APB Speaker Ruzwana Bashir Receives Founder Award for Persevering in the Face of Adversity
09 Jul 2021
Ruzwana Bashir, Co-founder and CEO of Peek.com, was recently honored by the Female Founders Alliance (FFA) with its Founder Award for pivoting her travel and experiences company in the face of a global pandemic. The Founder Award is part of the FFA’s Champion Awards, which celebrate champions of intersectional gender equity. Finalists for the awards were selected from hundreds of nominations submitted by FFA’s community. Winners were chosen after tallying thousands of votes.
+Watch the 2021 Champion Awards
The travel industry has been one of the hardest hit during the pandemic. In 2020, travel spending in the U.S. declined 42%—nearly $500 billion—from 2019, according to the U.S. Travel Association.
“My upbringing taught me to be resilient and gave me the confidence that I can find solutions in challenging situations,” Bashir says.
Peek.com is an award-winning platform for booking experiences, like ziplining, boat rentals and cooking classes. The company also offers payment and booking software tools for tour operators.
In addition to the Founder Award, Bashir has been named one of Fortune's Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs, Fast Company's 100 Most Creative People in Business and was a finalist for E&Y’s Entrepreneur of the Year. She is a Young Global Leader for the World Economic Forum and previously worked at Goldman Sachs and the Blackstone Group. She has an MBA from Harvard Business School, where she was a Fulbright Scholar, and a BA from Oxford University, where she was President of the Oxford Union.
In accepting her award, Bashir gave credit to her team. “At Peek.com, we had a really challenging period … It’s really the passion and the resilience of the team that inspired me,” she says. “When you have a whole group of people who say, ‘We are going to get through this. We know it’s really hard but we are going to do everything’ … that passion kept me going.”