#6 | "The Moore's Law of Startups": Insights from building Get Your Guide with COO and Co-Founder Tao Tao

I am sitting down today with Tao Tao, COO and co-founder of Get Your Guide, a global booking platform for travel experiences. Get your Guide is a two-sided marketplace bringing together travelers from over 190 countries with local tour operators to create memorable experiences. The company has approximately 800 employees in 17 locations. 

Over the past 14 yrs, Get Your Guide has served more than 80 million travellers, growing at a steady rate of 100% per annum; except for 2020, when travel came to a halt due to Covid. The team recovered and continued their growth path within the global travel experience market, estimated at $200-300bn, 80% of which is still offline.

I really enjoyed this far-ranging conversation with Tao Tao, who takes us back to the founding days and drops us off with his current goals, on a whirlwind tour of Get your Guide and his lessons learnt shaping it. 

In our conversation, we cover:

1. How to think about starting a business in the wake of an economic crisis
2. We talk about two founder qualities that are essential ingredients, namely: loving to build and having a high tolerance - not so much for risk, but for uncertainty - and not knowing for a long time whether what you’re building truly has product-market fit. Especially if you're trying a model that doesn’t yet exist
3. How to pivot from a C2C approach - think: peer-to-peer couch surfing - to a more quality-assured and reliable B2C platform
4. We cover some of Tao’s favourite maxims drawing on Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and Jack Ma, as we talk about life advice such as not living someone else’s life or template for success; applying a “regret minimization framework”, imagining whether your 80-yr old self would regret what you are presently considering; and, solving for learning in your 20s, building in your 30s, and harvesting in your 40s. I’ll let you guess who famously said what...
5. We talk about how to shape organizational culture through values and principles. Pro tip: make them 80% about what you are today and 20% about what you seek to become. We also talk about how not to do it...
6. We discuss “Moore’s law of startups”, and how high-growth settings require personal development to keep pace with the business: even as you retain your job title, you constantly operate with increased scope and basically re-qualify for your role
7. On this, Tao shares his cascade of ever-increasing managerial growth, ranging from managing a direct report, to a team; then on to shaping management systems that scale beyond individuals; then on to shaping culture as in collective norms and values, to setting corporate strategy and beyond
8. Finally, we discuss strategy under uncertainty and how to make those tricky 51/49 decisions, injecting creativity and courage.

Supporting material and further reading:

Tao Tao on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taotaotao/

Get Your Guide: www.getyourguide.com

Steve Jobs' Stanford 2005 Commencement Speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd_ptbiPoXM

Jeff Bezos on his regret minimization framework: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwG_qR6XmDQ

Jack Ma on advice by life stage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DByuo1UBiW0