A Truck Full of Money Read Online Free Page B

his engineers answered the emails and the phone, they would hear firsthand about problems, maybe problems that they themselves had created, and if they got yelled at by customers now and then—or, even better, had to listen to some customers cry—they would likely feel determined to find the guilty bugs as soon as possible and fix them.
    Eventually, Paul had given in and created a customer service team—paying people to care about the problems of strangers. The red phone still rang brassily, but only the senior engineer in charge of customer service could be counted on to answer it. And when he wasn’t around, there was only Paul. He would let the phone ring awhile, hoping someone else would act. Then he’d make a dash for it, all but leaping over desks. Once he had a customer calmed down, he would say, “My name is Paul English and my email address is Paul at kayak.com. I’m actually one of the founders of Kayak.” Sometimes he spent half an hour solving a customer’s problem.
    Travel was just something that Paul liked to do. What he really cared about was building new engineering teams. In a jaunty moment once, he said, “For me businesses exist as an excuse to get a team together, and product is what a team does. You have to pay salaries, so, unfortunately, you have to make a profit.” Creating teams and managing them were his version of the business romance. He loved his own large biological family, he would say, but at times he felt as though at Kayak he was building another family, better in the sense that he could choose its members and fire those who didn’t work out.
    He used to have his own website, where from time to time he posted his algorithms for recruiting and hiring. He actually practiced some of the techniques he described. His usual pitch was seductive. In effect, he’d tell recruits that they had higher aims than simply making lots of money, and he’d congratulate them for it. High-tech America was vying fiercely for the best programmers and web designers. Paul could offer stock options and, eventually, competitive salaries, but all the people he hired could have made at least as much elsewhere. The extra thing he had to offer was his enthusiasm, aimed at recruits. He told them they were “awesome,” “rock stars,” “monster coders” who could “knock down buildings with code,” and it seemed that in many cases both parties believed it.
    Paul’s recruiting might have served as the subject of a business school case study—called, let’s say, “Why the Traits of Effective Leadership Can’t Be Codified.” A young engineer whom he had recruited to Kayak described Paul’s courtship: “Maybe it’s a technique, but within the first five minutes of meeting someone, Paul will tell them something personal: ‘I broke up with my girlfriend last night,’ or ‘I was completely wasted.’ It’s disarming, especially if you know this is Paul English. Then you start to think of him as this empathetic being that you can totally relate to, and before you know it, you’ve totally fallen for him. I don’t think people are loyal to him because of his innate managing ability. It’s very stressful to work for him. He gets superemotional about stuff, and he changes his mind all the time. But ten minutes after meeting him, you think, ‘I will follow that person.’ And somehow that continues. People who make a strong first impression often pale, but not Paul. And I think it comes from knowing somehow he’s someone you can trust and count on.”
    Recruiting and hiring were one of Paul’s great loves, his knack for them perhaps his greatest pride. He hated firing people, though you would not have known that from reading some of his interviews in the business press. In the December 2010 issue of
Inc.
magazine, for instance, he was quoted as saying: “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