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February 22 - March 2, 2023
These elements were particularly powerful for millennials, who have exhibited a growing dissatisfaction with big brands and a greater sense of adventure, and who grew up so accustomed to digital-only interactions that venturing into the home of someone they’d connected with online wasn’t much of a stretch.
But this newfound opportunity to stay in other people’s homes also fed a greater need—one for an experience that offered more of a human connection.
(Many people suggest that Airbnb is not a technology company, since it traffics in homes and spaces, but it has one of the most sophisticated back-end engineering infrastructures in Silicon Valley.)
The renowned institution had filled him with a spirit of change-the-world idealism: almost any problem in the world could be solved by creative design, he was told;
They told him the story behind the Obama O’s. Graham sat back and listened. “Wow,” he mused. “You guys are like cockroaches. You just won’t die.”
Graham would later tell Chesky it was the cereal that clinched it. “If you can convince people to pay forty dollars for a four-dollar box of cereal, you can probably convince people to sleep in other people’s airbeds,” he said.
“profitable” was defined by Graham as “Ramen profitable”—raising enough for the entrepreneurs to afford to feed themselves, even if on cheap store-bought noodle mixes.
it’s much, much better to have one hundred users who love you than one million users who “sort of like you.”
they remove “airbed” from the name to broaden its market potential. They bought the domain Airbandb, but it looked too much like “AirBand,” so they chose “Airbnb” instead.
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.
They had the product; now they needed to build the company that would make that product.
You can look at Airbnb’s size and scale in a number of ways. The easiest is those 140 million “guest arrivals” since its inception. Its 3 million active listings—80 percent of which are outside North America—makes Airbnb the largest provider of accommodations in the world, bigger than any hotel chain.
The company operates in 191 countries—everywhere but Iran, Syria, and North Korea, as it likes to point out—and in 34,000 cities.
the founders wanted their users to never be more than three clicks away from a booking.
a “unicorn,” a private company worth at least $1 billion—though
the best revenge was to force them to actually run the giant company they’d just built.
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,”
Much in the same way we now want homespun, small-batch artisanal everything—from bread to pickles to cocktail ice—many travelers, and especially millennial travelers, want the same kind of imperfect authenticity from their travel experiences.
It’s about, as Airbnb would later promote, experiencing a place like a local rather than as a tourist.
The average age of a guest is thirty-five; a third are over the age of forty. The average age of a host is forty-three, but those over sixty are the company’s fastest-growing host demographic.
The company’s most hardcore users are a small subgroup of people who choose to live full-time on Airbnb rentals, nomadic globetrotters who migrate from one listing to another.
The scale of the Airbnb platform has grown so large that the fact that more things haven’t gone wrong may show that perhaps that trust is deserved.
the proliferation of units dedicated solely to renting out on Airbnb—so-called illegal hotels—removes housing from a market that is already in a serious affordable-housing crisis, driving prices up further for everyone.
the issue of affordable housing: that Airbnb removes units from the market, driving up prices for everyone else.
“It’s like they’re saying, ‘I’m not going to participate in the world in 2015,’” he told the Los Angeles Times. “You can either deny this exists, or figure out how to make it safe.”
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;
Today, the Priceline Group is bigger in market value than Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt combined.
Hotels are seizing on the same consumer shifts that propelled Airbnb and are now marketing themselves as anything but standardized and routine.
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.
‘Success does not consist in never making mistakes, but in never making the same one a second time.’”
Chesky approached former CIA director George Tenet, not for trust and safety but to talk about culture (“How do you get people to feel committed in a place where everyone’s a spy?” he reasons).
He believes that if more people in the world were hosts, “the world would be an inherently more hospitable and understanding place.”
“Maybe the people that my childhood taught me to label as strangers were actually friends waiting to be discovered,”
‘Pessimists are usually right, but it’s the optimists who change the world.’”
He then introduced a theory he’d learned. Called “elephants, dead fish, and vomit,” it was a set of tools designed to encourage difficult conversations: An “elephant,” he explained, is a big truth everyone knows but doesn’t talk about; a “dead fish” is a personal grievance that needs to be aired out, usually with an apology, or it risks getting worse (“I had quite a few dead fish to deal with,” he told the audience); and “vomit” sessions were time put aside for people to get things off their chest without interruption and without risk of judgment.
“I can be the full-fat version of myself here, not the skim-milk version.”
In 2016, the company ranked number 1 on Glassdoor’s Employee’s Choice Awards, beating out Google, Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce, and others.
Airbnb is too white.
Many (including the company’s founders) say a lack of diversity in the company—starting with its founders, three white men—is one reason that it failed to anticipate that its platform might enable such behavior.
According to Airbnb’s most recent diversity report, black employees are 2.9 percent of the total, Hispanic or Latino employees 6.5 percent, and men 57 percent. Those numbers put Airbnb ahead of Facebook, which is 2 percent black, 4 percent Hispanic, and 67 percent male; and Google, which is 2 percent black, 3 percent Hispanic, and 69 percent male.
Can true disruptions be planned and strategized, or are they more powerful when they’re accidental?
the survival of a tech company depends on a willingness to branch into new categories; and the CEO has to have the discipline to put the new venture ahead of the existing business and to take the new project on personally.
When the founders started Airbnb, they had no assumption that it would become so big or so polarizing and so detested.
as Sebastian Junger points out in his book Tribe, we are the first modern society in human history where people live alone in apartments and where children have their own bedrooms.
They have all joined the elite group of billionaires who have signed the Giving Pledge, the campaign created by Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates to encourage the überwealthy to commit to giving away the majority of their wealth in their lifetimes.
even the fork was once considered the “tool of the devil.”
