Interview: Gogobot CEO on the Secret to Travel Startup Survival

Editor's Note: In our Skift Startup Stories series, we document travel startup issues, solutions, and lessons from a variety of angles, hoping to shed light on what separates the winners from the losers. You can read all of the stories in the series here. Travis Katz, founder and CEO of trip-planning and local discovery site Gogobot, knows something about platforms as he did a stint as general manager, international, of MySpace in Europe in 2006. You remember MySpace (RIP), right? It was the social networking rage before Facebook, until it wasn't. But Katz took a lot from his MySpace experience, which found him traveling around Europe for work and fun at a frenetic pace. That helped Katz come up with the idea for Gogobot, which was founded in 2010 and has raised nearly $40 million in funding. "So most people will go and travel once or twice a year and I was traveling like 30 times a year, and so I started to have this interesting insight on travel, which was that booking travel, I found, was pretty efficient and pretty easy," Katz says. "I didn't have any problems booking a flight or a hotel, but trying to figure out where I wanted to go, where I wanted to stay was actually really, really, really time-consuming." From his MySpace and Gogobot experiences, Katz has formulated plenty of startup lessons about platform reliance, community-building, mobile, fundraising and more. Skift discussed these issues with Katz and the following are some of the highlights: Don't Become Reliant on Third-Party Platforms "We started from day one at Gogobot looking to leverage the strength of Facebook while not becoming wholly reliant upon it," Katz says. "Our goal was always to help you