Entrepreneur and Early Stage Investor
London, United Kingdom
Andy Phillipps is an entrepreneur and early stage investor in European start-ups. Following an MBA at INSEAD, France in 1998, Andy co-founded Active Hotels, an online hotel booking company. Through a slightly obsessive focus on data, conversion and booking yields, the team grew the company to become the largest online hotel booking company in Europe. The company was sold to Priceline.com, where Andy became CEO of the international business and instigated the purchase and merger with Bookings.org to form Booking.com, which now has a market cap of over $50 billion. The acquisition has been described as the most profitable in the travel industry. Priceline has subsequently rebranded to become Booking Holdings.
Andy subsequently bought into Toptable.com, where he became Chairman. The company grew to become the largest online restaurant booking company in Europe and was subsequently sold to Opentable (now Booking Holdings). He is an early stage tech investor in European start-ups, with a particular focus on market places and fintech. He regularly lectures at London Business School and INSEAD (France) and is a fellow at the Judge Business School at Cambridge University. He is on the investment committee for iQ Capital (Cambridge deep tech VC) and is on the board of a number of European companies including Trainline.com (Europe’s largest train booking platform), Prodigy Finance (providing social finance for education), and Thought Machine (building new foundations for banking). He also works with Beam (crowd funding of training for homeless people), is a trustee for the New Entrepreneurs foundation and is an Ashoka Support Network member.
Andy has a PhD and BA from Cambridge University. He is married to Andrea and is the unjustifiably proud father of three monstrous children. He causes himself much grief and injury by endeavouring to force his middle-aged body around triathlons.