Apr
5
Original Article: The Way I Work Paul English of Kayak
- We hold design meetings at one another’s desks throughout the day. We do design interaction like that, where everyone can hear and anyone can jump in. If anyone needs to make a private phone call, there are a few private offices, but our general philosophy is that an open environment facilitates intellectual intensity.
- When an e-mail comes in, I read it and decide immediately: Delete, reply, or delegate?
- The engineers and I handle customer support. When I tell people that, they look at me like I’m smoking crack. They say, “Why would you pay an engineer $150,000 to answer phones when you could pay someone in Arizona $8 an hour?” If you make the engineers answer e-mails and phone calls from the customers, the second or third time they get the same question, they’ll actually stop what they’re doing and fix the code. Then we don’t have those questions anymore.
- We have four monitors in the office where you can see real-time streaming information about the site — how many visitors, how many click throughs. It also displays the last customer e-mail that came in and the photo of the employee who answered it. So you’re walking by and you see, “Oh, Dan just answered a question.” We developed our own customer support software. One of the things it does is randomly select an employee response to a customer and send that response out to the entire company and to all of our investors each day. It keeps us on our toes.
- I once hired a guy because he had an Olympic medal in rowing. That blew my mind. I thought, This guy is hard core, and I bet that translates. I love diversity of success. But I also like diversity in style, thinking, and language:
- When I get to red lights, I like to play this game with myself — I look around me for something extraordinary. It might be sunlight hitting a building a certain way
- I read for an hour every night before going to bed.I love reading books by Indian authors. I’ll also read books about global health and Africa, as well as a murder mystery now and then. But I don’t like business books. There are so many things in life that are more interesting than business.
