Russ: This is The BusinessMakers Show heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com. And now its time for the Aflac BusinessMakers Flashback, brought to you by Aflac, ask about it at work. And for this mornings Flashback we are going to roll back to last week when Erica O'Grady, our social media specialist, headed out to San Francisco and managed to sit down with Elliott Ng, Co-Founder and VP of marketing for UpTake.

Erica: This is Erica O'Grady and I'm on the road, and I'm here today in Atherton, California. I'm meeting with Elliot Ng, who is the co-founder and VP of Marketing for UpTake. So welcome to the show, Elliot.

Elliott: Thank you. Hi, Erica.

Erica: So tell me a little bit about what it is that you do.

Elliott: Sure. UpTake is a travel search engine that crawls 5,000 sites and helps people plan vacations by organizing all the reviews and ratings from across the web so you don't have to go to all those sites to pick your hotel, your destination, and things to do when you go on your vacation.

Erica: So what kind of traffic are you seeing on this site?

Elliott: We launched last year in May, so we're about 15 months into it, and since then we've grown about 15 percent month on month. And we're now at about 1.2 million unique visitors a month – probably the largest new travel site in the last three years. And we've been having a great time.

Erica: Who are your major competitors?

Elliott: Interestingly enough, no one's really taken the same approach that we have. We have a license agreement with TripAdvisor, with Yelp; Yahoo Travel is some of the content that we have. So we're really taking a meta approach and being very complementary to the rest of the travel ecosystem.

Erica: So you're really doing kind of a collaborative coop-etition, not competition.

Elliott: Absolutely. So we've thought very carefully about how we can be complementary, and I think our partners and potential competitors are also very visionary in allowing us to partner with them to merchandise their content and give their content more distribution.

Erica: So tell me a little bit about how you came to found this company.

Elliott: My partner, Yen Lee, who is the CEO of the company, was at Yahoo Travel. And Yahoo Travel, as you may know, is the number two travel planning site out there after TripAdvisor. And he saw the opportunity to really take a search approach to our travel and organize all the content in the space, and help people with that initial step of planning their vacation. According to a study by Google on com score, people on average do 12 web searches and go to 22 sites before actually booking anything. So it's clear that travel planning is still broken and there's an opportunity to help people with that process.

When we started the company we thought very much about people that are looking for specific types of trips, like family travel, romantic travel. We're really focused on people that care about the travel experience as opposed to people that are shopping just on price.

Erica: When you first started the company was there a lot of push-back, because didn't people say, "Well, there's a million travel sites out there. How are you gonna be different?" And you know "This idea is a dime a dozen." And did you guys end up getting funding, are you bootstrapping?

Elliott: I'd say that a lot of what made us successful was the track record of the key founders. So Yen has been in the travel industry for over ten years; I've started three start-ups. So there was a lot of both entrepreneurship background and also travel industry background that allowed us to overcome a lot of those criticisms, which we definitely heard. So a lot of times it's being able to sort of package your own experiences with what you are pitching out into the marketplace to build that connection and credibility. So we closed a series of 3.5 million with Shasta Ventures, and later on a series B of over 10 million with Trinity Ventures and another couple funders.

Erica: Well, what kind of advice would you give to a young entrepreneur who's out there and he has no track record. Who has to real experience in the industry, who has a really great idea and maybe a fantastic team of people on board supporting that idea, who's looking for funding?

Elliott: There are some strengths that you have as a first-time entrepreneur. First of all, find a place where people are helpful. So find that ecosystem where people are supportive of new entrepreneurs and people who wanna give back into the community, and build relationships with those people. They could be formal advisors; they could simply connect you to other funders. So you have to sort of build an ecosystem around the company and find people that are supportive of what you're doing. The most critical thing that funders care about is the team.

Elliott: The team and the idea, but a lot of times new entrepreneurs focus a lot on the idea, because that's where they're really putting all their mental energy into. Think about the team, both the people that are working for you full-time as well as the other people that are associated with your business. And really try to pull that together into something that is fundable, that is credible, which has to do with experiences and your resume, but also the interpersonal dynamics within your team. Really invest in the right team dynamics that really come through when you're in a funding pitch or you're talking to partners, or in all your interactions. Because people are looking at this as this is a marriage between these business partners, and is this a good marriage or is this a bad marriage?

Erica: What do you think is the best thing as an entrepreneur coming into someplace like Silicon Valley or Boulder or someplace where there's a large tech community? What are the strategies they utilize to develop real relationships?

Elliott: I think the thing I've learned the most through what we've done with UpTake over the last 2 ½ years is what Shel Israel calls lethal generosity. Find opportunities to be lethally generous in your industry and in your segment. And what does that mean? That means create value that isn't specifically tied to promoting your company. I'll give you one very small example. We have one of the top travel industry blogs that covers important aspects of online travel. We blog about every other company in the space. You know people that would normally be considered competitors to UpTake, we help promote them.

That's something that most companies wouldn't think of doing, because they think of it as a zero-sum game. So partner with people. Find ways to engage in the conversation. How do you create knowledge and conversation around topics of mutual interest without always inserting your own commercial into that conversation?

Erica: What are the top three strengths that an entrepreneur would need to have to really make it?

Elliott: I think one is passion; successful entrepreneurs have a lot of passion for what they're doing. And if you're working in a large company, find ways to express that passion in some small area of either your job or something that's ancillary to the job and really push as far as possible. Aim to be more famous about that area of passion outside the company than inside the company. A great example that I have is a guy named Avinash Kaushik, who I worked with at Intuit and now is the Google Analytics evangelist; works for Google and has a leading analytics blog called Occam's Razor. Brilliant guy, great blogger, and he was just an analytics guy at Intuit and just started blogging.

So take that example. Anybody in whatever job they have can take an area of passion, go deep with it, build relationships in the industry, and good things will happen. And that's an example of cultivating passion. The second is people. When you're an entrepreneur, you're much more in a position of having to make judgments about who to pull in, how to shape a team, how to work with people in a more challenging situation. So cultivating people judgment is something which is literally a decades-long process. But get started on that now because that's a make-or-break sort of skill that entrepreneurs need to have.

Erica: Maybe even in college or high school to be starting down that path of building that network.

Elliott: Yeah. Think about your group projects or your small team inside of your company, and thing about how do you select who do you partner with, and thing about after-the-fact how things turned out and how you made those decisions and how that played out. Because those are the decisions you'll be making on an ongoing basis as an entrepreneur. And then I think finally make it possible for other people to give you advice. You need to project yourself out there; you need to change the world. But you also need to be a good listener.

Erica: Well, Elliot, I wanna thank you so much for being on The BusinessMakers today.

Elliott: Thank you, Erica.

Russ: And that wraps up Erica's interview with Elliott Ng, co-founder and VP of marketing for UpTake. Stay tuned in with Erica's discussion with Shel Israel, author of the just released book Twitterville. You're listening to The BusinessMakers Show heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com