I sat down with Brian Barth at SideStep’s office in Silicon Valley just after he announced he was stepping down as CEO. Russ Lemelin, SideStep’s CFO has since become Interim CEO. Here’s what Brian had to say.

My comments are indented.

On how SideStep works “SideStep has relationships with all of the brands on its site. We will win by being a good partner. It’s a lot more work building partnerships, but all the brands [airlines, car rental companies, hotel chains] appreciate our permission-based model. We want to create value, not create spite.”

This model is in contrast to players like Yahoo’s FareChase which crawl the brands’ sites and then scrape the pricing information. Note that FareChase was sued by American Airlines in 2002 in connection with FareChase’s access to AA.com. SideStep obviously wants to prevent situations like this.

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