TripIt Congratulations

This morning TripIt announced that it’s signed an agreement to be acquired by Concur, a publicly traded travel & expense company. It’s a fantastic outcome for all involved, and I’m very proud to have been involved as a member of the board of directors over the last several years.

For me, it’s a great example of doing things right. It’s an awesome team that made an awesome product that lots of people can’t live without — simple as that.

I started using the product way before I got involved in the company. I can still remember waking up in Tokyo at 4a suffering from jet lag, going through my news feeds and noticing a financing round in 2008 that Mark and Bryce from OATV had participated in (they did the original round of financing in 2007 — great foresight!). I sent them a short note, saying something like: “Awesome investment, it’s a terrific product. Couldn’t live without it.”

That led to Mark introducing me to Gregg Brockway and Scott Hintz, the founders, and over time we developed a relationship that turned into an outside board seat for me. It has been a wonderful relationship. If you’ve ever met Gregg and Scott, you know what I mean: they’re extremely hard working, smart, humble, thoughtful founders — really everything you could ask for in a founding team. They’re always ready and willing to engage on any aspect of the product or the business; they’ve always put building a great business at the top of the list of concerns. I love working with both Gregg and Scott, full stop.

And they’ve put together a team that is like that as well. The developers, marketers, designers and other managers — everyone’s been committed to building something great. (Andy Denmark, in particular, deserves an award for being patient with me as I nitpicked various things over the years — to his eternal credit, his response was always very positive.) And it includes the other members of the board as well — Mark Jacobsen from OATV and Mike Kwatinetz from Azure — they’ve been amazing and fun to work with, and I can’t imagine the past several months working with anyone else.

So I wanted to say thank to you the whole team — it’s been deeply gratifying to be involved, and I know you’ll continue to do amazing things with a bigger platform like Concur. To my mind, it’s a testament to doing things the right way, and to building products people love.

Onward and congratulations!

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