Source: Poets & Quants
by Nathan Allen
Aug 15, 2015
Pictured left to right are Garib Mehdiyev, CTO, Johannes Koeppel, CEO, and Zaky Prabowo, CMO, of Wetravel.to.
Photo by ©2015 Thor Swift Photography (thorswiftphotography.com)
And now at the epicenter of disruptive ventures, in a rooftop office full of snacks close to the Montgomery BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) station in San Francisco, there’s WeTravel, the company keen on having an Uber-effect on the travel industry.
WeTravel was founded by California-Berkeley Haas School of Business MBAs, Johannes Koeppel and Zaky Prabowo, and crack tech director, Garib Mehdiyev, who was the chief technology officer of the largest bank in his native Azerbaijan by age 22. Between the three, they can speak a combined 15 languages and have collectively traveled to more than 100 countries. On a phone conversation, excitement pours through Koeppel, and Prabowo’s, words—often speaking over one another to fully explain their passion and platform. At one point, Prabowo even asks to have his personal email published so he can “personally help anyone” who wants to use the platform, before kindly retracting the request after he realized the implications of his notion.
AN UNLIKELY PRE-MBA JOURNEY
How they both ended up at Berkeley-Haas was slightly unlikely and very unique. Swiss-born Koeppel, 33, spent the majority of his professional career as an aid worker and arrived on the northern California campus armed with the idea and rearing to use the two-year program as a way to incubate his venture. After earning his first masters in Switzerland, he went right to work as a health economist for Doctors Without Borders in Swaziland. He then held prestigious positions for the International Committee of the Red Cross, an organization that provides assistance and protection for victims of war and humanitarian crimes. His time with the ICRC culminated with Koeppel running an entire office for the country of Tajikistan, near the Afghan border.
The majority of Koeppel’s career was spent traveling. He is a serial-traveler, saying traveling is the main reason he has ever wanted a job or money. He also liked to share travel with others. So he started occasionally organizing trips for friends and family and then for tourists. But organizing trips for large groups of people in different countries is not logistically easy.
While traveling in India, he met someone with a similar passion and familiar struggle. “He was struggling as well with marketing, coordinating people, with collecting the money, and making the business seem legitimate,” Koeppel insists. “Then it dawned on me that group tours will not stay the same as they are now in the next five or 10 years.”
‘I WASN’T ONE OF THOSE GUYS WHO HIRED AN ADMISSIONS CONSULTANT’
Koeppel cites technology and the shared economy as indicators of a changing market. So he had the idea around the same time that he was realizing his current position might not be the safest moving forward in his life.
“I wasn’t one of the guys who hired an admissions consultant or did a whole bunch of research on all the schools,” Koeppel explains. “I literally sat down at the table with my wife and we picked four places we could imagine living in. And the Bay Area was number one.”
New York City was another option so Koeppel gave Columbia Business School a glance, but when it came down to deciding, proximity to tech-rich Silicon Valley gave Berkeley’s Haas School the edge. He entered the program with tunnel vision on starting his travel venture. And viewed the MBA as a “door-opener into the private sector.”
“The MBA was a way for me to redirect my career into new adventures—especially entrepreneurship,” he adds.
A MCKINSEY-ITE DITCHES THE FIRM FOR GOVERNMENT WORK
Prabowo, 30, on the other hand, had a slightly more stereotypical pre-MBA path. Indonesian-born, Prabowo oozes pride for his country. His father was a rocket scientist for the Indonesian Air Force and instilled on his son the importance of giving back to his country.
A proud product of a public school education, Prabowo was the seventh Indonesian-educated person to join McKinsey & Co.. He worked his way up and rapidly became one of the best business analysts in McKinsey’s Jakarta-based office. After three years, McKinsey was even willing to pay for his MBA.
But then the dream beckoned in the form of an opening with a small team setup by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to monitor performance of the various ministries of the country. “I decided I needed to quit now, jump ship, and serve my country,” Prabowo says.
So Prabowo applied and received the position. And he was immediately attracted to the difference in working directly for an organization compared to giving advice to clients through consulting. “Instead of serving multiple countries around Southeast Asia, I was able to just serve my own,” he says.
Still, the B-school bug festered and one project in particular led Prabowo to Haas. While on a project to improve agroforestry efforts in Indonesia, he initiated and established a partnership between the Google Earth Engine and the government of Indonesia and built a satellite-based forest monitoring system.
“We set up this system using Google technology to monitor forest degradation in Indonesia,” he recalls. “That’s when I realized how impactful technology can be to changes in society and that is when I decided, alright, this is the time to go to business school.”
Coincidently, Prabowo also had a knack for organizing large groups of people. He created Indorelawan, which was Indonesia’s first volunteer matching platform and is currently the largest. “That’s how I fell in love with marketplace technology and how I can connect people and make greater impact,” he says. The platform now connects 150 to 200 organizations with about 5,000 volunteers every month.
The Wetravel Dashboard
APPROACHING THE MBA AS AN ACCELERATOR
The two met on their first day at Haas and quickly established a common bond through their mutual passion for travel. And with tuition fully covered, they approached the experience like a two-year accelerator. Koeppel shared his idea in Sara Beckman’s Problem Finding, Problem Solving course. Prabowo was intrigued. They spent time flexing the muscles of the Berkeley entrepreneurship network, worked in Berkeley’s accelerator, SkyDeck, and became disciples of the lean startup method, preaching the good word of quick products and immense customer feedback. “We would never be where we are right now without the past two years of guidance from all of the entrepreneurs connected with Berkeley,” Koeppel insists.
Toby Stuart and Rob Chandra’s entrepreneurship course was particularly helpful for Prabowo and some initial seed funding for WeTravel. Chandra, a senior advisor for one of the top Silicon Valley venture capital firms, Bessemer Venture Partners, can leave budding entrepreneurs in awe. “He was on a first name basis with Steve Jobs,” Prabowo exclaims during our conversation. “He’s very humble and nice. And he trusts us so much, he became one of our initial angel investors—and one of the earliest ones.”
New Venture Finance, taught by Adair Morse, has also provided guidance on Koeppel’s early fundraising efforts. “It’s taught us how to ask for money from one person and how to ask differently from another group,” Koeppel explains. “It’s been a real eye-opener for me.”
SPURNING HUGE OFFERS FOR A DESIRABLE TEAM
Prabowo spent his MBA summer at a “dream internship,” working for EatWith, which he describes as the “Airbnb for restaurants.” In that role, he was fully immersed in the life of an early stage venture in Silicon Valley. “I helped them set up the San Francisco office and helped them get investment from Greylock Partners,” he says. “This opportunity gave me the ability to break into Silicon Valley and that gave me access to many opportunities.”
Koeppel reached out to Prabowo to ask if he wanted to join as a co-founder for WeTravel. At that point, WeTravel had raised about $60,000 in investments, mainly from friends, family, school competitions, and scholarships. The two offers in his pocket were to be “director of Southeast Asia for a multi-billion dollar tech companies.”
Koeppel wasn’t confident he’d get Prabowo’s services. “I didn’t think he would actually join us, but he did,” Koeppel says. Prabowo’s broad range of professional experiences, from working for a top international consulting firm to government work to creating his own volunteer matching platform to decide to work for WeTravel, serves him well. “It’s not about the brand. It’s not about the product. Of course it’s important, but the most important thing is the team,” he says. “We are like buddies, but we’re also colleagues.”
ONE-CLICK TRAVEL OPTIONS
Koeppel has drawn upon previous struggles and frustrations to provide the easiest and most user-friendly possible way to organize travel for large groups. “Think of us as an Eventbrite, but specifically for group travel,” says Koeppel.
The process is simple. First you type in your destination and dates for the trip. Then you decide if the trip will be public (anyone going to the site can view) or private, where you have a link to send to those you want to view it. After that, it takes a trip overview, description, itinerary, and pricing until you can start inviting people. You can literally plan the trip and invite anyone in less than five minutes for free.
Once you invite people via the shared link, they can start signing up by putting down a deposit of your choosing . “Our platform really automizes this whole process—it gives you one-click solutions,” Koeppel explains. “They join immediately, they pay you immediately on the platform.”
But what if someone who’s laid a deposit down hasn’t paid in full? “If you think about a big group of MBAs, this will probably be about half the group at first,” says Koeppel. “Normally, this would take going back through Excel sheets and cross-checking who has paid and who hasn’t and then sending emails. Our platform does this all with one click. MBA students are smart people but what they don’t realize is how painful it can be to follow-up on emails, asking for late payments, and that 70 to 80% of the trip planning is organizing all of that.”
For international trips, WeTravel will also allow you to skip losing money on wire transfers when booking lodging or anything else ahead of time in another country. “What most people don’t know is normally the way it goes is when you do an international wire-transfer, money will be withheld from their personal bank account,” Koeppel says. “And commercial banks give you really, really bad exchange rates. They usually take 3% to 5% on top of the market rate. We have professional b-to-b brokers that give a much better rate—it’s about half of average credit card companies or commercial banks. We saved a Japan traveler from UCLA last year thousands of dollars, because we transferred the money with our own b-to-b broker to their travel agent in Japan instead of a Bank of America wire-transfer.”
The two are incredibly confident their platform is ideal. “If you organize a trip for five or eight people, that’s fine,” Koeppel begins. “But once your trip size reaches 15 people, it gets so much more complicated. And once the trip is more than 20, 25 people, it’s just a no-brainer to use us. It’s free and it just saves you so much time.”
FULL SCHOLARSHIPS ESSENTIAL TO VENTURE
Six months after launching WeTravel, Koeppel and Prabowo say they have had more than 60 trips organized, with more than $600,000 has “flown through” their platform.
Both Koeppel and Prabowo admit having full scholarships were instrumental and according to Koeppel. Launching WeTravel would have been impossible without the scholarships, especially for Koeppel on a non-profit salary. “If I were $220,000 in debt now, I might have to choose a different career path,” he notes.
Still, for these two, anything but founding their own venture just wouldn’t do. “It wasn’t attractive for me to work for an app that will cause people to spend more time on their phones. Instead, we want to use technology to bring people together in the real world,” says Koeppel.
