Ceo Journal

Darren Huston was trying to watch a hockey game, half-listening to a headhunter talk about a company he had never heard of before. But as the headhunter went on, the then-45-year-old executive in charge of Microsoft’s global consumer and online businesses tuned out the arena noise and began listening to what he thought was an impossible story. “I said, ’There’s nothing that big in Europe on the Internet,‴⁣ he recalled, laughing. The 2011 call was from Booking.com, the Amsterdam-based unit of Priceline Group that dominates the European online travel market. By last year, Darren Huston became president and CEO of Priceline Group itself, which has come from dot-com laughingstock to the fifth most-valuable U.S. Internet company—if one still really considers it a U.S. company, because 90 percent of its profits come from overseas, most of them from Booking.com. Read full story @ https://www.cnbc.com/2015/03/31/why-pricelines-booker-in-chief-is-spending-big.html