Kukunu.com at LeWeb conference in Paris

http://techvideoblog.com/leweb/kukunucom-at-leweb-conference-in-paris/

The weekly life of a travel startup - Get ready for the pitch

Guest post on Hotel Blogs

Last week I wrote about the importance of finding the perfect co-founder and the journey to getting the right idea.

We started defining Kukunu’s concept in more detail, a new travel planning experience that would be fun and easy to use, and that would leverage smarter technology. We already had a good idea of the business model, and I built a first business case before sharing Kukunu’s concept with some travel experts and investors to challenge us and improve the proposition.

“First you jump off the cliff and you build wings on the way down”, Ray Bradbury

Last August we decided to quit our day jobs and work full time on Kukunu. We never had the opportunity to start thinking about next steps as a few weeks later we were selected for the Seedcamp 2009 final.

I’m trying to keep this post short, so if you want to know why Seedcamp is such a great experience, go read the post by Emi from Brainient. It was a fantastic week, we met awesome people, some of them are still helping us today.

We left Seedcamp with one idea in mind, get something, anything - a stripped down version of Kukunu - out in front of some users. One developer and eight weeks later, we had a first preview of Kukunu ready to share with some friends. We are now getting ready to launch a closed beta at LeWeb in Paris. Another fantastic opportunity, but I’ll talk more about that next week, during LeWeb 09 edition.

Looking back at the past few months, I can insist on 2 points:

1. Pick the best co-founder: someone you trust, someone that complements you, someone that will be with you whether in good fortune or in adversity.

2. Build something: you have no excuse to not have a working beta before raising some funding. It took us two months with a single developer to have something we were not ashamed to share, and three months to get something really cool and scalable.

Now it’s time to fine tune the last details before LeWeb. I’m leaving to Paris tomorrow. From this point onward I’ll stick to a weekly blog post relating the events of that specific week.

The weekly life of a travel startup - The beginning

This is the first guest post I did on Hotel blogs, I thought it would a good post to start Kukunu’s official blog.

My name is Itamar Lesuisse, to what people would typically answer ‘sorry?’ then ask me if I’m French. Born from a Belgian father and an Israeli mother, I studied Telecom engineering in Belgium and Canada. I have been a consultant at The Boston Consulting Group, a Product manager at Amazon where I launched new product lines, worked on ePayment at Visa and I’m now co-founder of Kukunu. I’m living in the UK and can be found on Twitter (@itamarl) or in any cafe in Soho with good coffee (I’d definitely recommend the Flat White)

The Start up roller-coaster didn’t start for me with a great idea or a disruptive technology but with a great Start up offering me a position of Chief Marketing Officer in London: perfect job, awesome team, great salary and equity in the company; I had 2 weeks to give them an answer.

I jumped on the Eurostar and met Gerald, my best friend, for a beer on the terasse of Cafe Belga. I told him about the job and after a few drinks we arrived to the conclusion that this was not the right move. It was time for me to build my own start up. The plan was simple:

1. Get the right best co-founder

2. Get an idea

1. Get the right best co-founder

I left Cafe Belga pretty relaxed. I knew exactly what I wanted and now the pressure was on Gerald. He had 2 weeks to let me know if he wanted to jump on the roller-coaster and be that best co-founder I was looking for.

I told him the job would be based in London, the opportunity was much bigger than in Belgium; I knew this wouldn’t be an easy decision for him who got married recently and just bought a flat in Brussels…

The next morning he was in.

This is the first and probably the most important step towards building Kukunu. How do you know you found the right co-founder? I guess you never know but in my case I have known Gerald for more than 25 years and I know he can handle me after a 100 hours work week and 5 espressos. I also know that he is smarter than me and as an engineer, PhD in Physics and great developer, he is the perfect match.

2. Get an idea

In 2 months we had disrupted more than 5 markets, changed the life of 500m people and generated more than £2b revenue, all that on some Excel spreadsheets and Powerpoint slides. It’s easy to get ideas, even great ideas, not so easy to pick the right one.

So I asked the team (at that point, this was Gerald, me, wife, fiancee, sisters, brothers, friends and the Starbucks staff, all those who spammed us with great, fun and crazy ideas) to stop looking for ideas, this wouldn’t work. Instead I needed them to share their daily problems and frustrations, we would take care of the rest. You’d be amazed on how much frustration people can face in a single day, on a single working task or a leisure activity.

Few weeks later, when planning holidays with my fiancee, Kukunu was born…