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

“Correct. They didn't have JetBlue at that point, for example. They didn't have all the content. They had a limited set of hotels, a limited set of airlines. And Steve said, why don't we create a website that you can't buy anything? All it does is search, but it searches everyone.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did And Steve had an idea. He was leaving orbits after four years. And he was frustrated with orbits. And he had an idea of a different way to do travel, but he was looking for a CTO, a chief technical officer. And this other partner at General Catalyst thought, I don't know, Paul's a good tech guy. Maybe Paul can Steven go work together. So the partner introduced us. Steve and I went downstairs to legal seafoods in Harvard Square for lunch. I think we each had a couple gin and tonics maybe, maybe no food, and he gave me the pitch. And he basically said, I want to create a search engine for travel, a search engine that has the stuff from everyone else's website. And I said, I think that's a brilliant idea. And we talked about it. He gave me his thoughts. I gave him some feedback. We went back and forth.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, back in 2000, this was the end of 2003 at this point. And the big travel websites back then was Expedia orbits, travel velocity, and priceline. Those are the big four.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of my mentors from Interleaf is a guy named Larry Bon, and he's a partner at General Catalyst in Harvard Square, and he had reached out to me to ask me to go look at a company for him. So I went to Cambridge to meet with a startup. And then as I was leaving, one of the other partners there had seen me and said, what are you doing here? I said, I'm looking at a company with Larry. And he said, there's a guy here I want you to meet. His name is Steve Hafner. He's one of the founders of Orbits and he wants to start a new company. Would you meet with him?”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the main thing during those years was my mom had died in 2001 and literally on her deathbed as she was saying by to each of us the thing she said to me was keep up the good work and take care of your father to keep up the good work actually I read as I'm not done yet like I have them won over my parents. I need to keep working. And then she said, take care of your dad. And my dad had Alzheimer's, early sage Alzheimer's at that point. And when mom died, I started spending a lot of time with my dad and then ultimately left into it as his condition worsened and became his primary caretaker for about a year, a year and a half. And I would feed him three times a day, bring him to all his doctor's appointments, try to entertain him. And that was my main occupation during those years.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hopefully what people come away with is to realize just the whole concept of impermanence. And there's something actually beautiful about acknowledging impermanence. It actually frees you. And it frees you to live in the present moment. So hopefully I'm fully present today because none of us know what our future is.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I don't tell that story often because I know people that actually died that day and I just had, you know, maybe I would have gotten on the wrong flight. I think flight 11 was, if I remember correctly, it was 1,400 to 1,800, and it was a corporate travel department that Intuit had the book flight. So it wasn't my money. But I grew up frugal. And so I didn't want to spend that much of the company's money. So I found a flight through Manchester, New Hampshire that was $343 and had a layover. But I felt proud that I saved the company money, so I switched to that flight. The interesting thing is when I put my son to bed that night and my son was five years old, my mother had died just a few months prior. And as kids say the most amazing things like just as they're falling asleep, and my son said he used to call my mother Mimi. He said.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Paper originally, I would have made $20 million, but when we didn't expect to sell it that soon, when we sold it that soon, I felt bad the engineers didn't make enough money. So Carl and I canceled half our stock and just gave it to the engineers. So instead of making $20 million, I only made $10 million. But then I also wanted to figure out how to give away the money because it almost felt unsafe for me to have all that money in the bank. I thought it might disappear one night. So I started giving money away. And that began a journey where I spend a lot of hours a week on philanthropy starting in my late 30s.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It did. It was actually uncomfortable for me to have that money. I actually originally, I had a part-time co-founder Carl, and the way we originally set up the company was I had two-thirds, he had a third, and then we started giving stock out to all the engineers.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I was reading books about it. It's funny, I don't read business books anymore. I rarely read business books because this is going to sound like a funny thing to say for someone who's created a lot of companies is I don't actually like business. I mean, to me, creating a company is just the vehicle where you can get a bunch of really fun people together and design products.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, the big tech companies all had a voracious appetite for internet because the big companies saw what was happening. The internet was going to take over everything. Desktop software is going to die. And they all wanted to do business with us, which I thought this is great. Then what it turned out is the more time we spent with them, they actually all wanted to acquire us. They just wanted the talent. They wanted the engineers. And I made the decision to go with Intuit because I like the culture. I like the values. I just thought it was a good group of people. And I'm glad I went there.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Most people didn't get it. We did a lot of individual selling where I literally went store to store and people looked at us like we were crazy people like why would a little bookstore create their own website didn't make sense to them. It's like, that's not for us. That's where big companies, little companies don't have websites. And we learned that I think it's 70% of small business in the US, a service-based business is not product-based. And since then we did this pivot. We said, okay, instead of just focusing on selling products, we should focus on selling services and doing online invoicing and online payments, even like your plumber could send you an email with the bill and you could pay that from the email securely.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I spent my savings. I remember I was dipping into my 40K at one point. And two of my friends put in a little bit of money. But we were a little company. We had 15 employees. And it included my three-star engineers, Bill O'Donnell, Paul Schwenk, Jeff Rago, and also my friend Jim Giza and Carl Berry. That was sort of the core group that built Boston Light. And back then, this was early, early days in e-commerce. I mean, Amazon existed, and there were some big sites, but your average store down the street didn't have a website yet.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We got revenue from a major network partner, we would increase the salary of the engineers. I remember I had a printed out spreadsheet with their existing child with the new salary. I had the CFO literally sign it because I wanted evidence of these approved. And then I told the engineers, you're getting a raise. And Sean and I got a huge fight over it. His memory was that I quit. My memory is that he fired me and I ended up leaving the company because of it.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's funny, my memory of my departure was that I was fired years, 20 years after that, I met the founder, the CEO again. His name is Sean O'Sullivan. He's a wonderful guy, went on to become a very successful investor. And we had breakfast after not seeing each other for 20 years. And we talked about the fact that we had this fight and that I left. I don't remember the final words that happened, but we left over a big disagreement. I was hiring engineers at ridiculously low salaries. Like he really had this religion. He developed this cult of all of us were very cheap. We spent very little money on computers in office and everything else. We were cheap as we possibly could. The sides were cheap. And we're all going to become millionaires on stock. Meanwhile, the friends of my engineer colleagues were all making big money at other companies. And so we had this agreement that the first time we shipped a server.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, put it this way, when I started taking lithium, one of my managers at Interleaf, a guy I was very close to, pulled me aside one day and said, is everything okay for you? I said, yeah. He said, you seem like you're not yourself recently, like you don't have your energy. And I stopped taking the drugs after he said that because I thought this is terrible. I can't lose my energy. I can't lose my creativity. But then I went through cycles for years of taking the drugs, not taking the drugs. It took me probably another 15 years on drugs, off drugs, on drugs, off drugs, until I found something that worked well for me. And I have not had a depressive, like a full-on depressive episode in 20 years now. So I'm hoping knock on wood that I've licked that with the meds and with other with meditation and therapies helped me with that.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't really know what a psychiatrist was, but I knew I needed to see someone who could help balance me, and I went to see a psychiatrist at Newton Wellsey Hospital. They had diagnosed me as bipolar. I had never heard of bipolar before, but it made me feel good because I thought, okay, if there's a name for it, maybe someone knows how to fix it. And they put me on lithium. And I remember I felt this is great if something can balance me out a little bit, but I was also afraid of the drugs because I thought it would cut into my creativity.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was very irritable, and I had this perception, which I learned later was just grandiosity with it, everyone became too slow for me. But it just felt like I was separating from people at work, in my marriage, with my friends. I had trouble communicating with other people.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so age 25 was a big year for me. In one month, I had four big life changes. So I got my master's degree. I started a new job. I got married and I bought a house. And I was working really hard full-time while I was going to grad school at night and then switched to a different company. And I was alternating between extreme depression and panic attacks where I couldn't leave my bedroom. And I remember just begging the sun to come out and just kept looking at the windowsill for the first signs of light. And somehow when the sun came out, it would calm me down a little bit. But I would go between these depressive episodes, which lasted weeks or longer, and then manic episodes where I couldn't sleep. And the mania or hypomania allowed me to be creative, but I also things would move so fast for me that I became detached from other people.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I actually met them at Interleaf, and Bill O'Donnell of Billow, as we called him and Paul Schwank or Schwenk, as we called him, turned out to be incredibly instrumental in my career. I've been incredibly lucky to work with those guys for decades. So when I went to Netcentric, I hired them as engineers. And then there's another guy that I hired that I had not met before named Jeff Reago, who also turned to be instrumental to my career. Really those three guys. And a lot of being successful in tech is luck. A lot of it is picking the right people to work with. And I felt lucky that I met these guys early on. And we developed a close friendship. And we worked together across several companies over decades. And they helped all of my companies be very successful.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. Yeah, we built software. Back then, this is back in like 1996 maybe, 1997, 1997. There's something called a point of presence, which is where all the internet companies connected users to the internet. It routed all the traffic from dial-up modems to connect to other servers and businesses. And we build software for these point of presence. So you could route faxes through the internet. And the beginnings of doing phone calls over the internet.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did, I did. I made my first million when I was, I have to do the math, but I think I was 29 years old. But I remember after I had vested half my options which was a million dollars, I then got convinced by a very gregarious recruiter in Boston to leave my big fancy job at Interleaf to go work for some unknown internet company. So I walked away from half of my options and then worked really hard at this crazy startup that imploded a year later. And so I learned quickly how startups shouldn't run.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not. It sold very successfully. I think it was a billion dollar exit Company called Broadvision, which is really hot during the beginning of the internet, the beginning of the web, I should say”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or I can have you run marketing. I said, I don't know anything about marketing. He said, congratulations, you're VP of marketing. And I mean, props to this guy for shaking it up. And I didn't really know what marketing was, but I figured, okay, we had a direct sales force. I wanted to learn how to sell software. Because if I could design it and I could learn how people sold it, then maybe I could figure out what marketing was. And it was a really fun job for me.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I started as a programmer and I loved programming. I worked a million hours a week. I worked weekends. I worked late at night. I was there early in the morning. I just became obsessed with programming. But it's true that after a couple or few years, they talked me into management, which I was really perplexed by and didn't like at first. I ran engineering there at one point. And then my last year there, I actually ran product management and marketing, which is kind of a crazy story. The company lost a lot of money one quarter and the board fired the CEO and appointed myself and another executive as an office of the president. We had to go recruit another CEO. So we recruited this guy to come in as CEO. And on his first day, he said to me, okay, we have 12 VPs, which is double what we should have for company of this size. So I'm going to fire half the VPs tomorrow. I want you to run engineering in the business units because I was running engineering at the time.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had two kids. Yeah, I have a son and a daughter. My daughter's Nicole, my son is Michael. And they both live in Boston, and they're super close to both the parents. I'm divorced now for fifteen years, but I'm very friendly with my ex. We live close to each other. We're still very supportive of each other. And we're both pretty close to the kids.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't remember how I got my first job, but I worked mostly full time during college. It took me five years to get my bachelor's degree and another two years to get my master's, but I did everything from, I work for a mini computer company called Data General in an operations research group. I worked for the U.S. Air Force writing software for spy planes. That was super cool. I worked for a medical device company writing device driver software for blood machines. So I really tried to change it up and learn about different industries while I was studying for my undergraduate degree”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They paid me $5,000 up front, but then they immediately went out of business. They never even sent me the rest of the $25,000. So all I really made out of it was $5,”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The deal was $25,000 up front and then a dollar revenue per game cartridge, which sounds really great, especially for a teenager. The bad news is I license a game to them, and they immediately went out of business. And then the question is, why didn't I then go contact every other game publisher to try to find someone else to license it? Like a lot of things, I would jump from thing to thing, and I felt like I had mastered the game, and then I was onto something else. So I wasn't really motivated by money. The money was very cool as a teenager getting a big check. But I went on to the next thing.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I called my little company Speed Games. It's funny to call it a company because I don't think I was incorporated. But the game that I sold was called Cupid. And it operated maybe a little bit like a Pac-Man, but there was a player that would race across the field, Cupid's arrows would shoot, and you had to avoid the arrows. And then my most proud thing about the game was I designed all the music and sound effects and all the graphics and I really put A lot of energy into what happened when Qubit's arrow would hit you. Like, what happened to your shape? What the sound effect was”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, to my surprise and the surprise my siblings one year my mother went out and bought a computer called a Commodore Vic twenty. I think it was three hundred dollars, which is a tremendous amount of money back then We were shocked that she would spend that money in the computer. And I still don't know why she bought it when she must have seen an ad somewhere and thought this could be a good way to entertain the kids. And I kind of selfishly took it over. And I learned everything I could. I learned how to code. I wrote software. I wrote a video game. And that to me taught me like, whoa, this way to make money programming. And that was pretty cool.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the way I looked at it was I tested well I felt like I had this trick that in classes I was fast on exams and I could guess things really quickly. But I don't know. I guess I would say I had a lot of diverse interests as a student. I won prizes in art and science and music and math. And I was a very competitive kid growing up with all those siblings in one house. I think it makes you both collaborative but also competitive.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I couldn't do it. I struggled with that. I did like performing intellectually. And so I worked really hard at music and science, things like that. But my grades were terrible.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Were you an ultra boy? I was. Which my teachers, my teachers didn't believe me. After I had many times I get set up to go to detention after school because I was a bit of a wise guy in school. I was bored and I would get in trouble. And many times I have to go to detention, I said, I can't. I'm going to altar boy, I have to go to church. And they wouldn't believe me. Yeah, the classroom was not a good place for me. I guess today you would say I had ADHD maybe. I'm not quite sure, but I'm still amazed. I think about if there was an anthropologist from another culture who beamed down to my schools in Boston or really any school and saw that they kept 30 kids in desks for eight hours, it just seems inhuman. Like who came up with this idea to make kids sit in a chair at a desk for eight hours? It just seems crazy.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they were very different people. My mom was an intellect. She grew up in a very difficult childhood. And my dad was kind of happy go lucky. He didn't go to college. He was very charming. He was a good storyteller. But they were very, very different. After my dad retired, I think they actually had a lot of nice times together.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was difficult during the 70s and 80s. At the end of their lives, my father ended up passing in 2003, so it's been almost 20 years since both my parents passed away. But I'll tell you kind of a funny scene. Literally, my mother's deathbed with her seven children around her. This is kind of a sad thing to hear, but ended up well. She looked around the room at each one of us, and I can't believe she said this, but she said, All my life I knew my marriage to your father was a mistake. However, I look around the room, I look at each one of you, and then she paused and she looked at each one of us, and she said, I can see what each one of you got from him and what you got from me, and I know now that my marriage was very successful.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And something happened to my mom that day, and she started healing. It wasn't a night and day switch, but she started fighting the disease. And my mom even started jogging back before jogging was a thing. Yeah. She started playing tennis. She became very strong at the end of her life. So I think the doctors told her she could never get rid of the disease, but somehow she fought it, and it seems like she won.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, my mom had an illness called myocene agravis, which is a debilitating muscle disorder. And she spent much of the first 10 years of my life in bed. But my mom had a miraculous recovery back when I was about ten, that she was healed by a Catholic faith healer. And my mother was very religious. I'm not, if anything, I might consider myself Buddhist because I read a lot of Buddhism and I'm very interested in following a few Buddhist teachers, but I'm not sure that this priest healed her or her belief in the priest healed her. And I think there is this magical thing that can happen when someone really, really believes something, they can will it to happen and they can will it.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Interesting. I have this one story about my dad. He wasn't like a huge guy. He was probably six feet tall, probably a little bit thin, as I remember. And there's this one scene where I had gotten a fight with someone, a kid down the street, and his father came over to our house and banged on the door. I remember him bang, bang, bang. My father opens the door, and there's this huge guy. And he said, you're a son. Beat up my son and blah, blah, blah. And my father put his finger on the guy's chest and said, don't you ever bang on my door again? And somehow the way my father communicated to people, this guy melted. And I remember watching my dad do that and saying, how does he do that? My dad had really good influence and skills. He was very charismatic and very confident.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My dad was a pipe fitter. He worked for the same company for 49 years. And he really ran the household. And probably all of us were like just a little bit afraid of him. Maybe probably more so Dan and I than the others. My brother, Dan and I were the ones who acted out, probably more than the others.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the brothers, the four boys slept in the attic, which had no heat and no air conditioning. I mean, the worst part of it was we had one bathroom with nine people. And so we each had a 15 minute slot starting at like 5 a.m. or something. And if you missed your slot, you'd be going to high school smelly. So that was tough getting up at 5 30 a.m. or whatever the time was. But it was fine. Like we didn't know anything different. And I never felt like my house was crowded. It's just that it is what it was. And that's how we grew up.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Different kayakers, yeah, who said this was terrible that we took this over. And this is like a blight on the internet, you know, 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
“We hired a top brand agency in New York City named Wolf Olins. The branding project was led by a woman named Cara Costello. Ultimately, her team came up with a list of about a hundred names. And Kayak was actually our second choice.”
2021-09-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · KAYAK: Paul English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT