[0:00]A traditional rewards points system gets devaluated through inflation. You basically are like losing money faster than you're losing money on fiat currencies.
[0:09]The Spring Network is the first of its kind like truly transparent decentralized rewards points that is every 100 points is backed by a dollar of stablecoin on-chain. Everybody can see it.
[0:23]Traditional rewards points are a promise from the corporation without guarantee of the actual value, right? So there are many, many cases where corporations actually went bankrupt and people holding the points are like, well, sorry.
[0:37]Significantly more unfair to charge consumers 29% interest. I don't know what justification there is to literally borrow money from the Federal Reserve as a bank for 4% and then charge your consumer 29% interest.
[0:53]Uh, so we're going to change all of that.
[1:12]Welcome to The Upwind Podcast. Episode 5, Navigating Innovation and the Future of Travel with Lin Dai and Oscar Diaz de Leon.
[1:21]Today we're diving deep into the world of innovation, travel and technology with two extraordinary guests: Lin Dai from Superlogic and Oscar Diaz de Leon from Bel Sono.
[1:33]An innovative and rapidly growing portfolio of travel companies. Lin and Oscar are reshaping how we think about travel and leveraging technology to create new and exciting experiences.
[1:43]From Lin's innovative ventures in Web3 at Superlogic to Oscar's extensive expertise in the global travel sector. Their collaboration represents a powerful convergence of cutting-edge technology and industry leadership.
[1:56]In this episode, we'll explore their journey together, how they navigate the complex waters of innovation and business pivots, and their vision for the future of travel and technology.
[2:06]Welcome Lin and Oscar. Thank you for being here.
[2:09]Thank you for having us. Lin and Oscar have partnered to create Bookit. Let's talk about how this collaboration started. Lin, coming from Superlogic, what inspired this partnership?
[2:21]As, you know, many of the very serendipitous and, uh, amazing opportunities like I, I have to thank, like, you know, my mentor and and our investor Doc Tai, who kind of, uh, connected the dots and introduced me to, uh, Oscar and, um, and Jon from Bel Sonio.
[2:40]Um, and, uh, they have, they came from, like, you know, Jon had, like, 20, 30 years of, of, um, travel industry experience, and we have, like, deep experience, you know, servicing, um, card card companies and building Web3 rails for some of the biggest, like, Fintech companies in the world.
[2:56]And kind of with the shift in the landscape in Web3 and Blockchain and it was like kind of the perfect timing last year when we started this conversation, uh, to really, you know, how do we build a next-generation commerce experience for, um, people that savvy on Web3, right?
[3:17]So, um, if you think about, uh, Blockchain so far, up to this point, it's like 99% of activity is digital asset to digital asset trading.
[3:25]There's very few, uh, examples of how digital asset or your tokens can actually be used in real-world commerce purchases and this kind of is just, uh, you know, kind of a lightning in a bottle we, we, you know, we're able to capture.
[3:39]Yeah. And Oscar, just a little bit on your background, I noticed that you're from California. Yeah.
[3:47]San Diego. You have a lot of experience in the branding and marketing sphere, right?
[3:53]Yeah, my, my background is really software engineer, that's what my actual degree is in tech management, and I've always been in the digital space before it was a thing, before it was a formal discipline, before it was like, hey, you're the guy that understands tech, you understand how to write software.
[4:10]And my career essentially evolved from development and actual software of developing like CRM systems into more being a thought leader in the digital space.
[4:21]So that's where I transitioned more out of hardcore software development into more strategy, innovation, thinking of where are the next wave of consumers coming from?
[4:29]So my background is really in hospitality, but it's been in the sales and marketing side, in the digital niche. Then it was a little bit smaller of a lot of companies weren't doing a lot of Ecom.
[4:36]Hotel companies were, but the travel industry, like certain sectors like cruise, very, very heavily dependent on call center, that's still the case to a certain degree.
[4:51]And my, my path went into, you know, I ended up at at Marriott doing, you know, a lot of digital work and decided I wanted to do something a little different.
[4:58]At that time, I also got into board apes really early and I, I started that's when I really understood the, the concept of owning a digital asset.
[5:07]Before that I had cryptocurrencies but I felt like the culture wasn't there for me at that point in time of my career.
[5:15]Going into board apes really early on, I got the sense of community, belonging, identity, uh, finding other people that are like-minded.
[5:22]Yeah. And to me it was that that was the catalyst of there, there's more to this blockchain space.
[5:28]It's not about the JPEG, it's about the people you surround yourself with and the my, my mind started going to what else can be done in the space?
[5:35]I think that's where we we Lin and I connected on this, we kind of thought very similar that this should transition into real world commerce.
[5:45]The question is, well, how do you do that at scale with people that understand how commerce works in the traditional Web2 space, how do you create that bridge?
[5:54]And that's where I think the, the merger, this concept I, I had a different version of this in my head years ago and when we, when we finally met, I was like, we're thinking about the same thing and the sum of his background, his experience, his company, his team, plus our background, our company, putting that together, we knew we were significantly more valuable together than we were independent of, of the partnership.
[6:17]So that, that's really what kind of brought us to, you know, Bookit. We acquired that domain a while back.
[6:22]We had an idea what we wanted to do with it, but it wasn't like the, the original concepts weren't anything different than what is out there today.
[6:33]When we, when we started to discuss Web3, it's like, well, this can be very, very impactful because we can change how travel is perceived and we really wanted to impact value back to the consumer.
[6:47]When you blend that together with digital assets, that's where the magic kind of went off, like, all right, we got to do something together.
[6:50]How do we start, where do we go? And that just, I mean, it was like, it was like six, seven months in the making of how do we take this to market with the commercial relationships that we have, the IP that we have, the backgrounds that we collectively have, and the network of people that are surrounding us.
[7:07]I think that's where the, the right pieces, the right time, the right people came together to create something that I think is going to be very groundbreaking.
[7:11]Yeah. So two things, Bookit, what a tremendous tier one domain. Like, I remember seeing the Google ads back in the day.
[7:22]Enormous, must have been enormous business at some point. It was a very, very significant, uh, many millions and millions of dollars a year, um, were ran through, uh, Bookit, the previous ownership.
[7:32]And now you guys have the opportunity to make that into something even bigger.
[7:38]A lot bigger. We, we want to reimagine what that brand can be and we know that going to market in the traditional book your rooms, book your car, there's thousands of companies that can do that across the planet.
[7:52]Yeah. But if we put a different spin on the ball and take that, you know, concept of the Rubik's Cube and turn a couple layers around, we can come up with something significantly more valuable to the consumers.
[8:03]So that, that's where we think Bookit is better positioned to be more of a global player in the travel space.
[8:10]And if we put the angle of Web3 on top of that, that just became significantly more powerful. You know, I think the reimagining of Bookit, right?
[8:16]Bookit was owned by some, uh, different company completely, um, and, uh, the domain was, was, we're able to acquire, uh, Oscar company was able to acquire the domain, uh, a little while ago.
[8:27]The idea now, the reimagined version is, you can book anything, right?
[8:31]So it's not just travel, it's also experiences, it's ticketing, it's concert tickets and sports tickets and VIP packages.
[8:40]It's also, um, premium products. So it's, it's, it's basically Expedia meets Ticketmaster meets, uh, kind of a premium version of, like, Amazon, right?
[8:50]So, uh, and if you think about, uh, aspirational thing, things that you would love to kind of, um, purchase, right?
[8:55]So it's, it is travel, it's very aspirational. Uh, counsel tickets and sports tickets, that's very aspirational.
[9:02]Premium, luxury goods that's very aspirational. You look forward to to save up or or do certain things to achieve that, like it's a reward to you, right?
[9:09]So and and tie on around this a brand new like payments and rewards layer that's completely 100% on-chain.
[9:21]Everybody can see it, it'll always be there, right?
[9:26]And the point is now usable across our 2 million brands, just because you you may earn that for staying on the Marriott Hotel, but you can spend that, um, on a flight or for, like, you know, buy a Tumi luggage or Taylor Swift tickets, right?
[9:44]So, so it's a kind of a seamless Universal across everything, but it's always backed by actual USD.
[9:50]It's not backed by a promise of a brand that you can redeem something with it.
[9:58]Uh, and this is kind of the ethos, we think this is like all brands are gonna eventually move towards this, right?
[10:06]Because this is kind of what consumers are looking for and, and of the day, you know, your customer is king and doing something that actually, um, good for, embrace that ethos.
[10:19]I think brands that basically put your customer first are going to win in the long run. So we have like a much bigger, I mean, we gave so much of the margin back as rewards, like you say, like unbelievable deals because there's a bigger mission here.
[10:37]Right. Right? It's not just like we're not launching Bookit just to make some money on like your bookings. We're almost making, we don't want to make money on book, right?
[10:48]We wanna usher in this new future of rewards and future of commerce that is actually on-chain, transparent, fair to the merchant, great for consumers and owning that or having a big part of that ecosystem is far more than, um, being in the short term, like looking at P&L and have like a great, um, great model that way, right?
[11:13]So it's like, how do you, how do you actually move commerce on-chain and if you successfully doing that, we're talking about like, it's, it's, it's multi-trillion-dollar industry, right?
[11:21]Yeah.
[11:24]No, certainly, you're absolutely empowering people.
[11:27]in the way that was originally envisioned for this industry, right?
[11:30]Set out, sovereignty, empowerment of people, increased efficiency, increased transparency, a better deal for the individual consumer at the end of the day, especially in this rapidly changing world of AI, where you need to try to generate, you know, different streams of savings and income as much as possible.
[11:55]Yeah, I mean, I think we're, uh, reinventing kind of Bookit.
[12:00]Um, you know, although it has a bookit.com, right?
[12:06]The consumer can directly interact with us, but it's also an ecosystem. So Bookit is basically a fully decentralized entity.
[12:15]So it is, it's based on a lot of the IP that, like, uh, you know, our company Superlogic, certainly have a commercial, uh, agreement and we do a lot of tech development and we're one of the core developers for, for Spree.
[12:35]Spree itself is a decentralized autonomous network, right? So this is like the vision of, like, how do you actually run a rewards network that can compete with the biggest rewards programs in the world, it is not by me raising money as a startup to actually build a rewards program, right?
[12:54]It is literally give the give the power to the actual merchants, users, uh, participants in in reimagining how rewards can be done.
[13:04]Right? That's right. So Spree is a separate, so it's a, it belongs to the, so Spree is basically a fully decentralized entity.
[13:16]So it is, it's based on a lot of the IP that, like, uh, you know, our company Superlogic, certainly have a commercial, uh, agreement and we do a lot of tech development and we're one of the core developers for, for Spree.
[13:35]Spree itself is a decentralized autonomous network, right?
[13:40]So this is like the vision of, like, how do you actually run a rewards network that can compete with the biggest rewards programs in the world, it is not by me raising money as a startup to actually build a rewards program, right?
[13:54]It is literally give the give the power to the actual merchants, users, uh, participants in in reimagining how rewards can be done.
[14:04]Right? That's right. So Spree is a separate, so it's a, it belongs to the, so Spree is basically a fully decentralized entity.
[14:16]So it is, it's based on a lot of the IP that, like, uh, you know, our company Superlogic, certainly have a commercial, uh, agreement and we do a lot of tech development and we're one of the core developers for, for Spree.
[14:35]Spree itself is a decentralized autonomous network, right?
[14:40]So this is like the vision of, like, how do you actually run a rewards network that can compete with the biggest rewards programs in the world, it is not by me raising money as a startup to actually build a rewards program, right?
[14:54]It is literally give the give the power to the actual merchants, users, uh, participants in in reimagining how rewards can be done.
[15:04]Right? That's right. So Spree is a separate, so it's a, it belongs to the, so Spree is basically a fully decentralized entity.
[15:16]So it is, it's based on a lot of the IP that, like, uh, you know, our company Superlogic, certainly have a commercial, uh, agreement and we do a lot of tech development and we're one of the core developers for, for Spree.
[15:35]Spree itself is a decentralized autonomous network, right?
[15:40]So this is like the vision of, like, how do you actually run a rewards network that can compete with the biggest rewards programs in the world, it is not by me raising money as a startup to actually build a rewards program, right?
[15:54]It is literally give the give the power to the actual merchants, users, uh, participants in in reimagining how rewards can be done.
[16:04]Right? That's right. So Spree is a separate, so it's a, it belongs to the, so Spree is basically a fully decentralized entity.
[16:16]So it is, it's based on a lot of the IP that, like, uh, you know, our company Superlogic, certainly have a commercial, uh, agreement and we do a lot of tech development and we're one of the core developers for, for Spree.
[16:35]Spree itself is a decentralized autonomous network, right?
[16:40]So this is like the vision of, like, how do you actually run a rewards network that can compete with the biggest rewards programs in the world, it is not by me raising money as a startup to actually build a rewards program, right?
[16:54]It is literally give the give the power to the actual merchants, users, uh, participants in in reimagining how rewards can be done.
[17:04]Right? That's right. So Spree is a separate, so it's a, it belongs to the, so Spree is basically a fully decentralized entity.
[17:16]So it is, it's based on a lot of the IP that, like, uh, you know, our company Superlogic, certainly have a commercial, uh, agreement and we do a lot of tech development and we're one of the core developers for, for Spree.
[17:35]Spree itself is a decentralized autonomous network, right?
[17:40]So this is like the vision of, like, how do you actually run a rewards network that can compete with the biggest rewards programs in the world, it is not by me raising money as a startup to actually build a rewards program, right?
[17:54]It is literally give the give the power to the actual merchants, users, uh, participants in in reimagining how rewards can be done.
