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 keep noon to 2 p.m. open, because I like going out to lunch. It's also a time for me to socialize. We have a very active work force. Some days, a group of seven or eight of us will go out for a run. Or we'll go out and play basketball, volleyball, or tennis. I like to encourage that. We had showers built in our offices.
I spend a lot of my time on recruiting. You could ask anyone in my office, "What are Paul's priorities?" and they'll say: "It's team, No. 1. Then customer, then profit." I really want to create the ultimate, most exciting dream team that's ever been created in software, and I focus on that every day. I love to ask people, "Who's the smartest person you ever met? The most creative person? The fastest?" Someone might say, "This guy I met in Ohio 10 years ago, but I think he moved overseas." I'll track him down.
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: The engineers here are German, Greek, Russian, Italian, French, Indian. One of my missions is that we will be able to answer every customer call, in any language.
When I am hiring, I try to get people to accept the job before I tell them about salary or title. I promise to make that person dramatically more productive, and that working for Kayak will be the most fun job he's ever had. I need two things in return: a promise to strive to be the absolute best you can be. And that you will be an energy amplifier -- someone people are excited to work with.
A lot of companies have the "no assholes" rule. So if the greatest programmer ever is also a jerk, he's fired. Our rule is "no neutrals." So when the new guy walks down the hall, is my team drawn to him? Or do they divert their glance? If they divert their glance, we fire that person. I call it the hallway test, but it's more of a conceptual thing. The idea is when you put superstars together, you can ask, "What did you do today that excited the people around you and made them better at their jobs?" If you can't give examples, I don't want you here.
I do all of the firing. At times, I've fired maybe one out of every three people I've hired. That might make people think I'm bad at hiring, but I think I'm quite good at hiring. 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 Olympic-quality, unbelievable all stars of technology. My favorite metric is revenue per employee.
I travel about once a week, but most of my trips are quick. So I'm in California meeting with the team there or investors. I'll help Steve with business development and look at companies we're trying to acquire. I like to take my kids with me on longer trips. A while ago, my daughter came with me to a global health conference in Zambia. We got a week of close one-on-one time.
We work really hard for 40 to 45 hours a week, but we believe in people having strong personal lives. Over the past six years, there have been maybe five times I've spoken with Steve before 8 a.m., after 5 p.m., or on the weekend.
My drive home is 20 minutes. Rush-hour traffic doesn't bother me. 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. For the last several years, I have been studying Buddhism. It has taught me to be a better manager and how to deal with things that 10 years ago would make me really angry and frustrated. I work on trying to be present -- in the moment. It's something you can actually train yourself to do.
After work, if my kids have a sporting event, I will go to that. During baseball season, I go see the Red Sox. When my son was 6, we started going to games together. He loved it, but for me, it was really an excuse to sit next to him for three hours uninterrupted. Over the years, though, I got hooked. Now that he's 14, he wants to hang with his friends more than his dad. So I invite friends to games. But my son and I still go down to Fort Myers [Florida] every year for spring training.
Every Tuesday night, I have an open dinner at my house. I'm one of seven children, and six of us live nearby. We're very close. Anywhere between four and 15 of my relatives will show up for dinner. I'm not a great cook, but it's fun to have people over.
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.
