Ron Levin was the founding CEO of TravelPerk, where he personally handled overnight customer bookings by hand before the company had a real backend, and he later wrote a book profiling 50 startups tackling gaps in education, healthcare, housing, food, and financial wellness after traveling to more than 140 countries. He's also unusually open about how venture deals actually happen, noting that cold outreach rarely works and most of his team's recent investments came through warm introductions, and he cautions founders against building thin AI interfaces without real proprietary data behind them.