🚫 OTAs Suck ✅ Building a Book Direct, Decentralized, Open-OTA ➜ 🚀 Operators Get Direct Bookings ✈️ Travelers Get Rewards for Booking Direct 💰 Anyone Who Refers Travelers Owns Them & the Revenue Stream They Generate.

🐥 I'm a startup founder, launching a direct booking travel platform for the AI agent era.

Why? Today, Online Travel Agent (OTA) commissions are draining 10's of billions of dollars out of the travel ecosystem. They enrich "Big Tech" and "Big Travel", at the expense of everyone else. I know because I helped them do it. For years I was a super-affiliate of Expedia and other big OTAs. I fed $100m+ in hotel bookings to the OTAs, generating $10m in commissions, but adding little of value to the ecosystem.

Now, I'm building a new travel distribution platform and protocol that enables travelers and their AI agents bypass the OTA middlemen and book direct.

👇 Want to be notified when we launch? Leave a comment in the featured post below titled "AI-powered community", or reach out and connect! 

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Previously...

🐣 I co-founded a venture studio. We launched 3 notable ventures:
 
1️⃣ 3Genius International. Network of travel booking websites. $100M+ in bookings and $10M+ in gross profit.

2️⃣ Moola.com. Multiplayer game. Grew virally to 450k community members, $7.6M economy. PCWorld's “Best Places to Waste Time on the Web”.
 
3️⃣ Locationary. Local data and community platform. Rewarded users for crowdsourcing local business data (eg. like for Apple Maps). $4.5M in funding. Acquired by Apple.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

🧠 Current Interests: AI, community, machine learning, travel, fintech, loyalty rewards, web3 / tokens / blockchain, creator & influencer economy, social commerce, marketplaces, network effects.

Arlen Ritchie

Candice Faktor

DISCO

Disco is the #1 platform for AI-powered social learning. Used by organizations for up-skilling, cohort-based learning, partner enablement, training and accelerator programs, Disco’s AI powered platform makes learning together super engaging and easy to operate. Venture backed by GSV, leading edtech investor and named Fast Co’s most innovative edtech of the year and Edtech’s Breakthrough’s Startup of the Year. Clients include Toronto Board of Trade, Kaplan, Coursehero, Deloitte, XPrize, Baptist Health and more.

Founder & Co-CEO

Lobby Capital

Venture Partner at Lobby Capital, Series A VC.  We care deeply about people and relationships and will never grow tired of meeting remarkable problem solvers and helping them change the world.

Venture Partner

Gamechanger

We run a community for 3000+ innovators and host a livestream weekly w leading Gamechangers including Seth Godin, Margaret Atwood, Adam Grant, Ryan Holiday and more!

Founder

DreamBox Learning

DreamBox Learning is a company that is solving a very important societal problem of helping kids get better at math and reading using adaptive AI. This is ever more important after the massive #pandemiclearningloss and the critical shortage of teachers in the school system. Over 6MM students and 400,000 teachers rely on DreamBox Learning to improve outcomes for students.

Board Member

Coveo

Coveo is one of Canada's leading AI companies focused on personalization and contextualization across channels for enterprises.

Coveo is the leading intelligent search and experience intelligence platform helping the best enterprise brands deliver highly relevant and intelligent experiences leveraging leading machine learning and cloud technologies. I stepped in to lead the marketing team of 50 people through a transformation from a predominantly field events focus to developing a world class, digital first focus which involves rearchitecting the narrative from tactical to strategic, investing in best in class performance marketing, ops and analytics capabilities and creating a modern, digital first product marketing capability. Coveo recently raised $200MM to develop the first experience intelligence platform for enterprise brands to have the superpowers to compete on intelligent experiences in search, commerce, service and workforce knowledge management. We are hiring!

Interim CMO

Wattpad

As the GM & Head of Business I helped scaled the mobile social storytelling platform from pre series A to Series E and 100MM users. Wattpad was acquired for  US $660MM by Naver Corp in 2022.

Global GM and Head of Business

Torstar Digital

I co-founded Torstar Digital, a corporate venture and incubation arm of Torstar, and invested in, acquired, and scaled over 25+ digital businesses including:  

Olive Media (premium ad network), Web2Mobile (Mobile ad network), Wagjag (group buying),Jaunt (travel e-commerce) Eyereturn, (ad tech) and Workopolis (job search), TOPS (CMS). 

During this time, I had many roles including leading our investments, our strategy, our product development, corporate development,  m&a, innovation and business development.

Co-Founder and VP, Innovation  and Corporate Development

Ourfaves.com

Created a local recommendation engine and user review community for local businesses.

Founder and CEO

Monitor Deloitte (ex Monitor Group)

Strategy Consultant

Harlequin Enterprises

New Business Development and Strategy Consultant (Office of the CEO)

Founder & Co-CEO, Disco.co I Venture Partner, Lobby Capital I Ex Wattpad

I’m the co-founder of Disco, redefining learning with AI, community, and intuitive design. Unlike static platforms, Disco transforms knowledge into a dynamic, evolving experience, empowering organizations to build and scale transformational learning programs. Backed by top investors, we’re headquartered in Toronto and serve hundreds of organizations globally.

Previously, I helped scale Wattpad as Head of Business and Global GM, leading to its $660M acquisition. I’m also a venture partner at Lobby.vc, a series A venture firm based in SV. I was a former board member of AI companies Coveo and DreamBox Learning, and host of Gamechanger.co, a community and podcast on the future of learning and innovation.

Originally from South Africa, now based in Toronto. Yogi at heart, proud mom to two amazing teen boys, living life to its fullest and making every moment count. 


Disco is your community’s smart home to learn together. Used by knowledge creators, innovation hubs, upskilling orgs, small businesses and non profits, Disco’s new proprietary AI enhanced platform makes it 10x easier to operate an engaged community and deliver a personalized “concierge like” experience for members to get the most out of learning together.  As the Edtech Breakthrough Startup of the Year and Fast CO’s Most Innovative Edtech Platform, Disco was founded by serial entrepreneurs Candice Faktor and Chris Sukornyk who both are passionate about augmenting human potential with AI and  the unprecedented need for platforms outside the “traditional” system to deliver lifelong learning and human connection. Disco is funded by world class VCs including GSV and has an impressive list of customers including, AltMBA, XPRIZE, Deloitte, Care.org, CourseHero, Roger Martin, MargaretAtwood, York University, 10Morein to name a few!


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Candice Faktor

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