In pursuit of the single version of truth: A founders’ story
By Brook Armstrong with color from Michael Share, co-Founders and co-CEOs of Blockskye
Michael and I are pretty good at answering questions about Blockskye by now. What we built, how it works, why it's different. We get asked those all the time. The one we don't get asked enough explains all three: Why did we start this thing?
Michael and I have told versions of this story many times before, from a stage, at a conference booth, in the two minutes we get to chat in the conference hallway.
This article has the longer version. The one we'd tell over drinks instead of a microphone.
Life before Blockskye
Before there was a Blockskye, Michael built and sold what became HRG North America. And he brought me into the industry in 2015, when we started a new company (before Blockskye).
We were growing and winning business, but we kept noticing the same thing: every airline and hotel we worked with was getting sharper about their own technology. Suppliers were building better apps to reach and reward travelers directly. The corporate travel technology that was sitting in between all those companies was getting older, not keeping pace.
The engineer who wouldn't stop emailing
One of the accounts we managed early on was for a large technology company with a serious travel budget. And that account had an engineer with some OPINIONS. A lot of them.
He often worked outside the system to book his travel. He’d find a cheaper fare on his own, then compare that to the corporate booking tool that had him go through five screens to get something worse. And still wouldn’t let him fly when he wanted or pick his own seat.
This engineer started emailing me directly. Not once. For weeks. And he repeatedly showed me proof from his own experience that the whole setup seemed to be built for someone other than the traveler.
Somewhere in writing back to him, again and again, my real answer became impossible to avoid. His company could get some of the spend data and the policy compliance it wanted, but only by keeping him on a tool that made his travel experience worse. But even the data itself was lacking, the commercials were opaque and confusing, and suppliers weren’t happy. No one was winning.
Money that keeps changing its name
The deeper we got into it, the more consistent the pattern became.
A former colleague who ran travel for a large media company called Michael once, confused. Her contract was explicit. Airline commissions on the company's business-class spend came back to her, directly. But the agency running her program told her there weren't any to pass back.
Money and data tend to disappear along the way, and no one was doing anything about it.
We watched the same trick play out live, at an industry event, when a procurement lead for a large energy company stood up and said her contract was clear. There were no commissions on air spend. An exec from agency A stood up right after and told her, as a matter of fact, that agency B did pay commissions on her spend. Her contract just never used that word. It said “upfronts.” It said “overrides.” It said “marketing dollars.” Anything but the actual word, "commissions."
Two different companies in two different industries, the exact same move. The trend is clear: opacity vs transparency.
The other side of the same coin
We noticed something similar happening to travelers. Airlines and hotels had gotten remarkably good at building direct relationships with people on their own time, through loyalty programs and their own apps. And it works!
We all know someone who will pick a pricier or more annoying route just to stay loyal to one airline alliance, because the points are worth more to them than the money they'd save.
I personally know someone else who flies constantly for a huge bank and uses a corporate card for on-trip spend that earns him nothing at all. If he could use a card of his own choosing, he'd pick up well over 200,000 miles a year just for dining, rideshares, and other expenses.
That's not just a perk, it's the closest thing to getting some of that time back. When expense tools are built only for compliance, the system quietly keeps those personal rewards.
It was clear to both Michael and me: The technology corporate travelers were being handed wasn’t great and the economics behind it were part of the problem. We both knew that combination wasn’t built to last. Somebody was going to be in a room somewhere building something better. We decided to be those people.
The call that started the partnership
Here's the part of the story that doesn't usually make it into the polished version.
Michael called me one day, mid-project, because someone on his team had just quit. "I need you to join some calls tomorrow," he said, "get stuck in and act like you know what you're doing."
That was his whole pitch.
A few weeks later, we were asking each other why any of this worked the way it did, because it made no sense. The answer, more or less, was “that's just how it is.” Which turned out to be the wrong answer.
We spent a good while trying to fix as much of it as we could from the inside, hit the ceiling on how far that would go, and then left our respective companies. We built the thing we kept saying somebody needed to build: Blockskye.
The idea underneath the idea
Zoom out far enough and every one of these problems is really the same problem. Every party in a travel transaction—the corporation, the traveler, the airline, the card issuer—is working off its own version of what happened. Nobody's numbers match, because nobody's looking at the same record.
Michael and I started describing corporate travel as needing a single source of truth. One shared, verifiable version of events that every party can trust without having to take anyone else's word for it.
That idea is the whole reason Blockskye runs on a ledger instead of a stack of independent and disconnected systems, each one guarding its own version of events.
Where that leaves us
We never set out to build a better app. Anyone can build a user-friendly travel app. We built what was missing underneath it: the plumbing. But plumbing is a much less exciting thing to complain about at a conference, which might be part of why nobody had fixed it yet.
Look closer, and fixing the plumbing turns out to be the fun part. Once the commercial model gets addressed with buyers, once the reporting matches what was actually spent, once suppliers and corporations are finally looking at the same record, a lot of things become possible that never were before.
Suppliers can extend travelers the same loyalty and app experience they already give leisure flyers. Finance teams can close the books on travel spend without a small army doing manual reconciliation every month. Procurement can negotiate from real numbers instead of a report that showed up six weeks late in the wrong currency.
The exciting part is none of that is theoretical. It’s the difference between an industry that taxes everyone in it and one that works for the people using it. And it’s possible now.
I still think about that engineer's emails sometimes. Because everything we've built started from an answer to somebody who just wanted to book a decent flight, pick his own seat, and keep his reward points.
If you want to see what came out of all that, take a look at how Blockskye works. Or just get a hold of us and we'll walk you through it.
— Brook & Michael
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