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January 21 - February 4, 2019
But Airbnb tapped into something greater than low prices and an abundance of available inventory. It offered an experience that was special and different.
“One of the signature elements of the sharing economy is that the ideas themselves are not new,” says Arun Sundararajan,
The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism.
What is new, though, and what Airbnb specifically has done, is to toss aside the barriers and build an easy, friendly, accessibl...
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“Make something people want,” originally attributed to Paul Buchheit,
YC takes on more than a hundred companies each season,
First, he asked them how many users they had,
much better to have one hundred users who love you than one million users who “sort of like you.”
Next, he asked them about these users.
the most successful companies always end up being the ones that participated most eagerly.
“The biggest enemy of a start-up is your own confidence and your own resolve.
“If you are successful, it will be the hardest thing you ever do,”
“You have to understand the number of people you talk to about doing a business versus the number of people who actually did it,”
“We focused too much on what they were doing at the time and not enough on what they could do, would do, and did do.”
It’s like jumping off a cliff and assembling the airplane on the way down. —BRIAN CHESKY, quoting Reid Hoffman, partner, Greylock Partners
“product/market fit,” a holy grail, proof-of-life milestone that a start-up hits when its concept has both found a good market—one with lots of real, potential customers—and demonstrated that it has created a product that can satisfy that market.
Product/market fit is a key first achievement; without it, there is no company.
Chesky had read several books about corporate culture and felt that he and his colleagues needed to be careful about whom they would bring in.
think hiring your first engineer is like bringing in DNA to your company,”
getting the first hire right really mattered.
One thing the founders noticed was that all the companies they admired had a strong mission and a set of defined “core values,” a somewhat overused term for the general principles that guide an organization’s internal conduct as well as its relationship with its customers, shareholders, and other stakeholders. Core values are a bit of a “thing” in Silicon Valley. But they are seen by organizational-behavior experts as being critical in helping a company define the kind of people it wants to bring in, and they are especially helpful when shaped during a company’s formative days.
For travelers, fees range from 6 percent to 12 percent; the higher the subtotal, the lower the fee. Hosts pay a 3 percent booking fee to cover the costs of payment transfer.
Anytime Airbnb enters into a new market, it has to grow both sides, but the supply, or host side, is inevitably harder to grow. This is why almost all of the fee structure lies on the guest side. The 3 percent host-booking fee basically covers payment processing only; if anything, Airbnb subsidizes hosts with not just the fee but also its free-professional-photography policy and many other forms of coddling, from mailing out free mugs to featuring stories about some of the hosts on its website to flying certain hosts to its occasional launch events and annual conventions.
“Product” is a vague and all-encompassing term in the tech world for everything after the idea: it’s the actual website or app; the way it looks, the way it works, the things it can do, the engineering that powers it, and the way you use it and interact with it (the “user experience”).
And, based on the famous three-click rule from Steve Jobs, a design hero of Chesky and Gebbia’s—when Jobs conceived the iPod, he wanted it to never be more than just three clicks away from a song—the founders wanted their users to never be more than three clicks away from a booking.
To them, design was not just about an object, or in their case a website; it was about how something worked—from the product to the interface to the experience.
He realized he needed to stop managing for the outcome and manage instead in accordance with his and the company’s values. He felt he needed to apologize, and in a big way.
Chesky’s primary takeaway from this experience: stop making decisions by consensus. “A consensus decision in a moment of crisis is very often going to be the middle of the road, and they’re usually the worst decisions,” he says. “Usually in a crisis you have to go left or right.” From then on, “add a zero” became a euphemism for taking one’s thinking to the next level. He would later call the experience a “rebirth” for the company.
Uber is transactional; Airbnb is humanity. —ELISA SCHREIBER, Greylock Partners
The opportunity to show some humanity or to receive some expression of humanity from others, even if you never experience that person outside a few messages, some fluffed towels, and a welcome note, has become rare in our disconnected world.
Our product is real life. —BRIAN CHESKY
“The more human interaction, the closer to our mission,” Chesky says.
consumers want it. You don’t get the kind of growth Airbnb has seen without striking some kind of deep chord in the consuming public.
It was a culmination of forces that were more powerful than that: an epic recession that left people with a much greater incentive to travel cheaply or to seize upon the opportunity to turn their homes into something monetizable; a general sense of fatigue with a hospitality industry that had become overpriced and overcommodified; a wave of new millennial values and attitudes that made the idea of a form of travel that was quirkier, more eclectic, more original, and more authentic not just acceptable but a way of life; and declining trust in government, especially among the middle class, and
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when eBay was gaining ground, it faced fierce resistance from traditional retailers; one of its opponents tried to pass a law requiring that users have an auctioneer’s license to sell on the platform.
“Success almost always results in legitimacy,” says Airbnb board member Jeff Jordan.
the peer-to-peer music-sharing service Napster was shut down over copyright-infringement issues, though streaming music would later become standard and the industry figured out a way to charge for it.)
George Bernard Shaw: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the environment. The unreasonable man adapts the environment to him. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
Victor Hugo. “You cannot kill an idea whose time has come,”
The first Holiday Inn opened a year later, in 1952, outside Memphis on one of the main highways to Nashville,
By 1972, Holiday Inn had 1,400 locations worldwide and had landed on the cover of Time magazine as “The World’s Innkeeper.”
Once a privilege of the wealthy, travel had been cracked open and democratized.
Wilson, Marriott, Hilton, and a handful of others were the hospitality industry’s first disrupters.
“over time, the establishment embraces innovations that represent a long-term trend.”
The younger generation, he says, has grown up without the fears and biases that he had—and has known only a world with Airbnb in it. Young people are “Airbnb native” in the same way they are “digital native”; for many in this group, staying in a chain hotel room is as foreign as talking on a landline, walking into a bank branch, or watching a television show at the actual time it airs. “Airbnb educated an entire generation,” the executive says.
“Celebrated author and playwright George Bernard Shaw said, ‘Success does not consist in never making mistakes, but in never making the same one a second time.’”
During his fireside chat with Sarah Lacy back in 2013, Chesky laid out three reasons people stay in hotels: a frictionless booking experience, knowing what they’re going to get, and services.
“There’s this great quote from Gandhi,” they begin. “‘First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you—and then you win.’”
Design is part of what makes him tick, but he basically was trained to run a military campaign. —MARC ANDREESSEN, cofounder, Andreessen Horowitz
His solution to acquire the rest of the tools he’d need was to basically hack leadership by seeking out help from a series of expert mentors.
