Responsibletravel.com – $40 Million a Year

In 2001 he set up responsibletravel.com, an online travel company offering eco holiday ideas. The company itself does not run the tours. Instead, it lists the available green choices and puts the customer in direct contact with the tour operators, who then pay a commission for any business passed through to them.

“We were the first to use the term ‘responsible travel’,” says Francis. “And now governments and journalists around the world are using the term.”

The business is now one of the fastest growing travel agencies in the UK according to The Times, and is currently turning over £20m a year, doubling sales in the last 12 months. The company started 2006 with six members of staff – there are now 16.

Francis says he couldn’t afford to pay his staff in the early days, so he compensated them with shares in the company – something he was advised not to do. “One of your main skills as an entrepreneur should be recruiting good people. If you have to give them part of the company like I did then so be it.”

The business was funded with an initial £5000. “I started by putting some of my own savings in,” says Francis. “The idea was to show people I was serious about what I was doing because we came after the dot com crash so nobody wanted to invest.”

See http://www.startups.co.uk/Responsibletravel_com.YVxwIe9oyivadQ.html

Website Flippers make millions

We’re seeing some smart people create very targeted web applications and flipping them just a couple of months after launching. First was MyBlogLog, which launched in October 2006 and was acquired by Yahoo just three months later for a reported $10 million.Confabb may on an almost identical path. The company, which has created a social network around conferences, launched just three months ago. And from what we’re hearing, they are very close to being acquired in the next week, for $5 million or so. Look for founder and Chairman Salim Ismail to make an announcement about this at the Stirr event in Palo Alto tomorrow evening.

This is good news for Confabb’s angel investors, including Dave Winer and Andrew Rasiel, who put a total of $75,000 into the startup. And it’s even better news for Ismail, who needed a win after his last startup, PubSub, imploded due to founder conflicts.

Dubbed from Techcrunch.com