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January 19 - February 3, 2018
Airbnb has a saying for this: it calls it “belonging anywhere,” the company’s mission, which it champions relentlessly. It says its platform enables a “transformative” experience called the “belong anywhere transformation journey.”
“There’s something I need to tell you,” he said. “We’re going to start a company one day, and they’re going to write a book about it.”
chagrin
“Like Craigslist and Couchsurfing.com, but Classier”
“network effect,”
umbrage
“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,”
‘imagineering’
“Technology-Enabled Blitzscaling.”)
Airbnb owners were missionaries, and Wimdu owners were mercenaries. Missionaries, he told him, usually win.
“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.
The Bélo itself was carefully conceived to resemble a heart, a location pin, and the “A” in Airbnb.
“I believe the better you know a place, the less you notice it,”
seniornomads.com
“Uber is transactional,” she said. “Airbnb is humanity.”
Early to bed, early to rise, and work like hell and organize. — CHRIS LEHANE
dovetailed
“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,”
“What you can’t solve for,” he says, “is if you built something nobody wants.”
Oasis, a business that would bring the elements of a boutique hotel to the world of short-term apartment rentals.
Sonder,
Flatbook, which bills itself as a “hometel,” a short-term rental with the touches of a hotel.
Common, a model of flexible, shared housing with outposts primarily in Brooklyn;
Arlo, a new hotel brand that calls itself “homebase for urban explorers.”
George Bernard Shaw said, ‘Success does not consist in never making mistakes, but in never making the same one a second time.’”
hypergrowth, that vertical phase in the middle of the stick part of the hockey-stick growth chart when revenues essentially double, or come close to it,
near-pathological curiosity.
He calls his practice “going to the source”: instead of talking to ten people about a particular topic and then synthesizing all their advice, he reasons, spend half of your time learning who the definitive source is, identifying the one person who can tell you more about that one thing than anyone else — and then go only to that person. “If you pick the right source, you can fast-forward,” he says.
Chesky started seeking out sources for specific areas of study: Apple’s Jony Ive on design, LinkedIn’s Jeff Weiner and Disney’s Bob Iger on management, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg on product, and Sheryl Sandberg on international expansion and on the importance of empowering women leaders.
‘infinite learner’
‘Pessimists are usually right, but it’s the optimists who change the world.’”
Deb and Bob Chesky
David Kelley, the founder of the design firm IDEO,
“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.
In 2016 the company launched Samara, an in-house design studio, overseen by Gebbia, that explores large-scale concepts, including the future of shared housing and new models for architecture and tourism that could help create social change.
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator personality test
“Tier 1” tech company — a company with a multi-hundred-billion-dollar market value, like Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon
“Tier 2” company, those companies with a valuarion of $10 billion to $80 billion, which Airbnb is now.
