YouSaid · the spoken record

Paul English

lines on the record: 93
first: 2021-09-27
most recent: 2021-09-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Thank God, no, I had a rule that when I would drive at night, as soon as I got the first drunk, I would stop driving. I didn't want to take that risk.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the first reason I signed up was at Lola we have twenty four seven customer support. And it's really the front of Lola is we want to have unbelievable customer service. But at the end of every interaction in the Lola app, when you've talked with one of our service people, you get to rate them like on a scale of one to five, how well is the service they did for you. But before I inflicted that upon our customer service people, I wanted to show that, okay, I'm happy to get rated. I want to see what it feels like to get rated. Being an Uber driver was the easiest way to do that because you get real-time feedback in the driver app, you get feedback every day about how your rating is.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I haven't done it since the pandemic just because I was nervous about. People in my car. But now that I think in Massachusetts now, we have over 70% of people are vaccinated. I think when it gets up to 80, 85%, I'm going to start driving again.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kayak was tremendous luck. I mean, it started with luck. I mean, just by chance, I happened to be in that office when Steve was there. And then luck along the way of hiring certain people who really transformed the company. I don't know. Maybe it's those four things, 25% each.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like to think of myself as intelligent. I will admit to being creative. I think my success leads to maybe three things. I do think work ethics is a part of it, the frugality and effort. I think the creativity is a part of it. And then the third thing, which is probably the biggest thing, is I love recruiting and I love being amazed by other created people. And I put a lot of effort into that. So with each of my companies and organizations, they thrive only if I'm able to attract really great people to work on them.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And every Monday and Friday we look at my calendar two weeks in advance, and we make sure there's a balance. So purple is Lola, which is, that's the brand color for Lola. And that's mostly Monday, Friday 9 to 5. Yellow is non-profit work, which is about eight hours a week. Green is self-improvement, which is going to the gym or going to therapy or going to my Buddhist class, what to do on Thursday nights. And then blue is everything else that are friends and family. And if I have a balance of those four colors, life feels really good to me.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, someday I will move on past Lola. Lola's my day job right now. I think for the rest of my life, rather than doing a VC-back company, I think what I might do is just have fun with these creative outputs and try to crank out like two to three or four companies a year. Because the most fun for me in starting companies is like day one. But it's all a matter of you have to have the discipline to say no because it could be like too much stuff to work on. And you have to just be very choosy about the stuff you do work on. So like I have an incredible assistant, Eliza. And we color code my calendar. Everything is one of”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is very much so. I mean, I work on Lola five days a week. I have, it's a little crazy, but I'm running three nonprofits, and then I have two other small startups that I run on the weekends.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We basically manage every penny that your employees spend. What are they spending money on Google AdWords or Amazon AWS? Or they're buying lunch for client or they're ordering supplies for the office, anything they spend, if they spend it using a Lola card, we actually issue cards like a Visa card. If we use a Lola card and you just tag it at the time you swipe at the restaurant, you never have to feel expensive whatever. And we guarantee to the CFO that your team will always be exactly on budget. No one will ever actually go about budget because the credit cards that we supply are tied to the budget of sales or marketing whether you department is so it completely changes the way finance people work.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My non compete ended. It was an 18 month non compete. It ended on July 14, 2015. I incorporated Lola on July 15, 2015 But I have to say, Lola has evolved, like when a pandemic hit a year and a half ago and business stopped, like travel stopped, I mean, we did a major pivot to say rather than selling travel software to CFOs saying we'll reduce your cost of travel, we're going to sell software to CFOs that manages all the money their employees spend. So we call it spend management budgets and spend management.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Human, yes. It's a very small company, very, very profitable, run by two of my friends in Boston, Christian Allen and Jeff Welpey, and it's an amazing company.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, get human became wildly popular. I created it in 2006. And we got massive media the first year. I got covered on every national network and magazine and et cetera. And sometimes I want to come in and do a photo shoot or an interview. I tried to schedule all of those to not happen at Kay Officer because I was embarrassed about this side project. It's not that I hit it. I didn't want to see people be working on it. However, I don't think anyone would ever say that I was a slocker at kayak because I pushed really hard on design and engineering and performance. But yeah, I did have a couple side projects.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know what to say about that. Part of it was probably the wealth thing. I wanted to be in the shadows after that. I didn't want to be public face at that point of this, you know, this guy with all this money. I wanted to hide for a little bit.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The main thing I wanted there, it was unlike when I sold my little e-commerce company to Intuit, I wanted to work it into it. I wanted to build careers for myself and people and learn skills. But when I sold kayak to Price Line, I felt like I had a very senior team at Kayak. I literally felt like they could run it without me. They didn't need me as much anymore. And I think I spent a year with Priceline transitioning and getting everyone set up for success. So I felt very good about it on the day that I laughed that night. In a really, really good position, and kayak continued to thrive.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm glad I didn't do that because I've been able to be more thoughtful about my giving over the years and I've now started three nonprofits that are all doing well. So that's been really meaningful to me and hopefully we've helped a lot of people. But I definitely have never become really comfortable with the money part of it.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just for philanthropy, I had someone show up in my house who asked me to pay her mortgage. A lot of people asked me to invest in their business, a lot of nonprofits hit me up. And it was overwhelming because it's tough for me to say no. I've had to learn to say no simply because I cannot afford to write checks to all the nonprofits who email me every day because I want to have a focus area. But just the amount of money that I made in the sale was a little overwhelming. And I kind of had this instinct of getting rid of it, like giving all of it away immediately”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a little overwhelming. I mean, my first thought was always how happy I was for the team. We had two hundred employees, over half of them became millionaires that day. It was great to see them celebrate the IPO. It was great to see them celebrate the acquisition. It was really an exciting time for people. As far as the fame that came along with it, that gave me anxiety. I'm an introvert by nature. I do not like being center attention. There's certain advantages to it, like it helps me raise money. I'm a little bit uncomfortable with it. And when we started getting a lot of press after the IPO and after the acquisition, I started getting a lot of incoming requests.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, when I think of the first 10 years of kayak, I think there were three things. Those three things came together, really good user experience, a really good brand, and really good commercial partnerships.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was a huge investment. Becoming fast is not easy. Becoming simple is not easy. Scott Cook and Tuit used to say, it's very easy to build complicated software. And what he means is to build something simple takes years.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right, it's interesting. When we created the company, Steve and I both thought if we make it big, the way people are going to know us is we're going to have all the content on one website. That's what we're going to be known for. It's not actually what we became known for. The way people talked about Kayak wasn't that, oh, that's the site that has all the content, which we were hoping they would say. But what they did say was, oh yeah, that's a site that's really fast. That's a site that's really clean. So I like that”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think so. And I think it's fine for someone to have Like nine terrible ideas as long as the tenth one is really big. Failure is okay. We built a lot of technology at COC that we threw away. We pursued some ideas which turned out to be stupid ideas that we worked really hard at them. No one used it. We threw it away. So that happened many times at Kay”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It did. I'm probably guilty of sending too much email, particularly when I'm in my creative or hypomanic states. Can be prolific on email. I mean, I can send hundreds of emails a day. And so my team was always like, whoa, it's like we can't handle all these different things. Like try this, try this, try this. And so sometimes there was this private joke that we're not going to do something unless Paul asks us to do it twice, unless the next day he still wants to do that thing. And I've heard this criticism of other entrepreneurs as well, so I don't think I'm unique in that I always want to push forward in multiple ideas, but I was both amused by it when I heard this, but also a little bit sad.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thought was even better. And we just had this relationship of really rapid iteration where we would each contribute ideas. And I remember during that time period, I felt completely a manic. Things are moving very, very rapidly.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I at that point I had pretty much controlled the depression so I had little to no depression during kayak but the manic episodes continued I would go through waves of sleeping very little I always have a sketchbook with colored pencils and sometimes I'd wake up at 4 a.m. and I'd draw pictures of what I want a kayak to look like like for new feature and I would email them to our head designer Lincoln Jackson and then we get a meeting and so I remember once we took a drawing that I did at three or four a.m we had a meeting with myself Lincoln and Jeff Reago who's our lead developer and then Lincoln cranked out a Photoshop version what I did but he pretty much ignored my drawing he did something completely different but it was inspired by my drawing and then Jeff wrote the code and Jeff ignored Lincoln's Photoshop and did something that he”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was before that. I mean, there were several milestones for us. The number we looked at that I looked at most carefully is what percentage of our traffic was self-directed. And as that number started growing, my confidence started growing because I said, if people come back to us, if they remember our name and they tell the friends about us, things are working. One of the biggest milestones in the history of kayak is when you went to Google and you typed the letter K, First word that came up was kayak. I thought that was cool”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think by the time things started growing, we were maybe The best people in terms of quantitative people stat at kayak is when we took it public 2012, we only had 200 employees, which is pretty small for public company. And we had 300 million in revenue. So it was one and a half million per employee. We were crazy profitable and fast growing.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But that's where I wanted to be. I wanted to be the front end. And I thought that's where the innovation needed to happen.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, they were different flavors than us. They were a merchant, but we used to say search with us, book with them. We didn't have customer support if your playing was late, call the airline, don't call us. We were just, we were literally just a thin search engine. We used on the back end another search engine called ITA software, which later became Google Flights. And my friends at ITA used to make fun of Kaik. They said, Kaik is a joke. It just sits on everyone else's technology, and all Kaik is a thin UI layer. And my response to that was exactly.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and for the airlines, original Kai was flight only. We didn't have anything except for flight. No hotels, no cars. And we did manage to get a really good deal with orbits early on. Steve, again, was one of the founders there. He was friends with the CEO. We were able to negotiate it with orbits to say, when you see a result from American Airlines, we give people the option to click here to go to a.com to buy it or click here to go to Orbits to buy it. And orbits would pay us. We basically said, we're a little company, we're a new business model with search only. You orbit should participate on this. We'll give you an exclusive. You're the only agency we're going to let on our site. And maybe we're little, maybe we're going to grow fast, but you should get in on day one as the e-commerce behind kayak, which they did. The nice thing is we then called American Airlines. We said, we're selling your flights all day long, but we're selling them through orbits. Wouldn't you rather sell them through AA.com? And we use orbits as a stalking horse to get all the airlines to pay us directly so we could send people directly.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it worked. And people told their friends about it. And so it got to the point where 70% of the traffic on kayak was self-directed, meaning someone typed kayak.com in the browser. And as soon as that traffic grew from 0%, 10 to 20 to 30 to 40 percent more, then the economics started working.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From word of mouth. I mean, believe it or not, in the early years of kayak, it costs us about a dollar on average to buy someone to come to our website from us spending money on Google AdWords or other websites. We made on average 20 cents per user. So we were losing 80 cents a transaction in large numbers. We were losing a lot of money very quickly. But if you build a really amazing website and you paid to have them come here, will they remember this word kayak? And the next time they buy travel, will they go directly to kayak.com without having to go to Google for us?”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're just moving as fast as we possibly could. So we just scraped websites. It took us about a year, year and a half till the software felt really good. And then we started growing rapidly.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“American and Hilton Yeah, it took us probably two years to get those deals. So originally, Kayak had no revenue. And also, we were scraping these websites without their permission. It's one of these things sort of ask for forgiveness, not permission.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I used to say on early diss of kayak is every company in the world only has 10 smartest people. So Expedia, only 10 of them are the 10 smartest. And even though we're much smaller, we have our 10 smartest people. They have their 10 smartest people, I think my team can outdesign them. And we were just, you know, it was a little bit of arrogance. Hopefully we had some humility as well. Like we knew we were small. We knew that no one heard of us. But Steve and I were both very aggressive recruiters and we thought we can recruit a really extraordinary first ten person team”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, believe it or not, we released the first beta, which is limited software that we don't promote yet, but we had a functioning flight search on Cinco de Mayo 2004.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From kayakers, yeah, who said this was terrible that we took this over. And this is like a blight on the internet, that someone would take over their precious hobby. And use it for something dirty like a travel site.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Number two was kayak. And the first name, the one we really wanted, which we tried to buy and we could not buy the domain name, was Lola.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, number four was rice because it's ubiquitous, global, and simple. Number three was cake because who doesn't like cake?”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The reason I liked kayak was I liked the letter K. It's a very valuable letter in branding. I liked that it was a palindrome spelled the same backwards and forwards. I like that it was only five letters, and it meant like freedom. It was just like a great word. And it's very difficult in branding to take a word which means one thing and change it to mean something else. But if you're successful and you own that word, it's incredibly valuable.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hired a top brand agency in New York City named Wolf Olins, and the project, the branding project was led by a woman named Carol Costello. Steve and I met with her weekly over maybe a six week process. What's the brand identity? What do we want people to think about when they hear the name of the company? What's life going to be like before our product and then after people use our product? Spend a lot of time talking to those things. Ultimately, her team came up with a list of about 100 names and we narrowed it down to five.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, going back to Interleaf, most of my work at Interleaf was on the user interface, and that's what my obsession was. And even going back to my first program I'd ever written, the video game back when I was in high school, I focused on the user experience. I've always been interested in that. And so for the travel company, I wanted to build something that was unlike any other travel website. I wanted something that was cleaner and simpler and faster. The first day Steve and I met in Cambridge, I went home that night. I spent probably ten minutes on expedia just to see what the market leader looked like to remind myself. And I thought this is not going to be hard to beat this because to me expedient was epileptic seizure inducing. It was really terrible. There was so much animation and graphics and so much stuff going on the website. I thought we can build something dramatically simpler than this.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, Steve and I both have made money before, and I wasn't going to move. He wasn't going to move. So we said, let's try it. And it worked out really well”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He lived, yes, and we had the tech team in Maine and then Concord Mass for many, many years where Kike still has an office. So tech was up here just outside of Boston and the commercial team was in Connecticut.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I remember thinking, is he really going to go for this 100K thing? Because he's probably making 400K. I said, I'd love to work with you, and I have three questions. What's company doing, travel? How much do you pay me? $100K, and then 2%. And the third question was, where's the company located? I was fearing I was about to lose some of the Sarley issue. So I said, you pick the location. So he chose the first office. It turned out to be a very good financial decision for him to get 2% of kayak.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They all said yes. And the interesting thing, I'll tell you about my negotiations with Billow, so he was an architect add intuit because he, again, he and I worked together for decades. So he was at Boston Light. We sold to Intuit. He became an architect at Intuit. I'm guessing by memory he was probably making 400K a year at Intuit. And I recruited him. I said, I'm starting the company. I want you to come work with me. And he said, what's the company? I said, travel. And he said, how much will you pay me? I said, I'll pay you a hundred K plus two percent of the company.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Yeah. And the partner, Joel Cutler, said to Steve, how did it go? And Steve said, Well, the good news is Paul's my fifty fifty partner and we're each throwing a million dollars in tomorrow, which he neglected to mention that to me at the lunch. And then he said, the bad news is I'm tearing up that term sheet because I'm worth a lot more now that I have a CTO. And he was just, I think he was joking a little bit. But anyway, General Caddis put in 5 million. Steve put in a million. I put in a million. And then we started kayak. And the middle thing we did, immediate thing we did was start recruiting.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, so first of all, I love travel. I think I travel about 100,000 miles a year pre-pandemic. And the idea that I could be in charge with designing a new travel site and have ideas about how travel actually, what it should look like on the webpage, that was incredibly fun to me.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Steve and I each have a lot of weaknesses, but I will say probably the superpower that Steve and I have is we're really, really fast reads of people. And I could tell quickly that this guy was crazy bright, and I liked how impulsive he was. And I thought this guy's an entrepreneur. He's a natural entrepreneur.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Equity. I said, that sounds great. I definitely can find someone for that. He said, why don't you do it? And I laughed and I said, no, I just sold my last company to Intuit. I want to create my own company again. He said, what would it take to have you join me as co-founder? I said, at a minimum 50-50, just kind of joking. And he put his hand across the table and he said, Done. And I thought, whoa, I like how bold this guy is. So”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not at the time, there were kind of simultaneous with the creation of our company, there was maybe four or five other companies being created at about the same time who had a similar idea. So it was not a novel idea. The idea of saying Google's a search engine, why is there a search engine just for travel? There were a few people thinking about that. But the funny thing about the meeting was, I said, I like the idea. He said he's looking for a CTO. I said, I'll find someone for you. I run a group in Boston called Boston CTO. It's like 20 chief technical officers. And I said, what are you paying? He said 4% and $1.50, like $150,000 a year.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT