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Show Notes

Christopher Olivares is the solo founder of Elyo (elyo.io), a conversational AI travel assistant that helps travellers find the cheapest flights across flexible destinations and dates with no commissions, intermediaries, or date pickers. Before launching Elyo, Christopher spent four and a half years at the OECD in Paris working on internal ethics, education policy, and international statistical indicators, and is currently completing an executive master's in statistics and artificial intelligence at Université Paris Dauphine. The conversation traces his path from policy analyst and serial expat to vibe-coded solopreneur, and explores how generative AI unlocked both the product idea and the ability to build it without a technical background. Highlights include why Elyo is built around decomposing traveller intent — cheapest meeting point, most flexible weekend, best-value destination — rather than the rigid inputs legacy search UIs require; how OTA commissions get reflected in prices that travellers absorb without seeing; why a freemium subscription is structurally important as a trust mechanism that keeps the traveller's interest as the unconditional north star; how at least one major GDS has closed its developer portal, raising barriers for early-stage builders trying to validate ideas; the seller-of-record problem that pushes white-label distribution liability onto startups; why AI can deliver the personalisation of the pre-internet travel agent era alongside the price transparency of metasearch without the commission layer; and the underserved corporate travel use case of remote teams trying to work out where to rendezvous.