Starting & Scaling Fora As A Leading Travel Marketplace With Evan Frank | EM Group Chat #214

Welcome back to Everything Marketplaces, where we talk about founders and leaders on some of today's top marketplaces. So this is episode 214, which is really good. Group Chat just had with Evan Frank, who's the co-founder of Fora. Fora is transforming travel by empowering independent travel advisors. They've raised over $75 million in capital from top investors like Thrive Capital, Insight Partners, and 400 Ventures. Prior to starting Fora, Evan was the CEO of One Fine Stay, so he has some incredible experience building in travel. Evan was also a past Group Chat guest, so it's great to welcome him back on. And we started off by going back to some of his key learnings from One Fine Stay. Evan shared the founding story and first steps of starting Fora, How it's evolved and scaled. We did a deep dive into how they're leveraging AI. Evan shared lots of tips for founders, and we also had a great group Q&A. We did unfortunately run a few issues with the Zoom and had to make some edits, but I really enjoyed this conversation. I can find it a great watch to the end. So Evan, it's been a while since your past group chat, you know, so it's great to have you join us here today. I want to start off by saying huge thanks for taking the time to do so in advance. Of course, I have a lot that we're going to dive into with all of your marketplace experience and Fora, but I thought it'd be great if we could all start off by briefly sharing a background for those here that might not know you. Nice to meet you guys. Evan.

I am one of the co-founders of Fora. So yeah, my background prior to this. So for about 8 years I was in traditional corporate finance. Oh, hi, Katika. Nice to see you. Traditional corporate finance followed by venture capital. So like sort of like, you know, came in undergraduate business education. I got a job in investment banking, but tech investment banking. So like I always wanted to be sort of, you know, somewhat entrepreneurial, I guess, in what I was doing. Moved abroad to London in 2005, got a job working for a growth equity fund. Decided when I turned 30 that I wanted to be even closer to the entrepreneur. So ended up resigning as this, like, you know, kind of pretty comfortable existence, I would say, as an investor to be part of the co-founding team of One Fine Stay. So that is sort of how I got into startups in the first place. This is my third travel startup. One Fine Stay was the first, and we didn't really even realize that we were a travel company at the time. And Mike, if it's interesting, I could talk more about One Fine Stay and any of these things. You might ask me some questions about that. But, but One Fine Stay was a 7-year or so startup journey. We ended up selling the business to Accor Hotels in 2016. And then I was hired as a CEO of a tours and activities business for a few years that was private equity owned. And then started Fora properly post-pandemic in 2021.

That's a really great background. I did want to go back to One Fine Stay. So what were some of your key learnings, you know, about building and scaling One Fine Stay that you've taken with you to Fora?

The key lesson from One Fine Stay, which is maybe a little travel specific, is that we really thought we were in the hospitality business, but we were really in the distribution business. So, you know, at One Fine Stay, we had this idea. It was kind of an idea whose time has come. This was just post-Airbnb launching in the US, maybe like one year after Airbnb was around. It was maybe already raised money from Sequoia, but exactly how transformational I guess it would be was not yet obvious. And so we had this really novel idea, we thought, which is, well, why don't you stay in a distinctive home when you visit a city, but with the services of a hotel? So it's not necessarily— it was like a hotel management company for homes. It wasn't meant to be directly competitive. It wasn't really directly competitive with Airbnb. We just thought we could manufacture a hospitality experience in a home setting, which would actually create for various segments of travelers, like a really great way to experience places like London, Paris, New York, LA. So that was the idea. And I think it was like a pretty good idea. We were pretty, I think some of the challenges with like being a former venture capitalist as I was, and my co-founder was, is like you have pretty good access to capital. Like people will just like take a flyer on you. So that got us through Series A, Series B. But by the time we were really trying to scale up the business, the challenge that really became a profound challenge was not delivering, you know, excellent hospitality experience or like, you know, scaling out the supply side or all these things that are like classic marketplace challenges, but actually how do we attract customers at an affordable rate at the scale that we were then operating? And so this is a very common challenge for boutique providers of any kind of travel services. And, and really was probably what led to us selling the business to AccorHotels because it was really hard for us to acquire customers profitably. We were starting to compete really either indirectly or directly with the OTAs. So Booking.com notably, and it's really hard to bid directly against Booking.com because they are such a large Google customer, have such sophistication around acquisition. And it's just like not really possible to compete. I've heard rumors that they actually get like discounted ads from Google. So it's like it's almost maybe impossible to compete, period. Or you could distribute through the OTAs and, you know, give up 25% of your economics, which of course makes it impossible to run a profitable, profitable business that has any kind of like operational overhead. So I would say the number one lesson is we thought we were in the travel business or the hospitality business, but we were actually in the distribution business. And so getting really, really good at sales, marketing, distribution is what we ended up doing with the, you know, with the time that we had in the last sort of phase of One Fine Stay, including it was sort of the strategic rationale for the acquisition by Accor was the ability to plug into their distribution apparatus so that we could actually like, you know, continue to scale the business.

That's going to be a really helpful learning. We have lots of founders and teams that are building in travel too. So it might, might come up with some questions during the group Q&A. I did want to transition to talking about Fora now, and I know we briefly spoke about it on your Path to Growth chat, but that was kind of early on. But as a quick refresher, you know, what was the founding story and what were the first steps that you took to start Fora?

Right when we were figuring out sort of multichannel distribution at One Fine Stay, we discovered travel agents. We actually had no idea that travel agents still existed. We were like really like kind of almost like shocked by the scale of the industry as we got into it. And right at this time, my daughter Alice, who is finishing up her 10th grade year right now, uh, was in 1st grade with my co-founder Henley's son Nico at the local school here in Tribeca, PS 234. Um, and she was a travel agent and she like seemed to really be having fun. Um, she was young, she was cool. She was like super smart, had more social invitations than she could possibly ever keep up with. And I was just like really struck by this because, you know, the way that agencies, I sort of understood them to be is like, okay, maybe for a honeymoon. Or otherwise it's like, you know, I don't really want, you know, somebody who's maybe like 25 years older than me planning my travel for me. Like, you know, the response times are slow. Like the experience is all a little bit weird. So it was really striking to me that here was somebody who was my age, who really seemed to not only like be excellent at her job, but like was really making a good living from it, drew a lot of energy from it. And this was not necessarily like the You know, the, um, the expectation at the time, uh, of, uh, of what a travel agent was or like, you know, what, what I thought a travel agent to be. So, you know, I just sort of parked that kind of insight and it was really the dislocation, uh, of COVID uh, on the travel industry. Excuse me. Which was a very traumatic time, uh, for anyone in the travel industry. If those, those of you can remember, um, if you're in it. To really make both Henley and I available to even contemplate this idea in the first place. But because travel agents became such an interesting and important distribution channel for us at One Fine Stay, and because here was an example of somebody who seemed to really take that career and like kind of modernize it in an interesting way, coming out of COVID the dislocation from a jobs perspective. So sort of the the stat that I use right when we were starting the company is 1.5 million women had left the workforce in the US due to the pandemic. Some of that was like childcare gaps. Some of that was other, other reasons that had not reentered. So you have this like enormous human capital element to it that was dislocated because of the pandemic. Suppliers, of course, like hotels and other types of partners figured out like Zoom, which is like obvious to all of us because we were all working at tech startups probably, but was like actually not the way that travel was sold or sort of education was provided at the time. You know, there's like all sorts of megatrends as well. Experiences, not things, the rise of the freelance economy, fun, flexible, like desire, the desire for fun, flexible ways of working, which was like a very pandemic thing. Like, let me really assess what I do every day. So all of these kinds of trends were converging at the time that we started Fora. And we decided that there was an opportunity to create something quite unique, which is to really think about how do we empower like this, like cloistered, sort of secretive, almost old school industry? How do we really bring this to the fore? Because if we could bring this to the fore, given some of the challenges it solved for me at One Fine Stay and subsequently a business called Context Travel, why couldn't this be 10% of distribution for commissionable travel, period? You know, OTAs are not the ideal distribution channel for most suppliers. They have a place, they have a role. Wholesalers are not the best, you know, kind of means of distribution for suppliers, but also 1.0 travel agencies aren't either because it's like super fragmented, super niche. It's really actually hard to sell through travel agencies. So combining single-channel distribution that like you get from an Amex or a Chase, you know, Sapphire Reserve or something like that with high-quality clients that you would typically only associate with, like, you know, agency customers, we thought was a really killer proposition for the supplier side of the industry. So I talk about this when I talk about the better equation, which I could talk about in more detail, but that's like the, that's the basic setup. We knew we couldn't do this without technology at the core. So we have a third co-founder, Jake, who has a product and tech sort of engineering background. And that was the co-founding team that got going right around actually 5 years ago this month. We incorporated Fora.

That's awesome. So, you know what we're going What were some of those early challenges that you faced when you were acquiring some of those early advisors and building tools to empower them?

Doing things that don't scale, of course, is like a startup adage that we probably all have thought of at one point or another. So we raised the seed round to really validate 2 key milestones. One was that we can find lots of people that at least notionally wanted to pursue this line of work. This was not totally obvious that if you just put up like a landing page and you kind of on this promise that actually you could build a waitlist and that those people may or may not end up being great travel advisors. But is there enough notional interest that we could easily access through like normal marketing was kind of like one milestone. And then the second milestone was that we could take a subset of those people and, and that had been outside the industry And transform them to real travel advisors through training, through tools, support, community. And so this is what we set out to prove when we raised the seed round. I think it's, you know, within a few weeks and a bit of meta spend, you know, after launching the splash page, we had too many people on the waitlist to even really like know how to navigate, at least at a human level. But then more importantly, in the early part of 2022, as we were selecting and working with these like new style advisors, we were actually beginning to show early signs that we are able to manufacture new style travel advisors who have a book of business at a level of scale that would be like kind of normal for what the industry would've considered normal kind of pre-pandemic. You know, kind of virtuoso style norms. So those were the early things that we set out to prove. In terms of some of the challenges, I mean, I think, you know, maybe not then, but I think as this has evolved, I think the technology surface area is enormous. Like, I wish that we could basically just like agentically sort of do, you know, integrations with suppliers, but like, it ain't there yet, truthfully. So we have a lot of surface area. We have a booking platform, we have workflow and CRM, we have training, we have marketing enablement and like having a marketing center. So like, how do you actually scale out the product so that it keeps pace with the manifold? We don't have a single user demo either. Like there's no one ICP, there's kind of many ICPs. So I think like What do you resource? What can you resource against? And how do you like sequence those investments when you have a big idea and a big, bold vision? I think has definitely been a challenge. I think it's also just been a challenge for us to— and we didn't even realize it maybe ourselves until year 2 or 3— that the advisors on our platform are quite serious about building a business. It's not just like, you know, Mai Tai, you know, by the pool when I'll book some travel. that was maybe what the early marketing was because that was what like a lot of our kind of early social media manager was like and things like that. But I think the reality is it's a much more serious business than that. And the advisors were taking the work so seriously and they were like real professionals. And we were hearing this in the industry, which was very surprising to us as well. Suppliers were telling us, your advisors are more professional, not less professional, despite the fact that they're kind of outsiders and a lot of them are part-time and everything else, because we selected for passion. And we gave them kind of, you know, and selected for kind of entrepreneurial skills and kind of plugged them into a real, a real sort of ecosystem here. So that's been surprising. But also as part of that, the flip side has been, you know, like shaking this like super casual influencer style reputation that we is not— that is not really what we want to be known for. That's not the brand that we want our suppliers to know us for. That's not what our advisors want us to be known as. So like, I think the evolving brand identity, I think, has been something that we've been really keenly focused on. And I would say is an ongoing theme at Fora.

I'm glad you mentioned that. I actually had a note down. I was going to ask about, you know, the, the role that you kind of think about, you know, the brand plays and kind of relationship with customers.

It's a, it's an interesting relationship with brands because fundamentally advisors, when they get to a certain level, want to have their own brands and own identities. And we encourage that actually. Like, we think that's great. I think so. We don't want everyone to just be Fora. Like, you're just, you're a Fora advisor. That's all it ever is. Because if you're like building a $2 or $5 million book of business, you don't want to be like Evan.Frank and Four.Travel. You actually want to be like your own travel brand. And we respect that and honor that and try to support that with our platform, actually, as best we can. We do want the brand to stand for something, though. What the brand should stand for is a stamp of quality assurance for the customer, for the— not the advisor, but the end traveler. That if it's a Fora advisor, you know you're going to be getting best-in-class support. You're going to be getting best-in-class sort of like planning, booking, and ultimately like trip execution. So those are things like price protection. So basically like best value is kind of a piece of that, which is if you book a Fora, you book through a Fora advisor and the price of the hotel goes down, we'll like automatically rebook it for you. We will package everything up. Up in a beautiful itinerary so that you don't have to sort of like, you know, um, you know, pore through your like Gmail inbox when you're like on vacation. It's all like packaged up and it's kind of presented for you. Um, I think the technology also means that your advisor is more informed because it's really impossible for any one advisor to be an expert in everything. Um, you might be an expert in Paris, that's awesome, but actually like if your client who you booked initially through Paris wants to now go to, you know, Chile, you want to be able to have like a networked intelligence at your fingertips. So we want the brand to stand for that as well. So technology and sort of, I would say, like, you know, network effect kind of community. I'm not doing the best job articulating it, but also for the advisor, that is what it should stand for as well, which is basically if you— it should be irresponsible to run your advising business anywhere on top of Fora, anywhere but Fora, but on top of Fora. Because the sort of the platform that you are able to access allows you to build and really scale and operate more successfully than anywhere else. So we do want it to stand for technology and a better sort of platform to build your business on top of than anywhere else, which also means that you should be able to earn more. And succeed more in a way that wasn't previously possible in the industry. And this is what we're sort of beginning to see, the sort of the, the sort of the early signs that actually our advisors are creating an unprecedented level of growth and profitability at scale because of the efficiency that you just get from like not having to hire all these different like assistants and admins and travel planners and everything else because we have AI agents and we have a technology platform that works on mobile and everything else to allow you to run your business however you want to run your business.

Certainly. And you mentioned technology, so that's a good transition to talking about AI. And I want to spend some time discussing that. You know, so as a starting point, you know, how have you approached leveraging AI? And are there any specific examples of, you know, you can share of how you're doing so today?

Yeah, I mean, I think I would broadly separate it into 2 key categories. One is how we're AI-enabling our organization, which is a very important theme. And then the other is how we're AI enabling the advisor platform, which is also a very important theme. So I think AI up until, you know, a year ago or maybe 9 months ago was, you know, basic sort of cleanup type stuff. So for example, you know, you are quoting a hotel for a client. That content comes from what's called the GDS. The GDS spits out the ugliest possible content and like weird gibberish words. AI cleans that stuff up really well, right? So you don't, as a human, have to like figure out what you're presenting to your client, or do I share this? Do I not share this? You just like AI translate essentially the GDS into something that is like coherent and makes sense to the client. So that was like one obvious use case. Another obvious use case, again, this is maybe like a year ago or something like that, is using AI to clean up your itinerary. So you're building an itinerary, but actually you want to clean up a description or something like that. AI was really useful for that. AI was really useful for, um, and this is when it became like, you know, multimodal. Maybe this was 2 years ago or something like that. You need to submit your confirmations. If you're booking something off the platform, we can ingest that confirmation and then it just like, you know, automatically with like once you approve it, it automatically shows up in your kind of, you know, bookings portal so that you can track your finances and everything else. So this used to sort of not be like we used to have a team of humans do this and then just AI started doing it. So we created a lot of efficiency around that. So now advisors can basically just like log their own business. And have real-time data that shows them how they're doing, which also gives us real-time data as to how our community is like, you know, how the bookings are evolving. So that was like AI a year ago. I think we all, or some of us certainly had like versions of like, you know, the Claude code moments of like whether it was December or something like that, October, December, January, where suddenly AI actually started to really do things for you. Yeah. Not just like clean things up reactively, but like do stuff, take actions. Like all the things with MCP servers and, you know, you know, you know, the various ways that like Claude Code is essentially, or Claude is essentially with all these connectors is essentially like your system of record in some ways all of a sudden. So very quickly we're like, okay, it's time to be way more ambitious with what AI can do and really build this like agentic sort of, you know, not copilot, but sort of like have the platform agentially do things for our advisors, such as point out opportunities for them to reengage customers and tee up an email that all they have to do is click send and then suddenly they can reengage the customer. Or, you know, a very common thing that we do at Fora is we send VIP emails to the supplier relationships. So one of the unique things about this industry is like. It's a lot of human relationships that we're trying to empower. So rather than have to construct your own email and figure out who the director of sales is and send it to the director of sales, it's just sitting right there, you know, as like an item in your to-do list. Okay, click send, done. I've VIP'd my client. I don't have to know who's traveling when anymore because the AI knows who's traveling when. So it's been incredibly useful to automate or semi-automate a lot of the work. Which is now becoming really interesting things, really interesting things that advisors do just from a prompt, whereas it would have been like lots of clicking around previously. So for example, constructing a proposal that includes a few hotels and a tour, you could create that on an itinerary software. Present the proposal to a client that takes like hours, actually probably two hours to do that well. You also have to do the research. Well, you can now just do that essentially from like a prompt, and it creates like the trip primitive, and then you can like ship off the trip primitive to the client. Same with CRM. Like I just you know my my like Whisper Flow demo is now like I just met Mike Williams. Him and his wife Sally have two kids. Tom and, you know, George. Tom has a gluten allergy. Sally has a shellfish allergy. Let's capture all this in the CRM with various notes. By the way, his favorite hotel is Aman Giri. So we should really only show him modern, you know, ultra-modern hotels in the future. And that's just like from a free text prompt that's now structured data that's sitting in the CRM. So We're really seeing opportunities to, like, really use applied AI in, like, super interesting ways. Eventually, and when I say eventually, like in a month, we'll have early versions of the actual AI trip plan, which of course is not novel to us. There's like that guy from Sonder just raised some money for this idea. There's this company, TravelAgent.ai, that's been in, like, super secret beta for, you know, 4 years or something like that. Like, we're not the person to invent AI trip planning. The thing that's interesting is our proprietary dataset. So we have tens of thousands of advisor reviews and client reviews of properties and other suppliers. So it's not like, where do I send my client in Rome and getting something back that is essentially a scraped internet sort of search? It is actually built on the review content that we have that would take you hours to have to do that research yourself. But instead, it's just presented immediately. With references back to the, to the, to the, to the property records themselves. So that's how we're using AI in the advisor enablement of everything that we're doing. And we will eventually make that headless. We probably need a couple more engineers to really figure out the headless version of this. But this is all— this is currently in beta. It's not even live in our advisor platform.

Very cool. Also great examples of how you're leveraging AI.

And I guess if we kind of zoom out, you know, and kind of more broadly speaking, you know, how do you see AI will kind of impact travel and what that kind of consumer experience In our business, we really think the key principle is really figuring out what AI is amazing at and what humans are amazing at, and letting humans do the things that humans are great at and letting AI do the things that AI is great at. AI is already great at a not very well contextualized 7-day itinerary to Italy. Like, let's just not even debate that point. I'm not sure how you would make that that much better. At least without lots of proprietary data, which is kind of what we're, what we're trying to do. So, I mean, I think AI is really good at just like reading lots and lots of information and then surfacing insights from that information that can then determine human actions or sort of AI-assisted human actions. I have no doubt that AI will make it, it's already kind of in our beta product, make it like sort of seconds to create a proposal. Which you can then serve up to the customer, and then you know seconds to transform that proposal into an itinerary primitive, and then like you can like lots of interaction back and forth from there. So AI is going to be great at all these things, and I think it's amazing because it really frees up the human from admin essentially, which there's a lot of admin in travel. What humans we think are really great at. Is a few things. At Fora specifically, what they're great at is a few things. The first is trust. Okay, great. Like our, our engineers are reviewing all of the AI code that we're generating, maybe like 50, not maybe, just over 50% of our code is either solely AI generated or mostly AI generated. But humans still need to review that code because a human needs to be accountable for the code that you're shipping in your systems rather than the AI being accountable, can really be accountable for it. So that itinerary actually, like the AI can do a great job writing the itinerary, but you kind of still want a human to review it and to sign off on it that you trust as a traveler. So trust, when you're talking about a $4,000 average trip value, Actually, Matt, and often cases quite higher, matters quite a lot. So humans are excellent at establishing trust. Humans are excellent at acquiring other humans. So I think there's also like the really original insight of Fora is that travel agents were basically a growth channel for us because travel agents are very good at no problem. Travel agents are very good at being the go-to person for travel tips, the travel planner amongst friends. So they have immediate credibility versus like an AI or an OTA or something like that for like, no, you should actually go here and stay here. So that creates like a customer acquisition opportunity, not just like an itinerary planning and review, you know, process. And then humans are really good at supporting other humans, right? So travel can be very stressful, very expensive. It's a high-stakes purchase and things go wrong all the time. And humans using AI can be super responsive to that. And 24/7 support and everything else is kind of a, you know, the expectation at this point. But also like you want to be able to rely on somebody to make it better. And when you think about all of the various large travel suppliers, regardless of how you book those suppliers, think about how many really bad experiences we've had with, with sort of hotels, cruise lines, other things where it's like, why can't I just get somebody on the phone or somebody at the front desk or whatever that can actually do like a normal rational thing to fix the situation? And we think humans have a really interesting role to play there as well. One that has been underplayed historically because there just haven't been very many travel agents. Or very much travel agent-assisted travel.

Looks like we have a few, you know, questions that founders are asking. But, you know, right before we jump into the group Q&A, you know, what would be your top tips for a founder starting marketplaces today?

What I would say is like, write a business plan. That's what we did at Fora. Take the time to write it down. Don't like create some slides and pretty visuals to like convince yourself. Really write a business plan with all of the components associated with actually what you believe will lead to the success of your business. Show your business plan to some investors. Show your business plan to a potential co-founder. And if you can't get sort of like a co-founder or investors excited about what you're doing, I actually don't believe at all that you should just like ignore market signal for like you know like you know years to basically prove everybody wrong. I think you should modify your story because ultimately the most successful companies. do actually have co-founders, they have investor capital, they actually are like kept honest in a way that sometimes it's easy to skip that step, but in many ways it's the most important step. So that would be my advice just starting out.

Yeah, really helpful. Hey, Heidi, saw you raise your hand. Did you want to come on?

What I'm working on is sort of adjacent. I mean, it's event rentals and it's similar because event planners do also sell a lot of that furniture and decor that gets rented for an event, and there's a built-in commission. So we're just sort of digitizing that experience, building a marketplace where that transaction can happen, um, because right now it's all via email. It's very fractured and very messy. And I think what I have appreciated about Fora is obviously the brand does a lot of the work to like build trust with potential travelers and you have the network. Um, but I really am impressed with like what tools you gave to people who maybe hadn't even been a travel agent before, but you educated them, you gave them a platform. I appreciate that. Thank you. I would love your thoughts on like really building that community. Like how to do it?

Yes.

Well, I mean, the way we did it was we had a splash page and we had like, you know, Meta ads. And, you know, we— that got us far enough to get started. So there wasn't any like viral loop. We did have an Instagram account that we seeded with some initial— I mean, it was just us, like our friends or whatever, you know, to be credible in terms of like how many followers we had. We want— we invested in the brand of that, you know, to make it beautiful. I mean, you need money to do all these things. So I think you should see if you can raise some capital. But you don't need that much money. So yeah, so literally, I mean, this is like the market signal that I would advise everybody to not skip in your early days, which is, you know, the forum version, your version of the forum sort of, you know, milestone test would be, can you put up, I don't know, maybe you already have it. So I apologize if you have like a website already, but like, Can you put up a landing page and drive some ads to it and get people that are at least notionally interested? And if you can't do that, you know, you can, you know, shake hands and kiss babies, you know, for the next 5 years, but you're not going to have enough scale. I think we lost her. Oh, there you are. You're not going to have a sufficient amount of scale unless you're just building a business for like, you know, a few hundred event planners or something like that. Then maybe like a sales model or something like that would be, would be like a, you know, a better, like, you know, going to, going to event industry trade shows and just like, you know, signing up 1 or 2 or 3 people at a time. But I think if you're looking for something that's going to number in the thousands, it's going to be at least somewhat sort of, you know, acquisition driven. And so I would just get started. It's not very expensive to start running, you know, Meta campaigns. We started really small. It's a drug that is really hard to get off of. We're still trying to get off of it, but it at least gives you initial product-market fit signal.

Awesome. Hey, Evan, I actually want to jump in here and ask a related question that someone sent, and it was around, around building community and offline events. So how have you approached, you know, building community and even like the offline kind of initiatives, like events for, for advisors on Fora?

So we do a lot of offline events. We think this is a key part of what people are seeking when they join Fora, which is like, I think like Post-pandemic, a lot. I mean, this was even pre-pandemic, but like, you know, decline of, you know, institutions, etc. People are looking for ways to get together. And this is also driving a lot of the trends in the travel industry and the live events industry. So we knew from the beginning that this would be a component also in the industry and travel. It's kind of normal because suppliers like taking advisors out for dinner. So it's like we were initially introduced to this concept just by like being in the industry. So we actually, like, it took us a year to actually produce our own events versus just like supplier in town, 4 advisors, my co-founder Henley, let's all go to dinner. So I actually, yes, fam trips. Yeah. But we, again, we got there later. And so I think like, you know, you always want to be able to, you know, fish in like an active, you know, an active stream or something. And there are these events that are already happening. So we just kind of got organized around those events. And then from there, we became more organized. We actually hired an events team. We, you know, and now we have an events team that operates these events. But I just want to emphasize, like, it started out super organic and this was a feature of the industry. that predated Fora, which is like suppliers and advisors getting together to, you know, to sort of educate the advisors on the product, but also just to build long-term relationships.

Hey, Jeff, I saw yours.

From a marketplace standpoint, do you think about other marketplaces? And in particular, are there marketplaces that you think are similar to this but not similar to that? So that's kind of the first question that I have. And then The second one, if we have time, is a follow-up on when you were speaking earlier about AI and, you know, the, the amount of information that you have and that being a way for you to leverage the information that you have internally to create tools to help guide travelers. Do you have concerns at all about your travel agents or people using your site wanting to gatekeep or not being excited about the fact that their information and their trips are being leveraged to create and kind of charge that AI. We have a similar issue with that. And so that's why I'm asking there. I'll answer the first one quickly, which is there's not really any other businesses that I think are that similar to Fora. I mean, there might be, but like they haven't, you know, investor— I know a lot of investors and these business plans have not crossed my desk. There are business— there are entrepreneurs that are creating Foras for other things now that I think is cool, but it's not like So, so because, you know, basically it's like there's— we pulled a lot of unique elements together to kind of create the business. It's not a simple, straightforward supply-demand marketplace. In fact, we're probably not a marketplace. We're just like a 3-sided business, I guess, maybe a 3-sided marketplace. I don't know. Somebody with better, you know, Silicon Valley branding can tell me what we are. But I don't think we have any like directly analogous sort of like large-scale businesses in other industries. In terms of getting, yeah, so I think it's really important that we're positioned and we expect to be, we are an advisor-first business. We are supporting the entrepreneur. We are not using humans to, in a sinister way, train our AI so that we can like get rid of the humans and then go direct to the client. That is not the governing principle for us. The idea is that you have something to share that is unique to you, but lots of other people have something to share that's unique to them. So the way that we all get better is by everyone sharing a little thing so that we can all benefit from the collective intelligence that comes from that sharing. So I do think the positioning of the companies needs to be authentic. We need to be honest about that. But I do think the better the AI becomes within Fora, The better every advisor using the AI will be. And so that's how we've thought about that.

Hey, Nikita, saw your hand. We'll try to get in one last question.

Love Fora, love branding. And could you please tell us the story behind that, behind the name, behind like your design? So, I mean, I do think like brand strategy and brand essence is like, it's not easy. But you have to like really kind of distill the brand. It's a worthwhile early investment. I would pay an agency to help you with it because like, you know, we didn't necessarily— we have no like CMO amongst us. You know, we have different skills, but it's not that. The inspiration for Fora though, names really do matter. Like I think names matter a lot. Fora was a riff on the Roman forum. Fora is actually a plural of the word forum, which we thought was a really— which for me personally was a formative travel experience that I had when I was 21 years old and backpacking through Europe. And this was a long time ago. So I think that you could even like walk into the forum with like a €2 ticket or something. I think it was lira, 2 lira ticket. This is like early days. And just how it is that one of these like foundational experiences. Like seeing that for the first time, especially as an American when you don't grow up with like that much history. And we thought it was a really nice analogy for what we do, which is the forum in Rome was sort of a place where ideas were exchanged. It was like where a lot of commerce happened. It was where a lot of community was built. It was really like the hub. So we wanted to play off of that with the brand name of Fora. Unfortunately for us, we weren't the only people with this brilliant idea. So for example, you walk around London, there's a very nicely branded coworking space named Fora. We did not know about that when we started our company, but a few months in, one of my friends texted me. They're like, you guys are in London already? And it was like some other company. It also means outdoors in Portuguese. Like there's like, it's not like a totally unique word, but I do think that it does work As a metaphor. And then just in terms of the branding, I mean, look, as I've said, like from business plan stage, we've had investors, we invested in this, not huge amounts upfront. We actually used to have a totally different wordmark and stamp, but then as you get bigger and bigger and you can invest more and more, but I think what it really distills from is a business plan.

Yeah.

It's like, what is the essence of the brand? Well, what is the essence of the company? What are we all about? And then you could take that data and you can give it to somebody that knows more about this stuff than I do, and they could feed back to you. This is what I think the brand should look like and how it should feel.

Awesome. That's a fun last question and way to wrap things up here. So I know we're almost out of time, but, you know, huge thanks for taking the time to join us today for the group chat and sharing all of your awesome, awesome marketplace experience, you know, more about Upwork and also answering some of the questions that we had today for the group Q&A. And I want to ask my usual closing question, which I'll kind of update this time, which is that if you could go right back to before you started Fora, you know, what would you tell yourself?

Try to enjoy the journey a little bit. I mean, I think the startup journey is long and hard. It's very lonely. It's very difficult actually to scale a business like we have 240 employees. I'd say it's harder now than it was to get started. Never gets really easier. I mean, I guess you could like sell the company and, you know, ride off into the sunset or something, which, you know, that happens for people. That's nice. We're not trying to do that. But, but I doubt we would even if we wanted to. It sort of feels like, you know, you're all in for a long time. Life is short, so you better enjoy yourself.

It's gonna be great parting advice for us all. And then last but not least, time for a quick plug again. Where can we keep up and follow along?

You can certainly follow along with the company just at foratravel.com. That is also our Instagram, @foratravel. We also have— I actually do personally a lot on LinkedIn. I'm not much in Instagram, but I post a lot. We post a lot of things on LinkedIn. I post a lot of things on LinkedIn and I'm Evan Frank. Feel free to shoot me a link. If anybody would like a promo code for referring other people, I have a personal promo code that I can, I'll drop it in here, but also feel free to DM me or whatever for it. It's $50 off a subscription, um, which is incredibly good value. I mean, it's like super cheap actually. You'd like get everything you need to like build your business. So, so, you know, so yeah, we're always looking for people, entrepreneurial people that are looking to build, whether it's part-time or full-time, like serious professional travel businesses. I think what always surprises people is that we have advisors that make several hundred thousand dollars a year doing this, not just like $50,000 a year, like several hundred thousand dollars, because we actually have made it easier to start, scale, and operate a travel business. So help us spread the word.

I'll be sure to include links and we'll probably send lots of folks your way. So really appreciate you taking time to join us today and, you know, paying it forward. And thanks everyone for the great questions today.