1. How does Paul English typify an entrepreneur? In what ways do you think his experience, background, or attitudes are unusual for an entrepreneur?

2. How well do you think Kayak.com manages its relationships with its users? If it grows considerably larger over the next few years, how do you think this may change that relationship?

Among the many business projects launched by entrepreneur Paul English is a Web site called gethuman.com, designed to help frustrated consumers short-cut their way through large companies’ automated phone systems. English’s main job, however, is running a popular travel search engine he co-founded with Steve Hafner called Kayak.com, and in keeping with his fanatical focus on good customer service (just what those automated phone systems often don’t provide), he and Kayak’s engineers take regular turns personally responding to customers’ e-mails and telephone calls. To those who say he could get the customer service job done for much less than an engineer’s salary, English says, “If you make the engineers answer e-mails and phone calls from the customers, the second or third time they get the same question, they’ll actually stop what they’re doing and fix the code. Then we don’t have those questions any more.”

When English, who is also the company’s chief technology officer, takes the calls himself, he’s likely to give out his personal cell phone number and tell the caller, “If you have any follow-up questions, my name is Paul English; I’m the co-founder of the company.” Only a handful of people will call him back, he says, “but they’re blown away when I do that.”

Kayak’s staff of about 100 employees all talk, Twitter, or e-mail customers every day. Their work supports a Web site that lets millions of users compare prices for air travel, hotels, vacation deals, and rental cars. There are offices in Connecticut, where Hafner lives, Massachusetts, where English lives, and California, where the two bought a competing firm in 2007, as well as local sites across Europe. Hafner and English phone or instant-message each other every day. “We can practically read each other’s minds,” says English. “If an issue comes up, I know how he’s going to weigh in and vice versa. We trust each other.” They also trust their engineers and encourage them to chime in with solutions to problems.

English, who has founded three other firms and sold one of them to Intuit several years ago, is an early riser who describes himself as having “more ideas than I can get done in a day.” After checking e-mail, practicing yoga, and taking his son to school, he arrives at work for a day that might start with meetings, including with nonprofits like Partners in Health or Village Health Works in which he plays an advisory role. “There are certain fundamental rights that I believe all people should have,” he says. “Kids shouldn’t be dying of drinking dirty water.” English likes to leave half his day free of scheduled appointments and spend the time walking around the office’s open-plan environment to “see what’s going on and work on product issues and design strategy.”

Acknowledging the company’s growing success, and mindful that it needed more sophisticated marketing to keep it in the forefront of travel customers’ minds, Kayak recently launched a national advertising campaign, which the cofounders took an active part in shaping. With a new logo and the tagline, “Search one and done,” Kayak.com hopes to make more people aware that, as their ad agency’s founder says, “it doesn’t make sense to start their travel search anywhere else.”