Active Hotels, via Booking.com, to Angel Investing: A Discussion with Andy Phillipps

Entrepreneurship and Leadership

Excitingly, Invested Investor Andy Phillipps joined Peter Cowley for a two part podcast. In part one, Andy explains how he established the hotel booking company, Active Hotels, alongside his co-founder and cousin Adrian Critchlow. Active Hotels grew rapidly, bought by Priceline and merged with Bookings BV to become Booking.com. Andy's business model transformed the UK online hotel market and continues to lead global trends. Having successfully exited to Priceline, Andy describes how he approached the topic of acquisition, and then how he approached the acquirers. Part two follows his transition into Angel Investing, what he learnt and his top tips for those looking to become Invested Investors. Andy is a serial entrepreneur and an early stage investor in startups. He co-founded Active Hotels with Adrian Critchlow, which their team grew to be the largest online hotel booking company in Europe before sale to Priceline. Andy became CEO of priceline.com’s non US business where he initiated the purchase of Bookings BV and subsequent merger with Active to form Booking.com. He subsequently bought into, and was chairman of, Toptable.com. He has also co-founded Reevoo, which provides social content solutions to brands in approx 90 countries. In addition, he lectures in entrepreneurship at London Business School and INSEAD and makes seed investments in early stage tech or market place businesses. He is an Ashoka Support Network member, fellow of the Judge business school at Cambridge University, board member of Cambridge angels, proud father of three monstrous children and has a PhD from Cambridge in mixed mode interfacial fracture of biomimetic ceramic laminates.

Produced by Mark Cotton, Twitter.

Andy Phillipps - Serial entrepreneur and accomplished Angel Investor Booking.com - a travel fare aggregator website and travel metasearch engine for lodging reservations. OpenTable - an online restaurant-reservation service company. Reevoo - helps shoppers make better buying decisions in their everyday lives Cambridge Angels - a leading UK business angel network with international connections

Peter Cowley is a Cambridge university technology graduate, founded and ran over a dozen businesses in technology and property over the last 40 years. He has built up a portfolio of 75 angel investments with nine good exits (including one that is 107X his investment and returned all the cash he has invested) and thirteen failures. He is a board member of the Global Business Angel Network (GBAN), President Emeritus of the European Business Angel Network (EBAN), former chair of the Cambridge Business Angels and was UK Angel of the Year 2014. He has mentored hundreds of entrepreneurs and is on the board of nine startups.

In 2011, he founded and ran Martlet: a Corporate VC, investing (currently £10M) from the balance sheet of Marshall, a £2.5bn revenue Cambridge engineering company. He is a fellow in Entrepreneurship at the Cambridge Judge Business School and is on the investment committee of the UK Angel Co-fund. He has also had 16 years’ experience as chair, treasurer and trustee of the boards of seven charities.

With his son, Alan, Peter is sharing his and others’ experience and anecdotes in order to educate angels and entrepreneurs via The Invested Investor which publishes two books and 75+ podcasts. A selection of Invested Investor podcasts are republished here on the Entrepreneurship and Leadership channel on the NBN. This is one of them. Peter is a public speaker on entrepreneurship and angel investing throughout the world. Here's Peter on Linkedin.

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