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Darren Huston born and grew up in Canada, where he spoke English at home. He learned French and Italian when he was a teenager, and after college he worked in the Canadian government, where his boss was from Quebec and would only talk to him in French.<br>
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Darren Huston Path To Priceline Group Source : www.hbr.org
Darren Huston born and grew up in Canada, where he spoke English at home. He learned French and Italian when he was a teenager, and after college he worked in the Canadian government, where his boss was from Quebec and would only talk to him in French. After graduating from Harvard Business School, he joined McKinsey & Company. As a consultant,Darren Huston finds out that he aspires to lead a company and he prefers B2C businesses more than B2B businesses. He understands how consumers interact with brands, and Darren like being able to use the products himself.
When Darren Huston was working for McKinsey in Seattle, he saw Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz giving a speech. Huston found him and his company very compelling. At the time, a lot of McKinsey people were leaving to join dot-coms; He joined a coffee company instead. People thought Darren was crazy.He spent five years at Starbucks working on new ventures and branded products. He led the acquisition of Tazo Tea, helped launch Starbucks concerts, arranged for Wi-Fi to be installed in all of the stores, and created a Starbucks card payment platform.
Through the Wi-Fi project, Darren Huston got to know Steve Ballmer and his colleagues at Microsoft. They recruited Darren, and he was serving in a variety of roles, eventually becoming CEO of Microsoft Japan.Microsoft is where Darren Huston learned to run a scaled operation. He lived in Tokyo for three years. Some of his direct reports spoke a little English, but they preferred to speak Japanese, so Darren had a translator for a long time. Two levels below Darren, no one spoke English very much. This was his first experience with language barriers as a management challenge.
One day in 2011, at a hockey game in Vancouver, Darren Huston received a call from a recruiter. She wanted him to consider a job running Booking.com, which she said was a big internet travel company based in Amsterdam. Darren Huston told her he had never heard of it. She said it was part of The Priceline Group, parent company of the popular North American travel website priceline.com. Like many other people, Darren associated priceline.com with its name-your-own-price model during the internet bubble of the late 1990s.
Darren Huston seen the ads starring William Shatner. He recalled that priceline.com expanded quickly into name-your-own-price groceries, insurance, and gasoline, and that it was hit hard by the internet bust. Huston thought it hadn’t survived. But as it turned out, the company had jettisoned nearly everything except its travel business and done a reverse stock split to stay afloat. Slowly it reinvented itself. If the internet of the 1990s was all about gimmicks and marketing, the internet of the early 2000s was all about the ability to do transactions at scale.
When Darren Huston got home and began researching The Priceline Group, he saw that it owned a suite of sites with that capability: Rentalcars.com and Agoda.com (for hotels in Asia), along with Booking.com and priceline.com. Later he added Kayak for travel search and OpenTable for online restaurant reservations. When Darren Huston checked its market cap, he was surprised to see that the company was not only bigger than Expedia, but bigger than most e-commerce businesses he knew. It was also very, very global, in large part because of Booking.com. He realized that a B2C company this big, on the internet, that nobody really knew about, offered a unique opportunity to make Booking.com a household name.
