The Upstarts Quotes

“If you want to build a truly great company you have got to ride a really big wave. And you’ve got to be able to look at market waves and technology waves in a different way than other folks and see it happening sooner, know how to position yourself out there, prepare yourself, pick the right surfboard—in other words, bring the right management team in, build the right platform underneath you. Only then can you ride a truly great wave. At the end of the day, without that great wave, even if you are a great entrepreneur, you are not going to build a really great business.”
― Brad Stone, The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World

“Wow, you guys are like cockroaches,” Graham finally said. “You just won’t die.”16”
― Brad Stone, The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World

“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.”
― Brad Stone, The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World

“Chesky was moving slowly, but at the same time, he was frustrated that his imagined success wasn’t arriving quickly enough. “Every day I was working on it and thinking, Why isn’t it happening faster?” he told me.4 “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.”
― Brad Stone, The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World

“It’s about a crucial era during which old regimes fell, new leaders emerged, new social contracts were forged between strangers, the topography of cities changed, and the upstarts roamed the earth.”
― Brad Stone, The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World

“But then he offered this:
'The things that people are going to feel are still to come. The kind of impact this is going to have on our cities -ninety-five or ninety-eight percent of it is still yet to happen. What if I said there's still going to be no traffic in any major city in the U.S. in five years?”
― Brad Stone, The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World

“Nevertheless, Blecharczyk came through with a new version of a site on March 3, a week before the annual conference in Austin, Texas. The new slogan was “A friend, not a front desk.”
― Brad Stone, The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World

“If you want to build a truly great company you have got to ride a really big wave. And you’ve got to be able to look at market waves and technology waves in a different way than other folks and see it happening sooner, know how to position yourself out there, prepare yourself, pick the right surfboard—in other words, bring the right management team in, build the right platform underneath you. Only then can you ride a truly great wave.”
― Brad Stone, The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World

“Our cities are going to be given back to us. Our time is going to be given back to us. And there’s going to be a very, very different world in terms of how we experience our cities. We are just getting started.”
― Brad Stone, The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World

“Progress eventually finds a way, especially when the difference between what is being considered and what exists is so, so massive and obvious.”
― Brad Stone, The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World

“The true measure of an entrepreneur is how well he or she can identify new opportunities.”
― Brad Stone, The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World

“Moving cautiously and playing by the rules had proven to be a costly mistake.”
― Brad Stone, The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World

“Every company creates its own origin myth. It's a useful tool for expressing the company's values to employees and to the world and for simplifying and massaging history to give due credit to the people who made the most important contributions when it all started.”
― Brad Stone, The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World

“A few weeks later, Chesky decided that the founders of the struggling company should apply to the prestigious Y Combinator startup school, which invested seventeen thousand dollars in each startup, took a 7 percent ownership stake, and surrounded founders with mentors and technology luminaries during an intense three-month program. It was a last-ditch effort and Chesky actually missed the application deadline by a day. Michael Seibel, an alumnus of the program (and later its CEO), had to ask the organizers to let the company submit late. They got permission, and the co-founders were invited for an interview. Blecharczyk flew out to San Francisco and crashed on the living-room couch on Rausch Street, and the three co-founders gathered themselves for one last try.”
― Brad Stone, The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World