Welcoming Trippy Aboard

We’d like to welcome to True and congratulate Trippy Founder JR Johnson and his team who announced a $1.75M round that True led today.  I met JR through Techcrunch’s Sarah. He exemplifies exactly the type of entrepreneur with whom we strive to work. He has deep domain expertise having founded and successfully exited Virtual Tourist to Expedia. Impressively, he only raised $237k to build Virtual Tourist. We love entrepreneurs who have a history of stretching investment dollars into tangible product traction to guide their early product/ market fit development cycle and capitalization strategy.

Trippy taps into the travel experiences of your social graph to let you get tips from the people who know your personal details, allowing them to jump right in with relevant suggestions. Trippy makes it just as easy for friends to then share suggestions with Facebook-style comments, one-click recommendations and an intuitive auto-complete tool, helping you choose hotels, activities, restaurants, and more. Your itinerary and map are automatically updated as you plan, and Trippy lets you check rates and book as well. Your friends can then travel along with you through Trippy’s mobile app, which allows you to share photos and messages as you enjoy their recommendations.  It’s a full circle social travel experience that takes you from inspiration to execution. A simple idea, but one we believe is very powerful and yet to be delivered on the web.

We’re equally thrilled to be joined by Sequoia Capital, SV Angel and some of the web’s most talented entrepreneurs and investors: Rob Solomon, Tim Ferriss, Brian Lee, Gil Ebaz, Brandee Barker, Chase Jarvis, Randi Zuckerberg, Jason Mraz, and Rachel Zoe.  That’s an excellent syndicate, perfectly balanced to provide insight from both a tech and travel perspective.

Thank you JR  and team for your faith and confidence in True. Congrats on your round, and congrats also on building a phenomenal syndicate of investors. We are really honored to be a part of the Trippy team and look forward to the adventure ahead.