CEO & co-founder at https://nitter.gq/t.co/UKrZ1IvQ11 - Improving the tech stack for travel advisors, suppliers, and the travelers they serve. Prev employee #1 @joinhandshake
Detroit, MI
Joined July 2009
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David Shull retweeted
Spencer wrote up the whole story. Approval workflows, prompt caching, error handling, and tool-loop control all went from workarounds to first-class APIs. Plus how we moved 2.5M+ messages to the new schema in four phases.
tern.travel/blog/workarounds…
It’s been fun watching paradigms @spencerskovy created for our agents become core parts of RubyLLM 2.0.
AI agents are revolutionizing how human travel advisors do their jobs via Tern and it’s all running on RubyLLM
Our AI stack runs on RubyLLM, and we'd built up several workarounds the past few months.
We just upgraded to 2.0. A few of our use cases were promoted into first-class APIs, including our multi-phase migration pattern that was upstreamed!
tern.travel/blog/workarounds…
Travel advisors
your biggest opportunity right now is finding industries that still operate extremely inefficiently because they were built when demand was huge and technology was limited
then ask: could this be run 10x more efficiently with technology that exists today?
there’s still a lot of time and a lot of markets left
technology is moving insanely fast. something that made zero sense yesterday can make perfect sense today
start with the boring industries: heavy equipment, construction, mining, etc.
Being a travel advisor is a growing and lucrative career for the people who love selling.
Lots of epic host agencies out there. Happy to make intros to folks interested in learning more.
I was curious to learn why some of my friends have recently quit their tech jobs to become travel advisors.
Apparently in 2025, "Travel Advisors" were the fifth fastest-growing job on LinkedIn
I looked into it - the top travel advisors on platforms like Fora make $800,000/yr planning trips for people. Kinda wild.
If you do it casually side, you could probably make over $10,000/yr easily (book 8–10 trips/yr).
It's probably one of the lowest-risk businesses you can start right now.
If you have great taste, you can basically monetize the things people already ask you for.
AI is the best thing that's ever happened to the travel advisor.
80-90% of their day is admin that doesn't use their expertise. Take that off their plate and give them back 10 hours a week, and a $127B industry becomes a $300B one.
Talked to @PhocusWire about it.
phocuswire.com/news/technolo…
1000% this. Totally believe the biggest AI winners won’t be “sexy AI infra” but the tools that embed AI to transform entire industries.
At Tern, we’re building the AI layer that reimagines travel agencies/advisors. Not by replacement but by improving efficiency. Low margins and massively fragmented SMB/IC user base.
The point on adoption is spot on. The top owners get it right away and use it, but there is a long tail who don’t want to learn a new thing even if that thing makes life easier, so the play is to embed it and automate it and just show them the work has been done while they were away and is ready for review.
David Shull retweeted
There are lots of good reasons to want in person work but “I can’t personally get anything done when my kids are in the house so I don’t think anyone else can either” is the weakest of arguments.
46 of 64 buyers walked from the world's largest corporate travel company, citing AI.
Long Lake paid $6.3B anyway.
Their bet: AI makes a people-powered business more valuable, not less.
It's the exact bet we're making at @ternsoftware. For the independent travel advisor.
tern.travel/blog/a-6-3-billi…
The latest AI travel planning app (Odessia) is making the rounds. I tried it. It's slick. It won't displace human advisors though. Let me tell you why (thread)...
Humans are uniquely good at selling travel. Travel is emotional. Scary. Exciting. It's one of the largest discretionary purchases someone makes.
Trust matters more so than others. In high trust purchases, from enterprise software to travel, humans thrive.
I always start my weekend AMs with 20VC. @rodriscoll saying “you cannot be an AI provider to a vertical and have any intention of competing with them” is so spot on.
While they were taking about legal it applies in every vertical. Def travel.
In so many conversations we are asked why not become a tech enabled travel agency.
That would mean competing with the industry. We are adamant we will never do this.
Several have tried including some really well funded players. But they’ll hit a ceiling. You can’t aggregate an entire industry if you compete with every player in that industry. Especially one that indexes so heavily on human relationships.
Being the tech layer that everyone uses (and has to use to stay competitive) is the way to build something much bigger.
Not my best photo but some of my best memories.
Fond memories. Handshake moved from MI to SV and lived and worked out of a house owned by a cofounder of LinkedIn.
At peak, 22 people lived there. Interns assembled their own bunk beds.
The closet-above-the-steps office. The laundry room office. The yoga room main office. The pool office. The hallway office.
Back in the days of a $10M priced seed round.
Keep stacking days.
David Shull retweeted
Fond memories. Handshake moved from MI to SV and lived and worked out of a house owned by a cofounder of LinkedIn.
At peak, 22 people lived there. Interns assembled their own bunk beds.
The closet-above-the-steps office. The laundry room office. The yoga room main office. The pool office. The hallway office.
Back in the days of a $10M priced seed round.
Keep stacking days.
David Shull retweeted
Be your self, not someone you were assigned to be!
Bezos won on time horizon, not AWS or 1-Click.
If your bets have to work in 3 years, you compete with everyone. Every smart, funded team is chasing the same 3-year problems. Short horizon, crowded field.
Stretch to 7 and the field collapses. Investors want returns, employees want vesting, founders want proof. Almost nobody can sit in a bet that doesn't pay for most of a decade. The patience is the moat, and it costs you, that's why it works.
But you can't fake a 7-year horizon on a problem you don't actually care about. Pick the users and the problem Moloch assigned you, the safe ones, the fundable ones, and you'll bail the first hard year. Pick the ones that are actually yours and you'll still be there when everyone else has quit.
So the real prerequisite isn't discipline. It's knowing yourself well enough to choose a problem and a set of people you care about that you'll serve them for decades.
The @ternsoftware trips are some of the highest ROI investments we’ve made.
December focused on AI across the org. Since then we have increased velocity by 300%
The driver? The trust that comes from creating lore with your teammates.
I’d also add user conferences to that list.
