AirBnb 6 Golden Rules via Brian Chesky

2009 we started hiring people April 2009 we took our first venture round from Sequoia Capital at that time we had no idea if more than a thousand people would ever use this but we had this idea that maybe we'd solve this problem I remember during a program I was in Y Combinator I did advise or Paul Graham he had this mantra that's really taught me about how to run a business he said make something people want and the best way to make something people want is to find 100 customers that love you by the way that's really hard to find a hundred people that actually love you most people don't have a hundred people to actually love them that's really hard and you said it used to say was it better to have a hundred people love you than a million people that's sort of like you it's kind of like oh well you can build us well of love or you can build us really shallow pool this utility people kind of care about kind of don't if you have a million people that kind of are apathetic about you it's going to be really hard to get them to care but it's actually not hard to find a hundred people and have them really love you at the company Joe and I in the 2009 we used to go door-to-door in New York City meeting all these hosts these people renting homes on our apartment we even offered free professional photography we photograph all the homes for free except we had no money so Joe and I were the free professional photographers I get a camera from my friend bring on the plane I'd go and I'd go door-to-door staying in people's homes when you buy an iPhone Steve Jobs never came it's up in your couch but I did that was my user existence strategy I just stayed never in Tom's gave him reviews then our friends they gave reviews and they're right in 2010 I literally lived on the website you know the best way to make a product that people love is and make a product for yourself we have a saying at Airbnb the best marketing is investing in the user experience and then your users will mark it for you you know RISD itit teacher used to say advertising is the price you pay for being unoriginal I don't know if I believe that but I will tell you that you can build something we always can build something that people love so much that they will tell everyone else they know about it and what it really means is that we want to hire people that are here for our mission we don't want people here because they think we've got a great valuation they like our office design they need a job or they think it's hot we want people to be here for the one thing that will never change and that's our mission and just to tell you a quick story about our mission you know Airbnb you know a lot of people describe it as a way to book a room or book a house and you travel around the world and that's what we do but that's not at all why we do it and they answer the question of like what what our mission is I'll just tell you a quick story and this I think describes it in early 2012 I met a host named Sebastian so we do these meetups around the world where you meet with hosts and I meet this host named Sebastian he's probably like late 50s to live in North London and Sebastian look to me says Brian there's this word you never use in your website and I said what's that word he said that word is friendship I would love to tell you the story about friendship I said okay tell me the story about friendship he said six months ago the Rowan riots broke out outside my home and I was very scared and the next day my mom called me to make sure I was okay he said yeah mom I'm okay and she goes what about the house and he says well yeah the house is okay as well he said here's the interesting thing between the time the riots broke out the time my mom called me was a 24-hour window time and in that period of time he said seven of my previous everybody gets called me just to make sure I was okay he said think about that seven of my guests called me from my own mother did I know what that says about our guest Rose mother more of us but in in this summer on a typical night or a peak night we would have four hundred twenty five thousand twenty five thousand people staying in homes in living together and they were coming from 190 countries in the world which is every country but North Korea Iran Syria and Cuba so when you hear that story at our core what we're about that's much more than just booking a room or traveling what we are about is we want to help bring the world together we want to do that by giving a sense of belonging anywhere you go so our mission is to belong anywhere so five years from now 20 years so now me we're still selling rooms and homes but maybe we're not but I can guarantee you what we're always going to be about is this sense of belonging and bringing people together and that's the more enduring idea so when we hire people the first thing we need to make sure is that that's our mission you need to champion that mission your champion a mission by living the mission do you believe in it do you have stories about it how to use the product would you bleed for the product I used to ask like crazy questions like one of the other crazy questions am reminds me of is I used to interview people so I interview the first 300 employees at Airbnb which people think I'm like really neurotic and that may also be true but um and I used to ask him a question which I've now amended I used to ask them if you had a year left to live would you take this job and actually the people who say yes that you probably don't want because that's like vicious I spent time your family so I amended it for 10 years because I feel like you should you whatever if you knew yet 10 years left to live whatever you do want what you would do in those last 10 years you should just do in in I really wanted people to think about that that was enough time for like you to do something you really cared about and the answer doesn't have to be this company and I say fine if the wheat you're meant to do is to travel or have to do is start a company you should just do that don't come here go do that and so there's this old kind of parable probably many you've heard of it about like two men or laying bricks somebody comes up to the first man says what are you doing is I'm building a wall he asked the other guy what are you doing because I'm building a cathedral there is a job and then there's a calling and we want to hire people aren't just looking for jobs and looking for a calling and that that's kind of the first value and that's champion the mission and I want to provide a great experience at the end of the day I want to provide a meaningful trip every single time and some of the trips are incredibly meaningful I'll just tell you a quick story go to questions on I'll tell you a couple one he didn't really scared a question yes that only question though I've already covered the method I know is that there's a guy named George he's a I believe he was from Berlin and he's staying with a host and the host name is God and George is talking to Kai now George and Kai are both probably like in their 60s and George was telling these stories about like how he was in the German army and I think George was in West Germany and it turns out that George was a guard at the border between the West and East and that all the and all the all the guard posts they like essentially like North South Korea like people like staring at each other guards on both side so he's talking about this to the sky high it turns out chi says well that's funny because I grew up in East Germany and I was also a guard and I was facing the other way and so they're talking to each other and they realized like what guard posts were yet they realized they were the same guard posts and they're like well when were you doing it and they realized they were doing at the same time and then something over comes George and he has these flashbacks he realized the person whose face he used to stare at that was the other was caught he used to look across the wall into this man's face in this man was the enemy and now this man was his host in his home and I think there was something incredibly powerful that idea that we're doing it bringing people together from around the world and tonight around the world people from over 170 countries are staying in other people's homes all over the world and there's something incredibly powerful about that and I think when that happens that's a better world that's the world I want to live in and yes there are going to be problems and we have to adopt and change and learn but there's something fundamentally good you know Mayor Willie Brown came and he spoke to Airbnb in San Francisco and he says when I grew up I couldn't stay in hotels because of the Jim Crow law Jim Crow law said that black couldn't stay in hotels hotels were for whites only so african-americans traveling around the United States stayed in other african-americans homes because that was the only way they could travel mm-hmm southern hospitality you ever go to someone's house in the south you'll see pineapples in their bed post that is a sign of welcome mm-hmm hospitality they stay in hotels welcome somebody as if they're in your home well this is an idea that's been happening for thousands of years so I don't think there's a new idea I think there's something finally important what we're doing - mm-hmm all right cool I want to say one more thing and I swear to God we're going to put a question I read this fascinating story I don't know if anyone else read it maybe you all right I am read it till today about unpassed company about how you like we're really inspired by Walt Disney and basically like storyboarded the next phase of your company and like you guys went through this crazy brainstorming process were you like storyboard it out how like a different Airbnb experiences and it helped you like really like visualize what you were doing and like you even had like an animator from Pixar come in and I mean it like it just seems it's it's such a manifestation of how you run the company based on fish like this visual design thinking that's like so unlike other companies so I'm curious you just tell us like you know a little bit about that and what that it sounds like such a gimmick from the outside but what did you really discover during that in the winter of 2011 we are faced with we had started to become successful we came out of the wake of all these challenges and we're rolling and it was like nope we're still growing really fast what should we do next should we go into cars they're going get cars events based co-working space there were all these like potential roads and paths and opportunities we didn't know what to do and I remember us like sizing the market for cars and like oh we can make this much money and then I go home for Christmas and I realized I'm asking like all the wrong questions who cares like the only thing that really matters is like what did the customer really want where's our guest one yeah and again it was part of like what I learned over time just focus on to delivering an amazing experience and then I was thinking back to what my background is industrial designer industrial design by the way Apple designs the end end experience and we caught this match everything Apple does it's just a design thing designing an end-to-end experience that's all it is they follow the users through the entire journey of using that that's not new I didn't invent that that's been going on for long as designs been happening well we came back and I said actually I was I was reading this fire to feed about Walt Disney and I get to the chapter about Snow White and it was like the same stage air Bibi at that time like same amount employees they're working of apartments that's net and well wanted to create a story that people loved I wanted a trip people love and trips or like stories right and anyone has a full movie and not just right yeah exactly not just like this little thing I want to find this entire thing and what was it I want to create a movie that people care about the way I know they'll care about it they'll cry because you don't care about cry about things you care about and so the movie was so long he's going to make a feature a movie he created a thing called the storyboard and that's been the life oh wow my head and I said what if we were to storyboard the perfect experience what if every trip and he was like this movie and everybody the movie every movie could be a fairy tale or a horror film mm-hmm or a documentary a docudrama something we're doing I want every trip and everybody to be like a fairy tale and if I do that I got to pretend like I'm all Disney and I got a designing the perfect story frame by frame and we did it we actually first we did it with like post-it notes and then we did crappy sketches and I felt like it wasn't really resonating so we ended up finding a Pixar story for us he came in he designed it with vivid detail and like when you do when you do something in really crisp detail you like make whole bun decisions like was a man or a woman it's a stick figure that's right man or woman well how old is she where's she from I feel like answering always questions so it really clarifies your thinking a huge insight happen from this we used to think the product was the website mm-hmm it turns out our product is not our website our product are the homes our product is the community that's what you're buying our website is just the store and the way you communicate with a product and we had realized we weren't even doing anything designed this offline experience it was an incredibly clear moment for us if people ask it's not a secret like what we're going to do in the future what we're going to do in the future is try to own the entire trip mm-hmm and make sure that every frame of that trip is incredibly powerful memorable and maybe once in a while like the two guys in Berlin even life-changing maybe not all the time but once in a while that's an incredibly important like way that we think about the company and so it's frame-by-frame we also try to do it inside out we try to do internally for the company first and then we do outside what does that mean you're going to control the trip or you're going to organise flights like tour buses what does that mean how do you get to a listing is a frame and if we can't add something to that frame we won't do it and flights and getting to cities the amount of effort would be to like fix that problem like given like so that's probably a frame we're not going to fix but maybe maybe we can like if you're here and you're trying to go to Sacramento maybe we'll tell you the best way to get there I don't know yeah that's definitely not a frame we're focused on right now we are focused on is check in the checkout when you walk into listing if you like love apple pie to some apple pie like winning in your kitchen table and maybe it's because the host was just educated that this is the person provide a higher local service or maybe eventually there's a service that can do that right and the service can fill in when the host isn't able to fill that level of hospitality hmm it all comes back to we want to create experience that incredibly meaningful incredibly memorable for our guests the best word-of-mouth the best marketing is just word of mouth if people love you they'll talk about you and so we think that's our North Star right oh god how did I raise money um it was not pretty um in in 2008 I met a guy named Michael Seibel and he told me that there were these people called angels and the first thing I thought it was oh my god this guy's insane he believes in angels and he goes no their angel investors you could have they'll write you twenty thousand dollar checks over dinner I was then I thought wait I lived in LA that's not a good sign when somebody does that to you and I goes no no you just got to have a slide deck and I'm like what's a slide deck and it was he said we'll go to this website there's fifteen slides and there's a whole process to doing it so we ended up you know creating Airbnb and then Michael introduces us to like 20 investors and I actually he mailed us like he gave always intro so basically the way the best way to get funding isn't to randomly reach out to an investor but get somebody who that investor trusts to validate you and giving you an introduction that's what Michael did and he did it like 20 times this is huge and the inviting he basically said like I don't know if anyone's going to fund you but if they are it's going to be one of these 20 people which basically told me that it's only 20 people didn't find us we're never gonna get funded and he gives us intros ten of them never replied to the emails and I wrote them like two or three times I'd never heard from them the other like five or six of them replied and they said you know I actually saved a lot of emails and in the emails were variations of you know we struggled with funding people that were engineers we don't we can't one person said we just can't get excited about travel that was crazy another person was like really Wow where do you go another person said the travel market the travel industry is not big enough it's not large enough meanwhile proximately decides the oil industry so it's actually fairly large but there were excuse after excuse the one first meeting we had with an investor was in a cafe is a cafe called University Cafe on University Avenue which was near Stanford and so probably similar to where the cafes around here and an investor sits down at a chair Joe and I are pitching him he's like he orders a smoothie he's drinking a smoothie at no point in the presentation does he lift his head up another words he's got his head monster out of her uh-huh uh-huh uh-huh just nodding like the whole time and we thought this was kind of strange but we proceeded to kind of keep going and we're like just just roll with it maybe there's a good side he's enjoying it all of a sudden he gets up and he leaves and we thought he was parking his car but I haven't seen him since so once he got really locked so all that is to say we were trying to raise a hundred and fifty thousand dollars and we were going to rate we're at a 1.5 million dollar valuation which means that we were trying to sell 10% the company which today would have been worse a few billion dollars for 150,000 dollars and nobody wanted that investment so we didn't actually raise money in the early days and so then we ends up doing what Joe and I like to joke was the visa round you know this is that these I didn't know about it we just kept taking out these and MasterCard credit cards and I don't know in in the United States kids used to collect weeds to collect baseball cards maybe you do like football cards and sleeves those plastic sleeves you know we put credit cards in those because we have that many credit cards we literally be like a stack and each of us went tens of thousand dollars into credit card debt and then in late late 2020 2008 everyone's got I think every entrepreneurs got story about rock bottom and late 2008 I hit rock bottom I was in a kitchen late at night with Joe and we came the realization that we are we're into the concept about air bed and breakfast we had made I think a thousand dollars in revenue or something like that with our air beds under words we weren't making a lot of money we thought air bed and breakfast air breads aren't making any money maybe breakfast will be more profitable for us so I know what you're thinking brilliant right and so we we think what if we sold a breakfast cereal because the only breakfast you can sell is a non perishable like a breakfast cereal and so it was during the summer of 2008 in the United States the thing happening in the summer 2008 was the election of Barack Obama against John McCain and so we provided housing for the Democratic and Republican national conventions we decided to do presidential themed cereal so he did a Barack Obama themed cereal it was we picked Cheerios and we called it Obama owes the breakfast of change and we thought well if we're gonna have a Obama theme store we have to have a John McCain themed cereal so we had a cereal called we found out he was a captain the Navy and so we named his cereal cap McCain's a maverick and every bite and we had a blue box for Obama and a red box for John McCain and of course we're about to make like cereal we called Kellogg's and they pick up the phone and I I thought we were mentally ill so they hung up the phone because just don't call them with ideas like that lot of story short is that we didn't have any money we ended up finding a former aristocrat who prints us he says that all the money by going to print you five hundred boxes of each of Obama owes and Kat McCain he princess leave boxes no one told me that they would just be giant pieces of poster board I have to fold and hot glue myself with Joe it was like I was doing giant origami I had to do it with hot glue they should call burn glue and I had a perfect one-to-one ratio of burned a box and I'm literally hot gluing at like midnight and a random like October night cereal boxes and we're stuffing boxes of cereal in and meet this long story short as we end up selling thirty thousand dollars worth of collectible breakfast cereal and that was our first round of funding and until now we say we have a core value it's to be a serial entrepreneur that joke but whenever now in the company because we have a lot of capital now somebody says the I need more money I don't have a big enough budget it's amazing to be able to well let me tell you about a time I didn't have any money and it's up it's pretty easy the third is simplify I think that probably speaks for itself in it wouldn't be simplifying play expanded on it you know there's something kind of weird about you know I I never loved being part of the status quo or the establishment I think I'm clear yeah but eventually you know we have we're going to pretty soon up two million homes and pretty soon we will become part of the establishment and we will become in a sense the status quo and the company itself would become status quo and so this weird conflict I have where that's not really in my nature because my nature is I always you know I went to RISD and I had a teacher that told me Brian you're a designer everything around you could be deceptive was designed by other people you can redesign the world you live in so I'm constantly obsess redesigning things and reinventing things so now I have a music company we've designed and so if I could change one thing really kind of I mean this is kind of weird but like when I'm really interested in is Airbnb 2.0 and and its really continue to transform the company you know we're in the technology industry and one definition of technology is change so our core competency have to be we have to be willing to change and not be viewed as static and I think eventually in many ways we're all in the technology industry because we all use technology and so what I'm really interested in and what I'm actually working on changing it's continued to shift ever me from spaces to experiences so in or do you don't go to a city to stay in a home you go to a city to have experiences so today you go to Airbnb and you can go to Paris you can stay in 60,000 homes but that's the limit of Airbnb in Paris today and I hope tomorrow when you go to Paris not only can you get a home you can you know you can get experiences provided throughout the entire city on Airbnb and so I think that's what I'm most interested in doing is redefining what it means to be a host and a host in the future isn't just somebody who offers a home hosted somebody offers a service or hospitality in a city and once you change your mindset about that there's 30 40 50 types of ways people can host in a city not just with their home and that's probably the thing I'm most excited about changing you

Channel: Dan Croitor

Views: 7,133

Rating: 4.869565 out of 5

Keywords: brian chesky, core values, company values, principles, hr, airbnb, leadership, Airbnb principles, Airbnb culture, hr analytics, life at Airbnb, leadership principles, executive education, company culture, Airbnb core values

Id: jgPYSogOOTY

Length: 23min 40sec (1420 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 06 2017