Mike Scott joined Thayer Ventures from KSL Capital Partners, where he worked on more than $4 billion in hospitality and travel buyouts, and he has pointed out that hotel owners often get the financial benefit of new technology while operators and brands are the ones actually using it day to day—an insight that shapes his investment approach of starting with small seed or Series A checks, keeping information and pro-rata rights, and later writing a larger check of roughly $1 million to $5 million once he sees real commercial traction. He also backs software companies outside of travel, like Twilio, that can expand into the industry, follows how hospitality-style models are spreading into real estate categories such as multifamily and office, talks about combining tools like keyless entry, CRM, and guest messaging into more connected systems, organizes his thinking around four themes—changing customer demographics, commerce, the future workforce, and sustainability—and advises Paradero, an experiential hospitality operator in Mexico.