The night auditor who built a unicorn: Richard Valtr opens The Boardroom Reboot

As a teenager, Richard Valtr spent his summers working the night shift at his family's hotels in Prague while his friends were on holiday. Four nights a week, seven in the evening to seven in the morning. He worked out early that the job barely needed him once the late guests had checked in. For most of the shift, in his own words, he was a glorified security camera.

That boredom became Mews. The company he started in 2012 is now one of the industry's first unicorns, a privately held business worth more than a billion dollars, a rare thing for any startup and rarer still in hospitality. It all traces back to a question he could not let go of. If the part of hospitality that matters is the human part, the welcome and the conversation, why is so much of the technology built around everything else?

He did not set out to build a software company. He came back to Prague to help the family business for a couple of years when his father fell ill, took on a hotel project, and started sketching an idea that sounded slightly mad at the time. Get rid of the reception desk completely. Put everything on a phone, so that nobody could hide behind a counter and the staff had no choice but to walk up and say hello. When he asked the existing technology vendors to let his app plug into their systems, they told him it was impossible. So he found two programmers and built the thing himself.

The early years turn on small moments that could easily have gone the other way. A conversation with Matt Welle, then at Hilton, who mentioned that an 800-room hotel in Prague was still running on DOS. The realisation that if nobody was building the foundations for this whole industry, that was the real prize. Richard admits he oversold how far along he actually was, and that Matt took a big gamble on him. Matt is now the CEO, and the two of them have been arguing productively ever since.

That is the other thread running through the episode we recorded at HITEC. Richard disagrees with people on purpose. One of his own colleagues once described him as someone who challenges everyone around him, who you cannot always tell is disagreeing for the sake of a better idea or just to see what happens. He does not really deny it. When something feels safe or copied or chosen only to win a deal, he pushes until something better shows up, and he has run the company that way from the start.

None of this turns into a pitch for Mews. Floor Bleeker keeps the conversation on the person, and Richard is the kind of guest who will follow an idea across philosophy, credit cards and the hotel star rating without stopping for breath. By the end he is somewhere you would not expect a hospitality software founder to be, making a genuinely big claim about where human work is heading over the next ten years.

In this episode

• Why Mews has never had a night audit

• The reception desk idea that made people laugh in 2012

• What a hotel still running on DOS had to do with Richard going all in

• Why he disagrees with his own team on purpose

• The single idea he thinks nobody else in the industry has copied

• His three predictions, for the next twelve months, five years and ten years

A few moments that stayed with us

• Richard thinks a credit card company should already have bought a hotel brand. He is almost disappointed it has not happened, and his reasoning says a lot about where loyalty is heading.

• His idea of a five-star experience has little to do with how many amenities a hotel has. He measures it another way, and it changes what he thinks technology is for.

• His answer on AI and hotel jobs does not land where you might expect.

• His ten-year prediction is the boldest thing in the episode. It involves half the working world.