Darren Huston Path To Priceline Group

1
Darren Huston Path To Priceline Group

• Source www.hbr.org

2
Darren Huston born and grew up in Canada, where
he spoke English at home. He learned French and
Italian when he was a teenager, and after college
he worked in the Canadian government, where his
boss was from Quebec and would only talk to him
in French. After graduating from Harvard
Business School, he joined McKinsey Company. As
a consultant, Darren Huston finds out that he
aspires to lead a company and he prefers B2C
businesses more than B2B businesses. He
understands how consumers interact with brands,
and Darren like being able to use the products
himself.
3
When Darren Huston was working for McKinsey in
Seattle, he saw Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz
giving a speech. Huston found him and his company
very compelling. At the time, a lot of McKinsey
people were leaving to join dot-coms He joined a
coffee company instead. People thought Darren was
crazy.He spent five years at Starbucks working
on new ventures and branded products. He led the
acquisition of Tazo Tea, helped launch Starbucks
concerts, arranged for Wi-Fi to be installed in
all of the stores, and created a Starbucks card
payment platform.
4
Through the Wi-Fi project, Darren Huston got to
know Steve Ballmer and his colleagues at
Microsoft. They recruited Darren, and he was
serving in a variety of roles, eventually
becoming CEO of Microsoft Japan.Microsoft is
where Darren Huston learned to run a scaled
operation. He lived in Tokyo for three years.
Some of his direct reports spoke a little
English, but they preferred to speak Japanese, so
Darren had a translator for a long time. Two
levels below Darren, no one spoke English very
much. This was his first experience with language
barriers as a management challenge.
5
One day in 2011, at a hockey game in Vancouver,
Darren Huston received a call from a recruiter.
She wanted him to consider a job running
Booking.com, which she said was a big internet
travel company based in Amsterdam. Darren
Huston told her he had never heard of it. She
said it was part of The Priceline Group, parent
company of the popular North American travel
website priceline.com. Like many other people,
Darren associated priceline.com with its
name-your-own-price model during the internet
bubble of the late 1990s.
6
Darren Huston seen the ads starring William
Shatner. He recalled that priceline.com expanded
quickly into name-your-own-price groceries,
insurance, and gasoline, and that it was hit hard
by the internet bust. Huston thought it hadnt
survived. But as it turned out, the company had
jettisoned nearly everything except its travel
business and done a reverse stock split to stay
afloat. Slowly it reinvented itself. If the
internet of the 1990s was all about gimmicks and
marketing, the internet of the early 2000s was
all about the ability to do transactions at
scale.
7
When Darren Huston got home and began researching
The Priceline Group, he saw that it owned a suite
of sites with that capability Rentalcars.com and
Agoda.com (for hotels in Asia), along with
Booking.com and priceline.com. Later he added
Kayak for travel search and OpenTable for online
restaurant reservations. When Darren Huston
checked its market cap, he was surprised to see
that the company was not only bigger than
Expedia, but bigger than most e-commerce
businesses he knew. It was also very, very
global, in large part because of Booking.com. He
realized that a B2C company this big, on the
internet, that nobody really knew about, offered
a unique opportunity to make Booking.com a
household name.
8
THANK YOU