Don't Hire Someone Because They Are Nice!

And more advice from Paul English, best known for Kayak, but who has started a dozen+ companies and nonprofits. Startups: Kayak, Supercal, Steppin, Lola, Xiangqi, GetHuman, Moonbeam, Deets, and Wellagram. Nonprofits: Embrace Boston, Summits Education in Haiti, Winter Walk for Homelessness, Institute for Applied AI, Bipolar Social Club

Paul is also a TEDx speaker and a frequent lecturer on entrepreneurship, creativity, and stress reduction.

1.Don’t hire someone because they’re nice!

We all want to work with nice people, and it's one of my requirements.  But sometimes I've been guilty of meeting someone who's so nice. I'm like, oh my god, this person's amazing, I'd love to hang out with them, and I'd hire them without checking if they meet the other requirements for the job.  I had people who were incredibly nice, but they weren't really up for the job. It caused me to reflect. And what am I looking for? Like, in a CEO? And then write up a job description for a generic CEO, engage my team on it, and really hash it out. And then, as I'm interviewing CEOs for some of my new companies, I'm using much more stringent requirements. Being nice is one of the things, but it's no longer the main thing.

2.I like entrepreneurs who build products for themselves!

Because if an entrepreneur has a problem, they'll do whatever it takes to fix that. And they'll make sure the product works, which I like.  At Kayak, secretly—I never really talked about this publicly—but I was kind of designing it for myself, because I travel a lot.  I used to visit 10 websites every time I booked a trip, and I wanted to consolidate everything into one website.  

3.Don’t use your initial assumptions to build a company. You have to test.

There's a danger in not spending enough time talking to customers. When you talk to a hundred, one of the things I use is transcribing the interviews. And then I use AI to help me analyze them because it's hard for a human to take 100 hours of recording and pull out the five key points in priority order.  Try to talk to at least 10 customers who have the problem you are trying to solve.  Understand how big the problem is for them. Is it nice to fix, or do they desperately need to fix it? How much are they willing to pay? How are they dealing with it today? Who else is solving the problem?  Release new code a few times a week. Monthly is too slow.  At Kayak, we spent nine months building something users didn’t want. Weekly releases would have saved us that time.

4.Don’t ever be satisfied with your design!

Don’t ever give up. Don’t ever say that’s good enough.  Strive for perfection, but that doesn’t mean keeping it in the lab for a year. You should release code every week, if not every day.  But if something bugs you, fix it.  Part of founder mode, in my interpretation, is if you’re a founder and a designer, don’t delegate to someone who won’t do as good a job as you.  I have a company called Deets. We let people build travel guides.  Engineers added a unique code to URLs, and it just looked bad. I should have pushed back. URLs are part of the UI.  When you're a perfectionist, you perfect everything—emails, formatting, column widths, URLs.  Most don’t notice, but if 5% do, and they love it, that matters to me.

5.Don’t let your board run your company.

Your board is usually not qualified to run it. Don’t treat unqualified opinions highly just because they’re on your board.  Be prepared to override your board. Find people who have the success you need. For Kayak, I recruited the founders of Expedia and Travelocity, and a VC who knew search deeply.  You should also switch boards over time. If someone isn’t adding value, fire them.