A Truck Full of Money Read Online Free Page A

And you were also watching a machine at work, responding to all those people—a complex machine made out of software and silicon that was spread across a large part of the world, connecting millions
to
the world.
    As the search numbers grew on the screen, you also began to understand Kayak’s purchase price. The business worked this way: A user goes to the Kayak website, finds a desirable flight or hotel room or rental car, and then is sent to the website of an airline or hotel chain or car rental company, or to one of the online travel agencies, such as Expedia or Orbitz. Kayak receives a fee from those other companies just for the referral, seventy-five cents for a flight and two dollars for a hotel, and considerably more if the user actually books the car or the room or the flight through one of those other companies. So every number added to the tally of searches conducted on Kayak was like a sale rung up on a cash register. Advertisements on the site, demure by industry standards, added more. In the course of fiscal year 2012, Kayak’s users made 1.2 billion searches. These brought commissions and ad revenues amounting to $292.7 million, and to profits of $65.8 million. Remarkable figures, not for their size but because only 205 employees had been required to produce them. In 2012, Kayak’s revenues came to nearly $1.5 million per employee, one of the highest ratios among all publicly traded companies.

    How do entrepreneurs succeed? There is a form of business romance that says you must be “passionately” committed to your idea, your industry, your product. But what was there in Kayak’s business to feel passionate about? Making sure that an ironing board was included in the first hotel room their website showed a traveler, or that a customer received accurate information about the prices and availability of seats on airplanes? Paul and his people cared about how to discover that a certain traveler was more apt to book a room with an ironing board than one without. They cared about delivering accurate flight information. (Not an easy or perfectible job, but well managed now by Kayak’s six-member team of mathematicians and computer scientists.) And as a group, Paul’s team cared about making the Kayak website produce, within seconds, an elegant-looking listing for that room or an accurate listing of flights between, say, Boston and Cleveland. They cared in part because doing those things increased the chances that customers would keep using Kayak and recommend it to their friends.
    Mainly, though, Paul’s team were craftspeople in software, employing the tools of logic—that is, approaching their tasks with a sensibility quite different from passion. One might infer the same about the spokeshavers and wheelwrights and blacksmiths and harness-makers of eighteenth-century Concord, who likely didn’t care so much about travel itself as they did about creating the things, the wheels and wagons and horseshoes, that made travel possible.
    Did anyone at Kayak feel passionate about optimizing a customer’s flight options between Boston and Cleveland? If anyone did, it would have been Paul, but what he seemed to feel was empathy for customers—not passion but compassion. He had wanted everyone at Kayak—and especially the programmers—to imagine themselves in the place of that customer looking for the right flight to Cleveland. Paul had devised a scheme he called “Empath,” which had obliged every coder in Concord to answer some angry emails from customers. All programmers were also supposed to take a turn now and then at answering the red phone. This was a big red plastic old-fashioned landline telephone with a very loud ring. Paul had bought it and had its number posted on the Kayak website, inviting customers to call with problems or complaints. “An angry customer is a passionate customer,” he’d tell his team. “And if you can win them over, then you have a passionate advocate.” He figured that if