Darren Huston provides his outlook on travel so see what he said about it.
But as the headhunter went on, the then-45-year-old executive in charge of Microsoft’s global consumer and online businesses tuned out the arena noise and began listening to what he thought was an impossible story.
It’s bigger, certainly, and makes bigger deals than ever, dwarfing the $135 million buy of Booking itself in 2005.
And—reflecting Darren Huston early career stops in consumer services (at Starbucks) and as a McKinsey consultant—Huston’s Priceline is keeping Boyd’s focus on maniacally minding the details of online-advertising tactics and software design.
“When they recruited him for Booking, it was clear he was the guy,″ said Philip Wolf, founder of PhoCusWright, an online-travel consulting group that runs the industry’s most influential annual conference.
Boyd’s even keel helped to right Priceline’s course after the carnival-barker days of founder and ex-CEO Jay Walker, who led the onetime “Name Your Own Price” pioneer to a $16-a-share 1999 initial public offering and a stock price that multiplied 10-fold within two months of the IPO—followed by a crash that took shares to $1.05, even as 1999′s $1 billion net loss narrowed to $7.3 million by 2001, the year Boyd became president.
Recruited by Steve Ballmer, his Microsoft stint taught him how to create new products and run large franchises, like Microsoft Japan.
