The Airbnb Story Quotes

“The company has codified this as something it calls the “belong anywhere transformation journey,” which goes like this: When travelers leave their homes, they feel alone. They reach their Airbnb and they feel accepted and taken care of by their host. They then feel safe to be the same kind of person they are when they’re at home. And when that happens, they feel like freer, better, more complete versions of themselves, and their journey is complete.”
― Leigh Gallagher, The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions . . . and Created Plenty of Controversy

“Cornell University School of Hotel Administration,”
― Leigh Gallagher, The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions . . . and Created Plenty of Controversy

“Chesky introduced the concept in a cerebral, high-minded essay on Airbnb’s website: A long time ago, he wrote, cities used to be villages. But as mass production and industrialization came along, that personal feeling was replaced by “mass-produced and impersonal travel experiences,” and along the way, “people stopped trusting each other.” Airbnb, he wrote, would stand for something much bigger than travel; it would stand for community and relationships and using technology for the purpose of bringing people together. Airbnb would be the one place people could go to meet the “universal human yearning to belong.” The Bélo itself was carefully conceived to resemble a heart, a location pin, and the “A” in Airbnb. It was designed to be simple, so that anyone could draw it; rather than protect it with lawyers and trademarks, the company invited people to draw their own versions of the logo—which, it was announced, would stand for four things: people, places, love, and Airbnb.”
― Leigh Gallagher, The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions . . . and Created Plenty of Controversy

“Whatever form it takes, it’s something that’s different, real, and unique. It’s making travel excessively personal when it had become impersonal. “It’s anticommodity,” says Greylock’s Reid Hoffman. “It’s uniqueness. It’s humanization.”
― Leigh Gallagher, The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions . . . and Created Plenty of Controversy

“in the summer of 2016, pegged to the release of the movie Finding Dory, Pixar listed a night on a chic floating raft in the Great Barrier Reef designed to bring winners as close as possible to the natural habitat of Dory and Nemo.”
― Leigh Gallagher, The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions . . . and Created Plenty of Controversy

“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.”
― Leigh Gallagher, The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions . . . and Created Plenty of Controversy

“The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism.”
― Leigh Gallagher, The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions . . . and Created Plenty of Controversy

“Pessimists are usually right, but it’s the optimists who change the world.”
― Leigh Gallagher, The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions . . . and Created Plenty of Controversy

“At the end of the day, the reason why Airbnb is succeeding at the level that it is is not because of some magic potion or fairy dust that’s been put on some algorithm,” he told the U.S. Conference of Mayors in 2016. “It is because we’ve built a platform that allows people to interact with people and have a transformative experience.”
― Leigh Gallagher, The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions . . . and Created Plenty of Controversy

“a satirical film about a political strategist called Knife Fight. In 2014,”
― Leigh Gallagher, The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions . . . and Created Plenty of Controversy

“We always make a trade-off, and we’ll start to make different trade-offs with the sharing economy.”
― Leigh Gallagher, The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions . . . and Created Plenty of Controversy

“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. This is another element about Airbnb (and other short-term-rental services) that makes it uniquely different from other aspects of the so-called “sharing economy.” At its core, Airbnb involves the most intimate human interactions—visiting people in their homes, sleeping in their beds, using their bathrooms. (Even in the listings that are run by professionals, there is still the semblance of this one-to-one intimacy.) That is of course precisely what makes it polarizing and objectionable to so many people who can never imagine using it. But it’s also what makes it unique. This kind of “sharing”—this hyperpersonal opening up of the most intimate and safest aspect of one’s life to a stranger”
― Leigh Gallagher, The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions . . . and Created Plenty of Controversy

“Chesky read the book Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow. The book’s author was Chip Conley, the founder of the Joie de Vivre boutique hotel chain, which he started in San Francisco in 1987.”
― Leigh Gallagher, The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions . . . and Created Plenty of Controversy

“The founders knew this from the earliest days, when convincing people to list their spaces was one of their first struggles. But it wasn’t until late 2012, when Chesky read an issue of Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, the journal of the esteemed Cornell University School of Hotel Administration, that he started thinking more seriously about the actual experience the company was offering. He decided they needed to transform Airbnb more deeply from a tech company into a hospitality company.”
― Leigh Gallagher, The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions . . . and Created Plenty of Controversy

“But “belonging” in the Airbnb-rebrand context didn’t have to be about having tea and cookies with the person who lives in the space you rent. It was much broader: it meant venturing into neighborhoods that you might not otherwise be able to see, staying in neighborhoods and places as a traveler you wouldn’t normally be able to, bunking in someone else’s space, and having an experience that person “hosted” for you, regardless of whether you ever laid eyes on him or her.”
― Leigh Gallagher, The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions . . . and Created Plenty of Controversy

“Before, in the days when Chesky, Blecharczyk, and Gebbia were trying so desperately to get the idea off the ground, the focus was simply on surviving. “Before product/market fit, thinking long-term seemed preposterous,” Chesky later said. “When you’re dying, you’re not thinking, ‘What do I want to be when I grow up?’ You’re thinking, ‘How do I not die?”
― Leigh Gallagher, The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions . . . and Created Plenty of Controversy

“It seemed silly to let a perfectly good apartment sit empty while I traveled, when there were so many visitors to San Francisco in need of a place to stay, who wanted to experience a city as I preferred to: in a local’s home, outside the tourist bubble of a hotel.”
― Leigh Gallagher, The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions . . . and Created Plenty of Controversy

“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.”
― Leigh Gallagher, The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions . . . and Created Plenty of Controversy

“If you are successful, it will be the hardest thing you ever do,”
― Leigh Gallagher, The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions . . . and Created Plenty of Controversy

“Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow.”
― Leigh Gallagher, The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions . . . and Created Plenty of Controversy