Kayak’s Co-Founder and the Secret of Travel Startup Success
Photo Credit: A new biography chronicles the life and work of Paul English, who co-founded Kayak. Pictured, English (second from left) collaborates with co-workers at Lola's Boston offices. Lola
Skift Take
Travel startups take a dramatically different idea, creativity, exuberance, focus, money, connections, a dedication to team building, and a helluva lot of hubris. Depending on the moment, Kayak and Lola co-founder Paul English has all of the above in ever-changing quantities.
Paul English met his soon-to-be Kayak co-founder Steve Hafner in December 2003 almost by chance in the offices of General Catalyst in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Over a 45-minute lunch at nearby Legal Sea Foods, they agreed to go 50-50 on the Kayak travel-search engine while each of them chipped in $1 million of their own money to have skin in the game.
English, a coder and entrepreneur by trade who had hacked his grade-school computer teacher's password years earlier to get access to more commands on his "dumb terminal," turned his $1 million Kayak investment into $120 million when the Priceline Group acquired Kayak for $2.1 billion a decade later in 2013.
Paul English, and the CEOs of TripAdvisor, Expedia, Booking.com, and More Are Speaking at Skift Global Forum 2016. Join Us.
A new biography of English, A Truck Full of Money: One Man's Quest To Recover from Great Success (Random House), written by Tracy Kidder, details this meeting of then-soon-to-be Kayak co-founders, and p
