In the parlance of the Valley, this kind of activity did not ‘scale.’ It was a wildly inefficient use of their time. But it helped the founders tune in to the needs of their earliest users and to recognize that large, rich, colorful photos of homes and good profile pictures of the hosts would make the experience on the site more compelling. ‘Paul was the first person to give us permission to say, It’s okay to think about things that may not scale, to break away from the mythology of Silicon Valley,’ Gebbia says. ‘We could actually think creatively around how to grow the business.’
