How I Got Here, episode 19 - Fritz Demopoulos of Qunar

Fritz Demopoulos, Co-founder and CEO

How I Got Here is a weekly podcast from PhocusWire and Mozio, getting the inside stories behind innovation and startups in travel and transportation.

Fritz Demopoulos, co-founder and ex-CEO of Qunar (now head of Queen's Road Capital), talks to Mozio's David Litwak and Kevin May from PhocusWire about how he created a travel startup in China.

There are not many industry figures who left the relative comfort of a job in the media sector to eventually launch a travel startup.

Fritz Demopoulos is one such entrepreneur, having quit Rupert Murdoch's News Corp in the late-1990s to create two web companies in China in quick succession before settling on Qunar.

The metasearch brand arrived on the Chinese scene in 2005, amid a massive upsurge in the country's economy and a huge desire by a growing middle class to travel.

There are many elements that Demopoulos brought to the startup from his time in the media, plus by then he had an extremely useful level of experience with getting a new business off the ground in China.

The company eventually went public (two years after Chinese search engine Baidu took a majority stake), only to de-list in 2017 after a sale to Trip.com Group (then Ctrip).

Demopoulos, who now runs the Queen's Road Capital finance house, is the latest guest on the How I Got Here podcast.

HIGH is a weekly show produced by PhocusWire and Mozio, aimed at getting the inside stories behind startups and innovation in travel and transportation.

It's hosted by our editor in chief, Kevin May, and Mozio co-founder and CEO David Litwak.

A full transcript and additional analysis in 5+ languages is available on Mozio.com/move.

Here is the video version via PhocusWire's YouTube channel: