Princeton Startup TV: Episode 3 with Adam Goldstein, CEO and co-founder of Hipmunk

Guest: Adam Goldstein, CEO and co-founder of Hipmunk
Host: Arman Suleimenov (twitter.com/suleimenov)
Date: December 8, 2011
Location: San Francisco, CA
Princeton Entrepreneurship Club

Hipmunk is the flight and hotel search engine which presents flight results as the visual timeline, sorts flights by agony, searches for hotels in the areas with many points of interests, and provides Amtrak train routes among other things. Time magazine named Hipmunk as one of the 50 best websites of 2011. The founders are Adam Goldstein and Steve Huffman (co-founder of reddit.com). Investors include SV Angel, Paul Buchheit (creator of Gmail), Matt Mullenweg (founder of WordPress) and Ashton Kutcher.

Questions discussed:
How / when did you come up with an idea for Hipmunk?
What was the process when coming up with the name?
YCombinator experience
ITA as the source content for search
Is the main power of Hipmunk an outstanding user interface?
Gantt charts for flights
Hipmunk's technology stack
Why companies like Southwest don't provide their fares to the flight search sites?
Hipmunk as the multitransport search engine
Hotel search around points of interest
What Hipmunk was like when launched?
What are the plans for improving the service?
How does feature prioritization work at the Hipmunk team?
Key lessons learned
Favorite blogs and books
Patents as the defensive mechanism from big companies which crush startups
Any plans to own the booking part of the equation?
What's your vision for travel planning space and Hipmunk specifically?

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People & Blogs

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