Peek Helps You Plan Your Dream Vacation
Think about it: How many hours do you spend researching where to go, what to do and where to eat when you’re planning a vacation? The information you need is spread across dozens of travel sites and local vendor sites, which can be hard to navigate, especially if they’re in another language. Ruzwana Bashir feels your pain. That’s why she launched Peek, what she describes as “OpenTable for the activities market,” in 2012. The site curates activities in cities around the world — London, Chicago, Napa and more — and lets you book activities, including wine tastings, hot air balloon rides and tours on the Seine. Perhaps the most fun element of the site is “Perfect Days,” which are 24-hour itineraries curated by celebrities and tastemakers with local knowledge of various cities. Jack Dorsey (a Peek investor) describes his perfect San Francisco Day, the band Neon Trees curates a day in Santa Barbara, and designer Cynthia Rowley shares her favorite Miami hotspots. Not only is Peek’s one-stop shop for activities booking a welcome addition to the $27 billion activities planning industry, but Bashir has business chops to make it a success. She’s an Oxford alum (a former president of the Oxford Union) who did private equity at the Blackstone Group and investment banking at Goldman Sachs, then went on to do business development at Gilt Groupe and helped to found Art.sy. Bashir earned her MBA at Harvard in 2010, where she was a Fulbright Scholar. So it’s no wonder she got Twitter and Square co-founder Jack Dorsey and Google CEO Eric Schmidt to be part of Peek’s $1.4 million seed round. We spent a day with Ruzwana Bashir and one of Peek’s other early investors, Todd Kimmel of Montage Ventures, to learn how Peek is scaling smarter (hint: more cities). Homepage image: Mark Kolbe/Getty Images Read more: http://mashable.com/2013/10/15/peek-scaling-smarter/