Right before starting graduate school, Eric Grosse set off with a good friend on the trip of a lifetime. They started in Buenos Aires, and through a combination of cars, trucks, trains and hitchhiking, ended up in Cartagena, Columbia. He then made his way to Bogota and flew to Miami, where he bought a motorcycle and drove up the coast to business school.
“It was an amazing experience that you can only do when you’re young,” says Grosse, who would go on to co-found Hotwire Inc., an Internet travel site. “Six weeks from Buenos Aires to Cambridge, Mass. It was great.”
Little did he know at the time that the experience in getting from Point A to Point B by whatever means necessary would help him later in his business.
Started during the dot-com boom, Hotwire was rolling along, but then Sept. 11 happened.
It was around 6 in the morning when the phone shrilled in the early morning stillness with a message alerting Grosse of the horrific events that had happened in New York City and just outside of Washington, D.C., that September morning.
Travel came to a halt. No one was flying anywhere, and struggling airlines were making cutbacks and flirting with bankruptcy.
“That put us in a crisis mode that we hadn’t had to do before, so we really had to essentially create at Hotwire an emergency task force to quickly identify how this is going to impact our customers, how is this going to impact our strategy, how is this going to impact our growth plans, and how is this going to change?” Grosse says.
Grosse quickly saw the effects the attacks had on his industry. “When you’re in the business of selling empty seats as we are, you see a 20 percent reduction in domestic capacity amongst the air carriers, that’s a massive change that took place very quickly that was obviously very sudden and precipitated by that awful day,” Grosse says. “What that meant was we had to be really nimble very early in our life to get serious about developing other lines of business in addition to air.”
Despite the circumstances facing the company, Grosse wasn’t one to sit around and let things fall apart. Much like his early trip through South America, he started figuring out how he was going to get from Point A to Point B.
“We’re very focused on action,” he says. “We didn’t want to sit and let the external events dictate to us what we should do. We wanted to get in the driver’s seat and respond in a proactive way that was going to allow us to succeed.”
