Jay Walker

Jay Walker is the founder of Priceline.com, the World Wide Web site that allows customers to specify the price they are willing to pay for airline tickets, hotel rooms, and automobile rentals. When Price-line's performance began to falter in 2000 and 2001, as the dot.com industry as a whole fell apart, Walker resigned as vice chairman of Priceline.com and increased his efforts at Walker Digital, the technology-based business model developer he founded in 1995.

After earning his bachelor's degree from Cornell University in 1978, Walker began founding new businesses. Many of his upstarts failed, but he eventually found success with New Sub Services, an operation that allowed magazine subscribers to automatically renew their subscriptions each year via credit cards. By the mid-1990s, New Sub Services was pulling in $300 million in annual sales. Anxious to try his hand at something newer, Walker sold off roughly 33 percent of his shares in New Sub Services for $25 million, which he poured into Priceline.com, a discount airline tickets venture that launched operations in April 1998. At first, the name-your-price Web site struggled to keep pace with the deluge of orders it received. Its $15 million radio marketing campaign, featuring celebrity William Shatner, generated widespread interest in the new site. However, Walker was only able to convince TWA and America West to sell their extra tickets on Priceline.com, despite the fact he was proposing a way for airlines to fill the roughly 500,000 airlines seats left empty each day.

Because Priceline's initial offerings were so limited, only seven percent of those bidding for tickets on Priceline actually ended up purchasing tickets there. Walker found himself having to purchase tickets from other airlines in the same manner a travel agency would and sell them at discounted fares to Priceline bidders, a practice that cost the firm roughly $30 per ticket sold. Realizing he needed help, Walker began hiring experienced executives to run Priceline, retaining the role of vice chairman. Less apprehensive about forging an alliance with the startup once seasoned managers were overseeing operations, Delta Airlines signed on with Priceline, a move which eventually prompted Northwest and Continental to follow suit. Walker took his firm public in March 1999 in one of the most noteworthy dot.com initial public offerings of the year. Priceline stock jumped from its opening price of $16 per share to $69 per share by the day's end. In April, stock soared to $162. According to a May 1999 issue of Forbes, "Walker's money-losing startup had been transformed overnight into a billion-dollar market phenomenon—and its founder reborn as an Internet icon." Walker was also named the 53rd richest person in America by Forbes .

United Airlines, American Airlines, and US Airways all began selling their tickets on Priceline in November of 1999. The firm expanded into groceries early in 2000 via its Priceline WebHouse Club, which allowed shoppers to name their price for groceries, print out a sheet with approved prices, and take that sheet to their local grocery stores, including A&P, ShopRite, Stop & Shop, D'Agostino's, and KeyFood. By then, roughly three percent of all airline tickets in the U.S. were sold on Priceline.

Despite its growing customer base and increasingly diversified activities, Priceline was one of the Internet startups hit hardest by the dot-com fallout. By the end of 2000, its stock had plummeted 96 percent, relieving Walker of his billionaire status. Walker found himself the target of a class-action lawsuit that called into question his sale of 12 percent of his Price-line shares days before the firm announced it was shuttering its WebHouse Club operations. Walker resigned as vice chairman of Priceline in February of 2001.