Kayak

“We had 200 employees. Over half of them became millionaires that day.”

“In the early years of Kayak, it cost 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.”

“General Catalyst put in five 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“He said, what would it take to have you join me as co-founder? I said, at a minimum, fifty-fifty. Just kind of joking. And he put his hand across the table, and he said, done.”

“And the first name, the one we really wanted, which we tried to buy, and we could not buy the domain name, was Lola.”

“It got to the point where 70% of the traffic on kayak was self-directed, meaning someone typed kayak.com in their browser”

“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.”

“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.”