A Truck Full of Money

"A perfectly executed, exquisitely reported parable of the Internet age and the wild, mad adventure that is start-up culture."-Charles Duhigg

Fortune, mania, genius, philanthropy-the bestselling author of Mountains Beyond Mountains gives us the inspiring story of Paul English, the founder of Kayak.com and Lola.

Tracy Kidder, the "master of the nonfiction narrative" (The Baltimore Sun) and author of the bestselling classic The Soul of a New Machine, now tells the story of Paul English, a kinetic and unconventional inventor and entrepreneur, who as a boy rebelled against authority. Growing up in working-class Boston, English discovers a medium for his talents the first time he sees a computer. As a young man, despite suffering from what would eventually be diagnosed as bipolar disorder, he begins his pilgrim's journey through the ups and downs in the brave new world of computers. Relating to the Internet as if it's an extension of his own mind, he discovers that he has a talent for conceiving innovative enterprises and building teams that can develop them, becoming "a Pied Piper" of geeks. His innovative management style, success, and innate sense of fair play inspire intense loyalty. Early on, one colleague observes: "Someday this boy's going to get hit by a truck full of money, and I'm going to be standing beside him." Yet when English does indeed make a fortune, when the travel website Kayak is sold for almost two billion dollars-the first thing he thinks about is how to give the money away: "What else would you do with it?" The second thing he thinks is, What's next?

With the power of a consummate storyteller, Tracy Kidder casts a fresh, critical, and often humorous eye on the way new ideas and new money are reshaping our culture and the world. A Truck Full of Money is a mesmerizing portrait of an irresistibly endearing man who is indefatigable, original, and as unpredictable as America itself.

Praise for A Truck Full of Money

"Kidder's prose glides with a figure skater's ease, but without the glam. His is a seemingly artless art, like John McPhee's, that conceals itself in sentences that are necessary, economical, and unpretentious."-The Boston Globe

"Kidder's portrayal of living with manic depression is as nuanced and intimate as a reader might ever expect to get. . . . You can't help admiring Mr. English and cheering for him."-The New York Times

1

The engineering office of the Kayak Software Corporation was murmurous. The collapsible walls that divided two of the conference rooms had just been moved aside, opening a theater barely large enough to hold the voices and the hundred bodies crowding in. Paul English stood behind a table, facing them.

He was tall, about six foot two, and no longer thin, though he didn't look fat, just big. He had a prominent jaw and a large face that in repose sometimes made one think of raptors, beaked with staring eyes. He still had a boyish quality as well, along with all his hair-dark with hints of Irish red, parted in the middle and curving slightly upward to either side, like water rising from a fountain. It was November 2012. It had been more than thirty years since Paul had taken Catholic Communion, and more than twenty since his last fistfight. The skinny kid with a hot temper and an attitude now practiced meditation. Traces of a Boston working-class accent still surfaced now and then-"cahn't" for "can't," drawr" for "draw," "remembah." And he was still at risk for dropping what his assistant called "f-bombs" in polite company. But these were like the fragments of a memory, buried under decades of experience and the transformations of success.

Paul had joined the world of software engineering some thirty years before, at a time when computers and software programs were becoming pervasive-an underlying part of everything, it seemed, and the source of a great deal of new commerce. It was the era that saw the rise of the personal computer, the Internet, the World Wide Web, the smartphone. An era with its own American success story, the story of the software entrepreneur, which begins in a garage instead of a log cabin. Capitalism had long depended on people with the ambition and daring-not to say greed and recklessness-to start their own companies. But lately, entrepreneurship had become a freshly exalted pursuit. It was a church, and Paul was now one of its bishops.

He was forty-nine. The crowd standing before him in the conference room was on average decades younger. Like most of them, he had been a computer programmer and by his own account uncomfortable in many social settings-or, as he put it, "shy." One engineer out there in the crowd remembered knowing Paul when they were both much younger, then seeing him again after losing touch for several years. "He seemed different," the engineer said. "He looked different, less nerdy. He seemed more cool."

Paul had worked at creating that kind of impression. At various times over the past ten years, for instance, he had asked fashion-conscious women friends to advise him on his wardrobe. He didn't feel that he had shed all his "shyness," but in this setting, anyway, he was a paragon of savoir faire. He had natural assets-his size, his prominent jaw, his hair. And here, of course, he was the boss.

When Paul was fired up, he spoke hyperbolically and very fast, dropping the g's at the ends of words, eliding phrases so that they sounded like one word. But today his performance was muted. When the voices in the room had quieted, he said, in an offhand tone, which seemed strangely at odds with the message: "So I have a big announcement about the company that I want to tell you. We've actually agreed to merge with Priceline."

The crowd turned into doves. "Ooooo," they said.

Priceline was a large holding company of online travel agencies, and Kayak was a small and unusual but very profitable travel site. Until recently it had done no booking. Rather, it was a comprehensive search engine for travel, often described as "a Google" for finding flights and hotels and rental cars.

Paul and a young businessman named Steve Hafner had founded Kayak nine years ago, in 2004. Since then, many companies had offered to buy them out. But, Paul told the room, Priceline's offer was the only one with the right ingredients. First of all, the purchase pri