When major challenges threaten your company, your market, your technology (AI), the economy, or the world order, will you survive it?
This is durability. This matters when big changes hit quickly.
- Can you survive a massive crisis and thrive on the other side?
- Do you have enough cash, team energy, and customer loyalty cushion to handle massive headwinds?
- Did you raise too much institutional funding and become more fragile when things change?
Steve Reynolds didn’t start TRIPBAM, Inc. to disrupt the global hotel industry—he simply noticed that corporations weren’t getting the discounts they negotiated, and no one was checking.
After 30 years in travel technology, he saw a broken system hiding in plain sight.
What began in 2013 as a consumer hotel re-shopping tool quickly revealed a much bigger enterprise opportunity.
When a corporate client offered to pay a subscription fee, Steve pivoted from B2C to B2B—and never looked back.
TripBam went on to serve 250 of the world’s largest companies, saving clients 5–10% on existing hotel bookings and up to 30% when switching properties.
TripBam grew to $8–10M in revenue, with 50 employees across the U.S. and Europe, and operated as a Rule-of-60 SaaS business.
Then COVID hit: transactions dropped 95% in two weeks, and the company had to prove its resilience before ultimately selling successfully to Emburse in 2023 when travel bounced back.
TripBam survived the COVID travel downturn and thrived on the other side by having enough cushion to withstand a big market shock, as Steve describes:
“Every company that I started within corporate travel in the last 30 years, we had a significant event. 9-11 happened, and nobody traveled for a couple of weeks. And COVID. I’m a bit paranoid and think about what the worst-case scenario is and how we’re going to survive it.
“So if there was a recession, a depression, a war, a thing like a pandemic, I was going to have a problem. Maybe I had enough money in the bank to survive through it and then get it back going again once we were on the other side, or maybe not.
“We had kept subscription fees lower and became the buyer’s advocate. We showed them we were their trusted tech supplier and auditor, so they really didn’t want us to go away.
“During the COVID travel stoppage, we right-sized staffing early and continued to be a Rule of 40 company, even when transactions effectively stopped. COVID actually helped us, in a way, since our eventual acquirer could see we could survive anything.”
We live in interesting times (again), which can be a threat to software companies that don’t have the means to respond to the headwinds and thrive on the other side.
Check out this episode with Steve Reynolds on the Practical Founders Podcast.
