tours-and-activities
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Aaron Fessler
He built booking software for the tours-and-attractions world by first living inside it - running a 100-acre racetrack in the Nevada desert. Now Aaron Fessler wants to hand every operator the tools he wished he'd had.
J. Scott Zimmerman
J. Scott Zimmerman is the CEO and co-founder of Xola, a San Francisco-based SaaS platform that powers booking, back-office management, and marketing for tour and activity operators worldwide. A licensed physician who completed a neurology residency at Stanford, Zimmerman chose Stanford precisely for its proximity to Silicon Valley, coding in Python during spare hospital moments - sometimes until 2am - while simultaneously building the company that would become Xola. He founded Xola in fall 2011 after recognizing that real-time technology had transformed flight, hotel, and car rental reservations, but the $135 billion tours-and-activities market remained largely undigitized. Backed by investors including Rakuten Travel, Michael Burry (of 'The Big Short' fame), and Google Analytics co-creators Scott and Brett Crosby, Xola has grown to serve thousands of operators across North America, Western Europe, and beyond.