As the co-founder of GTROT, Brittany Laughlin is making traveling a much more social experience, with the help of Facebook and Twitter. GTROT allows you to see where your friends are traveling.  While working at American Express, this NYU grad student wanted to do something more, so she began researching extensively about online travel businesses and travel blogs. This led her to meeting Harvard student Zach Smith, and eventually, their budding a business relationship would nab the top spot at the 2009 Harvard College i3 Innovation Challenge. If that wasn’t enough, just last year, Brittany completed her goal to reach all of the seven continents by 25. GTROT’s co-founder graciously took time from her busy schedule to give GWR her thoughts on travel, technology, and tell us who her role models are.

How would you describe GTROT for those who may have not heard of it?

Basically what GTROT does is, it makes it easier to share travel plans across the web with your friends. So you can share details about your upcoming trip, see who’s going to be there before you get there, and get some advice from friends.

In your opinion, what separates GTROT from the countless travel websites and blogs out there?

What we are doing with GTROT is we want to be a platform for sharing travel plans. Right now, it’s really easy to share photos, there are things like Instagram and Flickr. And you can share music through places like Grooveshark and Tiny Song. There is just no real place that you can easily share all of your travel plans, and keep them in one place. A lot of times when you get an itinerary for a flight, it just lives in your inbox  maybe you forward to people, but there’s not a lot social context around your trip. So what we are looking to do is sort of be that platform in between Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter, and these different social mediums, and then the actual travel commerce, those would be the Travelocitys, Kayaks, Expedias of the world.

How did you start you own business and co-found GTROT?

I always loved to travel, originally I was a Navy Brat. I got the travel bug from my parents, and all my free time and all my free money was going to travel. I made it a goal to go to all seven continents before 25. I hit that goal last year before my 25th birthday.  I was working full time at American Express, and pretty much from the beginning I wanted to do my own thing. I just didn’t know what I wanted to do. But it became more clear to me that tech was really exciting, I definitely have this passion for it, I was excited about all the new updates, constantly reading about it for months and months before I decided to take the leap and do something in that field.

So I basically drew up a business plan that sort of what I wanted to create — and there is still a lot of pain points in travel, anytime I plan a trip, which is pretty frequently. When my friends and family want to go on trips, they usually come to me for advice. I felt like there has got to be an easier way. I just found myself writing emails all of the time, stating “this is what you should do in New York,” “this is what you should do in North Carolina,” “this is what you should do in Paris,” and that’s not a very scalable model. So looking at the current environment of Facebook, and Foursquare, all of that data that’s being generated, there was no good way to keep it organized, and easily share it across multiple people. That was the idea of tying together social and travel and making it really about getting advice from people you trust. I came up with this idea and I did my due diligence of what’s out there, I went through probably over 200 travel startups and websites, to see if anyone’s doing this already, and if there was a way to team up with existing people, is this idea already done, I should think of new spin on it. During that process, I reached out to about 20 companies that had some similarities and one of those was GTROT. It was founded at Harvard Campus, and the thought was get advice from your friends for travel planning. So Zach [Smith, Co-founder of GTROT and I were supposed to just have a 30 minute coffee and it ended up being a two-hour planning session on where we could take the business if we combined our heads. Because I was really excited about new emerging technology in social, and he had a really good guide on how students at Harvard were using GTROT, which was originally connected to Facebook, you could send messages back and forth. And together we were like okay great, we are going to build this super social travel company and we kicked off about a year ago together.

Who were and are your tech role models?

It’s kind of cheesy but my parents. My dad was an entrepreneur, and he started twelve companies and basically has retired at a young age because he built up these business and recently sold them to private equity and now he just does consulting. And my mom, she also ran her own interior decorating company, so I kind of grew up in the household of entrepreneurs. My sister started her own clothing line. Everyone in my family has been pretty much entrepreneurial, which I think really helped when [I] turned to my family and said, “hey, I went to NYU, I got this great degree, I am working at American Express, and I get a great salary and benefits, but I am going throw all of this away and work for no pay for the next eight months on this website that I think is going to change the way people plan trips.” I think it would be much harder if I didn’t have that constant support from them.

Also in tech, there are so many people that I have met with in the community that have been really helpful  was so many people that I have met that were really helpful, just giving me advice, hearing out my ideas. I have spent time in the New York Tech Scene, and I have spent time in LA Tech Scene and there was no shortage of people that would sit down and have coffee with me and tell me why my idea sucked [laughs], or who I should be talking to, giving me an introduction.

What are you the first in your family to do?

That’s a hard question, I was going to say go to all seven contients but my parents did it with me because they wanted to do it too. I am definitely the first person in my family to go into the tech industry. I am also the first one ever to write for Forbes. A lot of my things are travel related, like I was the first in my family to learn how to surf,  I was the first in my family to learn how to snowboard. I was the first in my family to volunteer in South America and to backpack by myself. I also am the first person in my family to raise venture capital.