A Fortune 500 CEO and the leader of a company valued at more than $180 billion, Glenn Fogel is the CEO of Booking Holdings, the world’s leading provider of online travel and related services, and the parent company of Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, Rentalcars.com, KAYAK, and OpenTable. Glenn joins Adam to share his journey and his best lessons and advice. Glenn and Adam discuss leadership, business strategy, career success, and much more.
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Read the full transcript of Adam’s conversation with Glenn Fogel.
Episode Summary
Glenn Fogel is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Booking Holdings, the parent company of Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, KAYAK, and OpenTable, and he is also Chief Executive Officer of Booking.com. He tells Adam how he came back from a stroke at 17, how a winding career brought him to Priceline, and what he has learned about acquisitions, change, and treating people well.
Glenn recalls waking up one day near the end of his junior year of high school after a left temporal lobe stroke, unable to speak, read, or write. He says it took a long time and very hard work to come back, and that nine years later he graduated from Harvard Law School with honors. Life is never a linear upward trend, he says, and how you deal with the drops is what makes the difference.
After college, he recalls, he worked as a coder in the back office at Morgan Stanley, then went to law school and became an investment banker at Kidder, Peabody, where he was part of a large group that was let go. He says he did not work for a couple of years, later became a trader, and then wanted to be part of the internet. He says he arrived at Priceline.com in February 2000, one week before the Nasdaq peaked, and that within that year the stock fell to the equivalent of $6 a share; even his mother thought the company had gone bankrupt. Twenty-five years later he is still with the company, he says, and the stock is in the five thousands, but it was never a straight line.
Glenn resists the hero story. He says much of any success comes from things you have no control over, that nothing is done by a single person, and that the company was very fortunate. What it could control, he explains, started with discipline about cash after it nearly ran out, which led it to concentrate on hotels, the most profitable part of travel. Later, while he was running the company’s European efforts, it brought in two small startups, Active Hotels in 2004 and Booking.com in 2005, for roughly $300 million combined, he says. He prefers the word partnering to acquiring, and says the key was finding entrepreneurs who execute and giving them incentives to stay and build.
On change, Glenn says the hard part is convincing a successful organization that it needs to adapt. He reminds people of BlackBerry and Nokia, and he warns that companies not actively working with generative AI will disappear. He is candid that technology displaces people, citing the human translators once needed for the more than 40 languages he says the company operates in, and he asks what is fair and just for them. Having been fired himself, in a scene he likens to the movie Margin Call, he says letting people go requires a fair financial package, time to adjust, and respect, and that he will never be proud of it.
On leadership, Glenn calls empathy foundational when Adam raises it, and he adds curiosity and seeing the bigger picture, along with learning from good and bad bosses and listening to a trusted team. With 25,000 employees, he says, his job is not to code but to make sure everyone understands the vision and to hold people to what they say they can do, much as a football coach builds the units rather than playing. He wants people who want to win, not people who just show up. His closing advice: not everybody can be the best, but everybody can be better, so be disciplined about how you spend your time.
What You’ll Learn
- Expect setbacks and focus on how you respond, Glenn says: life is never a linear upward trend, a lesson he ties to the stroke at 17 that left him unable to speak, read, or write.
- Give credit to luck and to your team, Glenn says: much of any success comes from things you have no control over, and no championship has ever been won by one person.
- Treat an acquisition as a partnership, Glenn says: look for entrepreneurs who are actually executing, and give them incentives to stay and build, as he says the company did with Active Hotels and Booking.com.
- Fight complacency by reminding people that today’s success guarantees nothing, Glenn says; he points to BlackBerry and Nokia, and he warns that companies not actively working with generative AI will disappear.
- When you have to let people go, provide a fair financial package, time to adjust, and respect, Glenn says, a view shaped by how abruptly he was let go as a banker.
- Be disciplined about how you spend your time, Glenn says: not everybody can be the best, but everybody can be better, and the hours lost scrolling social media could go toward improving yourself.
About Glenn Fogel
Glenn Fogel is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Booking Holdings, a role he has held since January 2017, and he has also been Chief Executive Officer of Booking.com since June 2019. He joined the company in February 2000 and later served as Head of Worldwide Strategy and Planning and as Executive Vice President, Corporate Development, leading key acquisitions including Booking.com, KAYAK, OpenTable, Rentalcars.com, and Agoda. Earlier, he was a trader at a global asset management firm and an investment banker specializing in the air transportation industry. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School and earned a Bachelor of Science in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
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