Back in January 2017, we interviewed Céleste, the Founder and CEO of Live2Leave and followed her journey from journalism to entrepreneurship. We were also so lucky to have her on our tech entrepreneur panel to celebrate our 5th anniversary in December! If you’re planning your summer holiday, this is the perfect app to inspire your next trip and share your favourite places around the world. We caught up with the Co-Founders on how far Live2Leave has come one year on….
Live2Leave is a London based startup and a travel app that allows users to record their favourite hotels, restaurants and activities and see recommendations from a trusted community of friends and local experts. It was born in the mind of former foreign correspondent Céleste Owen-Jones. While criss-crossing South America with a camera on her back, she dreamt of the perfect travel companion that would provide her with recommendations she could trust, wherever she’d go in the World. Instead, all she could find were unreliable reviews in the usual places. She therefore decided to give her dream a shot, and after a change of continent, Live2Leave was born in May 2017. Joined in July 2017 by life-long friend and former marketing executive, Léa Bourratiere, the pair set out to build Live2Leave’s powerful brand and community.
How has Live2Leave changed over the past year?
12 months ago, when Live2Leave arrived on the App store, there was no team, no content, no users, no website, no backers. Today, I’m no longer a lonely sole founder as Lea joined me as Co-Founder on this crazy journey. So did Isabella, Elias and Ann-So. We just launched Live2Leave 2.0, and a brand new website.
Our users have created 10,000 high quality recommendations in all of the world’s countries and more than 2,300 cities. The number of recommendations is growing by double digits on a monthly basis! And many people believed and / or invested in us along the way. Not bad for 12 months! Let’s see what we can do in the next 12…
What are some of the major milestones for Live2Leave?
– Launching our beta version, in January 2017. It was buggy, it was crashing, and yet, our users were posting. a lot. And continued to do so as we finally launched last May.
– These metrics got us into Techstars London, our first investors. From a project we became a company. Techstars is one of the world’s top accelerator programmes, only 11 companies got in, out of 1300 applications!
– In September, we launched Live2Leave on Android.
– We finished Techstars at the end of October.
– Two months later, we were one of the 5 startups accepted in the Hotel Jumpstart innovation programme, powered by Expedia and Hotels.com, the world’s biggest travel company. It gives us a unique opportunity to work closely with leading travel brands and gain invaluable market insights and expertise.
– In February 2018, Live2Leave was voted in the top 3 travel startups of the Travel Technology Innovation Awards at the Travel Technology Europe Summit in London.
Two weeks ago, we launched our brand new app and website, getting closer each day to fulfilling our mission: Making the unknown a little more friendly, one recommendation at a time!
The Team
Live2Leave has an all-women founding team, with just the right experience under their belts to take on the challenge! Léa and Céleste graduated with distinction from Oxford, Columbia and Cornell. They also backpacked throughout South America together in their early twenties – the type of experience that can turn friends into enemies, or in their case, co-founders!
Léa is building Live2Leave’s powerful brand and knows how to grow its community because she did the same as marketing executive for Industry leaders such as L’Oreal, Cartier or Audemars Piguet. Céleste, as a journalist, worked for AFP, CNN, and the Huffington Post, travelling the world. She can tell a story, take people on board and she is now applying the same skills to spread the word about Live2Leave!
MEET CELESTE
Name: Céleste Owen-Jones
Role at Live2Leave: CEO and Co-Founder
Number of Countries on her profile: 25
Follow her to: Argentina, France, Brazil
Particularities: Absolutely adores cheese, her dog Madame, and her future husband Pierre. In that order (just kidding…)
When did you catch the travel bug?
When I was 10. My family took me on a trip to Cambodia. Visiting Angkor back then (19 years ago) was quite an experience: you were basically alone to admire the surreal beauty of the place, and I remember a very special energy that I felt there – the same one that I felt years later in Petra, at sunset, when again there was nobody around. Being alone when you travel is truly the world’s rarest luxury today… I remember we had this fascinating guide in Angkor: he used to be a teacher, and had to hide in the jungle during the Khmer Rouge years, when they were trying to kill every single person with a working mind… He lost his entire family. This man knew how to speak to a child: he would tell me stories, and the temples would come to life before my eyes. I kept a diary of this trip, that I still have today. It says that when I grow up, I want to discover the entire world and hear all its stories..
What is the best experience you’ve had while on holiday that you’ll never forget?
Falling in love! A year and a half ago, I went on this incredible trek in Sardinia called the “Selvaggio Blu” with my new boyfriend Pierre, who was meeting some of my best friends for the first time. For five days, we walked from 5 to 8 hours a day, stopping only to admire the most beautiful views. At night we would camp, make a fire, have some wine, eat some local cheese and laugh endlessly with our friends. Pierre and I spoke non-stop for five days, while we were walking, at some distance from the others. We had our own rhythm, the rhythm of two people who were falling in love! We had no phone, the outside world seemed far away – there was only nature, our life stories and a destination to get to by the end of the day. Pure magic. We started the trek knowing we really liked each other. When we left Sardinia we were in love. And we are now getting married this summer! (and yes, the Selvaggio Blu trek is on my Live2Leave profile 
)
When travelling, what are the top 3 things in your suitcase that you never leave home without?
– A pair or two of Bensimons, my one and only travel shoes (and to be honest my everyday shoes too during the summer).
– A large nice scarf: nice enough that I can use on an evening out, but also large enough that I can wrap around myself if it gets cold, or use as a pillow if I have a long bus journey!
– Sunglasses!
MEET LEA
Name: Léa Bourratière
Role at Live2Leave: CMO and Co-Founder
Number of Countries on her profile: 25
Follow her to: Santorini, Fernando de Noronha, Milan
If you had a year to travel the world, where would you start?
I would start by doing the Torres del Paine Trek, in Chile! This is a long time dream and I simply don’t know how long places like this continue to exist in their full splendor. So the sooner I can go the better!
When did you catch the travel bug?
Weirdly enough I caught the travel bug watching “Motorcycle Diaries” by Walter Salles, a road movie that recounts the initiatory journey of 23-year-old Che Guevara through South America. I was then 16 and I completely fell in love with the powerful South American landscapes and their colorful characters. It became my obsession to explore Argentina, Peru, Bolivia… A trip that I finally took 7 years later, alone at first and then with Céleste, my now partner in crime at Live2Leave!
Have you ever travelled alone? If so what’s the best thing about it?
When travelling to South America I spent a month alone in Argentina. I had been warned by overly concerned parents and friends against all the potential dangers I might encounter and had been encouraged to plan out every single aspect of my trip. But what I actually realised very soon was how amazing waking up every morning with the prospect of spontaneous encounters and discoveries was. I believe that by travelling alone one becomes more attuned to her environment. Suddenly it’s not just about “seeing” the place, it’s about living it and meeting its people, hearing their stories… To this day, my time alone in Argentina remains my most vivid travel memory. And probably the experience that transformed me the most too!
The Live2Leave app is available to download for iPhone and Android
The post Travel the world with Live2Leave – Meet the Co-Founders one year on appeared first on Eyedea - Female Millennials Network.