Steve and I then went down to Legal Seafoods in Harvard Square, where we had a few gin and tonics for lunch. Steve pitched me the idea. It was very simple. A search engine for travel. So he wanted to make a new website which worked exactly like this. At one point, we coined an internal mission statement "search with us, book with them".
He put his hand across the table and we shook on it. That was under an hour after meeting each other. This impulsivity would come to help us a lot over the years. We were also both very quick reads on people, which helped us with recruiting. We went back upstairs to GC. Joel asked how it went. We had a good laugh at that.
Research I knew that Expedia was the market leader, so I went home that night and spent half an hour on their website. I thought to myself, this won't be hard, their website is seizure inducing. We can build something simpler. Last month I asked my 15 travel consultants to ask people, do you want me to call you.
It was shocking to me but everyone wanted to text. English : There will be a commission on the products we sell, particularly on hotels. Now Blade is just a holding company for the investments we made.
English : I have an artificial intelligence team. But for now and for the next few years, we want humans to do most of the work. English : No. I think that a number of people still enjoy pressing buttons and looking at long lists of results. They just want someone who understands their personal preferences and can make a recommendation they trust. Adams : How will users know you are making recommendations based on their preferences rather than your commission?
We pay our agents based on customer ratings from and on "close rate" -- how long it takes them to help you book your trip. English : Absolutely. English : We use email as well, but our customers have enjoyed having everything travel related in one app. English : Definitely. Lola is fun the first or second time you use it. All of your frequent flyer stuff is in there and you get the best seat on the airplane and the best room in the hotel.
Adams : How can you promise the best seat on the plane or the best room in the hotel? English : We strive for the best available. Video Transcript Paul English: I did that just as part of my obsession to say that, "If you're a customer, you should be able to talk to the company you're doing business with. For the first nine months, Paul handled all customer complaints himself.
There's a phone that they call, I would answer it or if they send an email, I would answer the email. And after a while, as the site got more and more popular, the work became a lot. So, I started having a lot of emails that I would personally answer.
But I think more important than that, when I would answer a customer email and see a problem with the product, I would then go to the engineers and say, "People are having problems with this way of sorting hotels. I think we should consider something different. At Blade, he was approached by one of his board members, and subsequently started Lola.
At inception, Lola was a travel concierge app and now has evolved to a spend management platform that tracks and organizes company expenses in one simple console. While English counts Lola. One of his most anticipated ventures is Moonbeam , a podcast player app that lets listeners discover new podcasts and interact with hosts.
With a slew of extraordinarily profitable tech companies under his belt, English lives by the motto "Team first, customer second, product third. This would be my hobby," he says. Todd Goldberg and Darren Marble. Tony Tran. Amanda Breen. Tim Madden.
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