Zurich One of Europe's Best-Kept Tech Secrets, Says GetYourGuide CEO Reck

 

GetYourGuide has certainly come a long way from our early days at ETH and the Zurich Technopark. This year, I feel we’ve truly graduated from our startup phase, and we’re now truly on a path toward becoming the next great world-beating travel brand. 

 

We’ve just sold our 25-millionth ticket and our global team is now over 500-strong, with offices and great products on every continent except Antarctica. The days of fighting to hire top talent and get in the door with potential partners and suppliers are a thing of the past.

 

Our next great challenge lies in the year ahead: making GetYourGuide a household name. This summer, we’re diversifying and expanding our marketing channels dramatically to translate our business momentum into a travel brand that travelers around the world love and remember.

 

You studied biochemistry at ETH in the 2000s, was it always your intention to become an entrepreneur?

 

Not in the least. I come from an academic family, and before I founded GetYourGuide, I was firmly on my way toward a life of science and research.  My parents and grandparents have always been big supporters of GetYourGuide – not to mention, our first customers – but they still hope I’ll find my way back to the world of academia after this tourism 'project'!

 

What was your inspiration to found GetYourGuide?
 

In 2007, my co-founder Tao Tao and I were both living in Zurich and attending ETH; he pursued physics while I pursued biochemistry. As part of ETH Model UN, one of the many student clubs we both belonged to, we traveled to Tao’s hometown of Beijing. 

 

By mistake, I ended up landing a day early, and it was a costly mistake indeed. I spent hours just wandering the streets of Beijing, not knowing where to go or what to do. The next day, Tao arrived, and immediately stepped into the role of tour guide. As he likes to put it, “suddenly everyone was nicer, the food was twice as good and everything cost half as much.” 

 

That’s how our original insight was born, and when we got back to Zurich, we wrote our first business plan. The rest, as they say...

CEO Reck with Tao Tao, Martin Sieber and Tobias Rein.

 

Did being in Switzerland affect your path from student to CEO?

 

Honestly, back then, the odds were stacked against me in Switzerland. Many of our ETH classmates had clear career paths before them: management consulting, corporate R&D, academia. GetYourGuide’s path, by contrast, was completely untrodden, and many people advised us against even taking it. 

 

When we started, we were paying ourselves 40 percent of the minimum wage to keep the company afloat. In an expensive country like Switzerland, that salary does not enable a glamorous life, to say the least. We ate a lot of döner and supermarket ramen, and our first office space was so small and cramped, we had to be careful not to kick the power cord of our server out of the wall, or our whole site would crash. That happened more than a few times.

 

But that’s what motivated me and my co-founders even more. We wanted to carve our own path and follow what we believed in, not what was given to us on a silver platter. Nowadays, there is more mentorship, counsel and capital available to startup founders in Switzerland, but it’s still not nearly enough. I’d like to see real change in the coming years.

 

When did you realize this student project would become your livelihood? 

 

Getting money in the mail! No kidding: in its original iteration, GetYourGuide existed for about a year in 2008 as a peer-to-peer student platform. Remember, these were the days when Facebook was just taking off on university campuses, so we thought there might be a market for students to take tours from their peers. We failed miserably!

 

But in the course of the experiment, a Swiss rafting company saw our efforts, and contacted us with a request to be listed on our site, along with a check for a few hundred Swiss Francs. That was the moment that opened our eyes to the real market opportunity: the global community of in-destination tour operators and activity providers without a central platform to connect with travelers.

 

GetYourGuide is a Swiss company with an engineering hub in Zurich. What is special about the city? Is it better to hire here than in Berlin, London or San Francisco?

 

Zurich is one of Europe’s best-kept tech secrets. The benefits of the pipeline to ETH are undeniable, and the local talent pool is becoming only more enriched thanks to global players like Google coming to town.

 

Our Zurich-based engineering team works on some of the deepest layers of GetYourGuide’s technology stack, ensuring our platform and infrastructure are ready for the next 10 years of growth. There’s no shortage of exciting technical challenges available to tackle.

 

We find that the culture and lifestyle of Zurich is a surprisingly great fit for engineering talent, too. With fresh air, an extremely high standard of living and gorgeous scenery all around, the city of Zurich is the perfect complement to a tech job: the nature hikes our Zurich staff have taken are without a doubt some of the best team offsites around. I’m jealous!

 

You now lead a company with offices in 16 countries. For students studying for their bachelors at ETH today the path from seminar-room to CEO may seem implausible. What does it take? What made the difference and helped you succeed?

 

Whenever I meet aspiring entrepreneurs, I give them the same three pieces of counsel, no matter where they are in the world. 

 

First, good advice is priceless. Don’t choose your investors based on whoever's willing to cut you the biggest check: prioritize those that contribute to your culture and expand your way of thinking above all else. The same principle applies to team members, business partners… anyone you surround yourself with as a founder.

 

Second, be dedicated to infinite learning. Tao likes to say that, as a founder, your only superpower is your ability to learn more quickly than your competition. Treat every failure as a chance to learn, and find the growth opportunity within.

 

Lastly, let your employees share in your success. For today’s top talent, salary is just one of many motivating factors when it comes to joining and building a startup. Committing to a shared vision and being given true part-ownership of the company are just as important. Our American counterparts understand this well, but this is one area in which Europe has not caught up. I’m a big proponent of more flexible employee stock option policies across our continent, as I’d like to see the next Facebook-scale tech company come from this side of the Atlantic.

 

These principles made all the difference for GetYourGuide in our early days, and I’ve never followed them more closely myself than I do today.