Booking’s FareHarbor Kept the Bootstrapping Myth Going While Discreetly Raising Outside Money
Photo Credit: FareHarbor co-founders Zachary Hester (left) and Lawrence Hester several years ago. CEO Lawrence Hester has stated that the company took no outside funding, but FareHarbor now says he was referring to institutional venture capital funding. FareHarbor
Skift Take
Honesty is the best policy. Even if it clashes with a nice FareHarbor bootstrapping story that seemed too good to be true.
Lawrence Hester, co-founder and CEO of tour-booking software company FareHarbor, which became part of Booking Holdings in 2018, is fond of recalling the company's humble beginnings in Hawaii.
After taking over the operations of North Shore Catamaran in the 50th U.S. state, brothers Lawrence and Zachary Hester launched FareHarbor there in February 2013. Talking about the decision to go with a bootstrapping strategy, which generally means raising money from friends and family only, Lawrence Hester wrote a LinkedIn post two-and-a-half years later describing how he had slept on his brother's girlfriend's couch to be frugal in the company's early days.
"FareHarbor is like many other bootstrapped companies," Lawrence Hester wrote in that post in August 2015. "We put everything into our business."
And, in an appearance at a travel industry conference in November 2017, Hester kept the narrative going. The FareHarbor CEO said he "slept on the floor for a whole
