For two years, nobody at Skyscanner was paid.
Gareth Williams, Barry Smith and Bonamy Grimes were IT contractors with day jobs. They built the company in spare hours, financing it themselves, mostly with unpaid labour. It was not until 2004 that all three had quit to work on it full time.
What almost nobody realised is how long they held out before taking outside money.
The idea began with irritation. Williams wanted to plan trips, including visits to his brother in France, and every airline had its own website with its own prices. He wrote software to search many of them at once. He was born in Norwich and moved around in childhood, through Sussex, Switzerland and Canada. At Manchester he studied mathematics and computing, and in his first days there he met Grimes.
Skyscanner launched in 2003, and the first office, in Edinburgh, opened in 2004. It was a long, thin stretch. Money was tight and the product was unfashionable.
What almost nobody realised is how long they held out before taking outside money. Only in December 2007 did Scottish Equity Partners put in GBP 2.5M for a 40% stake. The founders had carried the company for most of five years. In 2009 it reported its first profit.
Then it scaled. Offices opened in Singapore and Beijing, and in 2013 Sequoia Capital invested at an $800M valuation. In January 2016 a GBP 128M round put the value at $1.6bn. In November that year, Ctrip, now Trip.com Group, bought the company for about $1.75bn.
The cost arrived in 2020, when COVID wiped out travel. Skyscanner cut 300 jobs, about 20% of staff, and closed its Budapest and Sofia offices. By 2025 it had recovered to revenue of GBP 540.6M and net income of GBP 56.9M, under a new chief executive, Bryan Batista.
The lesson is in the sequence. The three held on to their time and their ownership while the product was still small. By the time investors arrived, they were asking to join something that already worked.