Andy Phillipps

Co-founder at Active Hotels (now booking.com)

Speaker

Andy Phillipps is an entrepreneur and early stage investor in European start-ups. Following an MBA at INSEAD, France in 1998, Andy co-founded Active Hotels, an online hotel booking company. The team grew the company to become the largest and most profitable online hotel booking company in Europe. The company was sold to Priceline.com, where Andy became CEO of the international businesses and instigated the purchase and merger with Bookings.org to form Booking.com, which now has a market cap of over $50 billion. The acquisition has been described as the most profitable in the travel industry and Priceline has subsequently rebranded to become Booking Holdings (NASDAQ: BKNG).

Andy subsequently worked with Karen Hanton and bought into Toptable.com, where he became chairman. The company grew to become the largest online restaurant booking company in Europe and was subsequently sold to Opentable (now Booking Holdings). Andy has worked with and/or invested in numerous tech companies and marketplaces, including recently as a director of Trainline up to the IPO in 2019. He regularly lectures at London Business School and INSEAD (France) and is a fellow at the Judge Business School at Cambridge University. He is on the investment committee for iQ Capital and Albion UCL fund, and is on the board of a number of European companies where he has invested. He also works with Beam (crowd funding of training for homeless people) and is an Ashoka Support Network member. He has just returned from a year at Stanford’s distinguished career institute.