017 – Brian Harniman and Krish Jagirdar of Brand New Matter – Better, Stronger, Faster

Travel Is Your Business

Strategic advisory and venture capital firm with Brand New Matter…

Brian Harniman (Co-Founder and Managing Director, and member of founding team at Priceline – (bio)) and Krish Jagirdar (Vice President – (bio)) of Brand New Matter (a New York-based strategic advisory and venture capital firm that helps companies at any stage grow smarter and faster, starting with signature 30-Day Deep Dives), join Pavan Bahl and John Matson at the MouthMedia Network Studios.

Priceline and Robot Dog, exploring the meaning of success, and Krispy Kreme stories

Harniman reviews how he started in travel 20 years ago, recruited by a name your price company, and stayed for 10 years — as part of the founding team of Priceline. Jagirdar shares his background in film and finance, then working at top tier design firm Dom and Tom (and what Dom and Tom has in common with Priceline), then had own digital marketing agency Robot Dog, and learned the travel and hospitality industry building an app PlusMore. How Brand New Matter couples advisory and investment services, the 30 Day Deep Dive, exploring the meaning of success, collaboration rooted in empathy, a tolerated failure rate, help with extracting value and supporting that, helping companies dubug your company for a better foundation, defining success, risk assessment, perhaps a capital deployment, being specific to the business in the deep collaboration, and verticals such as liquor and spirits, travel, and health and wellness. And, everyone has a Krispy Kreme doughnut story.

Scale goals and vanity metrics, testing market, and stages of validation

Matson shares a listener-submitted question, how the investment process is a timeline instead of one time event, why having scale goals can be a vanity metrics, the need to prove that people want and need a product, and understand it and will use it, and then a market that will support it. The companies must have stepped through stages of validation to earn trust and establish that the business makes sense. How it doesn’t make sense to put the whole product out in a marketplace right away. The need to just show a plan to validate that the business should exist.

Hotel data, investing in travel businesses, and perfect Sundays

How hotels are using data and why hotels have been doing that wrong. Why legacy systems should not always be replaced, and the dynamics and considerations of investing in travel businesses. Personal Questions with Off the Beaten path covers a Day of Isolation, perfect Sundays, ordering a #13 bagel, coaching sports for kids, and the right places to grow up, Berlin, Parisian teachers, work/life balance, and when an industry folds back on itself.

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