Article About Ray Nolan and WRI / Hostelworld

Ireland’s internet hero Ray Nolan: ‘Just build successful web firms’
http://www.siliconrepublic.com/business/item/24460-irelands-internet-hero-ray

Raven was the incubation engine for many of the businesses that followed, including time billing software firm Coretime, which he sold to accounting giant Sage in 2004, and Web Reservations International, which he founded in 1999. Web Reservations International, which began as a booking engine for hostels, spawned sites like Hostelworld.com, hostels.com and boo.com. Very quickly, Hostelworld.com grew to 12m visitors a month and Nolan drove the business forward, returning US$500m on an initial investment of €130,000.

It's an interesting article:

“We started writing code in March 1999. We were in four countries by Christmas and we were in 12 countries within a year. It was 2001 before I began working full time on it and we recruited Tom Kennedy, a hostel owner, to run the business. It was an entire industry that was screaming out for technology. Before we knew it were live in 100 countries.”

Building the business involved some strategic risk taking, such as buying competitors as well as domain names, such as Boo.com and Hostels.com.

It also led to some clever breakthroughs, including setting a web-industry standard. “We were the first people to do online hotel reviews, before Tripadvisor or anybody else. We dared to think that an Irish company would go and do something that would become the standard for the internet.

(Actually, wasn't Bug.co.uk earlier than WRI with reviews? If anyone knows, please post below...)