how a €1M mistake at Booking.com didn’t kill his career

Maarten van Pijpen spent 15 years at Booking.com.

a place where experimentation wasn’t a project.
it was the culture.

now he’s chief growth officer at Unravel.
a travel app that feels like TikTok,
but lets you book instantly.

in his first 35 days, he:
– chose an experimentation tool
– lined up 10 experiments
– started building a data foundation

but this conversation isn’t about tooling.

it’s about:

→ how to move from top-down founder energy to bottom-up ownership

→ why shipping fast without tracking is dangerous

→ how a €1M mistake didn’t kill his career
(but actually strengthened it)

→ why failures were celebrated at Booking

→ how to scale leadership so you’re not the bottleneck

we talk about culture.
trust.
empowerment.
and what it really takes to build a data-driven company —
without killing speed.

if you care about experimentation, growth, or leading teams in scale-ups and how all of these dynamics work, this podcast is for you.