>> Hey, welcome back, everybody, Jeff Frick here with the CUBE. We're at Zuora Subscribe 2017 in downtown San Francisco. 2000 people, it's all about the subscription economy, and really what the subscription economy does in terms of the relationship between a client and a customer. And that's I think what's the important story besides the mechanics and the accounting and all the other stuff that's going on. We're excited to have our next guest, Barry Holmes. He is the chief revenue officer of Surf Air. Barry welcome. >> Thanks Jeff, glad to be here. >> Absolutely, so for people that aren't familiar with Surf Air, give them a quick background on the company. >> Sure, so Surf Air has been around for four years. It's a membership-based club where you save two hours every time you fly. You're flying out of executive airports on smaller, executive planes. You get the private experience, except it's on a schedule. Everything's on your app, et cetera, so we're really addressing that pain point that your business traveler has in wasting time at big airports to fly short haul trips. So currently, we're only in California and Las Vegas. We have big, aggressive growth plans in Texas, Europe, and the rest of the world, because for short haul city pairs, like San Francisco-L.A, L.A-Vegas, et cetera, they exist all over the world. Those big population centers are getting wealthier, busier, more time-pressed, yet the infrastructure and the commercial world hasn't kept up. >> Right, right. You mentioned the big airports, but you fly into the Bay area. I know you fly into San Carlos, right? >> Right, so that's how we solved the problem is when you're still going to the market that you want to go to from the market that you're coming from, but you're flying out of San Carlos in the Bay area to Burbank or Hawthorne in LA, or you're flying into an FBO attached to Burbank airport. So that's how you save so much time. You show up 15 minutes ahead of your flight. You book everything on your app. We basically give our members back two hours every time they fly, or a whole day if they fly weekly. So every month, you're getting a day back, and so our members are high-powered. They know how to use their time, and when they do that, they're able to create a life out of the time we give them. >> And yet, unlike, say, some of the net jets or some of those things, you're actually getting the, it's not a schedule. So you guys have added the schedule component to it, and you've enabled that using a mobile app. >> Yeah, so the schedule basically gives you the frequency that you need, and it mitigates the cost associated with typical charter travel. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> So you're getting a private experience, but you're not chartering the flight, paying for dead legs. You know, to charter a flight by yourself to San Francisco from LA is going to be $8,000 to $10,000, whereas you fly with us weekly, it's going to be an average of $650 a flight. >> Interesting, okay. We're here at Zuora Subscribe. So, subscription, why did you choose to go with a subscription model as the way to interact with your customers? >> So I've been in the membership business or subscription business in several businesses now, and I think there's a distinct difference between the relationship a company has with its members, and the relationship a company has with customers. So there's obviously- >> Funny, you don't even use the customer phrase, you say members. >> I don't use customers, they're members of ours. >> Okay. >> So when you're a member of the club, you're going to get treated differently, and in all honesty, sometimes we get scathing feedback, but it's good. We learn from that and improve the business based on how the members use it, and how they interact with us, because they're part of the family. A customer, if they don't like it, they often leave. You have to come up with surveys and things like that to find out what's going on, but with us, we can see how often a member engages with us, which flights they take, which flights they enjoy, and we have member care people or member management resources that deal with these members every day. >> Right. >> The feedback loop, it really improves the value of the membership and it also improves the business. And it clearly, a recurring revenue model is good, if you put the member first and handle their needs, that's ultimately going to drive your revenue. >> Right, because you got to keep delivering value over and over and over and over per time period. >> Right. >> You can't just rely on that first big pop and maybe a maintenance fee or whatever. >> No, exactly, we look at it as we don't want to get into the discount game. We want to charge a fair price for what we deliver, but we want to make the experience worth it. And we found that our members really don't blink at the price as long as the experience is there, because they realize it's a much lower price versus say charter, but if we keep innovating and give them the options they want, the times they want, the service level that they want, then it builds value for us and we put value back in it for the member. That's the symbiotic relationship. >> Okay, and how important was the subscription model to the business of Surf Air in terms of the founding. I don't know if you were there at the beginning. Is it really an integral part of it? Or is it kind of a nice to have that you guys added on after the fact? >> No, I was not there for the founding, but I do believe it was an integral part, because they realized that in order to create a different business model, they saw the value of a subscription business. Anytime you look at business models, knowing that when you wake up on June 1 or July 1, you've got recurring revenue there, that's going to be more appealing. >> Jeff: Right. >> How you treat those members to grow it is obviously the question. >> Right. Certainly not an inexpensive business to run, a small airline, so- >> No, and that's- >> It's nice to have that recurring revenue. >> It's a heavy asset business, so you have to get the value right. You have to get the pricing and the usage right, and those are the lessons that we've learned over time. Now we know how often people fly, what they expect, and what kind of price makes sense for both us and them. >> Right, right, I'm going to give you the last word before you have to go. What's kind of your sense of what's going on here at Zuora Subscribe? Water cooler chat, what are you hearing? Any surprises, what's kind of the feel as this subscription thing really starts to go. >> Yeah, I mean, I think, to think that you've got a conference built around a business model is unheard of, and so I think it's extremely valuable, because when you're talking to people in completely different businesses, yet they serve their members or their subscribers in the way that makes sense for their business. You can actually take a lot back into what makes sense for your business. So feeding the model, knowing that you've got a base of people that you have to serve the right way, you can really learn a lot from all sorts of businesses. That's what's cool about this. >> Very good. All right, he's Barry Holmes. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching the Cube from Zuora Subscribe. Thanks for stopping by. >> Thank you. >> All right, thanks for watching.