Fred Lalonde, Co-Founder of Hopper, Talks About the Startup’s Progress
Yesterday, Hopper announced that it had raised $8M in financing from Atlas Ventures and Brightspark. The company has raised a total of $10M in financing but has never launched. That’s going to change soon as the company starts to come out of stealth mode and show what it’s up to.
We had a chance to speak with co-founder, Fred Lalonde, about the company and the progress they’ve made since the beginning. Fred is also CEO, joining co-founders Joost Ouwerkerk (Chief of Product) and Sebastien Rainville (Chief Engineer). Hopper started in 2007, and they’ve spent the last 4 years developing technology. Over the course of working on the problems they see in travel, they had to develop an expertise in working with really big data sets. Joost notes, “It turns out that to fix the user experience in travel, we first had to fix the data.”
NextMontreal: What is Hopper?
Fred: Hopper is a discovery engine for travel. Which means that it’s a search engine totally dedicated to the inspiration and planning of trips.
NextMontreal: What makes it unique vs. existing travel search / travel sites?
Fred: Traditional travel sites are good when you already know where you want to go and when. But when you’re exploring ideas, they’re actually pretty bad. As a result, much of the exploration phase of trip planning is not happening on travel sites right now, it’s happening on search engines like Google.
Hopper lets you say, “scuba-diving in the caribbean”, and get a ranked list of the best places for doing that, based on the sum of all the web content that we’ve indexed. And for each of these places, you also instantly get the best available flights, hotels and packages, without specifying airports or dates. And Hopper helps you explore a destination: what does it look like? what’s nearby? what can I do there? what are the best restaurants? It really is a completely new kind of travel planning experience.
NextMontreal: For Hopper, the investment to-date is largely one in technology (since you haven’t launched, and there’s been a lot of heavy-duty tech built). That’s a-typical from most “web startups” that are focused almost exclusively on execution.
Fred: Right. That’s because travel is really complicated! Remember that travel was among the first use cases for computers, as early as the 1940s. Basically computers were invented to control the stock market, to guide missiles and to book travel. I think this complexity partially explains why the online travel establishment is having trouble evolving.
But we were also running very lean these past few years. There were only 5 of us for most of that time, focused completely on solving core technical problems. But now we have a solid foundation of technology and know-how that nobody else in the travel space has. And we’re building on that to create a user experience that would have been impossible otherwise.
So that investment has really paid off. As you know, there are lots of early-stage web startups in Montreal. And many have come and gone since we founded Hopper. But there are not a lot of success stories. We took a different approach: stay small, be super-frugal, stay focused on solving the big problems. And it’s paid off. We got multiple offers from the US for the round we just closed. I must say I am pretty proud of that.
NextMontreal: How did the current financing round come together?
Fred: Atlas has been tracking our progress since the beginning, and when we started getting offers on this round Jeff Fagnan (partner at Atlas) and his team just crushed it. We are psyched to be working with them; they have funded some great companies in Europe and the States, like DailyMotion and Songbird and Grockit. And Jeff is doing some really cool things with AngelList and VentureHacks.
NextMontreal: What’s the plan for the next 6 months with Hopper? Will we see a full blown launch?
Fred: First, we need to scale up our team and scale up our technology. We are looking for at least 10 really smart people to join our team in the next 6 months. And we are building up our physical infrastructure. We’re buying hundreds of servers – it’s kind of crazy actually. All of our focus now is on growing the size of the database and improving the quality of the results, which requires ridiculous computing power. In the meantime, we’re testing product features with early-access beta users.
NextMontreal: How big is the company today? What are the future plans for growing the company?
Fred: Hopper is a team of 12 people right now, which is double what we were a year ago. And we plan on doubling that again over the coming year. We’re opening up a new office in Boston in the autumn and we’re actively looking for software engineers with specialized knowledge down there. The Boston area has an incredible concentration of really smart people, orbiting around MIT. And there’s an incredible startup scene there that includes some major success stories. In the travel space alone, there’s Kayak, TripAdvisor and ITA — Two big IPOs and one important Google acquisition.
So we’re eager to build stronger ties between Boston and Montreal, to get more ideas flowing between the two local communities. You know when Newtrade (our previous gig) was acquired by Expedia, some of the team ended up moving to the States; to Seattle, the Valley, even Geneva. A lot of people ended up getting access to opportunities that weren’t available locally. And that brought new ways of working and thinking back to Montreal. So this time we figured we would get a head start; we’re not waiting to be acquired to get that exchange of ideas and talent going. And we’re going to export some Mile-End style down to Boston, too.
Related posts:
- Hopper Raises $8M to Reinvent Travel Search
- Product-Market Fit is All That Matters – an Interview with Hopper Travel Founder Frederic Lalonde
- Hopper Travel Launching Soon?
- George Favvas Plans to Leave Montreal for Silicon Valley, Joins Dave McClure’s 500 Startups Accelerator
- Are Canada’s tax incentives causing startups more harm than good?
