I had the pleasure of speaking with Deniz Tekerek, a co-Founder of Portier Technologies. Deniz’s background alone is fascinating. His ancestry is both Turkish and Mongolian, but he grew up in Germany. Still not interested? Deniz began his career as a professional footballer in Germany but was drawn to the world of business. After working briefly for others, he headed straight into the world of e-commerce and started his own company in the U.K. Deniz subsequently moved to Hong Kong and became one of the earliest employees in Tink Labs, The idea behind Tink Labs was to create a communication platform for tourists that supported by the hotels in which they were staying. It was not a bad idea…but there were gaps in the execution strategy. Those gaps created the opportunity for Deniz and his co-Founder, Mark Pope, to found Portier Technologies. Deniz, Mark and the team set out to build a business that was an extension to services in the hotel that allows them to better understand their guests. The critical part is to ensure that the entire operation is data-driven. This focus on using data to better understand the guests allows the hotels to create actionable insights. This is the secret sauce. Another key change from Tink Labs is that Portier has built a cloud-based device management system and they do not own any of the phones. By building a close relationship with Samsung they have also created an entirely new model for phone distribution to the hotels, utilizing the Samsung connection to get introduced to Samsung’s best local telco partners and striking deals with them that allows them to efficiently get phones to Portier’s hotel clients. They are also creating an internal communication mechanism for the hotels that includes a data collection layer. Things get really interesting here as well as the data that gets collected helps manage the business side of the hotels more effectively and efficiently as well. If you liked this episode, you may also like the Thailand GameChanger episode featuring Michael Cluzel, the CEO and co-Founder of eatigo.

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