Priceline was founded by Jay Walker, a forty-two-year-old entrepreneur with a clever solution to a real problem: every day, 500,000 airline seats were going unsold.1 Priceline would offer these vacant seats to online customers who could name the price they were willing to pay to fill them. Consumers would (theoretically, at least) get cheaper flights; airlines would be able to sell excess inventory; inefficiencies would be ironed out of the market; and Priceline would take a cut
