Muriel, I'm going to pick your brain now. Do you have a mic by chance? Awesome. Cool. So tell me a
little bit about your background. You come from a sports family and you're doing some really cool
stuff in the sports world. So my name is Muriel Monte Calvo. First of all, I'm up here with a lot
of giants and I'm feeling like a little leprechaun. I'm just missing my green jacket.
I come from a family of sports. My uncle was a fencer in the 1960 Olympics.
My mom was a diver. So it skipped a generation. I missed it. So I don't fit exactly here.
But I started a travel technology company that's changing the way you book sports travel.
It's pretty cool. Can you talk about it a little bit? Yeah, sure. The name of the company is Trip
Fusion by VKU. And what we've done is we've created the Connected Trip, which is basically being
able to book your golf, your hotel, all of the disparate systems,
events, anything, all with the hotel, all online, check out immediately in one shot. And we're with
Golf Now and Trin. We just launched. I've done events at hotels before, and it's really challenging
to book everything because you have to talk to multiple people, the cater people, the event people,
like, right? So you're solving that whole entire problem. You don't have to do it anymore. You can
go online and you can actually book in real time. You can book your event. You can book your hotel.
You can do it all. Wow. And check out. And you can get multiple rounds of golf, too, which Golf Now
hasn't actually figured out how to do on their own sites, but we've got it happening on our site.
Nice. Aaron's a big golfer. Well, there you go. You'll have to use our site. So tell me how you
came up with the idea. We actually started as a wellness travel company, which is also a massive
market. We couldn't scale because we were one of the failure part of,
I guess, the beginning of being a startup. We couldn't scale because you couldn't book spa with
your hotel and you'd end up like... canceling your hotel or whatever the case may be and or you'd
have to find a way it just wasn't scalable and so we put everything on hold we decided to build the
technology and uh and one thing led to another and it turned out it worked for golf however when i
met the president of golf now or the president of nbc sports i was like i'm going to continue to go
the spa route until i realized how big the the golf market was and um and then here we are and yeah
we went live with them about a year and a half ago and killed it so congrats what what do you find
the difference between or the similarities between elite athletes and elite founders very much the
same type of stuff resilience you have to keep playing you have to keep pushing through you have to
practice you're you've got to say take the nose you've got to be able to um you know can you just
have to be able to keep fighting right i mean i would assume that's what you have to do and as an
athlete you have to you know you have to do it over and over again until you get it right and and
also being a team player having a really great team having good people around you things of that
nature so how do you stay mentally resilient uh within your company I am someone who really works
out a lot. So I think that plays a lot into how your mind and wellness.
Obviously, I started a wellness travel company originally. But I think it really comes down to how
you treat your body, how you live your life and who you're surrounded by. What do you find that the
major roles wellness has played in your life, but also what you're seeing, how it's impacting other
people on your site? It's changing because wellness and travel are merging,
and sports, they're all becoming very connected to each other. I think people are starting to
really, when they travel now, they're starting to think about where they're going and what goes
into it. And it's turned into a $1.8 trillion market,
which is absolutely insanity, or it's on track to be. um so i would say that it's it's just i mean
even when i even this morning i got up and i worked out before i did anything because mentally to
stay on track for the day and to be able to lead the team and whatever the case may be as these
guys probably know from being in sports you have to be on it all the time so what do you find uh
with the challenges you've gone through as a founder um that uh you know the the top two or three I
would say like values in a human that gets you past those challenges?
That's a good question. I mean, I think, you know, we all know that a lot of startups fail, right?
I mean, I think it's the numbers are really high. I don't know them off the top of my head, but
they're very high. I think you have to be someone who continues to push through and not give up.
You always have to take the bad with the good. You have to be able to take the no's. I heard it
actually with the... with the interview you did with Chris as well and I'm like you know what
that's how it is it really is you've got to be able to just get back up and hey just brush it off
and move on and I'm in sales my background is sales so if you can't take a no they say some will
some won't so what who's next you know I mean you just got to do it I mean you keep going you keep
fighting until you make it so love it awesome give a round of applause everybody thank you so much
appreciate it
Bye.