Bizly

Bizly brings empty meetings space at "curated" hotels together with last-minute corporate demand. Bizly CEO Ron Shah shared how the company came to be with BTN's Elizabeth West.

What was the motivation for getting into the meeting-space space, so to speak?

I was in venture capital for 15 years. I was an early advisor to MakeMyTrip, which went on to become the largest online travel company in India, so I learned a lot about growing tech platforms around the travel space. I sold two companies to Google in 2014 and [had] a flurry of meeting activity around that time, and suddenly my building went under construction. The conference room was out for six months. I had six meetings a day and no idea where to hold them. There were 10 hotels near us [in New York City], where we knew the meeting rooms were empty. I thought it was a no-brainer, but it was actually a very, very difficult process. Getting someone on the line took forever. Then you are talking about a crazy price, negotiating a contract, then faxing things. Meanwhile the meeting space is sitting empty.

Why couldn't you go to a shared office space like Regus or LiquidSpace?

It doesn't have the amenities, the food and beverage. It doesn't have a certain level of quality to impress. Maybe some are good, but it was hard to identify the quality through other platforms. That's when we realized this whole process should be digitized, the last mile of the hospitality industry. We thought if we curated the right properties we would have consistent quality.

With two sales to Google in a single year, it sounds like you were doing OK with your day job in VC. Is Bizly your single focus now?

At the time, I didn't know if this was a big market. Could it be revolutionary? Is it big enough to pursue? When I got into investigation mode, I saw a huge revolution in how people look at office space. The stats out there are like 60 percent of the workforce will be remote by 2020; that's just around the corner. WeWork was blowing up as an idea. WeWork is a $20 million company now. It's like a hotel but offices. Big companies were cutting down on their space in [large cities]. Small companies were getting aspirational about how they wanted to present themselves. I saw a whole confluence of things happening that told me it's time, it's time to jump in and do this.

Curating the hotels—what does Bizly look for?

We started off saying four- and five-star, but we've drilled down further now in what we require. We require reliable amenity level: Wi-Fi, presentation equipment, [the ability to] order at least coffee, breakfast and lunch. Beyond that, it's a level of service. We've stuck to a fabric of lifestyle and boutique properties. It's hard to blueprint, but we visit in person, look at the spaces and know the event teams. Also, we are more concerned with utilization than with having a laundry list of hotels, so we have about 20 or 30 hotels in a given city.

Does it ever seem dodgy for the user to book meeting space based on pictures?

Our long-term aspiration is to be a useful tool for anyone who wants to book a meeting, whether or not at a Bizly partner [hotel]. We want to get very robust on the content side with the images and information that convey the space. In addition, we need a critical mass of hotel partners where there is instant-booking capability. In some cases, even if we don't have instant-booking capability, we think there will be enough to look at to make good assessments on where you want to do your meeting.

Who are your customers?

Right now, it's been an on-demand, pay-as-you-go model. That's been doing well with a wide assortment of companies. We are starting to crack into enterprise accounts, like Estee Lauder or Blackstone that are rethinking their space. These relationships are signed contracts. We give them administration tools like expense management, user management, invoicing—very simplified, but they are used for compliance purposes.

Bizly looks like a local demand type of app in that there is no way to book guest rooms, for example. Is that correct?

Companies are fairly well situated in how they handle room nights and flights. They need help with the small meeting solution. We provide a very easy plug-and-play solution. There are a couple of enterprises that have talked about putting our link on their CWT portal or their Concur portal.

Other companies have tried to solve the small meetings puzzle. Why do you think you will succeed where others have not?

Two things: There were 20 companies before Airbnb,before Facebook. There is something to be said about simplicity and curation. [Our predecessors] were overly complex and too disruptive to the travel manager's workflow. Success today begins with doing the simple thing well and then building from there. I would worry about being comprehensive if there was a gorilla in the market doing this really well. But there is no one else right now, so we keep it simple.