and complete failures on the site, and I make fun of myself in company meetings
when I talk about those. Then I look at each group and say, “Hey, I’m
hoping every one of you—in addition to all the successful ideas you’ll come up
with—aren’t afraid to come up with some resounding failures.” You just want
the failure to cost you a couple of weeks, a month or two—it depends on the
industry—a small, fixed cost. It’s the old adage: if we’re not failing at something
on a regular basis, we’re just not trying hard enough.
Livingston: Obviously your story ended wonderfully. You were acquired for
around $200 million?
Kaufer: Yeah. I don’t think of the story ending that way, but that’s how the third
chapter ended.
Livingston: Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. But most startups do want to have
a liquidity event. Would you have done anything differently before that, to get
there?
Kaufer: No. With TripAdvisor, it all really did work out well. Certainly one of
the keys to our success was being fanatical on the hiring side of things. I was
almost going to answer, “Well, I would have liked to have hired more top-notch
folks throughout the company earlier.” Because I’m still in that position now—
I’m still struggling to fill positions with the types of people that we want to hire.
It’s not something that we do very efficiently here. It takes us a long time to fill
a req.
When we do fill a req, we have a fantastic success rate. Many observers and
people that have done due diligence on TripAdvisor over the years have commented
on the caliber of individuals here. But if I ever start another company
again, I’d love to have as a founding or very early team member someone who
was a trusted recruiter. Because the difference in almost any position between
someone who does a good job and someone who does a great job might be
20 percent more in salary, but it’s 100 or 200 percent more in throughput. If you
Stephen Kaufer 373
can have enough people in the company that work twice as efficiently as the
person sitting next to them, because they just know what to do, what not to
spend time on . . . I mean everyone, they’re more or less all working the same
number of hours. It’s rarely a work ethic issue. It’s just, hey, you give this engineer
a task, and it’s just done right in half the time as the next person. That it’s
done right, that’s the first important part; it’s done quick; and there’s just less
communication if the teams are smaller, because everyone’s getting twice as
much done. Now how the heck do you fill a company with people like that in

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• and complete failures