A Truck Full of Money

A Truck Full of Money, One Man's Quest to Recover from Great Success, Tracy Kidder, Random House 2016

"...

I'm tense and nervous and I can't relax

I can't sleep cause my bed's on fire

Don't touch me I'm a real live wire."

Talking Heads, "Psycho Killer" 1978

According to Tracy Kidder, author of the historic chart-buster Soul of A New Machine (pub date 1981 just three years after The Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer"), Paul English, creator of billion-dollar web-based travel app Kayak, Blade, Lola, etc etc, along with dozens if not hundreds of equally powerful and catchy new apps,  said at one point during an manic episode that his legs were on fire. Forget the legs, it's his brain, a curiously revealed 24/7 wetware organ that has no on/off switches; neither does it appear to have, according to Kidder, any brake pedals.  With English, a Boston Latin alum who loved to play in the jazz band, from his first exposure to IBM punch cards that he used to jimmy attendance records at school, to his philanthropic funding of Boston's Pine St Inn and various Haitian charities, it's always on.  Except when it isn't.

Sleep did not come easy for English.  With a brain running 200 mph, who knows which of the dozens of images and ideas floating across his closed eyes would lead to the next Boston Light Software or the next Kayak?  Or the next Partners in Health (the Haitian charity).  Or the next few very precious MIT entrepreneurs? He fostered all of them, and continues today well into his sixth decade to look for new life where there is none. 

Everything is timing in tech.  What English and his buddies Billo and Schwenk achieved running full speed came at the right time - not too early and not too late - to a consumer market that was ready for mobile.  However, English's Trio carried with them in depth programming expertise and experience; no one who started coding in the age of Basic Assembler Language and FORTRAN could not be fascinated and quickly expert at new apps and languages such as C++ and now Python.  They built the first building blocks, and some 25 years later, they know how to move the blocks around, using and reusing just the right ones to integrate complex disparate systems, making them usable on very small screens.  

Born and raised in Massachusetts, educated at UMass Boston, now a professor at MIT, English is great proof of the hope we can take from the right kind of education, from adversity overcome, and from freedom and money.  Money helps.  

Patricia E. Moody

FORTUNE magazine  "Pioneering Woman in Mfg" 

IndustryWeek IdeaXchange Xpert

A Mill Girl at Blue Heron Journal, on-line resource for business thought-leaders and decision-makers, https://sites.google.com/site/blueheronjournal/, tricia@patriciaemoody.com, patriciaemoody@gmail.com, pemoody@aol.com 

978 526-7348 cell 978 578-5200