President, Hotels.com
Dallas, Texas
I remember when I decided to be in the hotel business. I was 11 years old and on vacation, watching all these people serving other folks, smiling and bringing smiles to customers' faces. From then on, it never occurred to me to do anything else. Being in the hotel business for 15 years before I came to Hotels.com, we had always lived with the problem of marketing rooms and having the consumer understand what you have available. Then it became wonderfully obvious in the late 1990s that the Internet was going to be a great way to connect hotel consumers with suppliers.
I became president of Hotels.com in January 2004. The challenge that I face, which I think is probably the same for every Internet exec, is trying to move fast. One thing that helped is IAC's formal cross-company conversations about expertise and how to leverage it across the company. We share best practices in marketing, HR, customer relations, call centers, and so forth. There's a lot that comes out of these meetings. We contributed our targeted approach to email marketing and the way we buy direct-response advertising. LendingTree and some others later adopted our approach. In thinking about improving our call centers, that team realized that a peak demand period for us is an off period for Ticketmaster, so now they help us out when we need it. Barry's big on us working together where it makes sense strategically.
Hotels.com became part of the company in June 2003. The biggest change since has come from IAC's culture: It has taught me to challenge myself and my team every day. When you think you've challenged yourself enough, go back and do it some more. Our business is so dynamic, you have to get everyone to think, to be strategic, to create, to innovate, and to always think about what our customers and suppliers are looking for from us.
Cheryl Rosner is asked every single day what her favorite place to stay anywhere in the world is. She wouldn't tell us, either.
Founder and CEO, LendingTree and IAC Financial Services and Real Estate charlotte, north carolina
I was fairly reluctant to sell LendingTree to InterActiveCorp. But we got to the point in 2003 where being part of a larger organization would help us succeed. We needed capital to invest in our real-estate business. I wanted to be part of an organization that was entrepreneurial and had similar values.
At first blush, it may seem weird to have a financial-services company as part of a company mostly focused on leisure activities. But all of us are creating services that look out for the user, that are focused on wedding customers with suppliers more efficiently. So LendingTree's way of plotting strategic opportunities, its relevance and doability, has been employed by other IAC companies, particularly in travel, because we're in the same business.
IAC has provided expertise in terms of process, negotiation, and how to integrate companies into the fold. In acquiring companies to build out our financial-services and real-estate business, I have learned the importance of making sure that we bring in those with management teams whose goals are aligned with ours, and putting compensation plans in place to back that up.
The culture depends on empowering leaders to make decisions and run their businesses successfully. It's very results oriented. Facts carry the day, as opposed to politics. With the amount of capital that IAC has, we can think bigger and more long-term than we could when we were a public company. I think it's a great balance for an entrepreneur.
Last July, Douglas Lebda competed in the CEO Ironman Triathlon in Lake Placid, New York, finishing in 11 hours and 51 minutes.
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