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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Brad Stone
Read between
January 3 - January 6, 2018
This idea was not necessarily novel (VRBO, HomeAway, Couchsurfing, and Craigslist did it first), but the elegance of the solution was unrivaled. Carefully selected photographs and reviews from previous transactions introduce the host and the guest to each other before they meet in person. Like Uber, cash is deleted from the equation; Airbnb collects the transaction fee from the guest when the lodging is booked and remits it to the host, minus its cut, after the stay is complete.
“He’s one of our outstanding young entrepreneurs who had an idea and acted on it.”
The companies’ stories are different in many ways but similar in a few crucial ones. Their founders’ original motives were not stated in high-minded terms, like Google’s (“Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”) or Facebook’s (“Make the world more open and connected”). Camp, Kalanick, and their friends wanted to ride around San Francisco in style. Chesky and his cohorts were looking for a way to make some extra cash when a conference came to town.
Both startups offered age-old ideas (share a vehicle, rent your home) with new twists and ended up fostering a remarkable degree of openness among people who had never previously met. In a previous decade, most of us would have stayed far away from someone’s private car or unlit home, scared by headlines about crime and by our mothers’ earnest warnings to avoid strangers. Airbnb and Uber didn’t spawn “the sharing economy,” “the on-demand economy,” or “the one-tap economy” (those labels never quite seemed to fit) so much as ush...
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The Early Years of Airbnb Every great startup starts as a side project that isn’t anybody’s main priority. AirBed & Breakfast was a way to pay our rent. It was a way to pay rent and buy us time and help us get to the big idea. — Brian Chesky
on September 22, 2007, with the World Design Congress coming to San Francisco and the city’s hotels either overbooked or overpriced, Gebbia sent Chesky the e-mail that would change their lives: Subject: subletter Brian, I thought of a way to make a few bucks — turning our place into a designer’s bed and breakfast — offering young designers who come into town a place to crash during the 4 day event, complete with wireless internet, a small desk space, sleeping mat, and breakfast each morning. Ha! — Joe.
McAdoo spoke about why being a great entrepreneur required the precision of a great surfer. If you want to build a truly great company you have got to ride a really big wave. And you’ve got to be able to look at market waves and technology waves in a different way than other folks and see it happening sooner, know how to position yourself out there, prepare yourself, pick the right surfboard — in other words, bring the right management team in, build the right platform underneath you. Only then can you ride a truly great wave. At the end of the day, without that great wave, even if you are a
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McAdoo and Graham were discussing that most essential characteristic of great entrepreneurs: mental toughness, the ability to overcome the hurdles and negativity that typically accompany something new. McAdoo and his partners had identified this kind of true grit as the most important attribute in the founders of their successful portfolio companies, like Google and PayPal.
When you open up that app and you get that experience of, like, I am living in the future, like I pushed a frickin’ button and a car showed up and now I’m a pimp — Garrett is the guy who invented that shit! Like, I just want to clap and hug him at the same time. — Travis Kalanick1
Now Uber had $1.3 million in the bank, a $5.3 million valuation, an office (small and crowded), and a product (buggy).
On his first day in the office, McKillen noted the table had piles of programming books in pristine condition and a well-worn Spanish/English dictionary. (The engineers had been trying to translate some of the instructions around the code written by Jose Uribe.) McKillen asked Conrad Whelan why the dictionary was there and later he would enjoy recalling Whelan’s response: “Well, Ryan, because the code is written in Spanish. Welcome to Uber.”
Everyone failed in the taxi industry. The fleet owners failed. The drivers failed. Riders spoke clearly. Some people chose to listen and some didn’t. I was part of it, and I accept it. — Thomas DePasquale, founder of Taxi Magic
If there’s a forefather of the crowded family of on-demand delivery startups that now jam the tech hubs of the United States, Asia, and Europe, it’s SeamlessWeb. Finger was among the first to see that the internet could do more than connect people with information and one another in a purely digital realm; it could also efficiently move physical things in the real world. He understood that if it worked for food, it could work for other things. And he drew up plans to take advantage.
Just as the search engine Alta Vista preceded Google, and Myspace dominated before Facebook, Taxi Magic would become the highest-profile precursor to Uber; the company was the first to seize, and squander, the opportunity to revolutionize the taxi industry.
As long as there is money in the bank, it’s never too late to change business models and seek more profitable pastures.
And he left behind his Honda Civic and commuted to the apartment by taking Uber, the suddenly fashionable black-car service that was sweeping San Francisco. The Airbnb employees marveled at the magic and simplicity of the Uber app, says Grandy, and it inspired the team when they developed the first Airbnb app for the iPhone in 2010.
Chesky was moving slowly, but at the same time, he was frustrated that his imagined success wasn’t arriving quickly enough. “Every day I was working on it and thinking, Why isn’t it happening faster?” he told me.4 “When you’re starting a company it never goes at the pace you want or the pace you expect. You imagine everything to be linear, ‘I’m going to do this, then this is going to happen and this is going to happen.’ You’re imagining steps and they’re progressive. You start, you build it, and you think everyone’s going to care. But no one cares, not even your friends.”
To understand the spark that finally ignited the Airbnb inferno, it’s imperative to explore the background of Nathan Blecharczyk, the tall, seemingly unflappable engineer of the group, the co-founder who always stayed behind while his partners traveled the world. Blecharczyk was twenty-four at this point but was already a technical wizard. He had coded the entire site himself, using what was then a new open-source programming language called Ruby on Rails. He devised a flexible, global payment system that allowed Airbnb to collect fees from guests and then remit them to hosts, minus the
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“Joe and I would have crazy dreams and visions,” says Chesky of his co-founder. “Nate would find a way, without compromising the vision, to...
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I’m better than I was. I’m more intense. I’m more awesome. The difference is, in the last [startup] I was afraid of failure. Now I’m not afraid anymore. Now I can just have fun and go and kill it. — Travis Kalanick1
“By the time we actually truly went out of business, I was probably sleeping fourteen hours a night,”
Chesky was astounded by what he saw inside a rehabbed factory in the city’s Mitte District: Row after row of employees, most in their early twenties, sitting shoulder to shoulder at desks in the sweltering heat. There were no fans; it was literally a sweatshop.
“You Americans innovate. Me and my army of ants, we go fast and build great operations.”
