He is brilliant, intense, generous and erratic. He is the entrepreneur’s entrepreneur. He is none other than unique– Paul M English.
If you reside in Boston, you might be lucky enough to bump into Paul, driving you in his Uber car. And, you could be among one of the thousands developers who have worked with him in many companies; sometimes taking a pay cut to be just part of his ambitious project.
He founded GetHuman, Boston Light Software (later sold to Intuit), Kayak (sold to Priceline for a record $2 billion in May 2013, which gave him an estimated worth of $120 million in the deal), Intermute (sold to Trend Micro). In 2013, he started an incubator named “Blade” which ran for 2 years. In 2015, he started his newest business lola.com, headquartered in English’s beloved Boston city. Lola operates a mobile application which connects an individual to a travel professional instantly for planning, booking, managing the travel.
His accolades don’t stop here. He is a pioneer in Philanthropy. He co-founded Summits Education, a school which serves around 10k students in Haiti. He is the founder of “The Winter Walk”, a homeslessness awareness effort for Boston. His recent philanthropic endeavour involves being part of Martin Luther King Boston, a $5 Million project initiated to showcase Dr. King and Coretta’s relationship for Boston city. Not to forget, he serves on the board of Partners in Health, a global health initiative; Humanity Rises, a refugee humanitarian aid organization; and Village Health Works, an innovative non-profit organization providing community-driven medical care in the rural Burundi
Early Life of Paul English
Founder of half a dozen tech companies, Paul grew up alongside his six siblings in a three-bedroom house in West Roxbury, Massachusett. He used to sleep in the unheated attic. Staying among his tight-knit family gave way for the rise of his competitive spirit which later helped him a lot in his professional career.
He graduated from the University of Massachusetts Boston with a Masters degree in computer science in 1989. Paul switched his jobs every year or two before he eventually found himself at a computer software company, Interleaf. He performed work at a variety of industries such as performing operations research for computer manufacturing systems. He created advanced software for US Air Force spy planes, wrote accounting systems and programmed medical devices. After joining Interleaf, he explored how he could become the best programmer. After his stint of six years as developer and marketing executive, Paul got his answers: “Design Simplicity”.
Kayaking his Journey
English’s desire to perfect the product design was a boon. Kayak was co-founded by both English and Steve Hafner with an aim to make searching for flights easy, simple and efficient for the end-users. Initially, like most of the startup founders, they struggled to generate traffic for the Kayak’s website. English has 3 things on his mind– create a clean platform, a simpler one and a little bit faster than any other platform on the internet.
This mantra paid off and soon Kayak platform became fast enough, with surging numbers, its SEO also rose, so simple that users remembered it and began heading towards the website. As English recollects the moment he knew he has clicked with his Kayak venture. On a fine day, he typed the letter “K” on Google search bar, and the very first word that came was Kayak, at this moment he knew his startup was successful. The company filed its IPO in 2012 and around 70% of the website’s traffic came from people who searched for the website directly.
In 2013, Kayak was sold to Priceline. That deal brought English into the ranks of richie rich. At the age of 49, with 2 kids and an ex-wife, he now had a net worth of $120 Millions.
Beep. Beep. Uber is Here.
Once, English looked up his calendar and saw about 92% of his meetings, conferences and interactions are with people who are into technology, start-up, business world and nonprofits. He decided to broaden his intellect by driving people around in Boston in his Tesla Model S for Uber.
On Halloween, he would host a costume party. He usually drove from midnight to 2AM. His customers used to think it hilarious to see a man in early 50s driving around in an Uber dressed up like a vampire in a Tesla. He always kept a notebook with him in the car and would jot down a line or two about every rider.
Driving for Uber was a blessing in disguise for English. He understood how people who are into the service industry are rated. His personal Uber driver rating was 4.97 and till this date he wonders which customer did not award him five stars rating.
These all events led to the founding of his next travel booking site- Lola.
Lola
Unlike Kayak, Lola consists of travel agents who make itineraries for customers; the customers rate their experiences from one to five. He set up Lola based on his experience as an Uber driver so as to keep his travel agents competitive. Having ratings motivates people to get better at what they do. English wasnt revealing Lola’s travel agents about the commissions on the various hotel properties so as not to influence them wrongly. Rather, agents were based according to the customer ratings one would receive.
English’s Unique Business Priorities
English swears by his business priorities- team first, customer second and profit third!
While he believes the customer is the king, he puts his team first. Because he thinks creating a culture and team where people love working with one another will create more magical products. Magical culture + Team = Magical Products. If you create a work environment which is negative, unprogressive, puts people down, people are allowed to be argumentative & arrogant in ugly manners, that is not going to create magical products.
Getting this concept right is the key. It depends on how one recruits, trains them and how to know when someone is not working out.
Net Worth of Paul M English
English is an intriguing man of zigzagging life. It isn’t a surprise that a serial entrepreneur like him has a net worth of $150 Million as of 2022. Being successful runs in their family, his siblings too didn’t stay out of the game for long. English’s brother is also an entrepreneur running a series of businesses, his one of the most famous endeavour being- “Video Game Frogger”.
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