Today we’d like to introduce you to Tiger Solomons-Tibi.
Hi Tiger, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I grew up in Paris in a family that was half English and half French, so I have always had one foot on each side of the Channel. I went to an international school in Paris, then moved to London to study history, politics and economics at UCL, and stayed on for a master’s in conflict studies and international relations at the LSE.
Straight out of my master’s I went into strategy consulting. I advised Fortune 500 companies on product, strategy and expansion into new markets, a lot of it in emerging markets, and I worked with French private equity funds on their deals, running commercial and vendor due diligence. Consulting was basically the army. It taught me rigour, discipline, how to work to brutal deadlines, how to figure out what actually matters and be 80/20 about the rest, how to work in a team, and how to stay in your lane. It also taught me something I did not expect: most companies, and especially services businesses, have no real appetite for the modern world. They run on old practices and they are comfortable there. That is what pushed me to quit and build things myself.
The first thing I built was Pollstr, a mobile app to help young people vote in the 2024 UK general election. We compiled every manifesto policy from every party in the country, which nobody else had managed to do, and we gamified the way we collected data so the whole thing felt built for young people rather than for political journalists. We got over 10,000 users in a few weeks, with usage and retention numbers I am still proud of, and we helped a lot of young people make up their minds in a crucial election.
After the election I worked in hospitality tech, selling to restaurants. That was my first real look at the hospitality world and at how it buys software. Then in April 2025 I got into Entrepreneur First, a programme that picks the most ambitious people in Europe, puts them in a room together and pushes them to build a company and raise capital in the United States. By July 2025 I was in San Francisco with $250,000 in pre-seed funding for my company, Eggi. I spent months building, pivoting and pitching investors. That company taught me every lesson I needed for what came next.
In June 2026 my co-founder Daniel Zyss called me. He thought he had found a goldmine: a content management system built for hotels, the piece of software that runs a hotel’s website and takes its bookings. I dropped everything and joined him, and we started working on Emporium. That was three months ago. We went from one client to over fifty, and we are now building the company from Miami.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Not at all. There have been a lot of very hard moments in my entrepreneurial journey. I have had investors walk away after weeks of negotiation. I have had to pivot and throw away months of work. I have had doors shut in my face the same day I walked through them. It has been a proper rollercoaster, with real highs and real lows, and I would not describe any of it as smooth.
Elon Musk once said that being an entrepreneur is like eating glass and staring into the abyss. When things go badly, that is exactly what it feels like. But the glass is the point. Whether a founder makes it or not comes down to what they do in those moments, and I have learned that the only way through is to keep going.
Picking who you build with matters more than anything else, and I got incredibly lucky to start Emporium with Daniel Zyss. Founder chemistry makes or breaks a company. Without Daniel, there is no Emporium.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
Emporium is the demand infrastructuer for independent hotels. The company behind it is Agentic Commerce Labs Inc., but everyone knows us as Emporium.
Here is the problem we solve. Independent hotels are some of the best businesses in the world and some of the worst at selling themselves online. Most of them are running a WordPress site that an agency built years ago, a booking engine bolted on the side, and a dozen plugins that do not talk to each other. So guests give up and book on Booking.com or Expedia instead, and the hotel hands over 15 to 25 percent of every room to a middleman. Meanwhile the hotel is paying an agency a retainer, a booking engine provider a fee, and a chatbot company for a widget, and none of it works together.
We replace all of that with one platform. We build the hotel a brand new website from scratch, our team does the design, and the booking engine is ours, plugged straight into whatever system the hotel already uses to manage its rooms. On top of that sits an AI concierge that talks to guests on the website, answers every message that comes in by email or through the booking platforms, sells upgrades and extras, and translates the whole site into any language. A hotel can go from first call to fully live in a matter of weeks. Our fastest took two.
The results are what I am proudest of. At our largest hotel in New York, direct bookings went from 9 percent of the total to 22 percent. Across our first properties we measured around a 40 percent lift in bookings. Roughly a third of visitors end up talking to the concierge, and those guests book at about six times the rate of the ones who do not. And every single hotel on the platform pays. We have not spent a dollar on marketing. All of it has come from walking into hotels, picking up the phone, and owners telling other owners.
What sets us apart is that we own the whole guest-facing sale. The big hotel software companies focus on back-office operations and treat the website as an afterthought. Agencies build beautiful sites for $50,000 and then disappear. The AI chat tools are widgets stuck onto someone else’s page. We are the page, the booking, and the conversation with the guest, all in one place.
The bigger bet is in our company name. Within a couple of years, a large share of hotel bookings will be made by AI agents on behalf of travellers, the same way people ask ChatGPT today. When that happens, an independent hotel either gets found and booked directly, or it gets buried under the big platforms all over again. We are building the layer that makes independent hotels visible and bookable by those agents, on their own terms, without a middleman taking a cut.
We are two founders. Daniel holds a PhD in AI, previously founded an AI e-commerce company, and writes every line of code. I do everything else: sales, strategy, and making sure our hotels are happy. We chose Miami because the hoteliers here, and across Latin America, are real hoteliers. They run boutique properties that people actually travel for, and they care about the guest experience in a way that is rare elsewhere. We already work with hotels in New York, Miami and Colombia, and we are growing fast. If you own or run an independent hotel and you are tired of paying middlemen, come and talk to us.
What quality or characteristic do you feel is most important to your success?
Grit. Grit is the thing that keeps a founder from abandoning the mission. The basic rule of founding a company is do not die. You will not die if you fight until the end. You will outlive everybody.
People have called me a cockroach founder, and I have happily adopted the label. It means that however hard you try to kill me, I just will not die. I will keep coming back, and back, and back.
I think this is what really separates founders. It is not intelligence or connections or even the idea. It is the ability to come back from failure, pick yourself up, and get straight back into the battle, because that is always the hardest thing to do. You have to put your pride aside, your ego aside, and your shame aside, and do whatever needs to be done to make sure the company succeeds and you achieve what you set out to achieve.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://emporiumstay.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tigersolomonstibi
