Earlier this week a small travel startup called Hipmunk got what was reported to be a $6 million venture round. I wasn't surprised. A friend had turned me on to Hipmunk a while back, and I loved it.Aside from the whimsical name and catchy ads, Hipmunk is actually a new take on the stodgy business of travel search now populated by Kayak, Orbitz, Expedia and many others. Hipmunk provides travel search results with key twists that make it much easier and faster to find flights focusing on travel factors that really matter.
This is second-act startup for founders Steve Huffman (co-founder of social news site Reddit) and Adam Goldstein (founder of BookTour with Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine). The team also includes Alexis Ohanian, another co-founder of Reddit. Hipmunk is one of many promising Internet startups helped along by Paul Graham, founder of the Y Combinator tech incubator. Graham may be the most powerful Internet venture capitalist on Earth.
I never get tired of hearing these conversion stories -- when someone first searches on hipmunk and it just clicks. Thanks, Alex! And you can be sure I'm going to mention the "Graham may be the most powerful Internet venture capitalist on Earth" to PG when I see him at Y Combinator today...