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“How I Built This” Podcast Notes from Kayak’s founder Paul English
And how pro sports taught me to build startup skills
I listened to “How I Built This” featuring Guy Raz on NPR with Kayak founder Paul English.
It got me thinking about my journey into the pro sports world, how my confidence grew through my deliberate practice of non-attachment, self-awareness, skill-building, and learning through experiments.
I think this sports skill-building process relates to the startup world because it’s not always how you feel, it’s how you perform in the daily process that creates value. I’d like to say I wasn’t ever a truly confident basketball player, especially as a pro. And Paul English wasn’t all that confident either, and yet, look at what he did with Kayak (Kayak.com was sold for over a billion dollars).
There are similarities between his love for the startup process and my love for developing in the basketball process. Even as I started moving up the ranks of high school basketball, got a scholarship to play at Kent State, and signed my first professional basketball contract, I realized the process is greater than the feeling of confidence.
