Dakota Smith Email Address

Head of Growth and Business

Hopper is a mobile-only company that uses big data to predict and analyze airfare and accommodations.

I've worked for Hopper as chief editor, user acquisition lead, head of growth and now, in my current role, as head of growth and business for over four years. It's been a great and rewarding challenge to work with our excellent growth and product teams to launch our app and introduce it to millions of new users.Hopper is among the fastest growing travel apps ever, having sold $500M worth of travel directly on our mobile app in our first two years and with over 17 million installs since launch. We use massive data sets to offer route-level predictions on airfare pricing to help travelers make informed decisions about when to fly and buy and were named the best travel app of 2015 by Apple with near-perfect user reviews.Our app consistently ranks as one of the top 10 free travel apps in the US App Store, successfully outcompeting every airline app and major competitors like Expedia and Priceline, despite the latter two spending upwards of $3 billion per year on marketing - the equivalent of our entire annual marketing budget every 12 hours.I direct a cross-functional growth and business team (reporting directly to the CEO) that is tasked with mobile user acquisition, retention, public relations, brand content, analytics, business development, revenue/conversion optimization and the air and accommodation lines of business. The team comprises 25% of the company's workforce and works in close coordination with the product, supply and data science teams.I also played a lead role in investor relations and fundraising, alongside our CEO, and personally built our company's financial model and projections. So far we've raised $104M from VCs like Accomplice, BDC Capital, Brightspark, CDPQ, Investissement Québec and OMERS Ventures.Prior to joining Hopper in 2013, I was working in the online travel space in Hong Kong.