Paul English, CTO and co-founder of Kayak, will talk  about what every company, small or large, should be thinking about when growing the team, recruiting and keeping top people and keeping employees happy and working working hard. 

Paul English is the cto/cofounder of Kayak.com. He writes mean code mostly in Powerpoint these days, although he still hacks his emacs lisp, and plays with perl/awk (yes, awk is still alive and well!) to help him analyze customer data. Paul's obsessed with customer feedback, and makes every Kayak employee talk, chat, twitter or email with customers every day. (He hates bad customer service so much that he launched the www.gethuman.com initiative to help consumers fight back against bad systems.)

Before Kayak, Paul cofounded a few companies you've never heard about. One of these (Boston Light Software -- a small business ecommerce platform) was sold to Intuit, where Paul became VP technology and led efforts on product strategy and innovation process, and also led tech recruiting efforts for the company.

Paul is an advisor to FanSnap, Roost, LinkedIn, Partners-In-Health and Village Health Works.

Before Kayak, Paul was briefly an EIR at Greylock, a cofounder/director of Intermute (an anti-spyware / anti-spam company where his brother Ed was CEO, and which was sold to Trend-Micro), the founder of the World Xiangqi League (a Pan-Asian online game community), the cofounder/chairman of Mancala, Inc (a "word-of-mouth" community which failed badly), SVP Engineering and Product Management at Interleaf, and also did contract programming for the US Air Force, operations research programming for Data General, programming for a medical device company, and even some video game development.