The airlines were skeptical. One seasoned executive straightforwardly told our founder Jay Walker that they’d be better off if Jay was “hit by a bus.” Jay conceded that a bus might get him, but the Internet wasn’t going away. The airlines needed it, even if they were wary of it.

One reason for airline skepticism was their desire to not disrupt pricing. In fact, that’s what “priceline” means. The “price line” is a point airlines didn’t want to sell below; if they sold seats at full price in one place, but put them on sale elsewhere, no one would pay full price.

We saw a way around that. We knew there was a tremendous amount of demand that wasn’t being met – millions of people who wanted to travel, but wanted to pay less. If we let consumers bid for a seat, and the airlines accepted that bid privately, the “price line” would remain intact.

We started with about ten people, in a small office in Connecticut. We bought only a pair of servers (a mistake, we later learned). We needed a customer service phone number, because even though we were online, the vast majority of travel was still booked by phone. When we tried to secure the rights to 1-800-PRICELINE, it was owned by a New Hampshire car dealership. We bought two cars off their lot in trade.

We were lean, a start-up in the truest sense of the word, created on a whiteboard by an entrepreneur and a team of data analysts. Other early entrants to e-commerce were more intuitive – you could buy books or shoes or music online, but also in a store. We were different. You couldn’t do what we wanted to do without the Internet.

Before we launched, we needed to capture attention. To build an audience. We set out to find a spokesperson – someone with a following, a well-known voice and an association with “the future.”

We approached William Shatner and struck a deal. As a young company, we really didn’t have the money to pay the going rate for him. But we had promise. Shatner agreed to invest in that promise, with stock. He was excited to be a part of the burgeoning e-commerce movement, and we were excited to have Captain Kirk as the face and the voice of Priceline.

The plan worked. In fact, on the very day we launched in 1998, it worked so well that our two servers crashed immediately. We realized why, and our alarm turned to elation. So many people wanted to name their own price for an airline seat that they overwhelmed our site.

It was a nice problem to have. It testified to the power of our original idea. With Priceline, airlines – and soon enough, hotels, and then rental cars – could fill the millions of seats and beds and cars that were otherwise sitting empty. And millions of travelers could fly, drive and sleep well knowing that they’d saved money.

We were ambitious. In 1999, we grew rapidly and were now publicly traded. So we figured, if naming your own price for flights and hotels was working so well, why not new cars? Why not mortgages, or gasoline, or groceries? We even developed a site, Perfect Yardsale, that let folks name their own price for used lawnmowers and household goods.