news Kayak.com sold for only $30,000 in 2004

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I had left Intuit and was trying to figure out what to do next. One of my former advisors, Larry Bohn, invited me to General Catalyst to look at a company they were evaluating. This was at the end of 2003.

Steve pitched me the idea. It was very simple. A search engine for travel. Steve told me that 70% of people on Orbitz left the Orbitz website when they found what they wanted, and booked directly with the airline or hotel. So he wanted to make a new website which worked exactly like this.

We ended up with five name finalists - lola, kayak (2nd choice), rice (simple and ubiquitous), cake (who doesn't love cake), and hive (probably a dumb name). We tried to buy the domain lola.com but it was too expensive, so we settled with our second choice, Kayak.com. It cost us $30k in 2004...

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Kayak is one of the world’s most successful brands related to travel. It was started in 2004 as Kayak Software Corporation by founders Steve Hafner, Paul English, and Terry Jones, with the goal of building a travel search engine that compares prices across airlines, hotels, and car rental sites.

According to Paul English, co-founder of Kayak, they paid $30,000 dollars for the domain Kayak.com...

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