Meet Alex Simon | Co-Founder and CEO of Elude

We had the good fortune of connecting with Alex Simon and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Alex, we’d love to hear more about how you thought about starting your own business?
One of my co-founders, Frankie, and I have always had a deep-rooted passion for travel and really enjoyed booking trips together. When we were in college, and early in our corporate careers, we would spend countless hours looking for affordable trips we could take to escape our monotonous, daily routines to explore new destinations. While booking a trip over one holiday weekend, we actually discovered something surprising: we could fly to our home state New Jersey for the same price as Spain. From there, Frankie and I set out to create Elude and help other fellow travelers access newfound destinations around the world, bringing a budget-first model that had not been seen in the industry before.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
Like nearly everything in life, it’s never an easy start. That’s what made our journey all the more exciting. We knew that we were creating something that had never been seen before, and we knew that we would have to overcome several challenges along the way. During the early days of the company, I would sit in a coffee shop with my co-founder, Frankie Scerbo, in Burbank, CA putting together hundreds of different options and itineraries manually, sending them back over to our customers. As an avid traveler, I became an expert on these hacky, DIY travel booking methods and found affordable ways to travel the world through arranging my own trips. From being in various groups on Facebook, I quickly realized that other people would want to know how to as well, which sparked the inception of Elude. The business grew and we booked a few thousand trips, which told us there was an audience of people who wanted to search, discover, and book trips budget-first.

However, doing everything manually was exhausting and wasn’t a very good way to scale a business when technology and search engines are as powerful as they are. People are used to filtering items by price for all sorts of purchases on their phones, and we knew that we needed to build the app and website people use today. The app was brought to life by our Chief Technology Officer and co-founder, Ivan Smirnov, who previously worked at Google on their Search and Ad product teams. He was able to implement an AI-component to create the most powerful search engine in the travel industry. It actually broke the database that we and other companies like Expedia and Kayak use on the day we launched because of how powerful the actual search engine is.

We ended up launching Elude in the summer of 2021 as travel was just seeing a re-emergence and the entire world started opening themselves up to the opportunity to safely travel again. Throughout our time, we have encountered some challenges that pushed us to figure out new ways to improve our product and the user experience while still being cognizant of the shifting sentiment of travel. When the new surge of the pandemic halted international travel, we pivoted our content to promote local travel destinations that would show users all the opportunities they had for a “staycation.” Throughout it all, we stayed true to our mission to provide an unmatched booking experience for our users and deliver innovative solutions that will completely change the way people experience travel.

I think the greatest lesson that my co-founders and I found was that it’s always worth reaching out to people whose expertise can help you grow and to not fear rejection. In the early stages of building Elude, we worked diligently to seek out advisors who clearly understood our mission and brought experience from their success in respective diverse industries. Frankie, one of my co-founders, and I didn’t start out with a large network in the travel or technology space, so we worked incredibly diligently to get on the radars of people who had been there before and could help connect us to more people to help build our dream. We reach out through a variety of channels, whether through email, social media DMs, or even cold calling, we found a way to get in front of the right people that could help us build the company of our dreams – we really weren’t discouraged by rejection and figured the worst thing that would happen is the person would say no or didn’t respond to our email.

One time, I recognized an executive on the streets of New York City who I wanted to be an advisor – I’m not kidding, I DM’ed him on Instagram asking if he was in NYC and wanted to grab a coffee. While he did not respond to me that time, we ended up connecting later down the road and he joined as an advisor. My overall view on this is that early entrepreneurs should never be scared to take chances, proactively ask for help, and put themselves out there.

Today, at Elude, we have brought on a team of investors and advisors representative of how interconnected the travel industry has become. Our team has diverse expertise across the travel, social media and technology sectors. We are grateful to have advisors from social media executives to travel industry veterans, including global entrepreneur of Priceline Jeff Hoffman, former Airmap CEO Ben Marcus and Former CMO of Instagram Cliff Hopkins & Head of International Partnerships at Snapchat Juan David Borrero. By leveraging the experiences of leaders in these industries, Elude is propelling the travel industry forward by supercharging the way people think about the future of travel. Today, travel and social media have become intrinsically linked, as more travelers are looking for mobile-first booking and content on social media is now replacing the traditional travel guides as primary resources for people to organize trips.

I want everyone to feel like there is something on Elude for them. We set out to bring innovation to an industry that hasn’t seen change since its inception online. Our approach to reshape the traditional travel booking model is driven by the idea that As CEO of Elude, it is my job to bring our dream of putting a travel agent in everyone’s pocket into a reality, while making sure that our search engine, booking tools, and overall company continue to grow in the right direction. At Elude, we have brought on a diverse team, who have come to our company from iconic brands like Google and Theory to supercharge the new generation of travel. As our community of travelers and company grows, my hope is that Elude becomes more than a booking platform– but a platform for the travel community. We are constantly listening to our customers’ thoughts on how we can make their travel experience more efficient, and we’ve scaled Elude with many innovative features in the works. In the end, we hope that Elude inspires everyone to worry less and wander more– visit new places that are uncharted, go beyond the mainstream and embrace this new era of travel.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
If a friend was visiting my area in LA, I’d for sure take them for a hike at Runyon Canyon to start the day off. I’d then show them a really good vegan spot for lunch, perhaps Green Table. We’d probably go to a comedy show right after having an amazing dinner in downtown Hollywood or Little Tokyo.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
Between my wife, Tiffany, and my co-founder, Frankie, there wouldn’t be an Elude. I’m grateful every day for their support, assistance and direction.

Website: https://elude.co/

Instagram: https://instagram.com/elude

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/eludeinc/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/eludetoday

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EIude