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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Brad Stone
Read between
February 9 - February 21, 2018
Early in Airbnb’s history, he said, “It felt like the world was against us and everyone was laughing at us.”
“On the East Coast you give money to charity,” Seibel says. “On the West Coast in the startup world, if you want to give back, you help young founders. This is a game where karma matters.”
“I woke up every morning with my heart pounding,” he says. “I would convince myself over the course of the day that everything was going to be okay and I would go to bed feeling good. And I’d wake up every morning with my heart pounding, Groundhog Day, asking, ‘How did I get into this situation? What did I do to myself?’”
Silicon Valley’s startup scientists have a name for this phase in a company’s gestation; they call it the Trough of Sorrow, when the novelty of a new business idea wears off and the founders are left trying to jump-start an actual business.
Cockroach was Graham’s word for an unkillable startup that could weather any challenge, and it was the highest possible compliment in his startup lexicon.
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.
David Cohen, co-founder of the Colorado-based startup school Techstars, got a chance to invest only because of a geographic accident.
“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.
“We were bringing a knife to a gunfight,”
“We are living in an era of robber barons. If you have enough money and can make the right phone call, you can disregard whatever rules are in place and then use that as a way of getting PR. And you can win.”
It wasn’t bad timing, stubbornness, or chronic niceness that doomed it, but something just as deadly in the cutthroat world of business: idealism.
“You want to back entrepreneurs who, even when the chips are down and things aren’t working and everyone says this isn’t meant to be, have so much love for the idea and so much passion that they just persevere,”
“Startups are very romanticized and most people are completely clueless about how you just have to will it into existence.”
Absolutely true.
As long as there is money in the bank, it’s never too late to change business models and seek more profitable pastures.
“It’s better to have a hundred people that love you than a million people that sort of like you,”
“Don’t worry about competitors; startups usually die of suicide, not homicide.”
“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,”
“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.”
“One of the lessons you learned is you have to be very close, provide constant management and guidance to the people you’re working with,”
“You can make lots of little type one mistakes all day long,” he says. “They are not fatal. This was a type two mistake, which is the one mistake you can’t afford to make. Entire funds are made often on one deal. If you pass on it, you are not doing your job as a venture guy.”
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.
“The drivers hate you because their wife doesn’t love them and their children are ugly and it’s all your fault. The taxi-fleet managers don’t like you because they aren’t making any money. And any regulation is too much regulation.”
“Lukas, everyone is going to give you advice,” Kalanick told him. “Ask for the story behind the advice. The story is always more interesting.”
The Peacetime CEO does not resemble the Wartime CEO.
“I think I’ve got like twenty thousand years of jail time ahead of me,”
“The time for the blitzkrieg must be chosen wisely, so each country tells me with blood when it is time… Now it is time to either decide we will die to win or to give up… i do not accept surprises. I want this planned confirmed by all three of you: you must sign it with your blood.”
“You among the founding team are the only one with the intuitive sense of what this needs to look like and the drive and passion to be able to lead it,” McAdoo told him. “So, yes, let’s hire Oliver Jung, and, yes, we have to bring in senior people. But you will spend a lot of time on airplanes learning how to build and run a large-scale global organization. Are you up for that challenge?”
how in the hell could a billion-dollar company not have its shit together,”
“We viewed ourselves as a product and technology company, and customer support didn’t feel like product and tech,”
The company would introduce a twenty-four-hour customer-service hotline, double the size of its customer-support staff, and form an in-house trust and safety department, separate from customer service, that focused on fighting fraud and addressing poor experiences on the service. The startup also began working on ways to verify users’ identities; for example, by making it clearer when customers had manually confirmed their phone numbers or connected their Facebook accounts to Airbnb.
“Only question how it can be done.”
It was pure gumption—a moment that demonstrates the difference between investors and one of the greatest entrepreneurs in the world. We could see all the reasons not to make that move and Travis just knew it was going to work anyway.”
“You can’t say out loud, ‘Fucking get over it,’ you have to be like, ‘We are working on it, good feedback, we’ll improve the app,’”
With venture capital in the bank and a host of potential rivals suddenly looming on his radar, Kalanick was ready to hit the accelerator. “I was waiting for Travis to say slow down,” says Geidt, “but that never happened.”
“We haven’t built our product around a market, we’ve built an experience around a customer desire,”
“When you tell us how to do business, and you tell us we can’t charge lower fares, offer a high-quality service at the best possible price, you are fighting with us,” Kalanick replied.
Anything you can predict, I expect you to handle.
Uber’s executives looked down from their perch and, seeing the historic opportunities before them, tried to conquer the world. The world looked up
Travis’s Law, which dictated that politicians accountable to the people could be pressured to accommodate any service that was markedly better than the alternative.
“Thuan, if we have a system breakdown, I’m going to have an aneurysm and my death will be on your hands,”
the praise came with a new challenge. “From here on out, anything you can predict, I expect you to handle.”
Uber had discovered what startup gurus like to call the virtuous circle, the links between various parts of its business. Lower prices led to more customers and more frequent usage, which led to a larger supply of cars and busier drivers, which enabled Uber to further cut prices and put more pressure on competitors.
“When we started testing lower price points, that’s when it was really ‘Oh my God.’ The price elasticity was impressive.”
Chief among those was his furious competitive streak, his drive to win not only in Wii Tennis but in business and to rub out his rivals in the process.
You cannot kill an idea whose time has come. And our time has come.
“So there’s a couple of things you need to do. The first thing you need to do is grow really, really fast. You either want to be below the radar or big enough that you are an institution. The worst is being somewhere in between. All your opposition knows about you but you are not a big enough community that people will listen to you yet.
“You have to get to what I guess I’d call escape velocity. If a rocket takes off, there’s a bumpy ride before you get to orbit, and then there’s a little bit more stillness.
The only real solution is to meet the people that hate you. There’s an old saying that it’s hard to hate up close. I have found that. It’s really hard to hate somebody when they are standing right in front of you.”
“This is where true entrepreneurs show up,” says Emil Michael. “We thought, What’s the worst that could happen? We’re not an incumbent, so let’s take the bet.”
