Trip Ninja CEO Talks Failures, Successes, And Leaving Founder Life Behind
HALIFAX — Last week, one of the darlings of Atlantic Canada’s startup community ceased operations.
Trip Ninja is an online platform that helps travel agents book complex flight itineraries faster, using machine learning. It’s a business dependent on people booking multiple flights at once. So, when Covid-19 all but stopped global air travel, it hit Trip Ninja hard.
RELATED: Halifax’s Trip Ninja Shuts Down
A few days after Trip Ninja broke the news, co-founder and CEO Andres Collart sat down with Huddle to reflect on his six years running the startup.
He was frank about the challenges Trip Ninja faced, his experiences in the Atlantic Canadian startup community, and why he’s looking forward to leaving behind the mantle of founder — at least for now.
Not Fair To Investors To Keep Going
The airline industry has started to recover from the pandemic, but Collart said that recovery won’t happen fast enough to save Trip Ninja. His team estimates it might take as long as two years for the industry to get back to the point where multi-destination travel is common.
Until then, there won’t be much space in the market for the company. Collart says the idea of trying to hang on until that space returned wasn’t appealing.
The team thought about trying to raise more capital to hold them over but ultimately didn’t think it would be fair to their investors.
“Ultimately I don’t think it’s a good use of anyone’s money to have us just waiting for the market to recover. It’s not an exciting prospect for me, either, to just wait,” Collart said.
Collart was frank. He said running a travel-related startup during the pandemic was a slog. By the time they finally decided to wind down, he was ready — maybe even a little relieved — to move on.
HR, Accounting, And A Psychological Burden
“There are certain aspects of my job, I think, that I look forward to not dealing with,” Collart said, adding that he’s now looking forward to taking his skills to a bigger company, where he thinks he can make a bigger impact.
He’s always been a product guy, so he’s excited to leave behind the accounting, HR, and other organizational aspects of being a founder.
And then there’s the psychological burden.
Collart says running a company is a high-risk, high-reward kind of job and that that comes with a lot of psychological pressure.
He remembers thinking about how his actions could affect not just the company, but his partners and all the people who work for him. There was an entire ecosystem hanging in the balance every time he made a call.
“It’ll be nice to not have the entire weight of the company and the livelihood of all my employees resting on my shoulders – that would be nice,” Collart said with a short chuckle.
Atlantic Canada’s Capital Problem
Collart also admitted that money played a role in Trip Ninja’s end.
Most people would probably be surprised to learn the company only raised about $1-million (Canadian).
For comparison, Collart said it’s common for companies in the travel space to raise anywhere from $5-$10-million (U.S.) over a similar period.
“We definitely didn’t have the funding that you see in Silicon Valley startups,” he said. “We’re competing against companies that are much better funded, and that shows.”
He said Trip Ninja had trouble raising in Atlantic Canada because “there just isn’t capital here like there is elsewhere” and that the company was forced to look outside the region for most of its investment.
Then there was his personal paycheck.
“Honestly, it comes down a little bit to compensation,” he said.
“I’ve got a bunch of equity right now in Trip Ninja [but] I’d like to make a market-rate compensation for a few years,” he explained. “I want to get what I’m worth.”
Building Something That Made A Difference
Despite the pains of being a founder, Collart says there were parts of the job he really enjoyed. None more than when he watched his product help people.
Not long ago he did a demo of Trip Ninja for a travel agent. The day before, the agent had spent hours working on an itinerary for a client. Collart was able to plug the same itinerary into Trip Ninja and get a better result in 10 seconds.
“And I could just see the relief on their face,” Collart recalls. “That fulfillment is something that honestly, I really, really liked.”
“I liked that and I liked knowing that it wasn’t just the tech, but the whole product, the whole business strategy that that enabled us to deliver on that, in the end. That was really fulfilling. I hope to see it in my next role as well.”
When he considers whether Trip Ninja was a “success” or a “failure,” he goes back to moments like that.
Collart is honest: he doesn’t consider Trip Ninja a wild success. (“We didn’t exit the company and sell for millions of dollars,” he says)
But he doesn’t consider it a failure, either.
“Looking at my own personal growth over the last five years, I’ve learned a lot: from negotiating million-dollar deals to traveling the world and doing business across multiple cultures and countries and time zones. That’s been really exciting,” he says.
“And we helped over 42,000 travellers. All these people were able to save hundreds of dollars because of the technology that we built. And there’s a certain personal fulfillment in knowing that.”
He said he’s now looking forward to taking his skills to a bigger company, where he thinks he can make an even larger impact. But that doesn’t mean he’s leaving the startup community behind completely.
He said he’s been impressed by how the community has “exploded” over the past 5 years, and he will never forget the incredible support he got from other founders and members of the community.
“I think the Nova Scotia startup community should know that at least myself and the team, will always be here as part of the community in terms of helping in whatever way we can,” he said.
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