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[on-hold music] If the world divides into, like, Cold War-like blocks again, I mean, globalization and travel are intertwined completely, and if, if globalization is gonna unwind, that's gonna have- Profound effects.

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The one silver lining is domestic travel has been booming and will continue to boom, and Airbnbs are now, uh, completely unaffordable. Uh, in general [laughs] it's very high prices.

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[on-hold music] Welcome to the Rebooting show. I'm Brian Morrissey, your host.

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During my nearly ten years at Digiday, I would always take notes from what Rafat Ali and his team at Skift were doing and compare them to our own approach.

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Every business is unique, but there were so many overlaps between what Digiday's approach was in media and marketing and what Skift's was in the travel industry.

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Rafat and I go back a long way, nearly overlapping at my very first job in journalism at Silicon Alley Reporter.

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Only I got laid off in late two thousand and one right before Rafat joined during Silicon Alley Reporter's last months, during which it spent as a venture capital publication of all things.

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He went on to found PaidContent, which he sold to The Guardian in two thousand and eight before starting from scratch in a brand-new industry with Skift, which is just now celebrating its ten-year anniversary.

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What I like about Skift is it goes narrow and deep on the business of travel while situating it within the broader context of the global economy and societal trends.

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COVID was a reminder that external events are out of your control, and the best you can do is adapt to them. But back in March two thousand and twenty, COVID decimated the travel industry.

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I remember speaking to Rafat during the dark days of March and April, when, to be honest, many in publishing didn't know if or even how we'd make it to the other side.

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Nobody likes the painful decisions you have to make to ensure simple survival, and Skift had to make a lot of painful decisions. It ended up cutting a third of its staff. The site's revenues declined forty percent.

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But it did get to the other side, 'cause for Skift, shrinking its business meant making painful decisions like furloughing employees and preserving cash to weather the storm.

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But it also made the business stronger in some ways. Skift used the pandemic to refit its business, casting off expenses of offices and event venues and building new high-margin products.

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Hard as it would be to believe back in the dark days of March and April two thousand and twenty, Skift is more profitable now than it's ever been, and it just crossed its employee count from pre-pandemic days.

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So even as Russia's invasion of Ukraine and COVID outbreaks in Asia and a new COVID variant circulating in Europe signal even more turbulence ahead, Skift is in a good position now and much better, I think, than even Rafat would have imagined back in those dark days of March and April.

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So now on to the conversation I had with Rafat. Rafat, this is a big year. Ten-year anniversary. Indeed. We're here still, ten years later. I know.

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And so we're two years into the pandemic and ten years into Skift, so I want to talk about both. I remember running into you when you were just getting started with Skift and about to launch because- Mm-hmm.

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You weren't in the travel sector, so what was the white space that you saw? I was always attracted to Politico as a business model or, like, certainly Bloomberg.

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Every B2B person has aspiration to create the Bloomberg of any sector just 'cause that's such an outsized thing.

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But Politico, I was covering as a journalist prior when I was doing my previous company, PaidContent, and always liked their mix of business-focused B2B but larger voice and larger brand and a mix of revenue streams.

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And as I was thinking about other sectors after selling my first company, PaidContent, which was a media company focused on the business of media, I was looking at things like the business of sports.

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I looked at the business of sports quite seriously until I realized I don't like sports at all. Yeah. I see some cricket tweets every now and again, but, like, you know. That said, one four-year to four-year tweets.

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[laughs] But that's it. And so I liked conceptually what FOS became. I had that idea, like, you know, ten years ago. Obviously, many people have had that, that, that idea. They just, um, did it. And so I had that idea.

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I think I may have looked at some other sectors. I looked at the business of tea. This is just so random. Just 'cause tea as a entree into wellness and didn't really go anywhere.

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But then so I was trying to do a consumer travel startup. This is when the iPad had just launched, and everybody was thinking, "Oh, this is gonna reinvent books or magazines, et cetera."

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You remember that 'cause you were- Oh, yeah... covering all of that as well. What was it, the Daily? The original Daily? The Daily or, like, the Time magazine in print going to iPad and- Yeah...

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Condé Nast spending so much money trying to come up with iPad versions. So m-- the itch that I was trying to scratch was what would travel guidebooks look like in a touch-based world?

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And was trying to learn about the industry 'cause I didn't know anything about travel, and then started reading the industry news about it and just realized how crappy it was, then ditched the idea of the consumer travel startup and said there's no Bloomberg, Politico of travel.

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The fir-- the waves of disruption that media, tech, and finance verticals that we knew in, in Web 1.0 wave, Web 2.0 wave didn't hit travel business information sector. And so that was the original premise.

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Travel is historically has not been looked at as a single sector from a trade perspective. It's always hotels have their own publications, airline had their own, et cetera.

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We, by being naive or, or smart or whichever one you wanna pick, uh, we just said, "Let's cut across these sectors because the consumers don't really care about these industry silos.

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Let's create something that, that sits on top of these different subsectors, very much focused on changing consumer behavior and how that affects the industry versus covering the industry." So I think that sensibility

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I've always had, even in my previous company'cause i- the, the previous company was covering the business media, but it was covering the business and media from the angle of how our consumer media consumption habit's changing, which is then changing the industry.

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Yeah. And I think any company I ever start from here will also have a similar thing, is like, what, how are s- how is the end user changing that then affects the industry? Yeah.

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I think that was really interesting because, like, I remember when you were starting, so I was like, well, is there a travel industry? I know we think about it, but do people, we think they're in the travel industry?

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Do people who are in the hotels, like, think about the flights?

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They're obviously all connected, but I think historically, i- it is always siloed, and striking that balance between the vertical story, it's tough to nail, but it's very powerful. It is tough.

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Yeah, and we, for the first many years, just, uh, focused on top of the funnel across the sectors. Since then, we have either created or bought publications or newsletters that go deeper into sub-sectors.

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We bought Airline Weekly, that covers aviation. It's been the Economist of the aviation media for 17 years. EventMB, which covers the organization of events.

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It doesn't cover the business events, it covers the organization, event planner type audience. We bought, last year, Daily Lodging Report, which has, been in existence for 27 years.

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It's a newsletter for hotel owners and investors. So now we have plays, uh, deeper parts of the travel industry, and we'll continue to look at that, I think, um, if I can continue to do at least one

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smart acquisition a year, um- Yeah... this is all, obviously we don't have any external source of, of money. This is our own money that we're putting into buying these companies.

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To call them companies would be a stretch. Publications is what we're buying, one or two person, three person, four person, five companies is what we're buying.

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Yeah, and that's where you go deeper into the particular verticals, whereas Skift will cut across and tell the big stories.

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And will continue to be, yeah, continue to have this big picture where the future of travel is going. And that has an appeal in the industry, but also then has a larger resonance. One of the reasons why,

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as a tiny company, we shouldn't have this outsized voice, but the, what gives us the license to do it is this big picture voice.

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'Cause if everybody in other sectors or business or, or media is trying to understand, well, what's happening to travel, they will turn to us versus any of the crappy trades that have existed for 10, 20, 40, 50 years.

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All right, so looking back, give me a couple things that you got wrong. We... Oh, many things. Oh my God. For media data now. Yes, I, well, we- [laughs] The, the [laughs] mediata is not- Mediata. It's even worse.

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Even worse.

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[laughs] So this was the concept that I was trying to raise money and was unable to raise money for the company, and I said, "Well, gotta come up with some new concept that we ‑‑ Did you have one of those two by two charts?

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I think you would've raised it if you had, like, a really good two by two. I know. I needed, no, I needed to have a circular econ- What's that thing that I keep making re- Oh, yeah. Flywheel? The flywheel? Flywheel.

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Oh, yeah. I needed to have the flywheel and I- Oh, yeah, you would've gotten, like, 10 million at 100 million post.

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I know, it's just, they would've thrown, been throwing money up in my window from outside if I had done that. No, flywheel didn't exist. Maybe it wasn't a term 10 years ago. [laughs] But it seems to have come in.

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Every SPAC IPO doc- Yeah... has a flywheel in it. What does that mean, the red flag?

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So and I actually do believe in the vision of, like, media and data services, or at least, uh, data-based analysis services along with it, and w- we were trying to build it ourselves, and it was too early.

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We didn't know what that involved as very well. Data services are a whole different breed. Yeah. Requires different expertise, not just to create, but to sell, and then upkeep and maintain and build on it.

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So certainly that was a mistake. The other big mistake we did was we expanded into other verticals beyond travel. So we expanded into the business of restaurants. We bought a newsletter- Yeah...

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and rebranded it Skift Table with an idea that w- we would do, you could assume that travel and restaurant industry are very interrelated next to each other. Didn't work. We, we tried it for two years.

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We didn't have the resources, and our proposition in travel was big picture thought leadership. Nobody gives a shit about big picture thought leadership in the restaurant industry.

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They're trying to get pennies on the dollar just in terms of margins. So it's very different industry. We also dabbled in the business of wellness. We started a weekly newsletter with the idea to become a daily.

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It was gonna be travel, restaurant, and wellness, so the business of leisure. We were gonna create a business of leisure.

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Not a bad idea on paper, but to execute, uh, for a small company like ours that is basically running based on just revenues we create, uh, was hard.

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I know Digiday, your former company, has been able to do it to various extent in various verticals. Yeah. But yeah, we were not able to do that. Yeah, it's really hard, particularly when you're bootstrapped.

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You can't afford to lose, like, $2 million for two years- Yeah... or something like this. Yeah, for a company that's 10, 10, 15, $20 million, yeah, it's very hard. Uh, there's downsides.

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There's a lot of upsides, but there's a lot of downsides, and some of the downsides are you can see an opportunity and you don't- Yeah... pursue it.

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I remember I came up with this opportunity [laughs] around the future of work two years ago, and to think about, uh- And you, this was pre-COVID. Yeah, pre-COVID. No, I'm sorry, two, it was three years ago.

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It was pre-COVID- Yeah... and just because of the lack of resources, we couldn't stand it up, and it would've got- A predominant, yeah. But who knows?

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We might not have been able to execute it, because I think that's obviously case. It, what have been the advantages up to this point of being bootstrapped, and then what have been a couple disadvantages?

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Yeah, and preface it by saying whichever side of the pie you're in, you'll figure out a way to justify that [laughs] part- Yeah... of the industry. Of course. So the advantages of, there's some cliched ex, uh, ones.

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Because you're small, you're more creative and disciplined. You try and stretch the dollars more.

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It certainly did have a hand in saving us, even though that sounds counterintuitive, during the last two years, meaning we were small enough and didn't have any external pressures of money, et cetera, that we could do whatever we wanted to save ourselves.First is having external pressures that would've, investors would've said, "No, do this," or, "Do that," or, "Go raise money," or, "Merge with this company or this."

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Uh, we didn't have any of that. So whatever we did during the last two years where we're like three weeks away from running out of money and had to do what we had to do.

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So certainly having complete freedom to do anything you want is probably one of the biggest advantage of being bootstrapped. We don't have a board. Whatever number we come up with, we say, "We're gonna grow 40%."

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Well, who's to say you're gonna grow 40 or 50 or 10? It's really up to you. Yeah. So that freedom is incredible.

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The other thing in which we'll talk about hopefully is that last year we were the most profitable year for us in our history.

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And what's that done to m- certainly my mind in the last few months is like how freeing it is to be profitable, like solidly profitable, not just profitable, solidly profitable. Okay. Not like one day in July. No.

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Like solidly- [laughs]... 20%-plus margin-type profit. Yeah. Just does wonders to your mind, just in terms of, uh, how you can think and how much more ease you, you feel and bets you can make.

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Coming back to advantages of, um, bootstrap, I do think that certainly the discipline of saying no to a lot of that, you don't have when you have too much money.

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You don't even have to have a meeting about this stuff, 'cause it's like it's not- Correct... it's not even possible- Yeah... so why even spend any time considering it? Yeah.

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So disadvantages, I think you mentioned this at the start of this, certainly opportunity that I wish we could capitalize on, the business of restaurants. Had I had more money, I probably could've made a go at it.

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Certainly- Yeah... in the pandemic it's gone to others. And our focus was business and restaurants from a tech perspective, and obviously a lot of that has evolved in the last two years.

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So we probably would've been much further along. It is frustrating not to have more money, of course. It's always frustrating not to have more money.

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[laughs] [upbeat music] So let's talk about the business pre-COVID, 'cause you're like eight years in at that point. I remember talking to you, things are going well, right? Um- They're going well.

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We were, top line was fine. We were always skirting profitability- Yeah... like plus minus. Sure. I think the problem with a lot of these businesses is your two lines need to separate.

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And by the lines, I mean your revenue and your cost lines, 'cause it's a business, right? And like- Yeah...

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I think one of the challenges of media is you keep having to add people and you keep having to add expenses in order to get more revenue, and you're like, "What are we doing here?

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We're making the same profits, and we've doubled our revenue." So I'm not saying about you guys, but I've seen this. Yeah, I know we made fun of flywheel earlier in this episode. Yeah.

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But the reality is flywheel effect does need to come in in media at some point, which is how do you make sure that you add more revenue without adding more people? Yeah.

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My understanding, and I haven't created giant businesses, I've created boutique businesses, is you talk to people and some people throw out numbers like, "When you hit $25 million, that's..."

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I don't know, that's just a broad number. Yeah. Uh, then you start seeing the flywheel effects in media, so especially digital media-type companies like ours and your former company, et cetera. Yeah. I can see that.

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I just don't have any proof in it, but that's a number that I was given by a few people that I've talked to in the industry.

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So- And the idea behind that is the infrastructure becomes a lot more efficient, because you're just simply inefficient as a sub-scale media company. I mean, there's a lot of advantages- Yeah...

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but the disadvantages are, I would always go six people in finance are, you know, 70-person company, six people in finance, like, that's just inefficient.

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Or like you don't have the negotiating power that a large- Yeah... company would have, whether it's for instance if- You're paying more for software, you're paying more for- Correct... everything.

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Event venues and as, you know, events, the biggest cost is venues and F&B and all this other stuff. So that has been reset for us in the pandemic.

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But when we- But pre-pandemic, what was your high water mark with revenue? We did 12 million in 2019 with an idea that we'd reach 17 in 2020. Huh. It's a big jump. Um- Yeah...

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and all of it was based on us starting, like, three new events. Uh- Yeah, 'cause you got on the events train. You got the crack going. Events can be crack.

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Well, we didn't have the, we didn't have the Digiday crack, but- [laughs] What's worse than being a crack addict? I don't know. Whatever it is, that's a... And I'm sure Digiday would say the same thing.

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It was all meaningful. [laughs] You know, there, there was a reason why we're expanding into these s- Yeah...

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uh, subject matter conferences, meaning, uh, vertical conferences within the travel industry, the tour operator conference, the family travel conference, and, and a few others- Yeah... uh, topics was there.

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Well, there is leverage. Once you have an events infrastructure in place, and when I say infrastructure, I'm really meaning people and- Right. Right. Yeah, 'cause that's all it is. They're a cost, right?

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And I used to always say, like, when I would go to the office or something, and, like, the events team, you know, there was times where they were not being utilized, and you just wanna utilize the events team.

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They're incredibly hardworking and incredibly good at what they do, but you wanna utilize people, like, as much as you can. And the way you do that with a, an events team is you do more events. It's like an army.

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If you got a big army, you, you're gonna go to war. [laughs] Like- Yeah. We went down 40% in 2020 in terms of revenues. We cut one-third of our staff.

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But since then we just crossed the mark of the same number of people literally last week or the week before.

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So we're back up to pre-pandemic numbers in terms of staff, but we've hired 25 people in the last year and a half, only one person in New York. Okay, I wanna get to that, but talk to me about the survival tactics.

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I mean, I remember us talking, like, early pandemic, and, like, it hurt everyone. I was, like, rereading the, like, Shackleton book. Like, that's how bad things were [laughs] because we had a massive events business.

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It was 65%- Yeah... plus of our revenue, and that's terrible. But then I would think to myself, "Well, geez, at least we're not Refat." Well, we were not 65, but yeah, 35, 40 for us.

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Plus travel, you know, talk about an industry that was completely decimated. I mean, the media industry ended up being fairly fine, honestly, throughout the pandemic. Yeah, except for March and April.

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For us, that stretched pretty much through 2020. The thing that saved us is tech, as in, like, tech companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe, had tons of money.

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These companies were getting richer and richer. They have big businesses in the travel industry, so they need to spend.

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I- in our industry, even if there were nobody was buying, they needed to show that, "Hey, travel industry, we're here for you whenever you're ready."

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Did your client base change during the pandemic?On the advertising side, yes, of course, a lot of the smaller companies or the, the travel brands themselves that were doing thought leadership didn't have any need to do thought leadership because they were laying off thousands of people of their own.

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It became more tech-heavy. Okay. We started early on, as, as you can imagine, any company starts with, like, vendor advertising, as in, like, hotel software type smaller companies. Mm-hmm.

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That's how Skift started early on in the advertising journey.

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We had over the years expanded that to consulting firms, financial services firms, uh, tech companies, larger tech companies, not just, uh, like industry tr- uh, tech companies,

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until COVID hit, and most of those others dropped off and the tech stayed, the larger tech stayed. And so that's what saved us in terms of advertising dollars.

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Subscription, people say subscriptions is the savior of media.

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Well, it's, it's savior if there's people on the other side to subscribe to your thing, but if everybody has been laid off, who's gonna subscribe to your thing?

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In the airline, this is what happened for us with Airline Weekly, like airlines were terribly hit, and so a bunch of our subscriptions there lapsed, which are now picking back up, as in, like, now people are coming back in on the airline side.

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So airline was particularly hit hard on the subscription side. 2021, financial services came back. Some of the consulting clients that we had also came out. A lot of those companies have come back.

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And I think the brand thought leadership is not back yet, as in, like, Marriott is not yet back. I think that'll probably be more like 2023, hopefully, if the world still is there.

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So when did you get out of survival mode? This is a answer I know very well. It is the day the vaccine was announced, this was sometime in the fall- Mm-hmm... to say it's coming in Jan.

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I said, "Okay, the world will be okay, which means travel is gonna be okay." That and then whichever side of the political spectrum you are, what you wanted was the political drama to end.

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And so when the elections results became clear that Biden was winning, those two things, I think the vaccine announcement and Biden- Yeah... winning were back to back in a matter of few weeks.

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And did that change how you approach? Because as you said, the early months, you gotta cut and you just have to get to the other side. It's survival mode. Yeah. I was not taking salary.

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Everybody in our company made some sacrifice along the way. Some people had voluntary furloughs. Even after we laid off the people, we still had to do some sacrifices.

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But it was November 2020, we thought that you get the vaccine, nobody's ever gonna get anything ever again. Right. This is gonna be the end of it.

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I think that changed the mood of the world, and anybody sneezes any part of the world, it somehow has an effect on travel. It's so much about sentiment. Yeah. Meaning the people's willingness to travel.

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And as you can see now with the war, it's beginning to show an effect on the travel industry when your first assumption would be, oh, it's, it's just gonna be Russia and Ukraine or maybe Eastern Europe, but no, Europe is going through a chilling effect.

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The hotel industry numbers for last week in Europe were pretty bad.

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This is all across Europe, and my joke on that was, well, when Ebola hit, we basically said nobody's going to Africa when it was just, like, one country in Africa, so we're just getting what we do to others.

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So about when you kinda got out of survival mode and got into preparing for the other side mode. We did such a good job of cash management, and I would credit our CFO, Michael Kniff, and the whole team.

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By January '21, where we were able to bring everybody's salary back up, we thought we would continue till, like, end of Q1, but we were able to push it up because we, we did a good job with cash, and we started doing okay on advertising.

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Some of the advertising started- Yeah... coming back as soon as the vaccine was announced. So how did the business change?

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'Cause you talked about actually the most profitable year was a year that was actually still kind of bad for the industry that you're focused on. So you must have remade the business.

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And, like, the old cliche is, you know, a crisis is a terrible opportunity to waste because you can reshape businesses. We were living that cliche. And so one, a bunch of costs are gone, like physical office was gone.

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So certainly that is contributing to it. Salary struck our cost base on talent is also spread now around the world, which means that I'm able to manage hiring people here in the US

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and then UK and India and other parts of Europe, et cetera, et cetera.

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So I'm able to spread my costs on talent as well, not just cost, I'm able to hire from anywhere, which means that talent is a crunch now for everybody, including us, but at least I have a larger pool to work off.

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So that's been gratifying. We've gone through our iteration of the great resignation in various phases in our company.

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We had a wave earlier than when it actually started in other companies, and so we went through a wave in early, like, mid-2020 with that, and then some part in 2021 in that.

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So we've gone through various phases of people leaving, and that's just part of life. So, so it's been set on the talent, reset on the talent. Subscriptions have come back very, very strong this year.

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This Q1 has just been blockbuster for us. And so subscriptions is becoming a bigger part. I've always said for 10 years now that I want it to be one-third subscriptions, one-third events, and one-third advertising.

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We're getting there on subscriptions. That's good. That's great. Yeah. So I think we're at 25% last year, uh, of our revenue. So we're getting there. You put events in advertising? No. We, it's, it's different.

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What, how do you, where does it go? Oh, you mean sponsorship? We talked earlier and you said events were, like, 35-plus percent. Yes. Of revenue. Events include sponsorship as well. Okay.

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So you include- Advertising, as in what branded content- Okay... is a separate P&L. Advertising has held very strong. You've been writing about this- Yeah... the whole time, which- It's been great...

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and so for us, the same thing. Travel advertising started coming back, as I said, last year, and it's still going very strong. What has also been reset is virtual events.

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One of the reasons why we were profitable last year was we didn't have physical event costs. We had one physical event. Yeah. And virtual events make a lot more profits. But they're not as good of a product.

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Well, define that because- Okay. You know, my general theory is there's a lot of different types of events, but they bundle together a bunch of different functions.

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The events at Digiday were very, very much about creating what our CRO artfully called a deal-making atmosphere, which is basically matching up a buy and a sell side. Mm-hmm.

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The actual content, the programming of eventsIt's great to do in a virtual environment. You can, like, have these... People have, like, TV sets, and, like, it's convenient. You can get speakers from all over the world.

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They don't need to pay for their costs, they don't have to get on a plane and stuff like... It's amazing. It's- Yeah... and it's just as good. Yeah.

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It's better than being in a freezing hotel room with those terrible carpets. The problem is the networking part. And l- all events are d- different, but a lot of events, that's the majority of the value being created.

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True. And I think, uh, in two years if we have this conversation, the tech will have re- will, will have leapfrogged a lot. But virtual events,

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especially shorter, I know you guys experimented with a lot of that- Mm-hmm... um, do have a place. So for us it's now a permanent part of our landscape, as it should be for a lot of event companies.

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And, and is that all mostly sponsorship versus tickets? Correct. Yeah, that- Okay...

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has been proven many times over so far, which is, um, either get the qualified people or the maximum number of people, or both, mix of both, um, and then make money on the sponsorship.

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And sponsorship there is not that you will get leads, but then you would get what in physical world would be called stage time. In virtual world, I'd guess it's still called stage time.

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But obviously clearly labeled as a sponsored thing. Sure. And so they're part of the, the programming flow. 'Cause, like, at this point, nobody's figured out how to integrate them otherwise.

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It has to be part of the programming flow. I guess my question ends up being when in-person events, they're coming back. In Miami I just, like, rode my bike along.

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There's, like, event after event, like, cocktail party [laughs] along the beach. Events are back, at least to Miami.

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But I wonder, like, with the virtual events if there is, like, a little bit of a false signal in that people who would normally

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find a lot of value in the in-person events sponsor the virtual events because, look, marketing people are... They're gonna move somewhere. They're not gonna be like, "Okay.

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Well, we're just gonna leave our jobs now," and stuff like this.

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So I just wonder whether people are betting that they're gonna have a new set of products, when in fact they were just taking money in one pocket and moving it to a different pocket, just temporarily. Yeah.

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I don't know the answer to that, but we'll find out. I do think that there's a place for virtual events. I do think there's also false signals on the coming back of physical events, by the way. Yeah.

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Which is there's this pent-up demand. People are doing it now, and will they come back to the levels that it was pre-COVID? I have my doubts. No way.

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There's gonna be a shakeout, and there's a lot of salespeople are itching to get out there. Every event I've heard about, they're, they're going gangbusters right now. I've heard the opposite. Maybe it's a Miami thing.

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People just wanna be outside. [laughs] But any industry event today, even if you take out the Ukraine war, is f- at 50%, this is the number I'm hearing from a lot of B2B folks, 50% attendance.

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So events are happening- Interesting... but they're 50%. 50% is just a, a broad number of course. But that's the attendance I'm hearing.

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Maybe in, like, crypto and stuff, they're blowing out of the water 'cause those are- Oh, yeah... sectors that are booming. But traditional B2B sectors, trade shows, similar on trade shows. Yeah, trade shows for sure.

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I was with a group of trade show executives about two weeks ago, and all of them hate virtual events. 'Cause you can imagine why they do, is just it doesn't translate well.

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For us as editorial-led conferences, there's a use case, and the world has, uh, shown it. So I think it'll become a permanent part.

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This will be a transitory year, as in how much do we calibrate to virtual versus physical, we will have to figure out this year. Okay. Because by, by next year we won't have the luxury to have this experimentation phase.

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So two quick final topics. One is remote work. You've gone all in. You have parted ways with the boss class. I salute you for that, in not putting a gun to people's head to come back.

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Imagine not having to worry about all this shit, all the, all these rules into place- Yeah, yeah, yeah... and, like, how do you manage them. It's just we don't have to worry about- Yeah... any of that stuff.

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I miss the people posting the photos of coffee cups left in the sink on Slack, like that. I miss it. Yeah, of course. There are downsides to working from home.

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There's- But tell me, you talked about the cost savings, but confining yourself to New York City t- to attract people, which, you know, we did for a decade, was in retrospect insane. [laughs] It is insane.

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People have been saying it, and, like, people like Automattic that does WordPress. What his name? Matt, the CEO- OneLike, yeah...

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has been saying this for years, like, why restrict yourself to this area of, like, 30 miles outside where your office is? That just seems ridiculous. So yeah, that's been liberating.

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Obviously when people said the world is their oyster, whatever phrase they wanna use, you cannot hire by, like, just posting a job and say, "You could be anywhere in the world."

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You have to have some rational parameters, maybe one country or time zone. Yeah. Like, those are the types of things you do have. Different teams have different needs in the company.

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Our research team can hire in India because it doesn't work on a constant 24 by 7 cycle. Mm. They don't produce daily stories. They produce weekly, monthly type work, so it works there. Sure.

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But in sales, I can't have a salesperson sitting in India and selling West Coast US. Yeah. They're doing, like, inside sales and... Maybe. Yeah- But...

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if it's just regulation stuff, but not, like, the high-touch stuff the B2B- Yeah... uh, sales requires. So, um, the downsides are obviously we're not able to see each other.

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It's funny, two people have, have left the company this year. Both of them we were hired in the pandemic.

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So, like, in the back of my head I'm thinking, oh, is it because we just were never able to form the strong ties versus the weak ties, whatever that- Yeah... cliche is.

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And so, um, that's always a nagging thought in the back of your head. How do I make sure that the people really do have some strong ties to each other in the company? I'm not gonna solve it.

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I hope other larger companies or larger tech players or whatever else solves it, and then I can adopt it. Exactly. As a tiny company, we're not pioneers beyond a certain point. Right.

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So final thing is how travel changes. I know this is a- Mm... massive, massive topic. Fascinating, yeah. We'll keep it very short.

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But, uh, uh, speaking of remote work, T- TBD what business travel comes back as, and does-If a certain class of people, which is the people that had a lot of money to travel, are remote and can work from anywhere, does that increase business travel because there's a new form of business travel, people meeting?

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That's a thing that we're following. Climate change has become such a central thing to travel just because travel is such a high-profile sector- Yeah... airlines particularly.

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And so carbon footprint of travel is very visible, which means that there's a lot more pressure on the travel industry t- uh, and companies that spend on travel, this is business travel particularly.

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So that's certainly one thing we're following. And then automation, which, as you can imagine, travel is one of the world's largest employers of people, particularly entry-level jobs.

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And so automation works particularly well, at least in theory, in those types of jobs. So how does that change?

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Um, what happens to China, which was the biggest force in the travel industry, has emerged as the biggest force in the travel industry in the last ten, fifteen, twenty years.

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But if Chinese travelers are not traveling, then economies like Australia and Thailand and LA and others, they're gone. Yeah.

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If the world divides into, like, Cold War-like blocks again, I mean, globalization and travel are intertwined completely, and if, if globalization is gonna unwind, that's gonna have- Profound effects.

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The one silver lining is domestic travel has been booming and will continue to boom, and Airbnbs are now, uh, completely unaffordable. Uh, in general [laughs] it's very high prices.

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Flights have become a lot more expensive. So domestic travel in general has been booming. Leisure travel has been one silver lining in general.

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People have shown that they want to travel, and countries are dropping their restrictions, certainly something we're following today.

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From today, UK has taken away all restrictions for travel, and I'm flying to London on Sunday night, so that works out. Excellent. Thank you so much, Rafat.

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It's been great to, to see Skift grow, and happy ten-year anniversary. [music] Thank you. I know, ten years. It took ten years for me to be sort of okay with the idea that we're a real company.

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[laughs] I know this sounds ridiculous. I shouldn't be saying out loud, but the reality is, like, profitability does play wonders with your mind. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you so much. Of course.

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And thank you all for listening. We'll be back next week with a new episode. I didn't say thanks to you, Jay. Sorry. I'll put it in later. [outro music]