VIDEO: Concur founder Steve Singh on next-gen business travel

Nearly 30 years after co-founding Concur – which reinvented corporate expense reporting – Steve Singh is on a mission to help build the next innovation in business travel.

As managing director of Madrona Venture Group since January 2020, Singh has led early stage investments this year in Spotnana and Troop Travel, a PhocusWire Hot 25 Startup of 2021.

In a conversation at The Phocuswright Conference 2021 with Phocuswright senior vice president of research and product strategy Charuta Fadnis, Singh explains why he expects to see “massive changes” in travel technology architecture in the next five years as the industry shifts to systems that serve the needs of the individual traveler for every trip.

Singh also argues for an end to the subscription model-based approach, which left many companies paying their travel management companies for services that went unused when the pandemic brought travel to a halt. 

Instead, he says travel management companies should adopt a consumption-based business model, which ties their success to the success of their customers. “If the customer is suffering, you should too,” Singh says.

That said, he remains optimistic about the future for business travel, expecting it to come back “bigger than ever” but also different – with a focus on travel that allows distributed teams to convene, in part funded by money saved by eliminating office space. 

Watch the full interview below.