One of the most memorable jobs I ever had was a summer internship with American Airlines, the world's #1 airline at the time. High-priority project. High visibility. And I was going to fly free all summer.

I felt like I had a front-row seat to the future.

That euphoria ended when a scrappy airline from Dallas made everything we were doing obsolete. I got a different kind of front-row seat that summer. The kind where you watch an underdog take down the industry leader.

Sometimes the best ticket is no ticket at all…LG

In the summer of my MBA program, I landed an internship at American Airlines, the largest airline in the world at the time. The project put me inside their SABRE group.

SABRE was the world's first computerized airline reservation system, built by American and IBM. It did more than make reservations. It was also the primary ticket printing vendor in the world.

By the time I walked in the door, SABRE was already processing over 2 million bookings a day for more than 500 airlines. It powered most of the airline industry and a big chunk of global travel.

TICKETS AS CURRENCY

At that time, every plane ticket was printed on paper, and that paper was as valuable as cash. Lose it, and you couldn't fly. If you didn't already have one, you drove to the airport, walked into a travel agency, or had it overnighted to your house.

Behind the scenes, the system was just as heavy. Travel agents worked on green-screen terminals, and SABRE printed millions of tickets a day on dot-matrix printers across the country. Entire departments existed just to track lost tickets, issue refunds, and reprint what had gone missing.

SABRE had already automated booking, but everything else was built on a single assumption: a passenger needed a physical ticket to board a plane. So the system optimized around that assumption. Faster printing. Faster delivery. Better tracking.

SAME DAY DELIVERY

My internship project centered on taking that process to the next level. Our team would get tickets to customers on the same day.

The project had buy-in at the top. I was sitting in rooms with senior people making big decisions and watching a Fortune 100 mobilize behind something I was contributing to.

To all of us, this felt like a big deal. American’s customers were now going to get their tickets the same day, delivered to their home or business, and be able to fly the next day. It felt like customer service at the highest level.

We were about to make a horse-drawn buggy faster and more efficient. We just didn't realize the automobile was about to arrive.

TICKETS NO MORE

The very month we were about to roll out the program, Southwest Airlines became the first major U.S. carrier to offer ticketless travel. They were not even in the top airlines at the time. 

Travelers called Southwest, made a reservation, paid by credit card, and got a confirmation number. Show up at the airport, recite your name and number, get your plastic boarding pass, and walk on the plane.

Southwest booked a million ticketless seats in the first seven weeks. They welcomed their one millionth ticketless customer about two months after launch. Their phones did not stop ringing.

My project, and the team building it, was suddenly solving a problem that no longer existed.

Years of brainstorming how to make the physical ticket process more efficient. Months of work building out a same-day printing and delivery plan. Hours negotiating national partnerships and mapping geographic rollouts. All of it built on the assumption that the customer needed a piece of paper.

Southwest had just proven the customer did not.

THE AFTERMATH

The FedEx project did not survive the quarter. Now, executives asked the obvious question, the one nobody had asked before Southwest forced them to: Do we actually need paper tickets?

The answer was no. The answer had always been no. Southwest had just been the first one willing to say it out loud.

But this went far beyond American Airlines. Every airline and corresponding department that touched ticketing had a stake in the old way. Travel agency relationships. Printer contracts. The agents who tracked refunds and reissues. Billions in tech infrastructure to produce and track pieces of paper. Years of process built around an assumption that turned out to be optional.

I finished my internship and went back for my second year of the MBA. The smartest people in aviation, working on the most sophisticated reservation system ever built, had been beaten by a regional carrier that asked one better question.

Goliath had the technology, the budget, the partnerships, and the runway. The scrappy underdog from Dallas had a slingshot. And they used it.

Watching Southwest leapfrog American Airlines taught me something I've carried into every startup I've built and every founder I've coached: the giants you fear are often more vulnerable than they look. Their size and success are what trap them. Here are three story framing ways to use to your advantage.

#1. Stop Solving the Wrong Problem

Most founders improve what exists instead of questioning if it should exist at all. They optimize symptoms, not root causes.

My team was working on how to get tickets to customers faster. Southwest asked if customers needed tickets at all.

Hotels kept improving rooms and rewards. Brian Chesky reframed the problem and built Airbnb around connection, price, and local experience.

ACTION: Write down what your customer actually wants in one sentence. Then write down what you're building. If those two sentences don't match, you're solving the wrong problem.

#2. Hunt the Sacred Cow

Every industry has sacred cows. Assumptions so old and so universal that they stopped looking like assumptions. They became the way things work. American Airlines never questioned physical tickets. Blockbuster never questioned late fees. Hotels never questioned the standard room. Not because they couldn't. Because they didn't see them.

That's your opening. The cow nobody is looking at is the one you get to hunt.

ACTION: List every belief your industry treats as untouchable. Cross out the ones customers actually love. What's left are the gems for you to uncover. 

#3. Innovation by Subtraction

Most companies add. The best ones remove. Big players layer on features, processes, and infrastructure to defend what they've built. That makes them slower and harder to change. Every addition becomes something they have to protect.

Startups have the opposite advantage. Nothing to defend. Nothing to protect. You can strip the problem down to its core and build only what matters.

That's what Southwest did. They didn't improve the ticket. They removed it.

Reed Hastings did the same with Netflix. No stores. No returns. No late fees. Then no DVDs. Each step removed friction that the incumbents couldn't touch without unwinding their business.

ACTION: List everything your industry treats as standard. Stores, salespeople, contracts, paperwork, hardware, fees. Then ask which ones a customer would actually miss if they were gone. The rest is your opportunity.

During my internship, I remember wondering where all those physical tickets got processed. So I asked my boss. He told me American Airlines had an island. Sort of that is.

It was a subsidiary called Caribbean Data Services, set up near the harbor in Bridgetown, Barbados. It grew to more than 1,000 employees, all dedicated to processing the paper assets we all carried.

And those tickets didn't get there electronically. American flew in crateloads of used ticket coupons from across its global network, on its own planes, to Barbados. Workers then keyed the data into databases at 13,000 keystrokes an hour with 99.98% accuracy.

The economics made it work. Barbados offered trained workers at roughly $2 to $3 an hour versus $7 to $8 in the U.S., creating a fast, accurate, low-cost processing engine (There’s a great write-up on the island here).

Until Southwest Airlines made the whole system irrelevant.

SHOUT-OUT
This issue goes to the world’s #1 flight attendant that happens to work at Southwest Airlines and is one of the shining lights in my life, my sister Cindy Volkmer (pictured below). ❤️U

Need help with your story? I got you.

Send an email to [email protected] and someone from my team will circle back with you.

P.S. This one’s for my BFF as she finally brings her vision to life. #betheONE