David
Krauter

A career that keeps booking the same flight.

David Krauter runs Going, the company that emails you a fare so good you book a trip you weren't planning. He stepped into the CEO seat on March 9, 2026, taking over from co-founder Brian Kidwell and joining the board on the same day. The pitch he gave was simple. He had been watching Scott, Brian and Going "for a while," and he liked what the product did: it helped people save money on the trips they actually wanted to take.

Here is the strange specific. Going is built on cheap flights and a team of human Flight Experts who read every fare before it goes out. Fifteen years earlier, Krauter was running AirfareWatchdog inside Tripadvisor - a site whose entire reason for existing was hunting down mistakenly cheap airfare. He has, in other words, spent a decade and a half circling the same problem from different chairs. Going just handed him the whole cockpit.

A growth operator for a company past proof-of-concept.

Going does not need to convince anyone the idea works. The $1 billion in member savings settled that argument. What a company at that stage needs is someone who has taken a proven consumer product and pushed it into a much larger market - more members, more destinations, more of the data and personalization that turns a good deal into the right deal for the right traveler. That is the exact shape of Krauter's career.

His Tripadvisor years were not about inventing travel search; they were about scaling a portfolio of brands that already had audiences. His Invaluable years were not about explaining what an art auction is; they were about widening the marketplace and lifting growth past a third. Pattern-match the two, and Going's choice reads less like a gamble and more like a fit. The board appears to have hired for the next ten miles, not the first one.

It helps that he is not a stranger to the terrain. Krauter has watched, advised and invested across consumer technology for years through Shalestone Capital, and his advisory roster - spanning artificial intelligence, sports resale and travel payments - suggests he keeps a close eye on where consumer spending is heading. Going sits squarely in that line of sight: a business built on the simple, durable human urge to travel for less.