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Highlights from The Way I Work: Paul English, Co-founder Kayak
Highlights from The Way I Work: Paul English, Co-founder Kayak
- Up everyday at 6:00, Email & then Yoga. Has a meditation room.
- We work really hard for 40 to 45 hours a week, but we believe in people having strong personal lives. Over the past six years, there have been maybe five times I’ve spoken with Steve before 8 a.m., after 5 p.m., or on the weekend.
- Always drives kid to school.
- We have offices in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and California. We started with the first two because my co-founder, Steve Hafner, lives in Connecticut, I live in Boston, and neither one of us wanted to move.
- We have an open office environment. our general philosophy is that an open environment facilitates intellectual intensity. Most engineers are introverted. Here, when people overhear a discussion, we encourage them to walk over and say, “There’s another way to do that.”
- The engineers and I handle customer support. If you make the engineers answer e-mails and phone calls from the customers, the second or third time they get the same question, they’ll actually stop what they’re doing and fix the code. Then we don’t have those questions anymore.
- Real time datamining and support information. We have four monitors in the office where you can see real-time streaming information about the site — how many visitors, how many click throughs. It also displays the last customer e-mail that came in and the photo of the employee who answered it. So you’re walking by and you see, “Oh, Dan just answered a question.” We developed our own customer support software. One of the things it does is randomly select an employee response to a customer and send that response out to the entire company and to all of our investors each day. It keeps us on our toes.
- I keep noon to 2 p.m. open, because I like going out to lunch. It’s also a time for me to socialize. We have a very active work force.
- I do all of the firing. At times, I’ve fired maybe one out of every three people I’ve hired. That might make people think I’m bad at hiring, but I think I’m quite good at hiring. The only way 100 people can ever build a larger company than one that has more than 8,000 people — that’s what Expedia has — is by hiring Olympic-quality, unbelievable all stars of technology.
- Every Tuesday night, I have an open dinner at my house. Anywhere between four and 15 of my relatives will show up for dinner. I’m not a great cook, but it’s fun to have people over.
- I read for an hour every night before going to bed. I love reading books by Indian authors. I’ll also read books about global health and Africa, as well as a murder mystery now and then. But I don’t like business books. There are so many things in life that are more interesting than business.
