Part IThe Story
The Loud Red Phone
Around 2009, in the open-plan engineering office of a travel search company in Concord, Massachusetts, a co-founder bought a bright red telephone with a loud mechanical bell and put it on his desk. Its number appeared on the company's help page for part of each day, so that anywhere from a few to a dozen customers would call it. When it rang, everyone on the floor heard it. The co-founder, Paul English, would sometimes vault over furniture to reach it first. If he was away, one of the engineers sitting nearby had to pick it up.
The engineers hated the noise. English told them the fix was simple: answer the phone, do whatever it took to make the customer happy, and then carry the phone to the far end of the office so someone else would have to answer the next call. He described it to Inc. as a game of hot potato that he took seriously. The point was not politeness. He wanted the people who wrote Kayak's code to hear, in real time and in the customer's own voice, what their software was doing wrong.
By the time Kayak was sold to Priceline in 2012 for $1.8 billion, it was handling well over a billion travel searches a year, with only about a hundred people in its engineering office. English had turned customer support into an engineering feedback loop, and he had made a fortune doing it. Then he spent much of the next decade trying to work out what to do with the money, a question that the writer Tracy Kidder found interesting enough to fill a book.
This is the story of a Boston programmer who built companies around one stubborn belief: the people making a product should feel the pain of the people using it.
By the Numbers
Paul English and Kayak
$1.8BValue of Priceline's agreed acquisition of Kayak, November 2012
$224.5MKayak revenue in 2011, the last full year before its IPO
310MTravel queries Kayak processed in the first quarter of 2012 alone
35MKayak app downloads by 2012, according to Tracy Kidder
$33.5MPrice Intuit paid for English's Boston Light Software in 1999
41Primary schools in Haiti run by Summits Education, which English co-founded (2016)
West Roxbury and a VIC-20
Paul M. English was born in Boston in 1963, the sixth of seven children in an Irish Catholic family in the West Roxbury neighbourhood. His father was a pipefitter for Boston Gas; his mother worked as a substitute teacher and social worker. It was a crowded, busy household on a city salary, and nobody in it was headed for the technology business.
The route there ran through Boston Latin School, the city's exam school, where English played piano and trumpet in the band and joined the computer club. In 1981 his mother bought the family a Commodore VIC-20, and English taught himself to program on it. His older brother Ed had already become something of a local legend: Ed had written a chess program and then been hired by Parker Brothers to convert the arcade game Frogger for the Atari 2600. Paul wrote a game of his own, called Cupid, and showed it to his brother. With Ed's help it was sold to a publisher called Games by Apollo for $25,000. The company paid a $5,000 deposit and then went out of business before paying the rest. It was an early lesson in the gap between a signed deal and money in the bank.
English graduated from Boston Latin in 1982. His grades did not open the doors of the elite universities some of his classmates went to, but his test scores qualified him to attend the University of Massachusetts Boston without paying tuition, and he liked that it had a jazz band. He spent the summer after high school reading gas meters for Boston Gas.
Night School and Interleaf
At UMass Boston, English took classes at night and worked part-time for his brother's new company, adding music and sound effects to video games. He also learned to play xiangqi, Chinese chess, a game that would recur in his life. He earned a bachelor's degree in computer science in 1987 and a master's in 1989. In 2019 the university gave him an honorary doctorate.
In 1989 he joined Interleaf, a software company in Waltham that made one of the early WYSIWYG document-publishing systems. He rewrote large parts of its code, became a manager within a couple of years, and read management books to work out how to lead a team. It was also at Interleaf, according to Kidder's biography and reviews of it in The Boston Globe and the San Francisco Chronicle, that English was first diagnosed with bipolar disorder, after a period of alternating hundred-hour working weeks and days when he could not leave his bedroom. Kidder describes the condition as a force that sometimes drove English's most inventive work and sometimes left him immobilised, and English has since spoken and written about it openly.
Interleaf ran into trouble in the mid-1990s. After heavy losses the board replaced its chief executive, and English, by then a senior vice president in charge of product management and engineering, was one of a small group of managers asked to help hold the company together while a new leader was found. The experience of steadying a failing software company from the inside gave him more practical training in management than any book.
He left at the end of 1995, forfeiting unvested stock options, to join a small startup working on sending faxes over the internet. It did not last; he left after a dispute with the chief executive over engineers' pay. In the gap that followed he built an online version of xiangqi and attracted acquisition interest, including from Yahoo, which he turned down partly because he did not want to move to California.
English's first company grew from a small contract. In the late 1990s The Boston Globe hired him to build an online store to sell T-shirts and memorabilia. He and a co-founder, Karl Berry, turned that work into Boston Light Software, which built e-commerce sites for businesses, and hired former colleagues from Interleaf and elsewhere. It was the start of the dot-com boom, and small businesses were suddenly desperate to be online.
In August 1999, Intuit, the maker of Quicken and TurboTax, bought Boston Light for $33.5 million. English and Berry decided to take a large share of their own stock and distribute it to employees as bonuses. English later described that decision as an example of what he called putting the team first.
— Paul English, Senior Executive, 2021When I sold my first company Boston Light to Intuit, I canceled half of my stock to give employees more. That's team first.
The timing was lucky. Boston Light was safely inside Intuit when the bubble burst in 2000 and took many similar companies down with it. English became a vice president of technology at Intuit, commuting between Boston and the company's headquarters in Mountain View. He stayed until early 2002 and then left to look after his father, who had Alzheimer's disease; his mother, who had died shortly before, had asked him to care for him.
Two other threads from these years mattered later. English helped his brother Ed establish Intermute, an anti-spam software company that Trend Micro bought in 2005. And he met Tom White, a Boston construction executive and one of the early backers of the medical charity Partners In Health, who became his guide to philanthropy. White was in the process of giving away nearly all his wealth, and English, starting with small donations to causes White recommended, began to think he might do the same.
Hafner's Idea
After his father's death, English went back to work as an entrepreneur in residence at a venture firm. Larry Bohn, a former boss who had moved to the venture firm General Catalyst, introduced him to Steve Hafner. Hafner had helped build Orbitz, the airline-backed travel booking site, and had the idea for a search engine for travel that would query airlines, hotels and online agencies at once and show all the results side by side, without trying to sell anything itself.
Kidder is careful to note that Kayak was Hafner's concept rather than English's. What English brought was the ability to build it and a set of opinions about how software companies should work. The two incorporated the business in Delaware in January 2004 under the plain name Travel Search Company. Hafner became chief executive and ran the business side from Norwalk, Connecticut; English became chief technology officer and ran engineering from Concord, Massachusetts, staffing it with people he had worked with before, including Bill O'Donnell and Paul Schwenk.
The company soon renamed itself Kayak, a short palindrome that the team liked. English later said the change went through over objections from the board, and he counted it as another case of listening to the team. General Catalyst, Sequoia Capital, Accel and Oak Investment Partners were among the venture investors.
Hiring People Who Weren't Looking
English told Fortune in 2012 that he and Hafner decided to work together after about an hour over lunch at Legal Sea Foods in Harvard Square. The first thing he did afterwards, from his car, was call the two strongest engineers he had ever worked with and ask them to join him again. They were well paid at a California company, and he was offering substantially less. Their third question was where the company would be. English, who knew he needed them, told them they could choose. They picked Maynard, Massachusetts; he talked them into nearby Concord. That is how a travel startup came to put its engineering headquarters in a historic New England town rather than next to MIT, and eight years later both engineers were still with him.
The story captured how English recruited. At Kayak he became known as a relentless hirer; colleagues joked that on any business flight out of San Francisco they would ask how many people he had hired on the plane. He said most of Kayak's hires had not been looking for jobs. The company's job site carried no job descriptions, only an invitation to people known as the best at whatever they did. When he met someone talented, he tried to invent a role around their interests. And once he heard a promising name, he gave himself seven days to make an offer, which meant persuading the person to meet, running the checks and putting them through two days of interviews with eight Kayak staff in that week.
The office culture he described was built for speed. Monitors on the walls showed live data: the latest customer feedback, Twitter mentions, search counts by country. Most meetings had about three people and lasted well under an hour. Employees were praised for shipping something quickly even if it was imperfect, on the view that customers would show what worked. At any moment, English said, a few dozen versions of the site were running for different users, with subtle differences in colour or the placement of hotel ratings, so that ideas from English or Hafner could be tested and discarded if they did not perform.
He also argued that focus was Kayak's defence against larger rivals. Google and Microsoft had moved into travel search, and Expedia was the biggest travel company in the world. Kayak's answer, he said, was to do only three things, finding flights, hotels and cars, and to do them well enough that most users came to the site directly rather than through a search engine.
A Search Engine That Didn't Sell Anything
Kayak's business model was its main strategic advantage. Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz and Priceline were online travel agencies: they sold tickets and rooms, took payment and handled the customer when something went wrong. Kayak did none of that. It searched hundreds of sources at once and, when a user found a flight or hotel, sent them to the airline, hotel or agency to buy it. Kayak was paid a referral fee for the click, plus more if the user completed a purchase, and it also sold advertising. According to Kidder, the referral fee was about 75 cents for a flight search and $2 for a hotel.
Not selling travel meant not needing much of what a travel company normally needs. Kayak had no call centres for bookings, no ticketing operations, and only a small sales and administrative staff. Its costs were largely technology and marketing. The company's prospectus later said that it did not incur meaningful costs for fulfilment or customer service on the products bought through it. What was left over could be spent on making the search faster, more complete and easier to use, which was the part English cared about.
The model had a dependency that the company was candid about. Much of Kayak's airfare search ran on a faring engine licensed from ITA Software, a Cambridge company whose technology powered many travel sites. In 2011 Google bought ITA after agreeing to a consent decree with the Justice Department, and soon launched its own flight search. Kayak's filings listed Google, which could send users straight to its own travel results, as one of its most serious competitive threats. The company that made its living from other people's inventory was always partly at the mercy of the platforms that controlled traffic and data.
Engineers on the Phones
For the first months after launch, English answered all of Kayak's customer email himself. He would take complaints to the engineers and propose changes, and the engineers would often disagree. It frustrated him that they did not feel the customers' pain. He told Inc. that he wanted to transfer that empathy directly to the engineers, and the way to do it was to make them do the support.
From around 2005, Kayak's programmers handled customer service. They answered email, and later the red phone. The logic, as English explained to Fortune in 2012, was self-correcting: an engineer who had to answer the same angry complaint two or three times would get sick of it, stop what he was doing and fix the underlying code, and the complaint would disappear.
— Paul English, Fortune, 2012From day one I made the programmers do the support, and that means when a customer calls and yells at us because we've screwed something up on the site, by the second or third time we get that criticism, the programmer is tired of answering the same question.
The red phone came later, as a way to recover what was lost in email. English wrote that he eventually used eight different processes for customer research at Kayak, and that he particularly liked talking to angry customers, whom he saw as passionate people who had had a bad experience. He would end calls by giving his name and telling the caller he was the company's co-founder. As the company grew it added a dedicated support team, but the phone stayed, and English or a senior engineer would still answer it.
The same obsession produced a side business. Frustrated by automated phone trees at big companies, English started GetHuman, a website that tells people how to reach a real person at companies like Comcast and Verizon. By 2016, he wrote, it was drawing millions of visitors a month.
— Paul English, Inc., 2010I love talking to customers, even angry ones. I learn a lot from them about how to make the site easier to use.
Mobile, Before It Was Obvious
In 2008, as smartphones were beginning to catch on, English and O'Donnell set up a small team to build a Kayak app. They gave it a great deal of independence, including permission to leave out website features that did not suit a phone. Kidder reports that without any advertising the app had been downloaded 35 million times by 2012 and ranked among the top travel apps on both iPhone and Android.
Mobile searches earned Kayak less per query than desktop searches, and the prospectus noted that the shift was pulling down revenue per query. The company kept investing anyway. By 2011 mobile accounted for about 14 percent of Kayak's queries, and the share was climbing fast.
The mobile work illustrated how English liked to organise: a small group, given a clear goal and freedom from the rest of the company's habits, with direct contact with users. It was the same pattern as the engineering office in Concord, which sat apart from headquarters in Connecticut and ran largely on his instincts.
The IPO and the Sale
Kayak first filed to go public in late 2010, then waited. On July 20, 2012, it listed on Nasdaq under the ticker KYAK, having sold 3.5 million shares at $26 each, raising $91 million. The company was profitable and growing. Revenue in 2011 was $224.5 million, up about 31 percent on the previous year, and in the first quarter of 2012 it processed 310 million queries, up 45 percent. Fortune noted that it was succeeding in a market where Google and Microsoft were both pushing into travel search.
Less than four months later, on November 8, 2012, Priceline agreed to buy Kayak for $1.8 billion, or $40 a share, in cash and stock. The deal closed in May 2013, and Kayak became part of the group now known as Booking Holdings. English woke up to find his photograph on the front page of The Boston Globe. His share came to roughly $120 million.
Years earlier, a colleague had predicted that English would one day be hit by a truck full of money, and that he intended to be standing next to him when it happened. Kidder used the line for the title of his book. By his account, English's first reaction to the windfall was a tightening in his chest rather than elation. He had long been uneasy with the idea that wealth reflected virtue; he thought he was simply good at something that happened to pay very well.
— Paul English, email quoted in A Truck Full of Money, 2016Money is a yucky reason to switch jobs.
Blade, Lola and a Bank
Even before the Priceline deal closed, English was planning his next project. With O'Donnell and Schwenk, each putting in a million dollars of their own money, he set up an incubator called Blade in a renovated space in Boston's Fort Point neighbourhood, complete with a basement club modelled on a speakeasy. General Catalyst and Accel added $20 million. Blade opened with a party in May 2014, attended by half of Kayak's engineers and by Governor Deval Patrick. English read nearly every one of the dozens of applications himself, and the founders picked a small first group: Wigo, an app for college students to share party plans; Bevy, a device and software for storing photos and videos; and later Drafted, a service for recommending people for tech jobs. The Globe's review of Kidder's book suggested the incubator-nightclub looked more like a product of mania than of sound planning, and English soon changed course.
In 2015 he folded Blade's efforts into a single company of his own, Lola, a travel app that paired chat and software with human travel agents working from home. It found more traction with business travellers than with the leisure market he had first imagined. In 2018 he hired Mike Volpe, a former marketing chief at HubSpot, as chief executive and returned to the technology role. Then the pandemic halted business travel. Lola cut nearly half its staff in 2020 and pivoted to software for managing all kinds of employee spending.
In October 2021, Capital One acquired Lola's software and its team of 57 people, and the startup shut down its travel business. English joined the bank for a time as an adviser on technology. In 2022 he launched Boston Venture Studio, which develops its own consumer software ideas and spins the promising ones out as companies, and which has released products including a restaurant-recommendation app and a free meeting-scheduling tool. He also taught at MIT's Sloan School of Management.
Giving the Truck Away
English's philanthropy predates his big payday. After the Boston Light sale, guided by Tom White, he began giving to Partners In Health, and in 2005 he made his first major gift, $1 million. He joined its board in 2010. After Haiti's 2010 earthquake and the cholera outbreak that followed, he offered to guarantee the cost of a vaccination programme for 100,000 people, which allowed the charity to order the vaccine while it looked for other funding; the Red Cross eventually paid. With Partners In Health and Haiti's Ministry of Education he co-founded Summits Education, which by 2016 ran 41 primary schools for about 10,000 children in Haiti's Central Plateau.
In Boston he has funded homeless services and in 2016 started the Winter Walk, an annual event to raise money and attention for homelessness. His largest local project began with a $1 million commitment in the late 2010s, held at the Boston Foundation, to build a memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, who met as students in the city. English co-chaired the effort with the Rev. Liz Walker and the Rev. Jeffrey Brown. The result, The Embrace, a 20-foot bronze by the artist Hank Willis Thomas and MASS Design Group depicting the couple's intertwined arms, was unveiled on Boston Common on January 13, 2023. The nonprofit behind it, now Embrace Boston, raised about $8 million for the memorial and has taken on wider racial and economic justice work. In 2023 English also co-founded BannedBooksUSA, which sends books banned in Florida to readers there who request them.
Kidder's book ends with English still restless, still building, and still intending to give most of his fortune away. What makes him an unusual subject for a business profile is that the pattern of his philanthropy matches the pattern of his companies. In both he looks for a point of direct contact with the people affected, whether a customer on a red phone or a school in a Haitian village, and he acts on what he hears faster than institutions usually do.
Part IIThe Playbook
Paul English's career runs from a failed video-game sale to a $1.8 billion exit and on to a string of new ventures and philanthropic projects. The principles below are drawn from how he built engineering teams, designed Kayak's business, handled money and chose his causes. Several reflect a strength that also created risk, and the history includes the failures alongside the successes.
The principles
- 1.Make the builders answer the customers.
- 2.Put the complaint where everyone can hear it.
- 3.Refuse the parts of the business you don't need.
- 4.Know which platform could crush you.
- 5.Pair with someone who has the idea you can build.
- 6.Hire the people you have already worked beside.
- 7.Give small teams permission to leave things out.
- 8.Share the exit with the people who made it.
- 9.Pivot to where the customers still are.
- 10.Backstop the risk so others can move.
- 11.Turn a personal irritation into a public tool.
Principle 1
Make the builders answer the customers.
English's most distinctive management decision at Kayak was to have programmers handle customer support. Most companies separate the two, with support staff filtering complaints and passing summaries to engineering. English thought the filtering destroyed the most useful part of the signal: the emotion that tells you how badly something hurts.
The system worked because of self-interest. An engineer who answered the same complaint repeatedly had every reason to fix the root cause, and the fix usually came within days. It was a short, tight feedback loop that required no product managers to translate between the user and the code.
Tactic: Rotate the people who build your product through direct customer support, with real calls and emails rather than summaries, and measure how often a support contact leads to a code change.
Principle 2
Put the complaint where everyone can hear it.
The red phone was loud on purpose, and English's desk sat in the middle of an open office on purpose. Everyone could hear the ring, watch him answer, and overhear what the customer said. A complaint became a shared event rather than a private ticket in a queue.
Visibility created accountability without a formal process. Nobody needed to report on customer satisfaction when the whole team could hear it. English also kept the number visible on the help page only part of the day, so the call volume stayed manageable while the signal stayed live.
Tactic: Find a way to make one raw customer complaint visible to the whole team every day, whether a ringing phone, a live channel or a read-aloud at stand-up, and keep the volume low enough that people actually pay attention.
Principle 3
Refuse the parts of the business you don't need.
Kayak chose not to sell travel. That single decision removed booking operations, payment handling, ticketing and after-sale service from the company, and with them most of the headcount a travel business normally carries. What was left was a lean technology company that could spend its money on search quality and marketing.
The discipline was in saying no to revenue that looked attractive. Bookings would have earned more per customer, but they would also have turned Kayak into a competitor of the agencies whose inventory it depended on. Staying a neutral search engine kept those partners supplying data.
Tactic: List the functions your competitors run that your customers do not directly value. For each, ask whether you could send that work to a partner and keep only the part where you are clearly best.
Principle 4
Know which platform could crush you.
Kayak's prospectus spelled out its vulnerabilities plainly: it licensed its airfare engine from ITA Software, Google had bought ITA, and Google was also the largest single source of travel traffic on the web. A company that aggregates other people's data lives inside someone else's ecosystem.
Knowing this did not make the risk go away. Kayak's brand advertising and its mobile app both gave users a way to reach it directly rather than through a search engine. The eventual sale to Priceline gave it the scale of a much larger partner.
Tactic: Identify the one or two platforms that control your supply or your traffic, estimate what would happen if they became competitors, and invest now in the direct relationships that would survive that shift.
Principle 5
Pair with someone who has the idea you can build.
Kayak began as Steve Hafner's idea. Hafner knew the travel industry from Orbitz and understood the business case; English knew how to build software and teams. They split the company along those lines, with Hafner running the business from Connecticut and English running engineering in Massachusetts.
English did not need to be the originator to make the company his own. His contribution, the culture of engineers who answered customers and the speed that came from it, was what distinguished Kayak's product. The partnership worked because each founder respected the other's domain.
Tactic: When you find a founder with a strong idea outside your expertise, define the split of responsibilities in writing at the start, and let each side own its half without second-guessing.
Principle 6
Hire the people you have already worked beside.
At Boston Light, English hired former colleagues from Interleaf. At Kayak he brought in Bill O'Donnell and Paul Schwenk, whom he had worked with for years. The same two men co-founded Blade with him and then Lola. His companies were built around a small group of trusted engineers who moved with him from venture to venture.
Hiring from a known network shortens the time it takes a startup to function. Trust is already established, working styles are known, and the new company can move quickly. The risk is insularity, which is why English paired his trusted core with independent teams and constant contact with customers.
Tactic: Keep a short list of the best people you have worked with, stay in touch with them between ventures, and when you start something new, recruit from that list first.
Principle 7
Give small teams permission to leave things out.
When Kayak started building a mobile app in 2008, the team was allowed to drop website features that did not suit a small screen. That freedom let them build a product designed for the phone rather than a shrunken copy of the website, and the app grew to tens of millions of downloads without any advertising.
Large companies often fail at new platforms because they insist on carrying every existing feature across. English's approach was to protect the new team from the old product's requirements until it had found its own users.
Tactic: When launching on a new platform or market, give the team an explicit list of existing features they are allowed to omit, and judge them on user adoption rather than feature parity.
When Intuit bought Boston Light, English and his co-founder handed a large portion of their own shares to employees. The gesture cost them money and bought them a reputation. People who had worked for English once wanted to work for him again, which made every later company easier to staff.
English described this as putting the team first, and he treated it as a principle rather than a one-off. It also reflected his discomfort with the idea that founders earn their wealth entirely through their own effort.
Tactic: Decide before a liquidity event how much of the founders' share you would be willing to pass to employees, and put the commitment in writing while it is still hypothetical.
Principle 9
Pivot to where the customers still are.
Lola was built for travel, and in 2020 travel stopped. English and Mike Volpe cut costs and turned the product from a business-travel tool into software for managing all employee spending. The pivot kept the company alive long enough for Capital One to acquire its team and technology in 2021.
The move was not a triumph; Lola shut its travel business and investors did not get a Kayak-style exit. But it turned a likely failure into a soft landing for the staff, most of whom joined the bank. Adapting quickly to a sudden change in demand preserved what could be preserved.
Tactic: When your market collapses, list the capabilities your team has built that do not depend on that market, and find the nearest customer who needs them now.
Principle 10
Backstop the risk so others can move.
During Haiti's cholera epidemic, English offered to guarantee the cost of vaccinating 100,000 people. Partners In Health could then order the vaccine immediately rather than waiting for funding. In the end another donor paid, but his guarantee was what let the programme start on time.
The same logic applied to The Embrace. His early $1 million commitment gave the King memorial project a funded starting point before a design or site existed, and the effort eventually raised about $8 million. In both cases the most valuable thing he offered was the removal of risk at the moment it was blocking action.
Tactic: When a project you support is stalled by uncertainty over money, offer a guarantee rather than a gift. It often unlocks more action for less capital.
Principle 11
Turn a personal irritation into a public tool.
English hated automated phone menus, so he built GetHuman to help people bypass them. He hated that engineers did not hear customers, so he installed a red phone. Many of his ventures started from something that annoyed him personally and that he suspected annoyed millions of others too.
Irritation is a useful signal because it is specific. It points to a real problem experienced by a real user, often the founder, and it provides the persistence needed to keep working on it. The risk is mistaking a private quirk for a mass need, which is why English tested his ideas with users so early.
Tactic: Keep a running list of everyday frustrations that make you angry, and for each one, check quickly whether other people search for, complain about or pay to avoid the same problem.
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Part IIIMaxims
- Emotion is data. A summary of a complaint loses the anger, and the anger tells you what to fix first.
- Neutrality is a moat. A search engine that sells nothing can partner with everyone who does.
- A deal is not money. The $5,000 deposit on a $25,000 game taught him to count only what has been paid.
- Luck favours the already-sold. Boston Light was inside Intuit when the bubble burst; timing did as much as talent.
- Wealth is a question, not an answer. The bigger the payout, the more urgently he felt he had to decide what it was for.
- Restlessness builds and breaks. The same energy that launched Kayak also produced an incubator with a nightclub in the basement.
- Talk to the angry ones. A customer whose problem you solve personally becomes your loudest supporter.
- Proximity beats reports. Whether in a software office or a Haitian village, he trusted what he heard directly over what reached him through layers.
- Soft landings count. Not every company becomes a Kayak, and getting your team safely to the next job is its own kind of success.
In Their Own Words
We weren't trying to sell travel. We were trying to organize travel information. That distinction was everything.— Paul English
We built Kayak to be independent, but we also built it to serve travelers. Sometimes those goals align with being part of a larger organization.— Paul English
We make money when travelers save money. That alignment is the foundation of everything we do.— Paul English
Every customer complaint is a product feature request. If someone is frustrated enough to call us, that's valuable information about what we need to fix.— Paul English
The best product decisions come from using your own product obsessively. If you're not your own customer, you're guessing about what customers want.— Paul English
Productive chaos isn't about being disorganized. It's about being organized around principles rather than processes.— Paul English
The best companies are built by people who are slightly obsessed with solving a problem that personally annoys them.— Paul English
Culture isn't what you say in meetings or write on walls. Culture is what you do when nobody is watching.— Paul English
Hire people who are smarter than you and then get out of their way. Your job as a founder is to remove obstacles, not create them.— Paul English
When everyone else is cutting back, that's when you invest. Users don't disappear during recessions—they just become more price-sensitive.— Paul English
The best competitive advantage is building something that customers actually want to use. Everything else is just tactics.— Paul English
Don't compete on features. Compete on user experience. Features can be copied, but great experiences are hard to replicate.— Paul English
Technology should be invisible to users. If they're thinking about the technology, you've failed.— Paul English
The most important technical decisions are the ones that affect user experience. Everything else is just engineering.— Paul English
Mobile isn't just desktop with a smaller screen. It's a completely different way of thinking about user interaction.— Paul English
Speed matters more than perfection in product development. You can always improve a feature that exists, but you can't improve a feature that never gets built.— Paul English
Leadership is about making it safe for people to take risks and learn from failures.— Paul English
The best meetings are the ones where someone changes their mind based on new information.— Paul English
You can't manage what you don't measure, but you also can't measure what matters most.— Paul English
Entrepreneurship is about solving problems that matter to real people. Everything else is just business.— Paul English
The biggest risk isn't failing—it's building something that nobody wants.— Paul English
Success is when your customers become your best salespeople because they can't imagine using anything else.— Paul English
Building a company is like raising a child. You can influence the outcome, but you can't control it.— Paul English
Scale problems are good problems to have, but only if you solve them before they become user problems.— Paul English
The red phone on my desk isn't about customer service. It's about staying connected to the reality of what we're building.— Paul English
Further reading
- A Truck Full of Money by Tracy Kidder
