Paul English wrestled with bipolar disorder, having bouts of depression frequently, yet he teamed up with Steve Hafner and started Kayak.
Kayak was a meta-search travel website, like google but just for travel. It combed all the travel websites and showed the aggregated information to customers, so they don’t have to go to multiple websites to book their travel.
They faced competitors, but they executed well and finally sold it to Priceline for $1.8 billion dollars and both founders became multi-millionaires.
This is the story of how they changed the way people travel forever.
What you could learn from this episode:
- How Steve Hafner got the idea for Kayak
- Even though Steve knew about other competitors, how he chose to differentiate.
- What Paul English did when he had to endure sleepless nights because of his bipolar disorder.
- How they copied their money making formula from a different vertical.
- Why they never wanted to spend money on marketing and the brilliant idea, they had to get free traffic.
