David Shull

CEO & co-founder at - Improving the tech stack for travel advisors, suppliers, and the travelers they serve. Prev employee #1 @joinhandshake

[David Shull @dsshull]

Hard tech problem but even harder distribution problem. OTAs spend $8B a year in marketing and around $30 PER TRIP to re-acquire travelers. Almost every Travel startup fails not because of tech, but because they can’t find distribution and without distribution, you can’t negotiate favorable economics with supply.

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Be your self, not someone you were assigned to be!

Bezos won on time horizon, not AWS or 1-Click.

If your bets have to work in 3 years, you compete with everyone. Every smart, funded team is chasing the same 3-year problems. Short horizon, crowded field.

Stretch to 7 and the field collapses. Investors want returns, employees want vesting, founders want proof. Almost nobody can sit in a bet that doesn't pay for most of a decade. The patience is the moat, and it costs you, that's why it works.

But you can't fake a 7-year horizon on a problem you don't actually care about. Pick the users and the problem Moloch assigned you, the safe ones, the fundable ones, and you'll bail the first hard year. Pick the ones that are actually yours and you'll still be there when everyone else has quit.

So the real prerequisite isn't discipline. It's knowing yourself well enough to choose a problem and a set of people you care about that you'll serve them for decades.

[David Shull @dsshull]

The @ternsoftware trips are some of the highest ROI investments we’ve made.

December focused on AI across the org. Since then we have increased velocity by 300%

The driver? The trust that comes from creating lore with your teammates.

I’d also add user conferences to that list.

[Ayman Al-Abdullah 🧱 @aymanalabdul]

An offsite will cost you 2% of your payroll

And return 20% of your revenue

[David Shull @dsshull]

This is super true in travel. Advisors get 150 emails per day from suppliers, clients, etc

Now Terns AI agent will process the information in each. Updating trips, CRM records, and more.

Saving hours of time daily. Agentic email will enable a massive shift in how many industries operate.

Plus more personalized experience for clients.

[Tomasz Tunguz @ttunguz]

Nobody will open Gmail five times a day in five years.

The average knowledge worker receives 121 emails per day. That's one every four minutes during working hours.

The inbox is a conveyor belt that keeps accelerating. You open Gmail. You read. You decide. You respond. One at a time. But the belt doesn't wait. It just moves faster.

Today's triage is generic : "This is from your boss. I need to work on that today. Next. Spam. Archive. Spam. Archive. Newsletter, read & archive." Tomorrow's is personal. User-defined skills & rules. Programming in English that encodes your priorities, your relationships, your workflow.

A receipt arrives & forwards itself to the expense platform before you see it. An inbound lead hits the CRM, gets scored, & a draft proposal waits in your outbox. The workflow starts the moment the email lands.

Then there's the archive. Years of context about every relationship, commitment, & decision you've made. That history becomes a personal context layer that informs how your AI handles the next message. On-device models process sensitive messages privately.

The inbox disappears. What remains are the 6 messages that actually matter.

https://t.co/qNLrpCHqLm

[David Shull @dsshull]

Coming soon to this list - travel advisors. A massive industry trapped in hours of monotonous data/text manipulation. All changing with Tern’s agent AI. Soon advisors will be free to do what they do best: sell!

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

Interesting.

[David Shull @dsshull]

@bhalligan At Tern we are building AI system of rec for travel advisors. They sell $127B in travel. Advisors pay to use Tern and centralize their book on Tern. Tern aggregates travel distribution. $2B in travel moving thru Tern advisors and we spent nothing acquiring travelers.

[David Shull @dsshull]

Travel advisors in the United States sell $127B in travel annually. That’s over a third of the entire US enterprise SaaS spending annually ($368B)

The difference? Travel advisor tech has seen zero significant innovation since the 1990s.

@ternsoftware is changing that.

[David Shull @dsshull]

It’s been amazing working with @semil, @aashaysanghvi_ and the Haystack team. Congrats from the entire @ternsoftware team on this major milestone guys.

[Semil @semil]

[brief update]

we have a new set of funds for @haystackvc

announcing haystack 8 plus more, but it's really about my teammates @aashaysanghvi_ & @DivyaDhulipala

thank you to all of our frequent ecosystem co-conspirators, our LPs, our co-investors, our founders. i'm very grateful 🙏 and this is the most fun role in the world!

https://t.co/BwjSh5NXio

[David Shull @dsshull]

@TheAmolAvasare - @ternsoftware has consolidated on Claude (canceled OpenAI last month Org-wide). Yesterday account banned. No context and no response to form.

Today we will have to move back to OpenAI if we can’t get access back. Can you help?

[David Shull @dsshull]

Travel advisors have been burdened with tremendously inefficient/fragmented systems. Many advisors turn away business because they don’t have the time.

Still, they sell $120B worth of travel in the US alone.

Imagine when they actually have the tools/AI to meet the demand.

[Aaron Levie @levie]

The reason that AI isn’t going to wipe out jobs in the way that some predict is that we consistently make the mistake of thinking that when we make something more efficient, you need commensurately less supply.

It turns out that in a significant number of fields, better productivity levels actually means more demand for that service. This is the whole point of Jevons paradox.

When the cost of doing work goes down, the demand for it goes up. And usually there’s far more pent up demand than we realize.

When AI drives up the output in these fields, thus lowering costs per unit per output, demand is going to rise of unexpected ways. This is true in healthcare, code, legal services, marketing, and a ton of other spaces.

[David Shull @dsshull]

@RippleFiber Any news on when installs will be happening? Been on the waitlist for almost a year but no news!

[David Shull @dsshull]

The whole upgrade to comfort plus is also super annoying. Just let people with top status book it free like United does with comfort plus

[David Shull @dsshull]

Miss my @united days. @Delta standby process for those with Platinum to 360 status makes no sense.

35+ seats open . Watching a 360 member wait at the podium for 20 min. Now in the back of the plane because gate agent wouldn’t clear standbys first.

We’re both last to board.

[David Shull @dsshull]

It’s @upfrontvc Summit time! Crazy this is @ternsoftware’s third year attending!

Time flies when you’re building awesome things with awesome people. Always a fun time to zoom out!

#upfrontsummit

[David Shull @dsshull]

@msuster All good! Next time! Hope you and the Upfront team have an incredible week. Know these events take a ton of work. We appreciate it!

[David Shull @dsshull]

@LifeMiddie Super exciting! Was this on the earnings call? This is great news!

[David Shull @dsshull]

@msuster So tragic. Thinking of you and everyone suffering tonight. Sending you support from afar!

[David Shull @dsshull]

@SawyerMerritt There are like 20 of these in the Rivian parking lot in Plymouth MI. Anyone have any idea why?