Bluesmart’s Diego Saez-Gil on Building a Travel Company Using Crowd Funding at Skift Forum

Diego Saez-Gil, CEO and co-founder of Bluesmart, spoke today at the Skift Global Forum.

Saez-Gil launched Bluesmart, the world’s first self-tracking, connected luggage, via crowdfunding platform Indiegogo and raised a record $2.7 million in the process. Prior to Bluesmart, Saez-Gil co-founded mobile travel startup WeHostels that was acquired by StudentUniverse in 2013.

Saez-Gil’s talk on “Building a Travel Company Using Crowd Funding” explored the ways in which the Internet allows us to reinvent everything around us, especially the world of travel, and has allowed for open innovation. Here are five things we learned:

• Crowds are very powerful today online, and the Internet is the tool of the crowds.
• Our story we feel that our stories represents a fundamental shift in how products, services and companies are going to be created going forward. We ave entered into an era of democratization of innovation, and this is going to affect small and big companies alike.
• Be transparent. Now people want to be part of the process. Young people prefer brands that take themselves less seriously, and when you open yourself you make people part of the process, and they not only become your customers, they become your allies.
• What the internet changes is that now, we are not confined to a city; we can reach the world for free.

Innovation is no longer going to happen in a closed corporate boardroom, where companies decide what companies want. Innovation is going to come from unexpected places.

Keep track of all the activity at this year’s Global Forum by bookmarking our #skiftforum tag.

And thanks to all the sponsors that made Skift Global Forum 2015 possible: Adobe, Amadeus, American Express, Boxever, Big Bus Tours, CendyneOne, Cheapoair, Criteo, Gogo, HelloGbye, Hornblower Cruises, MasterCard, Mindtree, National Geographic, NewsCred, Sabre, SiteMinder, Travel Channel, TurkeyHome, Uber, Underline, Virtuoso, and Yahoo.