Paul English
Founder & CEO, Boston Venture Studio. On 3 shows, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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Paul English is the co-founder and former CTO of travel search engine Kayak, as well as startups Lola.com and Moonbeam. He currently serves as the founder and CEO of Boston Venture Studio.
3shows
3appearances
40statements
3resolved
1supported
0contradicted
33%fully supported
6said about them ↓ Everything Paul English said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
English's recruiting rule: Make candidates an offer within seven days
“One rule I have for recruiting is, when you first hear someone's name, a clock starts ticking. I have seven days to make her an offer letter.”
Paul English omits distracting board member suggestions from official meeting minutes
“I don't write down everything the board says, and maybe this is bad. I write down the things that are the most significant or things that I'm going to take action on. But if it's something someone mentioned about some side project that I think is Defocused, ev…”
English: People follow confidence, but they are loyal to vulnerability
“I've always said that people follow confidence, but they're loyal to vulnerability, and so if you're vulnerable with your team about the things you're terrible at, Someone will lean in and take that over for you.”
English: Being highly skilled at recruiting is all that truly matters
“But if you're good at recruiting, it's really all that matters.”
Paul English: Asking theoretical interview questions yields fake answers
“I don't believe in theoretical questions because if you ask a theoretical question, you get bullshit answers.”
English: TikTok's phenomenal ML exposes how bad YouTube is at recommendations
“They have just phenomenal machine learning. It makes me realize how bad YouTube is at this. But TikTok just nails me.”
English: Early Expedia was 'seizure-inducing' and cluttered with excessive animation
“To me, Expedia was epileptic, seizure-inducing. I mean, it was really terrible. There was so much animation and graphics and so much stuff going on the website.”
Early Kayak scraped airline websites without permission to build its inventory
“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.”
Paul English argues interpersonal charisma and recruiting skills are fully trainable
“And a lot of these skills you can do in personal life transfer directly into business life. So I think it's absolutely trainable.”
Arrogant founders fail by hiring subservient employees who avoid challenging them
“Well, I think either the tech founder lacks humility, and they're arrogant, and they only hire people that would be subservient to them, so they don't hire people that are daring enough, and they're going to challenge them and push them.”
Philanthropists should fund non-profit leaders upfront without imposing bureaucratic reporting hurdles
“Find the leader that inspires you. Write them checks first, and ask the question second. And I know from being in the boards and helping start some non-profits, a lot of donors make the non-profit leader, like, jump through hoops, do so much work in reporting.…”
Paul English: Greylock passed on investing in Kayak
“We then went pitch Greylock on Kayak, and Greylock turned us down”
English: The first hire when starting a company is operations
“So the first thing I do when I start a company is I say, who's going to do operations for me? Because they do all the stuff either that I'm incompetent at or that I'm bored at, and with a really good ops person, I then get to work on the fun stuff.”
English: Recruit a candidate's references if they prove to be amazing
“During my reference checking, if the person is amazing, I recruit them. I recruit the reference.”
English avoided a hijacked 9/11 flight to save his employer money
“I think flight 11 was, if I remember correctly, it was 1418 hundred dollars, 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, …”
Kayak used Orbitz as a stalking horse to secure direct airline deals
“And we use Orbitz as a stalking horse to get all the airlines to pay us directly, so we could send people directly to the airline sites.”
Kayak reached $300M in revenue with just 200 employees at its IPO
“When we took it public in 2012, we only had 200 employees, which is pretty small for a public company, and we had three hundred million in revenue. So it was one and a half million per employee.”
English plans to launch multiple bootstrapped companies yearly instead of VC-backed startups
“I think for the rest of my life, Rather than doing a VC-backed 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…”
Paul English: Music arrangement requires coordination similar to software programming
“The coordination part of music arrangement, to me, feels similar to a lot of the coordination parts of programming, so I felt very comfortable in both areas.”
Tech startup creativity requires problem empathy and relentless iteration
“In tech entrepreneurship, I think most creativity comes out of people who are empaths for problems, and when you see something that irritates you, rather than just say that's irritating and move on, you kind of focus on it, and you try to think about other peo…”
Paul English validates startup ideas by pitching collaborators before writing code
“What I like to do to validate the idea is I write up a SPAC or a design, and then I pitch it, and I might be pitching it to a family member, a friend, a colleague, and it's only when I get one person excited do I say, okay, maybe there's something here, and th…”
Kayak raised $200M at an $800M valuation with only 39 employees
“So we had to raise like two hundred million dollars. I remember we had 39 employees. They had 130 employees. But we were able to raise an eight hundred million dollar valuation, which was crazy given that we're only 39 employees.”
Paul English argues customers do not care about venture funding announcements
“Your customers don't care who invested in you. And for the most part, your customers don't even care if you're a private company or a public company. I think these milestones are more internal ones. They're not ones important to the customers. So I would encou…”
The other half of the tape: Paul English's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 5 times in 3 episodes across the shows. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 4Neeraj Agrawal 1
Statements about Paul English, by other people (1)
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 5
2019 3 mentions in 1 episode
2018 1 mention in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Paul's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 HOW I BUILT THISLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Boston Venture Studio | 1 | 18 | 50% 1/2 | full record on How I Built This → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Boston Venture Studio | 1 | 12 | 0% 0/1 | full record on 20VC → |
 MASTERS OF SCALELEDGER | Founder & CEO, Boston Venture Studio | 1 | 10 | — | full record on Masters of Scale → |