Shades of Green

World's most trusted travel adviceĀ®TripAdvisor has gone public:

Eleven years after it began life above Kosta’s Pizza in Needham, and seven years after it was acquired by Barry Diller’s InterActive Corp. for about $200 million, TripAdvisor is finally gaining a NASDAQ listing of its very own. The company starts trading tomorrow under the symbol TRIP, and it will also be included in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index.

I briefly worked for TripAdvisor one summer when I was an undergraduate. It was a great place to work. One anecdote always stuck with me. I don’t even know if it’s true, but I heard it from at least two people while working at the firm. The CEO, Steve Kaufer, supposedly hates the shade of green that’s used in the company’s logo and in all the website menus. But the color consistently tested well in focus groups, probably because it’s well differentiated from Kayak Orange, Travelocity Navy, Orbitz Baby Blue, and Expedia Yellow. So he went along with it, even though he hated the firm’s color scheme.