We’ve covered Transferwise several times over the past couple of year, documenting how the U.K.-based firm is shaking up the international bank transfer market. The company maintains reserves across multiple countries, which it uses to allow transfers at much cheaper rates than those levied by traditional banks.

One of Transferwise’s early angels was PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, so it’s not hugely surprising to see Thiel join in the company’s $6 million Series A round. Other participants include Levchin again, IA Ventures, Index Ventures, TAG, Seedcamp, former Betfair CEO David Yu and Xavier Niel’s Kima Ventures.

Transferwise does seem to be growing at a very healthy clip indeed. At the end of February 2012, it had done £10 million ($15 million) in transactions. By the end of 2012 the total was £50 million, and now it’s apparently £125 million – growth is between 20-30 percent a month. And it’s not hard to see why. I used the service myself once, and it does what it says on the tin: save money.

As Thiel said in a statement:

“Innovation in the banking industry typically involves rent-seeking or unsound derivatives, which offer marginal benefits to consumers. TransferWise demonstrates true innovation in banking by enabling its users to retain their wealth across borders.”

According to Transferwise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus, the fresh funding will help the firm add a dozen new currencies (it currently does euros, pounds, dollars, Polish zlotys and Danish, Swedish and Norwegian krone) and push into the German, Spanish, French and Italian markets.

The company will also hire about another 20 people, on top of its current 35, and will start “taking a look at traditional marketing” too, Hinrikus said.

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SkyPhrase is a very early-phase company that, according to its web site, has “made breakthroughs in algorithms that enable computers to understand more complex language with greater precision than has ever been possible.” The goal is to improve search functionality but also to give developers a new, easy way to incorporate natural language processing into their apps. The company was founded by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Professor Nick Cassimatis.

In January, MIT Technology Review reporter Rachel Metz covered the company and actually reviewed an early version of the technology as applied to searching through tweets and emails. It wasn’t yet trained to do what she wanted with tweets but, she wrote, did a “decent” job searching through emails. Part of what makes it work appears to be its ability to understand conjunctions, even if it doesn’t yet have semantic capabilities: “I could search for, say, ‘e-mails from Bob Loblaw in December and January about recipes with a PDF,’ or ‘e-mails from Bob Loblaw or Tobias Funke about cookies in December,’” Metz explained.

Nanostraws in a cell

Breakout Labs’ other new investment, Stealth Biosciences, is a team of Stanford professors, executives and entrepreneurs that has invented a way to get materials into and out of individual cells and to monitor their activity via electric probe. Called Nanostraws and Stealth Electrodes, respectively, the companies two techniques do just what they sound like they do: NanoStraws let doctors inject or extract material from cells in the aims of advancing research and delivering personalized medicine, while the electrodes “automate long-term intracellular electrical recordings of neurons and heart cells.”

Stealth Biosciences, in particular, seems like a heady endeavor, but that’s exactly what Breakout Labs is all about. Launched in 2011, the organization aims to fund projects too early in their lives to attract traditional venture capital. Those funded aren’t giving up large equity stakes in their companies, but are expected to provide a “modest portion” of their revenues back into the program to fund the next generation of Breakout Labs investments. Other investments thus far include Modern meadow — a company trying to create artificial meat using 3-D printers — and AVEtec, a Canadian startup trying to harness the power of tornadoes for good.

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And now he’s backing a new project that would let corporate Media Lab sponsors fund students’ startups after they graduate, according to this Scott Kirsner story in The Boston Globe.  That means big name companies including Samsung, Panasonic, AOL etc. could pony up to fund a stipend for MIT graduates to build the company or technology of their dreams.

This is still early stage. Asked to comment on the report, an MIT spokeswoman said “the program has not yet been approved or funded, so the Boston.com story was a bit premature.”

Industry-funded academic research projects are problematic. Critics say that private companies use universities, which often are publicly funded,  as petri dishes for their own R&D purposes. Company-funded college research can also lead to squabbles over  who owns intellectual property rights of work done at the school but partially or wholly underwritten by private industry.

Here’s the crux of the issue from Kirsner:

“One key purpose of the new fund, Ito explained to me recently, will be to encourage students to finish their degrees before they start companies. “We want students to stay focused while they’re here,” he said. But once they’re done, the fund will provide a six-month stipend to lay the groundwork for their company, and help make sure that the new venture has clear rights to the intellectual property they developed while at the Lab. (In the past, there has been a somewhat vague non-exclusive right granted to students to commercialize technologies that they worked on while at the Lab, Ito said.)”

The idea of encouraging college researchers to stick around for their diplomas is actually of note. Obviously MIT has a vested interest in its students completing their coursework, but some in tech say this is a waste of time and resources. These skeptics include early Facebook investor Peter Thiel who has funded two classes of Thiel Fellows. These young technologists get money to leave school and pursue their work. His argument is that it’s better for promising talent  just to get to it rather than put in their time at college, running up huge student loan debt.

That’s a premise that Upstart, founded by Google veteran David Girouard, for example, finds troubling. Upstart invests in promising graduates of specified schools in return for a percentage of their future earnings. Again, you have to graduate to get that Upstart money.

Whatever happens with Ito’s new project, it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

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Photo of Bill Gates taste testing Beyond Eggs muffin on the wall of Hampton Creek’s food lab. Hampton Creek CEO on the left.

In the culinary lab

In Hampton Creek’s lab, Tetrick’s staff of 19 — armed with a combo of science degrees, chef experience and food industry chops — are obsessing over eggs. What gives an egg — the result of a chicken menstrual cycle (eeww) — its unusual characteristics and how can those characteristics be replaced with a combination of plants? The team has worked on over 344 prototypes for their egg-yolk product, and have studied 287 types of plants that range from peas and canola.

Jake the golden retriever and unofficial Hampton Creek Foods mascot

The lab is filled with industrial food measurement equipment like the “texture analyzer,” which basically pokes baked goods to see how much they bounce back. Before the company moved into the lab, Tetrick was doing these types of tests with his finger in his studio apartment in L.A. He discovered that switching the recipe to include a new type of pea, delivered the fluffy, elastic muffins that people really craved. Who knew?

Earlier this month Hampton Creek Foods, started offering samples to customers of its baking product, called Beyond Eggs, which can be used in goodies like cookies, muffins, and cakes. The team is also developing egg-free mayonnaises, sauces, and dressings, which Hampton will likely first sell to food manufacturers, instead of straight to consumers. Tetrick says they’re close to a deal with a large food company, which they hope to close next month. They’re also working on a scrambled egg product, too.

The lab of Hampton Creek Foods

The real reason that Beyond Eggs could eventually catch on is because it’s not striving to be an eco or vegan product. It will be about 19 percent cheaper than using eggs, will last longer on the shelf than eggs, is safer to use than eggs, and is better for you than eggs. Then there’s all of the feel good aspects — the poor environmental and inhumane conditions of the egg industry, and the reduced carbon emissions by decreasing the amount of feed (mostly corn and soy) that goes to chickens. But all of those won’t matter if the products don’t pass Tetrick’s “Dad Twinkie” test: in theory deliver a twinkie that’s cheaper and better for you, but that tastes exactly the same.

A new eco-food innovation movement

Hampton Creek Foods is just one of a new type of eco-food innovator that is being incubated in Silicon Valley. The company is backed by Sand Hill Road heavy weight Vinod Khosla’s firm, which is why Bill Gates — whose an investor in Khosla’s fund — gave Hampton’s muffins a taste test last year (and by the way, couldn’t tell the difference between a muffin with eggs and a muffin with Beyond Eggs). Khosla partner Tony Blair also did the taste test.

Assortment of Unreal Candy

Khosla is backing other sustainable food startups, like organic and healthier candy company (Unreal Candy), a salt replacement product (Nu-Tek Salt), plant-based meat replacement startup Sand Hill Foods, and a fake cheese company. During Khosla’s LP meeting last Summer, Bill Gates called the budding food innovation movement — which is making food more sustainable and also cheaper — a “huge thing” that “will confound the pessimists.” Gates’ team also recently created and will soon release a documentary about four food innovation startups, one of which is Hampton Creek Foods.

Other investors beyond Khosla and Gates also see promise in sustainable food tech innovation. Valley investor Kleiner Perkins and Obvious Corp — the company behind Twitter — have invested in Beyond Meat, a startup making plant-based faux-chicken products. NGEN Partners has backed sustainable lettuce grower Bright Farms, a vegan restaurant company Native Foods Cafe, and stevia zero calorie soda company Zevia.

Lettuce grown via BrightFarm’s supermarket growing method.

In addition to plant-based proteins and healthier foods, other startups are working on “cultured meats” or lab-grown meats. Modern Meadow is the most well-known of those, and it’s backed by investor Peter Thiel. Modern Meadow is looking to basically print out synthetic lab-grown meats, and somehow overcome the ick factor that goes along with the process.

Josh Balk, the Director of Corporate Policy for the Humane Society calls the emergence of new eco-food entrepreneurs as a “tremendous movement.” We see innovation in plant-based foods, as the next way that technology can help animals, says Balk. The first was in transportation — shifting from horses to cars — and the second was replacing animals in movies and TV with CGI, says Balk.

This isn’t to say that plant-based proteins isn’t already a big business. Kellogg’s owns veggie food giant MorningStar Farms, Kraft has its Boca brand, and ConAgra has Lightlife. But these startups think that their technology innovation can create products that are far better — without compromise — than the current ones on the market.

Is Cleanfood next?

Is eco-food tech the next big thing for innovators and investors? Well, a lot of the investors that backed clean power and “cleantech” companies over the years, are now turning to this movement. That’s because the thesis behind cleantech and “clean food” are the same: the population will hit 9 billion by 2050, and the planet will need to better manage food for this massive population and in particular find more efficient ways to make proteins and meats.

The meat, agriculture, dairy and egg industries are highly inefficient ways to produce edible proteins. Many of these new startups are looking at plant-based proteins not as a way to sell eco-food, but as a way to produce protein more efficiently, more cheaply and with less energy. In particular developing nations that have growing appetites for meat consumption, like China, India and Brazil, could be strong markets for a lower-cost type of meat.

Looking past economics and efficiency, the next-generation — the so-called Millenials — are becoming a lot more health and environmentally conscience. Sustainable brands that can also create better products will win out with this demographic. DBL Investor’s Nancy Pfund, who backed both Tesla and SolarCity, told me last year that she thinks eco consumer products will be a hot area for entrepreneurs in 2013.

Finally, cleantech and clean power startups haven’t exactly produced great returns for most investors. So it makes sense that some of these investors are looking at similar, but different, trends that piggyback their former thesis but add a new twist. Khosla, Kleiner and NGEN all made significant bets on cleantech.

Still, food technology — unless it’s IT-based — hasn’t traditionally been the fodder of venture capitalists. When I ask Tetrick why his company is “venture backable,” he says because they are creating a powerhouse of innovative thinkers that can come together across disciplines, and traditional food companies just aren’t as nimble. Tesla used that same argument for why as a startup it can revolutionize the car industry, and out innovate against the large automakers.

But Tesla is a sort of outlier on a lot of levels. It’ll be harder to disrupt more traditional industries without Moore’s Law in your corner. But in the meantime, as these startups sink or swim, at least they’ll be putting the spotlight on a crucial problem: the food industry is broken and it needs technology and innovation to be fixed.

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PayPal co-founder and HFV CEO Max Levchin at DLD 2013 Conference in Munich Photo by Om Malik

It is not the first time Levchin has turned to such a structure. In early part of the 21st century, he started MRL Ventures, with backing from Peter Thiel, who was chief financial officer of PayPal. MRL resulted in ten startups; two became successful — Slide and Yelp — while one, AdRoll, briefly flirted with bright lights. Others withered away. Levchin is betting that lightning will strike twice. “It is the same approach, but this time it is around data,” said Levchin.

The Kiev, Ukraine-born entrepreneur made his big pitch at the DLD conference in Munich in a speech that needed parsing. So we ended up having a chat about his plans.

When Sensors Meet Data

The focus at a very basic level is “data” and how it will influence our daily lives. Max believes — and I most certainly agree — that we are going to see digitization or penetration of technology into parts of our lives which have been hitherto untouched by it. Whether it is sensors or smartphones, we will have data emanate from different sources, and using that data to shape experiences is a big opportunity.

The word he used in our conversation often was “friction” or how sensors, embedded computing and the data that will result will reduce friction and inefficiency in many of our daily tasks. He pointed to Uber, the on-demand transportation service based in San Francisco as an example.

“The world of real things is very inefficient: slack resources are abundant, so are the companies trying to rationalize their use. Über, AirBnB, Exec, GetAround, PostMates, ZipCar, Cherry, Housefed, Skyara, ToolSpinner, Snapgoods, Vayable, Swifto…it’s an explosion! What enabled this? Why now? It’s not like we suddenly have a larger surplus of black cars than ever before.

Examine the DNA of these businesses: resource availability and demand requests — highly analog, as this is about cars, drivers, and passengers — is captured at the edge, automatically where possible, then transmitted and stored, then processed centrally. Requests are queued at the smart center, and a marketplace/auction is used to allocate them, matches are made and feedback is given in real time.

A key revolutionary insight here is not that the market-based distribution of resources is a great idea — it is the digitalization of analog data, and its management in a centralized queue to create amazing new efficiencies.”

“As we become more connected, we can make things a lot more efficient around us,” he said. “There is a lot of change that is going to happen.” Levchin pointed to a future where sensors in our clothing communicate with our in-home systems and adjust the temperature of our environment based on our body conditions.

Say No To The Four-Year Startup Cycle

As we talked about his plans, I couldn’t help but notice a certain level of maturity. Whether it is age or the fact that he is a family man, the older Levchin is in less of a hurry and is taking a more nuanced and longer view of the world. When asked, he said that it is time to get off the four-year-cycle of the Silicon Valley startup.

However, to solve bigger problems, sometimes you need a longer horizon: a ten-year schedule for example, Levchin said. “At PayPal, we viewed the world in a four year horizon,” he said, “Because that is how the valley worked. Had we thought it as a 20-year old company, the whole thing would be different.” He believes that for some odd reason being a 10-to-15 year old technology company isn’t cool, but that thinking has to change in order to get bigger breakthroughs.

The four year-cycle implies a certain pacing and if you don’t show returns in that time, people start quitting — whether it is your investors or employees, he added. Sure, some break out — Google and Facebook for example — but “we need more of those breakouts,” Levchin said.

It is a common refrain within the group of folks popularly known as the PayPal Mafia. Thiel, a controversial investor, has been most vocal of the lot. There is Elon Musk, the real life Tony Stark, who is probably the most successful. Levchin, too wants to make big impact with his new efforts.

The story of HVF

Levchin started HVF in 2011 with the notion of “going for bigger and longer term projects.” HVF, he said, will essentially be a vessel for working on his ideas and he will have a team, but some of those ideas will become mature enough and will be spun out as separate companies.

So far, he has about a dozen engineers working with him and he is close to announcing at least two projects later this year. But he is not willing to put down any dates, because again, he feels that it makes the efforts part of a rat-race. “Launch time frame is tied to value creation,” he added. It is one of the primary reasons why he is funding HFV himself.

Flush from the sale of Slide to Google, and thanks to his other investments in different PayPal Mafia companies, he has enough to self fund this new quest. However, that doesn’t preclude companies coming out of HVF from raising money from outside investors, Levchin said.

From the archives: A video chat with Max Levchin

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The entrepreneur behind tornado power is Louis Michaud, who is a Canadian engineer that has spent years “trying to be taken seriously,” as Toronto Star reporter Tyler Hamilton describes him (he profiled Michaud in his book Mad Like Tesla). Michaud’s startup is called AVEtec and his technology is called the Atmospheric Vortex Engine (AVE). Breakout Labs describes the technology as:

In his design, warm or humid air is introduced into a circular station, where it takes the form of a rising vortex, i.e. a controlled tornado. The temperature difference between this heated air and the atmosphere above it supports the vortex and drives multiple turbines. The vortex can be shut down at any time by turning off the source of warm air.

AVEtec says vortex-power can deliver energy that is carbon emissions-free, and super cheap at 3 cents per kilowatt hour (coal can be anywhere from 4 to 5 cents per kwh, and it’s got some of the highest carbon emissions).

The problem is that the tornado power has to be created in a large power plant, and that has yet to be built and tested at scale. The column of the tornado in a commercial-size plant would be 130 feet tall. Reporter Hamilton says Michaud’s plan eventually is to create tornadoes using waste heat from power plant or industrial factory and then harness those vortexes.

AVEtec will work with Lambton College in Ontario to build and study a prototype using the funding from Breakout Labs. Breakout Labs has also funded Modern Meadow, which combines in-vitro meat with 3D printing.

Thiel clearly has an interest in backing early stage research around new ways to use resources from energy to food to water. Despite that he was widely quoted as saying cleantech has been a disaster, he’s taking more of an ARPA-E style approach for cleantech through Breakout Labs. Thiel has also put money into LightSail Energy, a startup that makes a next-generation compressed air energy storage technology.

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The technology might sound like some boring power infrastructure system — and it is. Basically. But air energy storage technology could also enable grid storage cheaply enough to help the solve the problem of adding variable clean power to the grid. Solar and wind power can only be generated at certain times of the day. If wind farms and solar projects were coupled with cheap energy storage like compressed air tech, it could make them a lot more economical.

That’s one of the reason that entrepreneurs, investors and power companies are looking to develop the next generation of this “air battery” technology. While the idea behind compressed air energy storage has been around for years, a new crop of startups has been working on making the systems more efficient and lower cost. Here’s three startups and one consortium that are working on this next-gen tech:

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Compressed air is a decades-old technology which takes excess energy from a power plant or renewable energy and uses it to run air compressors, which pump air into tanks or underground caverns where it’s stored under pressure. When the air is released, it powers a turbine, creating electricity. There’s only a handful of compressed air energy storage projects in the world, including one in Alabama and one in Germany.

But over the past couple of years a couple starts have emerged that are creating a next-generation — more efficient — version of the this technology. LightSail Energy is one of these firms and uses a water spray in the air compression process. SustainX and General Compression, based in Massachusetts are two others.

SustainX has been planning on starting construction on a 1 MW compressed air energy storage project, likely at a coal plant, in conjunction with power company AES, its first customer. In late 2009, the Department of Energy awarded SustainX a $5.39 million grant to help it reach that commercialization goal.

General Compression is also working on its first project in Texas with partner and investor ConocoPhillips. General Compression raised a $54.5 Million series B in the Summer of 2011 from Northwater Capital Management, US Renewables Group, Duke Energy, and Serious Change.

According to this New York Times article, which cites Lux Research, the worldwide market for energy storage could be as large as $31.5 billion by 2017.

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And yet the ambition is there — and company he runs, online vacation rental company HouseTrip, is doing well right now. It just raised $40 million and is even pushing the much-vaunted Airbnb into second place in parts of Europe.

The businesses are not exact rivals — HouseTrip focuses on helping people rent entire homes for their breaks, rather than rooms — but they are both taking the continent seriously. There are a number of different ways you can compare the two companies, and in many cases Airbnb comes out on top: it’s certainly the biggest beast in some of the popular urban destinations around Europe, even when you strip out the room-only listings.

But at a national level, Housetrip is ahead in many countries across the continent — with far better coverage of rural locations and out-of-the-way hotspots that appeal to families on vacation, rather than urban travelers on short breaks. In its home market of France, for example, Housetrip emerges narrowly ahead in volume, while in other popular destinations (Spain, Croatia and others) it boasts a greater lead in its number of listings.

In a highly competitive market that includes rivals like Wimdu, OneFineStay and many, many more, that’s no mean feat.

And the fact that Bertrand cuts against the grain is, perhaps, part of the reason for that success.

The Insider

After all, unlike most of the people fighting for this market, he didn’t end up in the business by accident: he started out in the world of hotels. The idea for HouseTrip came to him and his wife, Junjun Chen, while they were studying at Ecole Hôtelière de Lausanne, the oldest and most famous hospitality school in the world.

“When I studied hospitality over five years I guess what you really understand is service — how to make people feel welcome,” he says.

“If you ask the team I’m very, very detail-oriented, and the product is all in the detail. What gave me that focus on the details, certainly, was studying hospitality. In Paris hotels, if one pillow is not perfect, or one knife is not exactly two centimeters from the edge of the table, it’s a big, big deal.”

Hidden underneath his crop of curly red hair, it seems, is a mind focused on getting it right and almost nothing else.

The company, which started in Switzerland but now has its HQ in London, became unique when it took on its latest funding. The round was led by Accel, making HouseTrip the only company that all three of Europe’s leading venture firms — Accel, Balderton and Index — have backed. They’re all on board because they see a massive opportunity, and (perhaps) a chance for Europe to exert its power over foreign competition.

This, says Bertrand, plays to the continent’s natural strengths.

“When you look at most of the big travel companies, they’re European-based,” he explains. “By far the biggest is Booking.com, which is a Dutch startup. Travel is different maybe because that’s our DNA in Europe: Most of the market is European; Most of the schemes for decades have been European; We invented the hospitality industry, and so on.”

He may be overstating the case a little (Booking.com is a powerhouse, but it was acquired by the Connecticut-based Priceline back in 2005) but Europe is definitely HouseTrip’s stronghold right now. Its biggest cities include Paris, Barcelona, London and Berlin, where demand is high and the company is working hard to keep its supply of listings closely matched.

But while Bertrand says those large locations are profitable — Paris, he claims, hit breakeven nearly two years ago — the company is taking on a lot of funding: near $60 million at last count. He is using venture money, he says, to try and achieve scale. This means opening up new destinations and bringing on fresh listings, which can be an expensive, arduous task.

“Destinations that are big and have reached critical mass are profitable, but we’re expanding to lots of new places at any one time and that’s what really costs the money — but that’s what gives us so much growth,” he says.

“We could decide tomorrow that we’re happy with the existing destinations we have and become much more profitable, but we still think there is huge room for growth, so we want to capture the opportunities.”

Focus, focus, focus

For now, however, that need to grow is tempered by the desire to keep quality up — his obsession with quality. That means that although cities outside Europe, like New York, are growing fast, the company is primarily sticking to what it knows best.

“I think Europe will still be our focus in the medium term. This market is a European market, and if you conquer Europe you can conquer the world.”

For all the drama and talk of competition between HouseTrip and Airbnb and the rest of them, though, it’s only a small part of a very large story. Holiday rental is a big industry — big enough to support a public company like Homeaway, which is currently valued at around $2 billion — but it’s dwarfed by the much larger hotel sector.

And long-term success may require a change in strategy for many of the players in the game. Like others in the collaborative consumption sector, I have spoken to, Bertrand believes that Airbnb is soon going to have to move sideways into some unexpected markets to maintain the growth its investors seek.

After all, there’s a certain kind of pressure that comes from the $220 million that Airbnb has now had pumped into it — maybe more soon, if rumors that Peter Thiel is interested in investing another $150 million pan out. Building a company that can match those expectations may mean expansion into areas like, say, car rental, or a deal with the hotel industry to offload empty rooms.

Bertrand doesn’t think the same sort of pressure will come to bear on HouseTrip, even with the bundles of cash it has taken. For a start, he says with a smile, his wife and co-founder Junjun is the CFO. But more importantly, his business fundamentals are more sound: renting entire homes means that the average booking on the site is higher than many of its rivals. And that, in turn, gives it a stronger position to attack new destinations, new places.

But more than that, it’s a philosophy.

“My whole vision from the beginning is that holiday rental is much better than hotels, more authentic, and a much better way to travel,” he says. “I wouldn’t be able to look at myself in the mirror.”

Still room at the inn

It’s clear that this game still has a long way to go, and the market in two or three years may look very different from today. The vast number of names currently in the mix are likely to consolidate, and perhaps one or two of them will get snapped up by the bigger travel giants.

Still, though, Bertrand says there’s a lot of headroom — even at the most basic levels.

“We’re still focusing on what we call internally the low hanging fruit — on the rental side, that’s people who have been renting out holiday rentals for a long time and are simply looking for a more efficient way of doing it. When you look at that market in Europe it’s 3 million properties, it’s massive and there’s a lot of room to grow in there.”

And how many of those 3 million properties would HouseTrip need to make Bertrand feel comfortable?

“Three million is the answer,” he says, without blinking.

Oh yeah. There’s that ambition again.

Update: This post has been edited and updated to clarify how Housetrip is “beating” Airbnb in Europe. More detail in the comments.

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The deal is not yet signed, and the details aren’t totally clear. The report says that current Airbnb investors at Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital would also participate in this round of financing. Thiel’s cash infusion would be more than double the $120 million the company has raised so far. After its last financing in July 2011, Airbnb was valued at $1.3 billion.

The company has recovered from an unfortunate incident last year, and over the past few years its growth has skyrocketed. Today the service is active in 192 countries and has seen more than more than 5 million nights booked. Between February 2011 and February 2012, the company’s nights booked multiplied by five.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user [401(K) 2012].

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