We were lucky to catch up with Paul English recently and have shared our conversation below.
Paul, we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?
I grew up in a three bedroom house with nine family members, and my Mom was very sick during the first ten years of my life. My aunts helped raise the seven children. Through this, we had to learn how to depend on others, and somehow find confidence that my Mom was going to be ok.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
My day job is running Boston Venture Studio (bvs.net) where we create 2-3 companies per year. We have been in operation for three years. We have had one company sale already (Moonbeam Podcast Player) and are now focused on three companies:
– Supercal.com – group scheduling by email
– Lola.com – dating app, first focused on Boston MA US
– Steppin.net – control your social media by requiring steps to get online time
I’m an engineer by training, but my career (including Cofounder/CTO of Kayak.com) is focused on product strategy and design. At BVS, I manage the design team but also work on ideation of new company ideas.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
1) Hiring is job #1. Think about the best person you have ever worked with, and the worst. How would you like to have 10 of the former and 0 of the latter? The answer is in hiring. Make this an active topic with your team, read books together about hiring, listen to podcasts on this topic, read blogs, etc.
2) Customer support is the secret to building a winning product. At Kayak, I did all the support for the first year, and then I started having my engineers do support in year two. This turned out to be a pivotal moment for Kayak. Many engineers did not like doing support, so when a bug was reported, they stopped what they were doing and fixed the bug, so no other customer would have that bug again, and so the engineer would not get any questions again about it.
3) Maya Angelo said “At the end of the day people won’t remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel.” — I wish someone made this strong point early in my career so that I would have learned to treat *everyone* as kindly as possible. People won’t collaborate with you if you are a jerk, so if you want a functional team, you have to find ways to be nice to everyone.
To close, maybe we can chat about your parents and what they did that was particularly impactful for you?
My parents gave us each chores around the house as well as encouraged us to find part-time jobs for spending money. I became a paperboy around age 10, and then when I got a little older, I started mowing lawns and shoveling driveways for extra money. It was this sense of accomplishment that started the work ethic that I’ve become known for.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://paulenglish.com
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/englishpaulm/
- Other: https://bvs.net
Image Credits
John Davenport, Rachel Cohen, Paulina Kusiak Daigle
so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.
