S12E5: Bootstrapping to Billions in Corporate Travel with Elia Wallen, Founder and CEO of Engine

As resources grow, as our capabilities grow and we understand the market more, we'll start to add things like flight sim cards, which we just did. And a couple other spaces that we're excited about is groups. It's a very big problem and we're solving it, I think, through technology and people. And that's how you build it, right? It's iterative. You see what clients need, see where the market takes you, but don't try to be all things to everyone. Just because someone else does it a particular way doesn't mean that you have to.

Welcome to The Room Podcast.

I'm Claudia Laurie, the founder, and I'm Madison McIlwain, the funder.

We are on a mission to open the door to the room where it happens, sharing the stories of some of the world's most iconic builders.

Authentic storytelling is core to our community. It all started as two best friends who met in the heart of San Francisco as product managers in 2018. When I left Uber to start my company, Madison was our first yes. It was these conversations that birthed The Room Podcast.

And nearly 5 years later, our guests have built businesses with a combined enterprise value of over $100 billion. You'll recognize conversations with your favorite technology founders from Perplexity to Vercel to Zillow to Cloudflare, all across our 110-episode catalog. The best way for you to get to know our community, both online and offline, is by subscribing to the podcast and our newsletter, which you can find at theroompodcast.com.

Perkins Coie supports the most innovative entrepreneurs and investors in fast-moving and high-growth sectors, addressing their myriad of legal needs. But the firm doesn't just provide end-to-end legal and business counseling to its startup clients. It also facilitates introductions to key advisors and sources of capital. Perkins Coie's interactive website, Startup Percolator, offers access to programs, resources, and rich dynamic content. Designed to assist entrepreneurs on their startup journey. To learn more, go to startuppercolator.com and perkinscoie.com.

This podcast is brought to you by Mercury, the banking platform businesses like The Room Podcast use to simplify their finances. It's time banking did more than hold your money. Now it can. With Mercury, you can pay bills in seconds, close the books faster, and even send invoices. Not only does Mercury do away with a patchwork of tools, it eliminates guesswork, giving you complete and accurate visibility into your business's finances, all from one account. Apply in minutes at mercury.com.

In today's episode of The Room Podcast, we sit down with Alaya Wallen, the founder and CEO of Enjin. Enjin is a fast-growing B2B travel platform helping businesses book hotels, flights, and rental cars. In an era where AI is transforming how teams discover, plan, and optimize travel, Engine is building the infrastructure to meet modern expectations by layering personalization, automation, and low-friction UX on top of a deeply integrated supply network. Born in Logan, Ohio, and raised in Naples, Florida, Ilya dropped out of college and launched more than a dozen LLCs before the age of 22. It was in Denver and not Silicon Valley where he bootstrapped Traveler's Haven into one of the largest corporate housing platforms in the country. Instead of rushing to scale or raise capital, he quietly built a product that his customers insisted on and held this focus firmly for 5 years before expanding it to start Enjin. From narrowly avoiding bankruptcy days during his Series A to navigating COVID as a travel startup, Elia brings a refreshingly grounded lens for company building. And today, Enjin is used by thousands of companies across the country and recently closed a $140 million Series C at a $2.1 billion valuation. As conversational AI reshapes how people interact with travel. Eli is building Engine to go from a just booking tool to mission-critical infrastructure for corporate lodging and beyond. Themes and insights from this episode include building a moat within the SMB segment, avoiding the noise by starting outside of tech hubs, and raising capital when focus meets friction, not just when you can. Let's open the door. Eli, thank you so much for joining us today in the room. We're thrilled to have you, and we love to start at the beginning with all of our guests, which is really about where you grew up. So tell us about that and how that's shaped your view of the world.

I grew up in Naples, Florida, which is a retirement community for those of you that know. Beautiful spot, but to be a young kid growing up, maybe not the best unless you're really into golf or the beach, which at the time I wasn't as much.

So growing up in a retirement community, where did that set your sights? Were you destined to leave from a young age? I would hope maybe there was an interim between your end and your beginning there, or vice versa.

I'm going to insult a lot of people with the retirement community comment, so we ought to take it back. Different vibe than a big city. But yeah, I dropped out of college my first semester and being a native and at the time in Naples, Florida, there was a lot of snowbirds coming down and spending the winter. And so I did have the benefit of knowing the space in the market. So when I dropped out of college, I went into real estate, which was what you do if you don't know what you're going to do, at least in Naples, go get your real estate license. and that's what I did. And then I started building my business beyond that and knew that Maples probably wasn't going to have the young talent that I needed to scale a business.

We love telling what I would maybe consider an untraditional career path. Dropping out of college, I think qualifies as such. Tell us about that early identity for you, and did you always think you were gonna become a founder?

Oh yeah. Yeah, it's, geez, I probably started 15 LLCs by the time I was 22.

Wow. New record, I think. Yeah.

If I had an idea, it was before like LegalZoom too. I would spin up an LLC and I would just do a thing. And later on the tax returns, the burden of having a ton of LLCs is, doesn't make a ton of sense. So it's not the advice to go do a ton of things at once. But yeah, I think just it was opportunities abound and when you're young and ambitious and you just wanted to I don't know, get going. That's what I did. So, I started several companies and the first large commercial successful one was Traveler's Haven, which took, it took me up until 2 years ago when I sold it to a company called Blueground. So, learned a lot. Every one of them was its own adventure.

So, this was in your DNA from a young age and learning on the job is a critical function. How did some of these earlier founding experiences, you mentioned one just now with Travel Haven, shape your view of leadership? How has that brought into the leader you are today?

Oh goodness. Just trial by fire. You just learn as you go. There's pros and cons to anything, right? But in this case, I wasn't told how to be a leader, right? I didn't have a professor or school book to tell me what I'm supposed to do and when I'm supposed to do it. So I think there's a lot of benefit to that, but also probably some very obvious missteps that I took that I could have avoided, but I'm just a doer. Put me in. Where's the problem? Where's the opportunity? Let's go figure it out. And I do think that there's a lot of benefit of not coming from another industry or someone else's perception of what this industry or space is supposed to do. And made a ton of mistakes, but also learned a lot of things and probably approached things differently because it was a clean canvas versus being filled by someone else's opinions or experiences.

That's incredible. Numerous LLCs later and a fresh perspective on the space, you co-founded Edgen in 2014. Before we dive into the aha moment, tell us what Enjin does for our listeners who might not have heard of Enjin before.

Essentially a B2B travel booking tool. Funny thing, it was really just an internal tool for Traveler's Haven customers. We were doing corporate housing at Traveler's Haven, primarily to healthcare industry, and it was going very well. We became the third largest corporate housing company in the country, bootstrapped from day one. We never raised a dollar. And our customers said, hey, book hotels for us. And I said, go to hotels.com. What are you talking about? I don't understand how I'm going to create any value. And clearly there are tools and services out there that are built. And as we started to understand the problem a little bit more, the customers were quite persistent. We realized that there really was a gap here. And so the idea was just to start out with this booking tool to give to our customers so they could self-serve. And, uh, it clearly snowballed from there.

I've personally felt the pain of having to book hotels and flights individually for my sales team. And being a sub-10-person company, although small, the complexity really mounts and you're navigating all of these different schedules and bookings. So I personally understand the need for a company like Enjin. Enjin was originally named Hotel Engine. Walk us through how you thought about this as an initial wedge into the corporate travel space and as you were hearing from those customers and you were thinking, okay, how are we differentiated here? Tell me a little bit more about that specific moment where you were like, wait, no, this is something different. This is something that can break through in this market.

I wasn't thinking super big at the time. It was like, let's just— I did lodging, so it wasn't really travel. I wasn't trying to solve business travel problems. I was trying to solve a lodging problem, especially for customers that were doing corporate housing. This was really like to do the bookends of any sort of corporate housing stay. Usually they need hotels at the beginning and the end. And so that's all this was. And there was value, so there was savings and there was convenience, right? So payments that we would handle on behalf of the customers, some other amenities, reporting, some of those things that just were very obvious. And there were platforms and tools that were out there that would do this, but they were really designed for enterprise, larger businesses. And so you have that. And then on the other side, you had more of the B2C specific platforms. So what we did is we wanted to merge that, bring low friction, ease of use that you kind of see on a consumer site, but bring down maybe any cost or burden to get some of the tools like analytics and payment terms and things like that.

I find a lot of the most successful businesses are the ones that didn't just, you know, start with some crazy lofty vision, but actually solved a real hair on fire problem for a specific customer segment, did it well and grew into a larger vision over time. Enjin operates on a B2B model, as you mentioned, serving businesses now of all sizes with their travel and accommodation needs. Tell us, who was your first customer and how did you think about scaling your go-to-market motion?

First customers were those customers that we knew. So we had a very captive audience, which was fantastic, right? I didn't have to spin up a bunch of marketing or sales teams. We just basically like, hey, try this out. We started to get feedback and started to iterate from there. And then clearly it became pretty obvious that we'd have a more commercially viable, larger product because we were building it for this business and many other businesses that could benefit. Yeah, scaling go-to-market. Honestly, we've been very scrappy. Uh, when some of these founders raise a lot of money, I just— money ruins a lot of things. It makes people think about the world differently. And I would just suggest to anyone, keep it simple. Don't go overboard. Make sure that you have a product-market fit. If I really scaled this up quickly at the beginning, I would have just lit a bunch of money on fire and still maybe learned the same things, but just a lot more expensive. So at first, just, we were smiling and dialing, hitting the phones, doing what we knew how to do, and going to some trade shows. And that's what it was. And then obviously once you got some traction and you can see, then you can start to think about scale. And that's when we raised our first money, 2019, summer of 2019 was when we first raised money. And February of 2020 is when I came over full-time CEO to Hotel Engine at the time from Traveler's Haven.

That's incredible. I'm also in the B2B space and there's multiple really established players and we're the small startup disrupting the space. So can truly relate to what it's like to build and scale a business when other players might have more capital or more brand name. The corporate travel management industry is highly competitive with entrenched players like Navant, SAP Concur, TravelPerk. You mentioned you started more SMB, but how did you position Enjin as you scaled and what strategies have you employed over time? And what advice would you have for founders who are trying to maintain a competitive edge in a market like travel?

Yeah, so I tell the team a lot, most of these startups, most of these companies start in the SMB. It's lower friction. It's easier to talk to people. It's easier to get responses. And then over time they start to go upmarket. What I truly want our team to be able to do, and I hope we can keep the focus, is to stay serving this SMB clientele. We can create a lot of value. We're not trying to be the tool for everyone. And I think some of the advice would be just simply focus on what works and go deep. There's a reason that we didn't add flights and rental cars for approximately 5 years after raising our first money. All we did was lodging until October. And I think a lot of people are like, what the hell are you doing? Don't you need all the things? And frankly, the answer is no. Of course we got to a $2 billion valuation, $2.1 billion valuation just doing lodging. And so I think there's so much pool, whether it's investors, friends, family, clients, anything that wants you to do all these other things because they sound cool and sexy. And I think the hardest thing is to like fight that self-doubt and fight those voices and just stay focused. And honestly, in my opinion, obviously I'm partial, I think we built the best lodging product there is. And now we're going to start to expand out as resources grow, as our capabilities grow and we understand the market more, we'll start to add things like flights and rental cars, which we just did. And a couple other spaces that we're excited about is groups. It's a very big problem and we're solving it, I think, through technology and people and That's how you build it, right? It's iterative. You see what clients need, see where the market takes you, but don't try to be all things to everyone, I think is probably the best piece of advice there. Just because someone else does it a particular way doesn't mean that you have to.

Double-clicking there a little bit on that expansion strategy, which congratulations on this milestone. You touched on briefly there about the fundraising. We're gonna get to that and I'm excited to dive in, but on this expansion story that you're telling, right? When you think about scaling a tech venture, there's the opportunity to either go deeper, higher contract value within your vertical, which we've established as your expertise, or to your point, which you are doing is expanding into rental cars and flights. And so how did you and your leadership team discern which was the right scaling direction to go?

We got signals. So we had built a great hotel or lodging product and we could continue to spend time there. And we are— the idea wasn't that we're going to add flights or rental cars and change our ICP entirely and change our go-to-market motion entirely. It's, we're going to continue to do more of what's worked, but we're going to offer these additional tools because customers are saying like, hey, if you can do this, can't you do that? Or man, I would love to move over, but you don't have this and this. And we just continued to hear it. So we could still win the same deals that we were doing, but at this point, again, engineering was now in the few hundreds, product had grown significantly. We could start to take some of those bigger bets outside of our core to start to turn more of those nos into yeses. When we're on the phone with customers and it's iterative though. Again, like I, I think some people do things because they feel like they're supposed to, even though, you know, in your gut, like it's not right or this isn't the right time. We believe in strong conviction, loosely held. If you ask me that this time of '24, Janfab, hard no. Fuck no. We're never doing flights around the globe. No way. Right? But as sales grew and as capabilities and more voices, like it clearly was going to be what we were going to do. So we changed our mind and I think it's very important that people change their mind too. Strong conviction loosely held. Yeah, that's the best way to put it.

Thank you for sharing a bit of that internal struggle that I'm even hearing from you as the founder of like, well, this is what we're doing. This is our North Star. I don't want to do anything else that's going to distract us. And then you have this team that you're listening to and a great leader listens well and lets the market and their customers and their team help them guide towards this next shift in scale that you're clearly in now with the rebrand with Enjin. Excited about that. I guess maybe double-clicking again into this focus narrative about how you've been able to build it. I'm curious how that played in those early years from maybe that 2014 to 2019 era where you mentioned you were still working on Travel Haven. How did you think about striding that line between extreme focus but also managing two businesses?

It's a great point. I feel like I talk about focus, but at the time I had a side project over there with Traveler's Haven. It was a tough time. We started with THH, Travelers Haven Hotels, and it was just a small manual team that was just booking on behalf of these customers. And that was working. And so that was Travelers Haven that was working. And so it became pretty obvious that we could do this outside of being manual. And so we stood up, we hired a handful of engineers and started to go to work on a hotel engine. But you're right, there was a couple times, and I don't know if I've told the story many times, that I remember going to some close friends and say, I'm gonna shut this thing down. I'm spending a couple hundred grand a year, which at the time was a massive amount of money for me. And Traveler's Haven was very successful. It was growing very fast. I'm like, what am I doing, guys? Like, I'm supposed to focus, right? Why do I have this thing? But there was something that was there. The customers were saying they wanted it. And there was some interest in just more of that scalability with something like Hotel Engine that we were building. And so we stuck with it, but, um, it was a side project. You're saying 2014, which is right. It didn't become real as a standalone product really until 2019. And we raised money summer of 2019, but early then, like, it was this thing that we had on the side that just kept going up, you know?

Claudia and I are big fans of side hustles. The podcast is actually our side hustle. And it's funny you mentioned this 5-year mark, right? We're actually in our 5th year of the podcast and you can do a lot of things very well on the side for 5 years. And then a question does become like, okay, are we going all in on this? What is this utility? So, you know, to be clear, Claudia, you're asking us asking themselves this question at the moment too. Thank you for sharing a bit behind the curtain there. We appreciate it. And I think many entrepreneurs feel this tension and it's great to hear that this worked out for you.

I would say early when I did the other LLCs, there's a little bit like safety in numbers. If I have enough of these things, it's one of them's bound to work. Enjin wasn't like that. It was more like it was going to complement. There was a purpose. It wasn't just a side hustle. It was like this, I don't know, extension of. So it wasn't really to augment or supplement something else. But early days, yeah, I did a lot of things and then a few things stuck and then ran with them.

Yeah, completely. And have you been in Denver this majority of the time building both platforms?

I'm in San Francisco now. I moved out here about 4 months ago, but yes, Denver was where it all went down.

How was building a company in a non-tech hub and what prompted you to decide to move to one?

Denver was great for the time that we were there. And again, it was up until just a few months ago. Coming from Naples, Florida, Denver was a big city. It was wild. And I didn't know any place really outside of that other than small town in Logan, Ohio, where I was born. But I, I think Denver checked a lot of the boxes when we were the size we were. Frankly, we were bootstrapped. Again, we didn't raise money, so I didn't need maybe that ecosystem that a lot of companies do early on. Great talent. Great weather, it's young, young crew out there that we could hire into. And so it worked really well. And honestly, it was probably the right, I shouldn't say probably, it was the right move for me at the time. If I would have came all the way to say San Francisco, I think money probably would have slapped me in the face and I probably would have taken it and gone down some other path. I'm really glad that I wasn't exposed honestly to all the temptations of a tech environment like out here. Early on to establish our core beliefs and business.

Claudia and I spent the better half of our career in the Bay, and there is definitely a lot of that zeitgeist that seeps into you. I had a friend when I moved there at 22 say, you're gonna become a founder. And I was like, I don't, I don't know. That's not really why I'm moving to the Bay. And then lo and behold, I started a podcast 2 years in. So here you are. Have there been any early reflections or thoughts since your move?

I love Denver, but I'm glad I got to skip the winter. I have enjoyed the weather immensely. We've met great people. Food is terrific. Honestly, probably one of the biggest things is anyone that's listening that hasn't been to San Francisco at least recently, and I was one that, I think the city's fantastic. And I think if you don't know it though, you just hear on the news and these things like kind of Mad Max-ish style, and I don't want to get political and things, but I think the city has been fantastic. It's early, but I hope it will stay the course.

I am hearing whispers that SF is back. There might even be a billboard that says that, someone's telling me. So we'll see. We'll see. The city itself aside, this move was prompted by a really exciting milestone, which you already alluded to on our call, which is experiencing significant growth and achieving a $2.1 billion valuation, $140 million Series C funding. Congratulations on this exciting round last fall.

Thanks. Thanks. You're too nice.

It's our job to, you know, hype it up a little bit, and it is seriously impressive. You kind of alluded to this around the 2019 journey of taking that initial capital, which again, doing so in a non-target market with venture dollars is a unique experience in and of itself. So maybe speaking specifically about the Enjin story, who was the first person to say yes to investing in you?

Mickey at Telescope Partners. I gotta give him a plug. He's incredible. He's an incredible investor and friend and mentor and all the things good to say about him. We were starting to think about raising money for Traveler's Haven. And so I got exposed to some VC, private equity, growth equity, and he kind of came out of the woodwork and he just like, hey, I'm going to be here. I want to meet you someday in Denver. And I was like, okay. And he came by and just salt of the earth, just like a fantastic guy. And I was smart enough, I think at the time to take his money, put my pride and ego aside. I wasn't programmed the same way. For me, like being independent and not having investors was more of a point of pride at that time. No, but he, um, he came in and certainly opened up my eyes to what could be. He was a big reason I appointed my CSO as CEO of Traveler's Haven and moved over full-time to Enjin right at the beginning of COVID which had he not invested and had he not maybe suggested and nudged and pushed me to move over full-time, the outcome may have been different, but he's a fantastic guy. I'm very lucky.

Thank you for sharing that. We love an inspiring founder-funder story. Claudia and I are an aspiring successful one. And so That deeply resonates. And unfortunately, or fortunately, cuz it's always good learning, not everything goes as planned on the founder journey. You just hit on something that definitely didn't with the global pandemic and a travel startup. But tell us a bit more about some of these moments that didn't go as you would've hoped them to.

COVID for most travel companies was a really bad time. It was a bad time for most people. We though, we got very fortunate. We were awarded a large contract with the city of New York to help support their COVID response. So we were already tied into the healthcare community from Traveler's Haven, and we stood up a program from scratch with NYSE, New York City Department of Emergency Management, and we housed tens of thousands of medical professionals and patients that were no longer critical that needed to go quarantine. So we would put them in hotels for 14 days and we did a lot of that. And so our entire business shifted overnight. Remote, obviously that was a big one for us. People don't realize like we were all going to the office every day, 5 days a week, and that was normal to not. So that was one step, but really working with the city and setting up a program as fast as we did, it was the wildest time of my professional life. And we had a very good outcome and New York was a terrific partner throughout the whole thing. And I think we, we made a difference in a lot of people's lives throughout that process. So going through that and helping out the way that we could with our resources was massive. On the challenging side, so, um, Mickey doesn't know this, our Series A and B investor, so might as well just get it out now, right? Um, so when we were about to close our Series A with him, we were out of money, full stop. Like Traveler's Haven couldn't continue to afford kind of supporting what business is, lines of credit. And I remember going to some close friends and asking for literally cash. I need quarter million dollars, right? I need to cover payroll. I need this and this. and everyone said no. And we were probably, no joke, like 2 weeks away from missing payroll. And if rent and corporate housing like doesn't clear and your clients are getting evicted, like it's not good. And then the closing was delayed. The Series A was delayed like a week and it was by far and away, I'm, I'm throwing up in the backyard when I come home from work. Then I'm picking up the phone and calling people asking for money. Banks said no. Like, it was just a, it was tough, but we somehow, Mickey's money hit, Telescope's money hit, and coffers were refilled. And, um, it was a wild time though.

I'm tempted to ask which bank you were holding that money in and if it was in around 2023.

No, this was summer of 2019, just before our Series A. But talk about just like kind of went for it. I mean, I think your most, I think successful stories have some sort of perilous right on the edge, almost didn't make it. And that was our moment for sure. SPV was a wild time too. Goodness.

Yeah, it's been a crazy few years and we really appreciate you sharing that story because it's so easy when you have these amazing headlines, $2.1 billion, again, not to diminish that in any shape or form, but say actually, gosh, like we got there because of this grit and these moments of extreme uncertainty. And you too have been through that to get to the other side. So it's even more encouraging to hear that this is not normal, but it's not crazy and it happens and it works out as it should.

Yeah, it's not all pretty. Yeah. And you got, there's a lot of luck involved for sure.

We're gonna take you out of the hot seat and position a bit more our questions around the product itself and how our listeners and founders can be thinking about some of the opportunities that you're chasing after and how you've thought about building some of this infrastructure out. So switching gears beyond the fundraising and kind of the early moments, everyone probably has used a corporate booking travel platform. Platform most people have, but if you haven't, it's much like booking on Expedia. So you've probably booked a form of your product before. In some ways it's a commodity, right? There's prices that you don't control on goods with contracts with third parties. So how have you guys thought about building out both the integration suite and then a secondary question of the business model to support a lot of things from where I'm sitting out of your control?

You're absolutely right. It is very similar to booking on another tool that most people have booked against. There's a couple nuances or differences. I think some companies can offer travel as convenience and they'll layer on some policies, some expense management tools and things. For us, we've really taken the time to build a deep supply network. For us, it's extremely important to be as close to the supply as possible, and we've got some very good friends in the supply space, whether it's wholesalers or third party or just the hotels directly. For us, that's where we can start to create real value. But honestly, just the product in itself too is just thinking about like, how do you keep this as low friction as possible? We don't have contracts, we don't have minimum spend requirements. We're not trying to add any friction that isn't absolutely necessary to get someone in the platform and using it. We've done a good job with that, and I think that's why it works very well with the SMB. We know our audience, we're going to build to them, and they want simple, they want straightforward, and they want savings. And that's what we've been delivering. And as long as we stay close to supply and make sure that we build to both sides of the network, you know, we can continue to create value.

I love this sort of design principle of just eliminating as much friction as possible. As an early-stage founder with a small business, it's easy for everything to be really frictionful. And the reason why I resorted to personally booking folks' travel was because of all the fine print around minimum spend and upselling to all these tools that that we didn't need. Wish I knew about Enjead when I was booking my last trip. But there's been obviously so much tech innovation regarding friction with sort of the incorporation of AI into consumer and B2B software. Really clear that conversational AI powered by LLMs is transforming how we interact with travel from discovery to bookings. I've been personally using ChatGPT to plan trip itineraries, what's the best flight, so on and so forth. So as consumer expectations evolve alongside these tech shifts. How are you and the team thinking about the future of user interfaces in travel? And what role do you see AI playing in shaping engine experience?

It's going to shape a lot. It's going to change a lot. AI is the new interface that I think people will become more and more accustomed to. Now, I do think that there will be some folks that are used to what they do. Right now, picking a date is arguably easier than typing out the date that you want. And there's also search results, there's new hotels, there's new terms, there's new policies, and, and the average ticket price is quite high. So I don't think it's just a book me something in Chicago and that will change. But I do think that getting more personalization into the process, making it easier for people to finish, but also to your point, like the itineraries, building the itineraries, making a dinner reservation, so and so forth. All of that is just, it's here, it's happening, and it's gonna make a lot of people's lives easier. From our standpoint, we have to add a lot more value than just connecting a person with a hotel and charging their credit card, or we're done. You can't just be a simple tool or service anymore. You have to go a lot further and you have to create real differentiation and value. If we could be as disrupted from a simple booking tool that could do that for you, then we'd be in real trouble. So I think we're very aware of it. We're integrating it in a lot of aspects of the business. And going back to the supply and making sure that is a place that we hold near and dear and create differentiation there, along with other things like our lines of credit that we can offer and incidentals and some of the other terms and services, then you have kind of a more complete offering.

That's incredible. You sort of mentioned value and just making sure that you guys are providing this differentiated, seamless experience. I know loyalty and points is often a big lever in booking travel. I had tons of consultant friends that were like, I just book through my personal and expense it so I can get rewards. Maybe stepping away from AI a little bit, how are you thinking about diversifying those extra benefits beyond the transaction of just booking a hotel?

I'm glad you asked. So on our platform, you can get all of your favorite brand points and earn Engine points. So you essentially can get twice the points with us. Points are a real thing. Anybody that doesn't know, they're real. And for us, it was a big unlock. And what we're trying to do with the business is, is don't give a person any reason to not join us. So if points gets in the way, let's go talk to our suppliers and figure out a path to go forward. If this is in the way, let's go figure that out. And all we're trying to do is convert nos to yeses. And if we can do that via relationship or volume or guarantees or whatever, we'll make it happen. And that was certainly something early that was major.

We all love our loyalty and status and points, so that's incredible. We chatted a little bit about COVID and just how that changed the sector a lot. More broadly, how are you feeling about corporate travel as a sector for growth and opportunity, especially as businesses adapt to new travel norms? Hybrid companies that are doing tons of offsites, remote companies that are doing more conference travel, so on and so forth.

Our CFO has said you can't out-TAM this company. And so for us, it's just a big space. It's massive. And for whatever reason, the SMB side of travel has not been covered. Again, I think most companies hit the space, they see some early success, they start to move upmarket, and there's a lot of opportunity upmarket too. But for us, I really like the space that we're in, and it's very large. So we're gonna continue to focus here, and there's a lot we can get after.

And that's like the perfect segue into my next question, which is, where do you think Enjin and yourself will be in maybe 5 years?

Oh boy, 5 years. Do you have trouble with it? Do I get this question all the time?

I don't know how to answer that question.

Sorry, I wrote that one.

I know it's a fair question, but I don't— I have no freaking idea. If you see how fast things have changed in the last few years, and the software was always the thing holding us back, and now the software is there, and, and now you're into hardware, and you see these races with the robotics, it's I don't know. I love what I'm doing and with the team I'm doing it with, and there's a big opportunity. What it looks like in 5 years, my crystal ball's broken. I hope I'm doing something that's super fulfilling and fun as it is right now. If it's this, I hope it is. Let's go. If the robots take over all the jobs, I don't know. I'll be working for them. Who knows?

It's funny, we've had guests on the podcast talk to us and then we do a revisit 2 years later, and it's wild how much changes in 2 years. So, maybe we need to reduce the scope of that question and then have you back on the pod in 2 years.

There you go. Yeah.

As we come up on time today, we'd love to ask the hero question that we ask all of our guests on the podcast. Who is a woman in your life that has had a profound impact on you and your career?

Oh, geez. My wife, for sure. She's a total badass. We have 3 kids. She's got a way harder job than I do, and she helps with the business. And she keeps the trains on track. She's the organized one in the group, and I'm definitely lost somewhere meandering around without her, for sure.

That's incredible. We love a strong sort of collaborative partner in both work and in the personal sphere. That's incredible. And Eli, thank you so much for being on the podcast today, telling the Engine story. It's been a delight.

Thank you, Claudia. Thank you, Madison. It's been great to meet you. Appreciate it.

Thank you so much for joining us at The Room Podcast. If you want more from The Room every week, subscribe to our newsletter at theroompodcast.com/newsletter. We'll be back next week with a new episode, an inspirational guest.

Tuesday, 10:00 AM Eastern, 7:00 AM Pacific. See you in the room.

Perkins Coie supports the most innovative entrepreneurs and investors in fast-moving and high-growth sectors. Addressing their myriad of legal needs. But the firm doesn't just provide end-to-end legal and business counseling to its startup clients. It also facilitates introductions to key advisors and sources of capital. Perkins Coie's interactive website, Startup Percolator, offers access to programs, resources, and rich dynamic content designed to assist entrepreneurs on their startup journey. To learn more, go to startuppercolator.com. And perkinscoie.com.

This podcast is brought to you by Mercury, the banking platform businesses like The Room Podcast use to simplify their finances. It's time banking did more than hold your money. Now it can. With Mercury, you can pay bills in seconds, close the books faster, and even send invoices. Not only does Mercury do away with a patchwork of tools, it eliminates guesswork giving you complete and accurate visibility into your business's finances, all from one account. Apply in minutes at mercury.com.