hotels is really interesting, because if you’re a Travel Advisor, you have access to all of these preferred partnership rates through a good host agency like i. That has that. So we have we have that. So we have consortias that we’re a part of, like virtuoso or small leading hotels, and other ones hotels have their own preferred partner programs, like Hyatt prevail or Rosewood elite. And then we also have negotiated deals with individual properties, or we’ve negotiated our own bespoke deals with a brand like, oh bearish that doesn’t have a chain wide preferred partner program. So then to go access those. So let’s say your, your client, wants to go to Hawaii, and you want to, like, get all the preferred partner rates and see all of the stuff that we have in Hawaii. The traditional way, I guess you could do this is you go on the GDS, which would involve, like, a matrix, like looking, you know, like in the old days, when you go to airlines and you’d see this, like them typing in a in a terminal system that, you know, with, like command line prompts. This is the GDS, and it was invented in the 70s on mainframes for airlines, and then quickly also expanded to hotels and other things. And it’s kind of like clearing house of information that allows you to book Airlines is primarily the business, but also hotels, and they have connectivity to all the different hotel chains. And hotels load and rates in and distribute them through the system. And so you can, you can use it through these like antiquated interfaces, or they all have APIs now, the main GDSs, and you can build your own interface on top of it. So we’ve spent a lot of time building our own booking platform on top of our GDS partner. So if you see our fora advisor portal, it looks like a very beautiful, consumer grade OTA website. I’m biased, but I think it was really looks nice, but has a lot more details around perks and commissions, and we’ve integrated community things like client reviews, advisor reviews. So if you’re an advisor and you go visit a hotel on a site tour, you can take pictures and leave your comments and upload that right into our booking platform. You can see how many times people have booked this, and very soon, we’ll extend this to like people who booked this also book this and all sorts of other data that we have proprietary to us in our own booking platform, but from partners, you can now see in one place all of our preferred partner rates. And you can also, now that we’ve done the next step, we have all of the best sort of rates from people like Expedia booking and all the stuff that you’d see if you were to search on Google, and the sidebar where you see all these wholesaler rates and OTA rates. So as an advisor, you’re able to tell your client who may be new to working with a Travel Advisor. I want to recommend this property for you in Paris. It’s we have a preferred Partnership deal. Here’s a refundable rate. It has perks. When you look this up on Google, you’re going to see a rate that’s $100 less, but it doesn’t have the breakfast and the upgrade and this other stuff, this spa credit. So actually our rate is cheaper if you actually value it correctly. But if you want to book this other rate, I can also book that for you too. And so we’ve combined all of this together in a really easy to use interface, along with soon to roll out very soon advanced features that let you track price changes over time and see alerts on price changes for bookings you’ve already made, and other kinds of things. And there’s really no other I’ve looked at all of the other tools out there that exist for travel advisors, and from a booking side, there’s other things, but they don’t come close to exactly what we have built for our advisors. So that’s been the most powerful thing that I think makes it easy to step into this, because without that, you’re like opening 100 tabs, and you’re searching around, and you’re writing information down on spreadsheets or, like, on notepads, and then you’re consolidating it, and it’s really a lot of work to get simple answers for your client.

Max Branstetter 33:30
Yeah, congrats, and thank you for that. That is like the biggest pain point. I think overall, with travel, it’s like you have this awesome reward at the end of it going on a trip, but there’s so much effort going into it and just planning it, and so whatever you and team could do to make that as simple and easy as possible is just awesome and awesome. That is usually the way people describe the puns in the podcasting to the max newsletter. I mean, there’s no other way to describe it if you want awesome puns that are just awesome. As people say, you can sign up at max podcasting.com/newsletter it is your newsletter, short and sweet every Thursday that is where podcasting tips, meet entrepreneurial stories, meet terrible puns, Max podcasting.com/newsletter now let’s switch it up to dive into how in the world Jake and his family balance family and startups and beyond. I want to switch gears a little bit, because on top of everything you’re doing with your plate full at work, you revealed when we were chatting earlier, that actually at home, you have three kids under five, including twins. You’re co founder of a startup and now hot off the press, your wife is co founder of a startup as well. She’s

Jake Peters 34:53
technically not a co founder, but she’s like one of the first employees of a non alcoholic beer company called Bero, BeroBrewing.com,

Max Branstetter 35:00
yeah, congrats on that. That’s a really exciting space to be in. And I’ll consider a co founder. Well, well, you know, they can, they can deal with me on the waterfall chart or whatever, but you can tell I don’t know funding. But how do you guys do it all?

Jake Peters 35:15
Well, we don’t sleep a lot. She was off work for a little bit, and before going back to work. I think in her mind, she was going to go to, like, a big company and kind of not hide, because she’s a hard worker. So there’s no way she doesn’t like and we both, neither of us, have like a kind of middle gear, like we both, we’re going to do something We work extremely hard. So the question is, what are you committing yourself to? And I think in the corporate world, where it’s, like, very political, and you can sort of, like, detach a bit more, but you do with, like, these frustrations that kind of come up, and there’s unpredictability, like someone needs a, you know, PowerPoint, like, tomorrow, and you’re like, Okay, great. I mean, the startup world is, it’s a little bit more tolerable in the startup world, because you’re doing it a little bit for yourself, and you ultimately have more flexibility, because these small companies, it’s a team of 10 people. If you need to duck out for an hour, you can kind of move a meeting around your schedule. So, you know, we also have great support system at home with, you know, excellent nanny, and, like, our schools are near us. And you know, we’re very fortunate in that regard. We have neighbors and but to say that we don’t like put the kids to bed, and then when we’re home, and, you know, like, immediately, both get back on our computers and work for hours. That’s what we do. I think we both like working, so that’s good, and I don’t want to speak for her, but I think we’d both rather be working for ourselves, in some sense, than working for some bigger, bigger company. It makes it rewarding to do this kind of stuff.

Max Branstetter 36:39
So you have a great system in place, but obviously, like, it’s still a lot of work mentally or to set those boundaries to be like, All right, like, when we’re home and our kids are not sleeping yet, like we need to be as present as possible. How do you kind of establish that the

Jake Peters 36:56
thing is, like, to put the and I’m really bad at this, and we, she reminds me, we sort of have to figure out how to help each other, because, you know, I run out of work a little bit earlier. The day isn’t quite over. You know, it’s six when I’m home, so there’s still messages coming in, and if I have my phone on me, I’m looking at them, what I try to do is, and I’m not always, I mean, to be totally honest, I’m not always successful in this, but what does work is, if you take the phone out of your pocket and put it on the counter away from you, and then you just don’t have it on you. And I actually stopped, like, I stopped wearing my Apple watch because I loved my Apple watch. And I was like, I don’t need these notifications all the time, like, I don’t need to know that I have a text message or I have an email coming in. And so it was more work to figure out how to fine tune that than just like, taking the Apple Watch off. So now I have a old school watch and a phone that I can put down. And so I think the key is like, we both put our phones down, and then you don’t look again. The problem is like, then we’ll be sitting around eating, and we’re like, hey, what’s the weather like tomorrow? And then you’re like, the phone, you know, or, like, it’s like, hey, what time is this happening? And you’re like, Okay, let’s we need to Google something, and then you quickly pick up your phone and and there’s like, 17 notifications. It’s so hard. So my son and I have recently started doing things where I use chat GPT to create stories. I don’t know we have this, this joke about the tickling Phantom. He we speak French at home. He speaks English and French. So the tickling Phantom is a ghost. Anyway, it was like we used to, like, hide under blankets and tickle each other, and we were joking that we were like the tickling ghost. So we started creating the series of stories using chat, G, P, T, so it has brought a little bit of the phone into, like, the bedtime routine, but it what I try to do. Instead of like, you can generate these stories and then have the have the app read them. And if I don’t put the phone down, I’ll like, switch the app and start, like, reading slack while it’s like, reading the story. So what I do is I, like, literally try to set it to read out loud and put the phone down over there, so I’m present, and actually, like listening to the story, and he notices, you know, if I’m doing that or not. So I think that’s really the only, the only way to do it. And like, the messages will wait. And then soon as the kids are down, it’s like, okay, we’re both like, we can ignore it. We either eat dinner together, try not to look at our phones, or we’re like, okay, let’s just eat dinner at our desks, our home desks, and like, you know, get back to work so we can get to bed as fast as possible. Yeah,

Max Branstetter 39:17
appreciate that. I think that’s golden. Of like, like, obviously, we rely on our phone so much, and, like, our phones make so much possible. But also, like, just the pure, genuine family time, like, the most important thing in that moment can be leaving your phone on the counter or in another room, or, like, making sure you’re present. And it is really tricky, because it’s like, you know, something’s really cute, have really cute happening. That’s you’re like, oh, you should take pictures of videos of videos of this. And then it’s like, oh, you’re seeing your emails and your texts again. So really, really tricky there. But by the way, that is the, probably the most fun and ticklish use of chatgpt I’ve ever heard.

Jake Peters 39:51
It’s great, and you can make it read in different accents. So we have it say French words, or the French Canadian accent, the Phantom chateau. It’s very it’s fun. And you can, like, have it, modify the stories. And then I was like, I’m sure other people are doing this. So I started to go down a rabbit hole and, like, read it. There’s, like, tons of people that are, like, sharing prompts for like, more advanced stories. But what’s really nice is you can say, I need a four minute story, two minute story, five minute story, so I can go back to a previous story and say, regenerate this with like a slightly different version, and make it three minutes and you have a bedtime story.

Max Branstetter 40:28
Well, we’re much better off with you Pronouncing French or French Canadian than me, and we’re much better off with you answering rapid fire questions than me. So let’s wrap up with some rapid fire Q, a. You ready for it? Let’s do it. All right, let’s get wild. Phantom, how did I do see home?

Jake Peters 40:47
Also, it’s a mess.

Max Branstetter 40:52
All right, what is the hands down, tastiest sip of wine you’ve ever had. Like, what wine was? It

Jake Peters 41:01
easy, 19 my birth year, which I’ll expose for everyone here, 1978 domain, Roman y Conte, which is, you know, the famous, expensive burgundy. It wasn’t their most famous or expensive covet, but it was a hesitate, and I can’t expose where I had this, but it wasn’t my bottle. Someone graciously gave me a 20 ml sip of this wine that I smelled for like two hours and then finally drank. I’ll never forget this, and you can reveal it, it was me who gave it to you. So yes, thank you so much. Once again, Mercy. It was a New Year’s Eve at a restaurant. If that person listens to this, thanks again.

Max Branstetter 41:35
I’m sure they will. They again. It is me perks. We didn’t dive into it too much, but for offers a ton of perks and like potential upgrades and little sweet things like that. One of my guests called it, what’s it? Creature comforts, things like that.

Jake Peters 41:49
Creature Comforts is the name of a Wallace and Gromit cartoon. I don’t have you ever seen this, but Google creature comforts. It’s like a British people being voiced. They’ve used, like claymation to use animals to with, like, real, live interviews of British people anyway. Oh

Max Branstetter 42:03
my god, no. Thank you so much for interjecting. There’s

Jake Peters 42:05
like a lion who has, like a Brazilian guy living in England talking about how there’s space, I think it’s called creature comforts. Thank you. Perfect.

Max Branstetter 42:13
Well, that was why I brought this up. I’m actually, I know I grew up on Wallace and Graham, and haven’t thought about Wallace and Graham and since growing up. So thank you for that. That’s I’m gonna deep dive after this. But anyway, you as a traveler, what would be, what’s your like, favorite perk? Like, if you find that you have some sort of like, upgrade, what’s your your go to? Like, this is awesome.

Jake Peters 42:33
That’s a good question. I mean, the upgrade is really nice. Like, having more space, not to bring it back to space, a better view space, like, usually, somewhere to sit that’s not your bed. And I’d say I was a consultant for eight years, and, you know, lived in hotels and Monday, you know, for most of the week. And after doing I went abroad and did this, and I realized, like, after a year of living basically in hotels for like, a year straight, the thing that I hadn’t done was sit on a sofa, because you like, if you’re staying at, like, a business hotels, like, there’s no sofas, like we weren’t getting upgrades, so there’s, like, you know, you’re in a regular room, there’s no sofa. So I think going to a room where you have an upgrade and, like a sofa and like a lounge areas, is really nice. Also breakfast. I’m a big breakfast guy, so the breakfast included is the nicest perk of all of these things. And I think everyone has had this experience who’s traveled ordering room service or getting the bill at breakfast, and you’re like, Wait, this is $75 like, what is this? Like, $15 tax and $10 service charge. So just having that be zero is really nice.

Max Branstetter 43:35
Thank you. Yeah, I’m totally with you on both of those. We did a Spain and Portugal trip this summer, which, which was awesome. And, like, we were really happy with all the hotels, but some of our favorite parts are, like, the rooms that did have, like a sofa or couch, or, how do you say it looks like Chase Shays, whatever, chaise lounge? Perfect. Yeah, whatever, as one of those. And also, like, breakfast is so hit or miss hotels that offer it versus you need to pay for it. So crazy, but all right, what was the most difficult class you took at Wharton?

Jake Peters 44:07
I guess it’s a toss up between my finance and my accounting classes. I would say I knew I was not going to Wharton to be a finance major. I knew I was not going to Wharton to be an accountant. And in theory, I like all these things. But as I mentioned, I study computer science, and so the problem with computer science is that the homework can take an unlimited amount of time, like it doesn’t, as we were talking about before, when you’re building like it doesn’t the you’re not done until like the program runs. So we used to sleep in the lab a lot. You know, that just meant I didn’t pay attention in some of those classes. So the fact that I, like, managed to eke out, like, a b plus or something, and, like, you know, accounting 102, I mean, very lucky,

Max Branstetter 44:51
yeah, I have PTSD from that as well. Like, college finance and accounting classes are no joke. And I’m sure a warden, it’s another level, all right? And then what? This could be about anything, just small, minuscule, work wise, or personal life wise. What’s your biggest pet peeve?

Jake Peters 45:06
Like, literally, I was almost late to, it’s a good thing. We were both a little late because,

Max Branstetter 45:11
yeah, which you just out of me, by the way, that’s, that’s, yeah, that’s ever happened. Oh, really sorry. No, I’m

Jake Peters 45:16
just going we were, I was sitting with our designers, and we were looking at some alignment issues. And so I think like, one of the things we take so this is an answer in the realm of product, you know, which is the other job I have it for. And I think the thing that I try to instill on people, in our whole team, is that the way we craft the product that we build is super important. And if you think about like, the like funk of the like, you know, 1990s 80s, Mercedes door closing, like that solid funk. You want the product to have that feel to it, because you can miss a feature. You can be a little bit later with the feature. You can but if, when you, when you use websites yourself, if the if the website is constructed with whatever that is, you know, the Mercedes door funk, in that way you you really enjoy using the product, and if it’s the thing I think that detracts from that immediately, is, like, weird font sizes or weird alignment, or, like, Wait, why is this spacing, vertical spacing between paragraphs? So I’m kind of annoying about those kinds of things, and I’ll be like, we’re not releasing this if, like, you know this vertical spacing between the paragraphs is not correct, and we haven’t really thought about the sizing of fonts and things like this, because to me, that’s like, how we communicate our trust. It’s one way we can communicate trust with our users. And so, like, we’ve taken the time like, and I’ll give you an example. At Wharton, I took a class, which was my favorite, Wharton class, information systems, with Lauren hit. I wrote a paper that was like, it was a 10 page paper on like a marketplace business model, and I basically described like, home away at the time, which, you know, is now famously, the vacation home rental market has evolved a lot since the 90s. I was a procrastinator in college, and sometimes still am today. So I wrote the paper, and he wrote like, this is an A plus, but please next time, just like, read the paper, because you have all these typos. Like you would have just thought if you had read it, like, I could literally tell you didn’t read it. I’m a big fan of like, reading and rewriting my emails to the team or to clients and and I think the same as the product, like you look at something and you’re like, if there’s weird alignment, it’s like, you didn’t read it and look at it again. And I think users can feel that. And so it’s really a pet peeve of mine when people don’t see the little details. Not to say that, you know, there’s all this talk about, like, no one should strive for perfection. We can make mistakes. That’s totally fine, but there’s a very big difference between, like, not doing something and trying to make it perfect, but just saying we need to just make sure that stuff is aligned. This may not be the perfect alignment, but we actually did look at it and it’s not unaligned, you know, like, or un thought, thought out that

Max Branstetter 47:42
one hits extra close to home, because today the time of recording. You know, I sent out a newsletter this morning, and I like to pride myself in being very good with, like, having few typos, and I, like, reread multiple times make edits before I send and I had a big typo at like, the start of the newsletter, and I didn’t see it until after I sent it out to everybody, so I’m with you. All right. Last one, what would be your dream place to chill out and retire?

Jake Peters 48:11
I’d say probably somewhere in Europe, maybe somewhere in Spain, somewhere near the Mediterranean. I love the Mediterranean. My wife and I took a bike trip in the Costa, brava region of Catalonia. That’s nice as one does. We’re like, biking and looking up, like, property websites like, how much does this house cost? You know, like, so that would be fun.

Max Branstetter 48:32
Perfect, cool. And, yeah, we’ll run into you, you know, as Frequenters of Mallorca. Now, we’ve never been, but my wife’s family talks about Mallorca. Has a place in Mallorca, and loves it there.

Jake Peters 48:44
There’s amazing I would for my 40th birthday, my wife got me, which was the trip was slightly delayed, but we went just before the pandemic. It was like our last trip actually ended a week in mayor. It was amazing hiking and eating and just exploring really special place. So there’s amazing hotels there that we work with. So when you’re ready to go, if you don’t have to stay with your friends, we can hook you up, perfect.

Max Branstetter 49:09
Well, it all comes full circle. And speaking of full circle, we’ve gone from C 3p, O to Wallace and Gromit. So appreciate all the pop culture fandom here. But Jake, thank you so much. This has just been awesome. And for I think what you’re doing is a couple as a company is so cool. The Travel Advisor side, on the supplier side, on the travelers side, I know if people want to learn more, they can do so at Fora Travel.com, for is F, O, R, A, and then is there any place that if people want to connect with you online, you

Jake Peters 49:38
want to shout out, yeah, if it’s like for work purposes, LinkedIn is probably the best. I don’t really tweet and my Instagram is more like my kids. I’d say LinkedIn is the best place to see what we’re up to hear

Max Branstetter 49:49
it for perfect. And then last thing, final thoughts. We’ll call it the fora. Final thoughts, just to quote words to live by your favorite line from Wallace and crime, whatever you want. Send us home here. I

Jake Peters 50:00
was almost gonna say this before in one of your other answers you know about when you said, like, team and like, how do we ensure a great experience for our clients? And I think I’m stealing something one of my co founders says a lot is really servant leadership. And I think the founders try to do this with our team here, and we try to instill that with the other levels of leadership at HQ, but really also for our advisors, like, we’re really all existing at HQ to serve our advisors, to help them serve their clients. So it’s this real big culture of kind of servitude, you know, and like, making sure that we exist to help other people do their jobs better. And so I think that philosophy is really good. The other thing I’d say is, if you want, like, a recommendation, we were just talking about this internally here, there’s two books that I highly recommend to everyone that I was just trying to figure out how to buy them in bulk for my team is one is Danny Meyer setting the table. So he’s the founder of Union Square Hospitality Group and the Union Square Cafe. This book is excellent, and there’s a you can google it too. Like there’s this clip about the salt shaker metaphor, which I think is really a good analogy around like, how, as a manager, you need to keep like, what your job is, to remind people about how to hold standards high and what they need to keep doing, so you can go see it more for yourself. And the other is Atul Gawande. Is book called The Checklist Manifesto, and he’s a great writer. And if you like medicine, like his other books on medicine are really great. He’s a surgeon in Boston, and The Checklist Manifesto is amazing. I also had a job in aviation, so I’ve seen checklists before in action, and if I’ve had a lot of surgeries, and so I’ve seen, you know, pre op checklists in action on the operating table. We talk a lot about checklists here at fora, so I highly recommend this book as well.

Max Branstetter 51:46
Thank you, Jake. I made the 311 reference at the start, and I’ll close this out by saying you are certainly not Less Than Jake. Thank you so much, Jake, for coming on the Wild Business Growth podcast, sharing your Wild story, and thank you, Wild Listeners for tuning into another episode. If you want to hear more Wild stories like this one, make sure to Follow the Wild Business Growth podcast on your favorite podcast app, or Subscribe on YouTube, where you can check out the video versions. YouTube is @MaxBranstetter. You can also find us on Goodpods, and for any help with podcast production, you can learn more at MaxPodcasting.com and sign up for the Podcasting to the Max newsletter. That is where podcasting meets entrepreneurship meets puns worse than the rock band references in this episode, and you can sign up at MaxPodcasting.com/Newsletter Until next time, Let your business Run Wild…Bring on the Bongos!!