Page 46 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

CONNECTIONS: A LIFETIME OF FELLOWSHIP

someone didn’t make it easy to schedule flights and line up hotels and cars
at the same time so you didn’t have to book one and then find out you can’t
get one of the other pieces,” Glueck said. “That was one of the genesis
moments for what became Site59, which stood for the site where you went
at the fifty-ninth minute to make your travel arrangements.” At the end of
their Fellowship year, Peluso, then twenty-eight, and Glueck, thirty, moved
to New York and started Site59 with funding from Peluso’s former
employer, the Boston Consulting Group. In spite of launching in March
2000—the same month the dot-com bubble burst, followed by the 9/11
terrorist attacks eighteen months later, which sent the travel industry into
a tailspin—Peluso, Glueck, and their four partners had grown Site59 into
a profitable venture within two years. “We actually had awful timing sev-
eral times, but we made it through,” Glueck said. “We were probably the
ten thousandth travel site, but we solved a problem that no one had really
thought about before, and we broke the great technology.” That technol-
ogy and the team’s brilliant management skills caught the attention of Trav-
elocity, which bought Site59 for $43 million in 2002. Peluso now serves as
CEO and president of Travelocity, and Glueck is its chief marketing offi-
cer; all that is due in large part to the relationship they forged and the
bright idea they had during their year as White House Fellows.

STAR POWER
Since the first Fellows arrived in Washington in 1965, the program has
served as a conduit for connections between Fellows past and present as
well as their principals and others they have met along the way. Working
alongside Washington’s elite has benefits that extend well beyond the Fel-
lowship year, as nearly every Fellow has learned. For example, if you had
told Dr. Sanjay Gupta (WHF 97–98) that within a few years of complet-
ing his Fellowship he would become a television star, a bestselling author,
and a household name, he would have flashed that dazzling smile and told
you—with his best bedside manner, of course—that you were totally out
of your mind. But today Gupta is a star and a household name thanks to
a connection he made when he was a White House Fellow.
At a Fellowship function, Gupta met former Fellow Tom Johnson
(WHF 65–66), who was chief executive officer of CNN at that time. “He
really cared deeply about health issues, and when he found out I was a doc-
tor, we started talking,” Gupta said. “He was very interested in bringing

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