Airbnb’s Joe Gebbia: "Do Things That Don’t Scale"

I had one of those binders were you keep baseball cards and I had probably dozen and a half credit cards in each of these pages and he just max went out you go to the next one you max amount you go to the next one I don't totally recommend this as a way to fund a company but for us that was our answer to all the rejection that we had received there's a design conference coming to San Francisco and there's not a single place to stay in the city and I'm looking around the apartment seeing all the space in her living room thinking wait there's all this extra space what if we took an air bed out of the closet we blew it up on the floor and we hosted guests who needed a place to stay I call it Brian said Brian we're gonna throw air beds on the floor we're gonna host guests this weekend we wants just in time for South by Southwest and we had about 10 people list her place in Austin in a total of two reservations one of which was Brian so we were not met with success it did not take off like a rocket ship in fact I would call it a miserable failure at that point well we actually had 20 introductions to investors throughout Silicon Valley 10 of those people replied to our email five of them Meadows for coffee zero invested in Airbnb and talked about a tough time you've got some of the smartest people in the world you know they've picked some of the most well-known companies that we all love them these today from Google's and PayPal's and youtubes and here they are telling us that our idea is crazy that it's not going to scale that people aren't going to stay in people's homes around the world kind of the world thought we were crazy it was late one night in the kitchen Brian and I are trying to keep her spirits up and we're brainstorming crazy ideas like what if we provide a breakfast to go on with the air beds of air bed and breakfast it's the middle in the height of the political conventions and campaigns so we thought well let's make them politically themed we'll call one Obama owes the breakfast change will call the other cat McCain's maverick and every bite one thing led to the other we ended up making cereal boxes and selling them online for $40 a box waited in making twenty thousand dollars on breakfast cereal so little-known fact the Obama has not only got us to zero like that's something to be proud of if we got it to zero but we then got introduced to Paul Graham phone rings it's Paul Graham he's calling to tell us that we've been accepted to Y Combinator and so what we later found out is that the reason that Paulo decend wasn't because he thought her idea was amazing he actually thought it was kind of weird he let us in because he saw that with the breakfast cereal we could figure out how to do anything and that's how we got into Y Combinator it's our very first office hours with Paul Graham he's looking at Brian eight nine and he goes so where's your market and we kind of look at each other and really thinking ourselves we don't really have a market no one's using our service but there are some people in New York who are renting out their homes and Paul goes so your customers are in New York City and you're here in Mountain View go to New York City we pull up the twenty house and search results and we realize something that the photography the images of their listings are actually not very good so we kind of have this realization know we can solve that problem we know how to take a good photo but it's not scalable that's the thing is that up until this point we had tried to solve problems in a scalable way which I think I would call like some of the mythology Silicon Valley is that you have to solve problems in a scalable way that one line of code has to meet the needs of hundreds tens tens of thousands or hundred thousand maybe millions of people so Paul Graham comes along and basically gives us this message which was the single greatest piece of advice we ever got go meet your people do things that don't scale it'll teach you you'll learn from it so we fly to New York that weekend we rent a camera with the wide-angle lens and we go from door to door throughout Manhattan Brooklyn so here we are in the environment of our customers now watching them use our product in real time and we're seeing a lot of things that we didn't know were problems we got so close that we got to step into their shoes for a moment and see the world through their eyes and really see the pain points that they were feeling and that to me is like that's the basics of innovation you take a analyte and empathetic point of view for your customers you combine it with your own unique point of view of the world to create something new you know what happened because of this they started using the word love in the same sentence as Airbnb they started telling their neighbors their friends or family members their co-workers and so two things started to happen simultaneously the amount of choice started to go up and the quality of that choice went up as well and when a new host came to the site they said oh well I guess I need to have really nice photos to be in the part of this marketplace and we started to see the number of reservations go up I remember the first time I saw a treehouse at Airbnb it was in Vermont and this treehouse was built by parents for their kids many years ago their kids go off to college and they're thinking well let's just take this treehouse down because it's taking up space in our backyard and the kids are like no no there's this new website called Airbnb why don't you list it and rent it out to people who want to come to Vermont to see the leaves change color in the fall they put it on Airbnb and before they know it they have people from around the world coming to their treehouse over the course of a couple months they start to realize they're making enough money to actually pay their mortgage for their real house there's now six-month wait list for the tree house what's amazing is you when you create a platform to see what your community does with it and our community does proven that they're very creative where Airbnb is headed is directly related to where it all started we hosted our guests and got to provide hospitality to them right we got to care for them second thing that happened is they got to belong in San Francisco none of them had really ever visited the city before but because of our suggestions and recommendations they got to go from feeling like outsiders to feeling like insiders and the third thing that happened is we became economically empowered we were able to make enough money to make ends meet and save our apartment and those three principles are exactly what scale today hospitality belonging and economic empowerment for any entrepreneur out there like you can't take no for an answer you know we had really smart credible people telling us no and had we listened to them there might not be Airbnb today thank you action

Channel: Greylock

Views: 47,971

Rating: 4.9672132 out of 5

Keywords: airbnb, joe gebbia, entrepreneurship, greymatter, greylock partners

Id: 2hESOWxPrSU

Length: 7min 36sec (456 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 28 2015