The Failure Guy

Sylvia Brune has spent her whole life travelling.

Raised by missionary parents, she lived in Asia for a time during childhood but regularly found herself in a new country as the family upped sticks. In attempt to create some stability, at age 15 she moved to her aunt and uncle’s in Norway – only for her uncle to secure a new job which took them Ethiopia.

Brune opted to travel with them to Africa before attending university. Following graduation, she joined consultants McKinsey in Denmark with a clear plan to climb the career ladder.

But thoughts of finally settling down were soon discarded as she and McKinsey realised she was “a rubbish assistant”.

“There were a lot of things that I was supposed to do that I didn’t really see the point of, so I was selective. Apparently, in that role, you’re not supposed to be selective!” she told BusinessCloud.

Not even being aware of what an entrepreneur was at this point, she nevertheless volunteered to arrange an award ceremony for entrepreneurial ideas.

After interviewing the nominees, Brune was left inspired by their energy and wanted to match it by becoming an entrepreneur herself. She just needed a good-enough idea.

“The entrepreneurial bug just kind of bit me, and there was no going back,” she said. She joined Kenyan-based investment fund accelerator programme 88mph – which takes its name from the speed the DeLorean must travel to instigate time travel in Back to The Future – and stayed with the firm for four years, helping to invest in African web technology companies.

She says this gave her a ‘crash course’ in the types of problems that sectors and industries face and the types of entrepreneurs – some good, some bad – which were trying to solve them.

“At the end of the four years, I’d only scratched the surface of entrepreneurship,” she said of her time there. But seeing the varying quality of pitches was inspiration enough to legitimise her own.

She moved back to Europe and brought with her some new ideas for businesses, centred on her experience of a life spent travelling around the globe.

The two that didn’t make the cut when she canvassed opinion were an on-demand premium meat delivery service, which she now laughs about. The second combined time spent in Shanghai and her interest in contracts as a hobby lawyer. It’s an idea she said might still one day come to life.

Her most recent business would become Ahoy – but began in WhatsApp.

As a seasoned traveller, Brune knew how to travel the world without the frustration, and her WhatsApp number quickly became a resource for her friends, and friends of friends.

“People just started WhatsApp-ing me random requests – please do this, please do that, can you research this for me?

“Every time I got a WhatsApp, I answered them and did some research and over the course of a month [my number] was getting passed around to other frequent travellers.

“The volume of requests went from zero to thousands in a very short time. By the end of three months I had 40 or so frequent travellers WhatsApp-ing me all hours of the day and night.”

The messages were pouring in, and Brune said it became too much to handle. However the travellers valued the ‘service’ enough offer to ask about paying a fee.

“I gave the number out to everybody, and they started paying a monthly fee to use the WhatsApp service,” she says.

The success of the early service was at the cost of sleep, while Brune says her daughter began to hate her phone.

It was then that a friend – who had sold companies – convinced Brune to ‘productise’ her efforts and find some tech co-founders. While living in Berlin in 2015, she started the business with Bartosz Hernas and Michal Hernas.

“Business is stressful but it’s also like a game. Half the time you’re afraid you’re going to die, but at the same time if you die then you learn what not to do and you play again,” she says of her experience as a new entrepreneur.

Ahoy now has around 25 employees and is headquartered in London, where Brune lives – at least for now – while her co-founders have moved to Poland.

Now a fully-fledged concierges and flight booking app for business travellers, they have created a service designed to remove all stress from travel, which is no mean feat.

Brune said her main goal was to build something consistently reliable. “When you travel for business, you’re not just travelling somewhere and then doing business, you’re doing business while you travel. You’re answering emails, you’re on calls, and you have to answer problems.

“My goal for the app was that it could figure out anything you need, from home to hotel and back again; that it’s just sorted and it’s consistently sorted every single time.”

Part of that 25-strong team is a customer service department, because although the platform has evolved a great deal from its WhatsApp days, there might never be enough technology to fix the hiccups that happen during international flights.

“You can search for a flight and we pull in real-time prices and availability from all the airlines and then you can book a flight up to an hour before departure.

“We built in some automation. We do auto check-ins and make sure that these regular traveller’s preferences are properly stored. There are some people that are all out of sorts when they don’t get the window seat!”

The firm is now looking at one-click airport pick-up, lounge access and meet-and-greet, says Brune. It has processed around 15,000 flights to date.

To continue the firm’s growth, Brune is now hoping to get to grips with the challenges of scale.

“It’s imperative that we grow the volume quite drastically, so we can continually offer them the best prices,” she says.

Ensuring this access means appearing on eta-search engines such as SkyScanner, Google and Kayak; each platform has business travellers who, as creatures of habit, prefer one platform over another.

Ahoy is looking to ‘ramp up’ the relationships with the likes of SkyScanner and Kayak in order to make this a reality and gain access to new customers.

“There are a lot of online travel agencies that do this pricing way better than we do or ever will do, so the rationale behind integrating with some of these sites is not so much that we think we are price competitive on every single group, but that we’re using it as a way to find business travellers who self -manage their travel.”

Brune said her now teenage daughter, who had previously wished failure on Ahoy for its affect on her mother’s life, has since become more positive.

In the past few years, after being gifted shares for her 12th birthday, her daughter now looks set to be a future employee.

“She’s got a bit more involved in the success of the company rather than just hating that I spent a lot of time on it,” Brune says, laughing. “She’s asks: ‘Are you working on a Ahoy? How’s it going? Do you have new customers?’”