Opinion
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.”
Disclosure
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.”
Disclosure
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, …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Assertion Supported
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.”
Disclosure
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…”
Disclosure
English forfeited $10 million of his Intuit acquisition payout to his engineers
“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 twenty million, I only made Ten million.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hafner agreed to a 50-50 Kayak equity split on the spot
“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.”
Assertion Partly supported
Kayak launched with $5M from General Catalyst and $2M from its founders
“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.”
Disclosure
Kayak founders wanted to name the company 'Lola' but lacked the domain
“And the first name, the one we really wanted, which we tried to buy, and we could not buy the domain name, was Lola.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Kayak initially lost 80 cents per transaction on paid user acquisition
“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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Eventually 70% of Kayak's traffic came directly from users typing the URL
“It got to the point where 70% of the traffic on kayak was self-directed, meaning someone typed kayak.com in their browser”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Over half of Kayak's 200 employees became millionaires at the 2012 IPO
“We had 200 employees. Over half of them became millionaires that day.”
Disclosure
English drove for Uber to experience customer ratings before rating Lola staff
“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 a…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
English licensed his teenage video game for $25,000 but the publisher folded
“The deal was, it was 25,000 dollars up front, and then a dollar revenue per game cartridge, which sounds really great, especially for a teenager. The bad news is, I licensed the game to them, and they immediately went out of business.”
Disclosure
English walked away from $1M in unvested Interleaf equity at age 29
“I made 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 is a million dollars, I then got convinced by a very gregarious recruiter in Boston to leave my big fancy…”
Disclosure
Paul English was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in his twenties
“And I went to see a psychiatrist at Newton Wellesley Hospital. They had diagnosed me as bipolar.”
Disclosure
Meds, meditation, and therapy kept English free of depressive episodes for decades
“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, ah, with meditation and therapy has helped me with that.”
Paul English