In 2012, I joined a small travel technology company called Dida Travel. Nobody knew the name. We had maybe twenty people, an office in Beijing that smelled like instant noodles, and a belief that we could fix how Chinese travelers accessed the world.
Fourteen years later, that company had processed over twelve billion dollars in travel bookings. We had teams in eight countries. We were serving fifty million travelers a year. And I had learned more about building things the hard way than any MBA could teach me.
This is the story of what went wrong, what went right, and why I’m now building RollingGo.
The First Mistake: Building Everything Ourselves
When we started, the problem seemed simple. Chinese travel agencies had no reliable way to book hotels outside of China. The big OTAs — Ctrip, Qunar — dominated domestic travel. But international? That was a mess of phone calls, emails, and handshake deals.
