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Johannes is the Co-Founder and CEO of GetYourGuide, the leading global online booking platform for unique travel experiences. Here, he talks through his entrepreneurial journey that has led to more than 200 million booked experiences across 12,000+ cities.
This interview is taken from The Scaleup Playbook: The Inside Track to Series A, published with Airwallex, where we gathered insights from 300+ European founders and investors who have successfully raised Series A funding and beyond, to break down what it actually takes to scale a business.
In GetYourGuide’s early days, we did everything ourselves out of necessity. Customer service, coding, sales, design, hammering together the office furniture – everything. But it’s that hands-on and building mindset that became our foundation. We had to survive on marginal seed funding for four years before raising our Series A in 2013, which meant we had to be ruthlessly focused on what mattered: solving real customer problems, delivering quality, and proving the market existed.
We learned to hire people genuinely passionate about building something with impact and travel experiences. Whether someone is early in their career or C-level at GetYourGuide, chances are they’re a modern explorer themselves. That shared passion creates alignment no process document ever could and it’s the bedrock of who we were then, who we are now, and who we’ll always be as a company. There are now more than 850 employees from GetYourGuide’s headquarters in Berlin.
As we scaled, I had to learn to trust the team and focus on vision and strategy rather than execution. That transition isn’t natural for founders. We’re wired to be in the details. But the company can only grow as fast as you’re willing to let go.
Our most critical early hires weren’t the flashiest names. After our Series A, I made the classic mistake of hiring shiny talent from big tech companies or larger corporations. Great individuals, impressive CVs, but simply wrong for our stage. The right people understood our stage, believed in the mission, and were both excited and capable of building alongside us. They had the humility to roll up their sleeves, to learn by doing, and to think big. Through it all, we learned that culture-market fit matters as much as product-market fit when building teams.
Our evidence was straightforward: we’d proven demand existed, built a working marketplace connecting travelers with professional operators, and demonstrated we could scale without external capital. But what convinced our first institutional investors, PROfounders, Spark Capital, and Highland Europe, wasn’t just our numbers. It was that we’d survived and grown while bootstrapped, understood our market deeply, and had a clear conviction for where the industry was heading.
They saw that experiences weren’t an add-on to travel, which is what many in the industry viewed them as. Our investors, like us, saw experiences as the main attraction. We had the data to prove that consumers wanted experiences – not things. We had evidence that showed how travelers were evolving their spending and booking decisions, and we had the platform to capture that shift.
Companies that move from Seed to Series A and beyond share one thing: they prove they’re solving a real problem or fitting a real need, not just igniting an interesting idea. The biggest difference is often execution, resilience, and the willingness to make bold decisions when the moment demands it. Too many founders wait for perfect information. The winners act with conviction when they have enough information. They understand that in the gap between analysis and action, opportunities close. After 16 years of building GetYourGuide, I can tell you: the biggest regrets aren’t the decisions that didn’t work out. They’re the decisions you didn’t dare to make!
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