Meet our team

Sanjay Vakil has played a pivotal role in shaping and shipping key products at industry giants like Google, Tripadvisor, and Time Out Group, with a focus on enhancing direct booking capabilities, optimizing digital advertising, and leveraging AI for personalization.

During his tenure at Google, Sanjay led teams across Hotels, Flights, Things to Do, and Vacation Packages. For Hotels, he led projects like Free Booking Links, Official Site badging, AI-powered price retrieval, and building Extranet tools to improve supplier visibility and direct revenue.

He's a seasoned product and engineering leader with a strong track record of driving innovation in travel, hospitality, and digital experiences. He spent the 90's at MIT training as an aerospace engineer culminating in a PhD – he's actually a rocket scientist.

With expertise spanning AI, metasearch, advertising technology, travel tech, and digital commerce, Sanjay continues to push the boundaries of how businesses engage with customers in an evolving digital world.

Theresa Meyer brings nearly two decades of experience in online travel product management to the team, and is curious about the world and passionate about delivering exceptional travel experiences. She’s thrilled to be part of the DirectBooker founding team.

After spending the early part of her career in the public sector practice at Deloitte Consulting, she jumped over to the travel industry with her first product gig at Tripadvisor, where she had the opportunity to work across social, mobile, consumer and B2B products.

During her tenure at Tripadvisor, Theresa’s longest stint was driving product strategy and innovation across multiple B2B products, including Business Advantage, which enables hoteliers to drive more direct bookings via the Tripadvisor platform. She also led product for Tripadvisor’s strategic partnerships and content syndication platforms.

After leaving Tripadvisor, Theresa held leadership positions at smarTours and Time Out, where she spearheaded customer experience and digital transformation initiatives.

Axel is a Co-Founder and General Partner at Baukunst, DirectBooker’s lead investor. He has been an entrepreneur, investor, and company builder for his entire career. Axel brings expertise gained through leading investments in more than 100 companies, serving on more than 40 private and public boards of directors, and from the creation of many billions of dollars of enterprise value.

Steve Kaufer is the travel industry trailblazer who co-founded Tripadvisor with the mission to help travelers around the world plan and book the perfect trip. Under Steve’s leadership, Tripadvisor grew from its humble beginnings in an office above a pizza shop to a publicly traded company and the largest travel site on the internet. Tripadvisor transformed the travel landscape by making UGC a must-have in travel planning, and grew to over a billion traveler reviews and opinions during Steve’s tenure. Steve is now the CEO of a new startup, Give Freely, which has the sole purpose of harnessing the collective power of online commerce for charitable good.