Now Boarding: Capitalizing on Disruption in the Travel Industry

Greg Sterling is the founding principal of Sterling Market Intelligence, a consulting and research firm that tracks the impact of the Internet on offline consumer purchase behavior and its disruption of traditional media. SMI covers consumer adoption and ad models across a range of market segments, including local search, online yellow pages, online newspapers and classifieds, mobile search, social media and multi-channel shopping. Sterling is also the lead analyst for Internet2Go, an advisory service from Opus Research.

Before founding SMI, Sterling ran The Kelsey Group’s Interactive Local Media program. Prior to The Kelsey Group, Sterling was at TechTV where he helped produce “Working the Web,” the first national television show dedicated to e-business and the Internet. Prior to TechTV he was a founding editor and executive producer at AllBusiness.com. Before joining AllBusiness, Sterling was a practicing attorney in San Francisco.

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Nathan is the technical architect behind Airbnb. A pragmatist who translates vision and design into tangible product through fast iterations, Nathan uses data to identify and pursue high-growth opportunities. Under his leadership, the engineering team has developed a robust, secure marketplace which now facilitates a massive amount of commerce each day.

Nathan got an early start in business and technology when he founded an online marketing company while still in high school. Since then he has worked as a program manager at Microsoft, engineer at OPNET Technologies, and lead developer at Batiq. Nathan graduated with a degree in Computer Science from Harvard University.

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Adam Goldstein was a co-founder of BookTour with Chris Anderson. He was the youngest author ever at O’Reilly, writing AppleScript: The Missing Manual at 16. He graduated from MIT in 2010 with degrees in Electrical Engineering/Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering, and was North American Debating Champion in 2010. Adam lives in San Francisco, and is co-founder and CEO of the travel search site Hipmunk.

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As an online travel industry veteran, former co-founder of discount online travel company Hotwire and former president of Expedia’s luxury travel company Classic Vacations, Inc., Gregg knows the ins and outs of booking and planning travel online. When he realized the rapidly growing number of online travel options and sites was beginning to conspire against his own attempts to easily plan trips, he knew that non-online-travel-experts must be having a heck of a time keeping it all straight. Thus the idea for TripIt took shape.

Prior to his work in the online travel industry, Gregg was a director at the private equity firm Hellman & Friedman and worked in the merchant banking group at Morgan Stanley & Company. Gregg received his MBA from Harvard Business School and has been a featured speaker at numerous industry conferences, including TravelCom, Internet World, eTravel, EyeForTravel and others on the topics of travel, e-commerce and revenue management.

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