Steve Kaufer Sharing His Biggest Learnings As The CEO Of Tripadvisor

I did, you know, want to learn a little bit more about, you know, the difference, I would say primarily from the role of a CEO, kind of, you know, I'd say like pre-IPO to kind of, if we fast forward to the later stages. So what would you say like some of the biggest differences were from those kind of those 2 different stages and then maybe even learnings now looking back?

Yeah, it's nice to be out of the public eye. You just have more flexibility again, depending on who you're parent company is or your ownership structure is. The word on the street in terms of, oh, it's miserable being a public company CEO. No, it wasn't. I didn't think it was bad at all. Oh, you have to be on the road all the time talking to your investors. No, you don't. I am an existing proof point that says, nope, I would do a Boston investor conference. Sometimes a New York investor conference. That was kind of it. I sent my CFO to do those. I won't say I enjoyed the earnings calls, but they were a great quarterly opportunity to take stock of your business, to think about the questions that kind of your customers as a public company, your investors are gonna ask. Really get down and dig into, hey, they're gonna ask about, hey, is it domestic or international? Where's this office? Like, we should have a better answer to that because I'm not really sure. And we would dig ahead of time so that I could understand that. So I, you know, I didn't ever have to deal with a hostile takeover, that sort of thing. And I very carefully and deliberately Shared with the people inside the company that we were not going to be a company that was going to pay any attention to quarterly earnings and hitting quarterly numbers. We're going to miss some, we're going to exceed some. I accept an annual report card, like, how did we do? But if we feel we have an investment that we want to make, that will hurt our earnings and pay off, and we're confident about that, or it's good odds on the risk, I will go to the board and make that claim. And I did several times. The board said, we agree, go. Or they said, we agree, let's test it this way and then, you know, spend the real dollars. And I've been on several boards and like, that's the way many boards operate. I'm well aware that there are other boards that are like, like you'll keep your job if you hit your quarterly number. But if you're the CEO creating a board and then deciding to go public, hey, you're calling the shots. You can create the board that you want. Usually. And like employees did not like it when stock price went down after a bad quarter and I addressed it in the next company meeting, but that was it. Just didn't give it more airtime. And those companies that, those people that were really there to make sure their equity went up, they probably weren't joining TripAdvisor in the first place. Which was fine with me. And that's kind of how I dealt with that aspect. As a public company, you know, you have the stock to play with. If you spend your cash, if it's not a lot, Wall Street doesn't even notice. So that's another reason to do an acquisition. Like literally I could grow by spending $10 million to buy a company that I thought had a product that could generate a couple of million or more in the following years. If it was breakeven, like super, I could spend the money and no outside investor would give a shit. Truly, if they were losing money, I, you know what, I would have to report that EBITDA loss consolidated basis. But at a company doing a couple hundred million, if they were losing $1 million, it just didn't matter to me. They were losing $10 million, it did matter to me. So I'm like, it, as a startup, try not to lose money. Companies can be bought when they are losing a lot of money. Not a strategy I recommend. But yeah, I'd like— I'm thumbs up on being a public company if you have the background to get there.