Airbnb's Joe Gebbia: The Intersection of Art & Business | Chase Jarvis LIVE

hey everybody how's it going I'm chase Jarvis I want to welcome you to another episode of the Chase Jarvis live show here on creativeLIVE you know the show this shows where I get to sit down with the world's top creators entrepreneurs and thought leaders with the goal of unpacking their brains and adding valuable hopefully valuable right valuable insights that will help you live your dreams and career in hobby and in life my guest today is a designer and entrepreneur and you know him as the co-founder of air B&B my guest is Joe Joe via [Music] [Applause] [Music] how are you good to see you how about it yeah it's gonna be here been a long time in the making that's right I'm gonna tell a funny backstory we were gonna do this two days ago and I got a text or an email from you at five in the morning said my plane just landed five hours late he was supposed to come in at like 10:00 in the morning we let him go back to sleep you made it well we looked it I stood I feel fresh you do I'm great I ready to tell some stories awesome share some lessons me but thank you for being the show like you happen really before we started the cameras rolling I was just pontificating for a second about how you as a human I feel like epitomize so many aspects of the show has a career you went to college as a went to RISD raised their rates per day went to RISD designer and then this you know you had an idea you chase the idea struggle it's like it's it's very much the hero's journey and it's if we did anything today it would be a of course I want to know some things you haven't said elsewhere in the world but also to help the folks at home understand that a it's hard be success comes from hard work and grit and the grind and then see we do want to hear a couple of the stories that you like the holy we're we're making it so I got a little bit of an arc I want to cover for the show but start off with you know for the like three out of the million people that are gonna see this who doesn't know you give us the backstory like young you give us the young you I don't know a little entrepreneur jail yeah I don't know where you an entrepreneur actually you know my first business was selling drawings of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to my second-grade classmates for $1 or $2 if you wanted the big version no way yeah and it was doing so well that the parents of the students were getting complaints because their children were asking for extra lunch money yeah and so they complained to the teachers they're like why is my student asking for extra lunch money and then they traced it back to me and they shut the business down at the time the regular tour their regular swoop and the regulations on head right have you pay your taxes in the second grade second grade oh but you know where was that and what's give me a little childhood where it where in the world I grew up in the deep south okay Atlanta Georgia Snellville which is near Lawrenceville which is near Lilburn which is near Norcross which is kind of close to Atlanta so is great great southern town in the suburbs of Atlanta and you know just kind of always was looking for opportunities to start things you know whether it was the drawings had a first al automotive business I'm sure you know at some point it was raised and then getting into high school found all kinds of opportunities to to bring ideas to life yeah so I feel like that's that's my life story is just you know the gift of having an idea go from a sketch book and to see it become reality and there's nothing nothing greater than that well on the journey toward we have a couple swaths of audience zero to one people are trying to figure out what they want to do or do they have enough hutzpah to do the thing that not not the thing that their parents and their friends and the men culture expects of them and they're people who are on a path but they're trying to get from one or two or five to tend to you know create companies and things as you have and when you were younger did you identify with this creative spirit and clearly you're hustling and entrepreneurial in your second grade class but was it always something that you knew that that was a piece of you did you grow up around art and design did did you find it did it find you help us understand that well there is literally zero art talent in my my family maybe that's not my grandfather but I did have the chance to grow up very much into art so I spent my my childhood drawing painting taking art classes at every turn Wow on weekends I'd go down to the Atlanta College of Art and take for your drawing classes you know I was definitely the youngest guy there I did a summer program in the state of Georgia called governor's honors which was about celebrating different disciplines science art music etc it was during that that summer where I really fell in love with art and the instructors the college instructors said job like you've got something here this is something to pursue that's when I first heard about the Rhode Island school design they suggested I take a look into it I did a summer program there the year later as a junior in high school and I absolutely fell in love not with Providence but with art school and this idea that like art is just a channel to take an idea that you have and finality and it could be painting the drawing a sculpture a photograph yeah as you know like it could be any kind of medium and I feel like you know this there is a nice Venn diagram of art and entrepreneurship yeah in the sense that you have to imagine something that doesn't yet exist and then have the willpower to bring it to life that's you know one of the things that I I find I mean you said there's like not a history of art or creativity or whatever in your family and a that great creators can be born of families or out of a heritage where that wasn't the norm and the and vice versa that you know folks that for whom that is the way they grew up sometimes they we all revolt against it and whatnot my personal beliefs as you probably know from the previous episode the show that there's creativity inside of every person absolutely but that it's not fostered and we sort of train it out of people rather than cultivate it or we're not even neutral towards it you know if you say hey mom I wonder when I grow up I want to I want to be a dancer I think culturally speaking that's like oh my parents like okay great I'm seeing all these things in the world about stem and steam if you're lucky but so I can need science we need computer programmers we need I don't even mind if you're a tradesman you're gonna build stuff but I know dancer and musician whatever these things tend to be culturally less poignant maybe for our parents did you feel any of that pressure and if so where did you just did you manage to escape it based on having thoughtful heartfelt warm caring family or what was the what was the secret for you to tap into it I'm forever grateful to my parents I mean they really supported me whatever interests yeah I put a lot sports growing up I was in the music playing piano and certainly the art track you know they never really second-guessed I like well should we really support him and fund that you know weekend class downtown yeah for figure-drawing they really got behind whatever my passions were and I think thank goodness because I had very talented friends in art whose parents didn't yeah they had to be an engineer or going to professional service and they never really got to see their gifts the artistic gifts come to life and I remember in high school just feeling very very blessed very lucky that the kind of windows in my sail yeah you knew had something and you were told clearly from other folks in that summer program that you had some talent yeah you know sort of you know you're searching for yourself certainly in high school right oh yeah well big decisions really college fine image like a career maybe we've been home for the first time so there's a lot of like life questions that have to be answered and I think for me it was I was on a path to become a fine artist so I applied to RISD and I got in and as a on the path one of the things that I love about the path is if you're always pursuing the thing that feels right then you're on the path it doesn't it might not be the path where you end up and I don't know if you identify as a fine artist right now or like like but that was the thing that you went to RISD to pursue and then here you are something not not a fine artist but let's say you got distracted on this little other side right here in two seasons yeah there's a parentheses in there it's a big-ass multi-billion dollar plant the see but you know how did you did you ever question the path of the Iran did you you know did you identify with it what about this other entrepreneurial thing that ya got into well I think another reference point that the factors in here's when I was in high school from 1996 to 2000 okay which was the birth of the Internet yep and every day I come home after school and I would teach myself HTML and CSS and the notion that you could have an idea and you could code it and publish it to the world completely captivated me yeah there was something enthralling about that and it left this deep deep impression with me as I read about other company the companies that were starting and every day and read business 2.0 and zeenat and see thing oh yeah ZDNet all and all the roads of these companies let back to one place San Francisco there Silicon Valley hmm I remember thinking to myself like man I I know one day I have this inclination I want to run like a company of some kind I want to you know run my own business whatever it might be it sure seems like the best place to do that is this part of the west coast where everybody seems to be coming from right this hotbed so you have to that was very active in the back of my mind and then you know chance to go to Providence to study Fine Arts and when I got to campus okay so here's here's a story I get to campus and during orientation you're meeting the upperclassmen and they're asking oh who your teachers and so I go through the list of my instructors and they get to this one name and when I get to this name I had the same reaction from every upperclassman I say Gareth Jones and they go oh no not Gareth Jones and I go what what is it I could just waiting so my very first college course is with this guy Gareth Jones I roll into the art studio with you know 18 other freshmen but literally just got to campus and this guy walks out this British fellow with this really big hair black turtleneck black pants and he stands in the front of the class in front of all of us and he goes I just want you all to know that half of you were going to fail my course one of these guys because you won't finish the chess set project and we're like what the eff is the chest at project so he went to explain and we found out that there's this you have your weekly assignments and then on top of that you have this semester long assignment okay where you have to choose a three-dimensional artist a sculptor a fashion designer and architect a furniture designer you have to find a book on them pick pieces of their design or this their sculpture and then recreate them in miniature scale so if you chose like Henry Moore yep right at the sculptor you'd find Henry Moore's sculptures you have to recreate them you'd do it in the numbering format of a chess set so you take one sculpture and reproduce it eight times for your pawn pick another one you reproduce it twice for your Brooke your Knights your bishops your King your queen so overall 16 pieces they don't look like chess pieces they look like the actual reproductions of the sculpture you have to look at a photo and translate that alright and this is on top of all the weekly assignments this is like an outside class project Wow and as you got to know Gareth you got to know this very opinionated fella who always had to be right he would argue you to the death and so I made a decision very early on that no matter what I did I would finish this project I was not going to fail out so I had an interest in furniture design at this time and I discovered a guy from the early twentieth century named Gerrit Rietveld he's a Dutch designer architect and he did a couple of very famous chairs than the MoMA for example and I fell in love with his work and I thought you know I'm gonna spend this whole semester fully dedicated these chairs I don't want to make small chairs want to make full-size chairs oh right like I'm gonna put all my effort in I want to use these afterwards and so here I go to my gareth the teacher and I pitch him on this idea and I expect him to say yeah Joe you got this one behind you yeah he looks to me he goes Joe I really don't think you can get it done really focus on the smaller scale and he walked away and I was like that's it row down I'm gonna prove this guy wrong I've got a semester to figure out how to make chairs by the way I'd never like worked with any kind of hand tools definitely no heavy machinery never made a chair in my life amazing more or less these like really intricate famous chairs but I was like I'm committing to this I'm gonna figure this out so how how do you make a chair well I there's a furniture design department on campus I ran to the department I met with the department head sat with her and pitched her on what I was doing she said I'll go talk to these three seniors the hub yeah so these seniors showed me how to work with wood they gave me access to the woodshop on campus and piece by piece I started to actually figure how to make chairs the thing is I didn't show Gareth anything during the course of semester right so he's asked me to check Kazuko and jus like it's fine don't worry about so along the way I got to the pawn we had to make eight of the sale and Garrett refilled had this beautiful bench design just four pieces of wood but it was big and I'm thinking oh I don't have the money to buy the wood to make eight of these ginormous benches what am I gonna do and it's around this time I'm in the courtyard section of the dorms and I'm noticing that everyone's smoking outside and they're standing up because there's nowhere to sit and like wait what if the school pays for the wood I make the benches for my project and then they put these benches in this courtyard some people can sit down when they want to have a smoke break I pitched the school and they loved it so the school funds a few thousand dollars of this inch thick plywood I mean this is like heavy-duty stuff yeah and you know a few weeks later I've got eight benches and the other eight pieces and I store them all in a certain part of campus and on the final day of class and how a whole semesters gone by I've been up for two days straight I haven't slept and looked for like 54 hours working the final you know sanding putting final finish on these chairs and the class goes out for lunch and I specifically signed up for the next thought so one everyone was away getting lunch a couple my roommates and buddies help me carry all these chairs into the studio space so when everybody walked back in there was this full set of sixteen full-size functional chairs and my only regret is that I didn't have a photo of Gareth Jones's face when he walked into the studio after lunch this is a literally when he walks in digos and you can see him counting sixteen and then he looks at me and it was beautiful he goes Joe you've done it you've proved me wrong okay I never do another thing in my life you still have these pieces of furniture I do ID yes these are um these are so symbolic to me because I mean literally to go from no knowledge yeah and no expertise something to you know 12 weeks later you've done quote impossible yeah for me it was one of those life moments yeah we all have this mom so you so powerful breakthrough you know cross some threshold of what you think is possible for yourself and you get to other side and you're standing it physically with a room full of chairs that you made and you know or you got scrappy within you forget who would pay for it and who would help you build him and it was this remarkable moment and then after that I probably went to bed for another fifty four hours probably right just enough so if you unpacked that just for a second yeah are you stubborn as hell is that why you chose to do the thing are you like what is it about your personality because I think you know Gareth is probably right when he sends that warning ninety-nine out of a hundred students don't pursue the thing is is that thing that piece of you the thing that you feel like has driven your success is it the stubbornness or is it would you because that's kind of a little bit of a negative connotation or is it the pride that you take in a job well done is it curiosity that I wonder if I can do this fear of failure fear of success like what what are what's at play there for you you think man that's such a good question I think it's it's this deep desire to constantly get the next level with whatever it is and I had this with supports to you you know a basketball coach in seventh grade gave me advice that I've carried through my entire life he said took me aside one day cuz I just started playing basketball and he goes Joe never he told you if I was you know comparatively I was pretty tall but my shot wasn't quite on just yet I get this today and he took me sign he goes Joe you know if you want to get better play with people who are better than you and since that moment probably with anything that I can think of in my life I've always sought to throw myself into situations where I'm probably maybe one of the least knowledgeable in the room or you know I have the least amount of experience so I did I started playing with upperclassmen the basketball at the YMCA at my high school at the time I was always playing with guys who were taller than me stronger than me had better skills than I did and I feel like that just being thrown into an experience like that it sort of it forces kind of sink or swim like it kind of forces you and you have to find the self-reliance inside of you just to stay with it yeah to actually excel and get to the next level and so were there things that you sunk Eadie's sink or swim right yeah what were this things and you threw yourself in the deep end and yeah I mean sure there's been things have come and gone I don't know I used to play violin when I was really little that's no longer around I was knocking that threw yourself in the deep end of the violin yeah I get it I get it so I think somewhere in there a it's combination then of great advice putting yourself around that that seventh grade teacher had seventh grade is that right you have a lot of wisdom and that very simple saying but there's also some grit in inside of you and SCIM grit that built 16 chairs in a semester is that is that your best quality is that a quality is that a quality that you see consistently with yourself and your peers what role and I'm just tired I'm just naming this thing greater maybe you got a better name for it but what role does that play in building a however many billion dollar company you guys right now I think there's a lot of answers that question well the first thing is comes to mind is perseverance yeah I mean any entrepreneur that's sat in this chair and talk to you it's probably use that word yeah because we I feel like as you know like when you're trying to bring an idea into life when you have a concept in your head that doesn't yet exist and you're basically the only person that will will it into existence like there will be like every kind of obstacle in your way sometimes yourself sometimes other people sometimes resources sometimes facilities or lack of facilities I think having a it's just this perseverance this well of of a drive that allows you to just keep going even when people say no even when people say it can't be done which here's this faster who everybody looked up to yeah he was notorious on campus this guy was a legend and he looked mean I said I couldn't do it I thought a few like who are you gonna tell me if I can or can't I'll tell myself if I can't do something not you yeah and I feel like you know the quickest quickest ID I later caught up with him on campus it's about two years ago so you know 12 13 years later and we reflected on this moment and he he uses me as a reference point ever since then with his class like course right he'd built 16 areas sake the quintessential answer to my project and I tell him like Catholic you know what was that about like I really expected encouragement and support and and advocacy and and here to me he goes I need you do it I just wanted to I just wanted to give you the rub to get you going on it yeah and I was like oh my god like at the time I didn't realize it sure but looking back it makes a lot of Sun said great I to me that's a a beautiful story because it reveals a lot about you it reveals a lot about the character of art school the character of the true mentors people that can see potential and but go ahead keep going now you said a big inhale you're gonna say well you just triggered something which is down the joy of not only that moment in that critique that final critique with the chairs the additional joy that came when I got to see other students sitting on those benches a week later that triggered something else in me that I had never experienced before that you could design things for other people and to see them interact with your creation you know in this case the physical sense I certainly had Web Design experience on the digital sense but now to like bridge that to the physical it was like oh my god this is really exciting yeah this is really fun and so it was a combination of that moment of learning about Charles and Ray Eames and their lives as designers of learning about the industrial design department on campus and where I had this this the shift of this path that I was on come back to paths of being a fine artist maybe within New York City exhibiting galleries suddenly was about how could you use design to improve people's lives just like the Eames had committed their lives to yeah how could use design to create these beautiful interactions with the people who use your products and so in those you know in those moments I switched majors that triggered something you were just triggered into that story that triggered something in me which I'd like to you to reflect on just for a second so it's the Eames quote that says the details aren't the details the details are the thing so what role has that quote played for you and how you approached Airbnb or furniture design like is that something that holds true to you absolutely yeah I feel like ask any designer who cares about their craft and what they put out into the world and then when I have pride in what they produce um I feel like they would wholeheartedly agree with that quote and I think if I reflect just on on our company on Airbnb you know we do put a lot of effort probably more than what is asked of us well more than what is it necessary for you know a site that does what we do and I have to I have to reflect because as the Internet has matured I feel like and as like technology and computers have matured the Plainfield in my mind is largely leveled yeah right like what used to be a competitive advantage whether that was you know megahertz speed or screen size or whatever Ram like everybody now has access to the same stuff yeah so that the tech Plainfield has largely leveled which begs the question how else do you differentiate and the way that we've always thought about is through design right maybe the details can help us differentiate maybe our you know and sometimes insane attention to details can help us elevate beyond you know the rest of the noise in in our in our industry and so I feel like that's the details have been our differentiator we're gonna go back to RISD you're in RISD you're you've just completed your project just for Gareth and the fact that his name is Gareth is so pretty I love it these actually Welsh le well there you go they even even better more nuanced but you meet a guy called Brian Chesky that's right I'll go down to understand that story you need to understand that during orientation as a freshman there's somebody giving you no welcome to campus lecture an upperclassman and they made a comment that really stood out to me they said look Joe EFTS look to your right those might be your future team members or your future employer so make sure you nurture your relationships while you're in campus here because you never know one day who might be working for who or collaborating with you and I thought oh he's right like if I have this general idea I want to start Roma and business one day I better turn my radar on to see who might be a good you know co-creator with me yeah so all throughout campus I you know every person I met whether it was you know explicit or implicit in the back of my mind I was just always thinking like you know is this somebody that I would love to start something with and you know when I got to campus here's another another story that intersects into Brian having played basketball get to RISD I go into the office student life one day and I say hey I'd like to play in the basketball team and the guy behind the front desk god bless him he gave me the blanket stare I've ever seen he looks at me like this he goes we don't have a basketball team and there was this weird awkward silence where I'm just I'm staring him he's staring at me and he breaks his silence by saying but you can start one and I go really what do I have to do and he goes find 12 other people on campus that want to play basketball I don't like that's it well and bring the list back to me so I spent the next week rounding up 12 people who also play basketball and I came back in the list I said what's the next step he goes well you need to take this to the student board and get funding for it and get recognized as an organization here's this paperwork so that Wednesday night I went got recognizes in that group and I came back and said now what is what we need to rent a gym and find a place to practice so eyepieces whole thing together and by the end of that that academic year my freshman year we had a basketball team whack self coaching it was a player coach for the first year in a year or so but what was actually unfolding and unfolded the next five years I spent on campus was my first startup he had to recruit a team you know raise funding you know create a brand to market the brand you to run an operation of playing other teams putting schedule together you to build a community of people who wanted to attend and be a part of the team so I remember now that we had a team we were practicing but we had no schedule I started calling other colleges in New England right like pitching them like come play us in basketball and so I I remember the first worry about you I love that had the first couple calls I'll never forget because they were very short this is Joe this is Joe calling from the Ron school that I'm basketball team hello okay up on me however I remember the first coach I spoke to he didn't hang up was from Clark University in math Western Massachusetts and they did agree to play some basketball with their varsity team but they said they send their JV team I said perfect well play him so December 4th 2001 the RISD basketball team played the Clark University JV team and when their bus showed up they rolled into the high school gym that we were renting we're gonna have one on campus yes and I have to say say every single player in the team is taller than our tallest player and they have three coaches to assistant coaches and then there's just me and I think they arrived and they pretty quickly realized what they got themselves into a makeshift team of some art school guys and one girl actually or one woman that was on her team with us and you know we played our hearts out that night we lost on the scoreboard as 94 49 I'll never forget but for me that was a huge win yeah we actually got to some milestone of we had fans there of students faculty alumni administration all under the same roof at the same time and I got this little glimpse because at RISD things get very silent go into offering departments you never see anybody again together this was a moment outside of graduation where cross-sections of campus would come together and there was some magic to that I felt that that was that was one of the benefits of the team that I could really bring people together outside of graduation and so you know that after that it was all downhill you know we got more games with no colleges lost worse search in some cases we also started to win some yeah that's amazing oh cool got a coach the second or third year in and it was really a incredible incredible feeling in fact I remember the moment when the basketball team was first printed in the Student Handbook as as a tried and true option for students so any was thinking about coming to campus as a student now if there were athletes out there who were thinking about going to art school they now had more incentive to come come to RISD I met a lot of them who decided to come because we had a basketball team and so you know it was just this wild startup I made a lot of mistakes I learned how to get people excited about you know volunteering their time to move an idea for it and it was because I was in sports that I met Bryan because I was running a basketball team he was running the hockey team and so we would end up meeting each other in the Office of Student Life and I'd be like who's this guy like he was gonna be saying the same thing who's this guy sort of asked about so we nurtured this this friendship during our time there largely through sports also through design of course and a lot of mutual friends and you know skip skip ahead to the senior year we worked in a project together and we got paired up and our the output of what we created was so different than everybody else that I remember thinking to myself wow there's something special about this guy and I really thought that if you put us in the same room we could think of something big even this is as seniors yeah and so the night before he's graduating I was doing a five-year program so as they're a little bit longer the night before he's graduating he's about to move through the West Coast and I had this this feeling is growing and I felt like I just need to tell him so I invited him out for a slice of pizza and glassy I kind of look him in the eye and said Brian I think we're gonna start a business one day and I think they're gonna write a book about it and he literally just laughed it off because who knew which direction life was gonna go but I had this premonition I thought I just had it and needed to tell him and he moved off to Los Angeles I finished out my last year of school and that was the the early sort of coming together of him and I well I want to jump in just a second to starting the company because I think that's a really important milestone in your life obviously and in it is a lot of the struggles that I try and bring up with the show so people at all more struggling don't feel like they're alone we'll get to the part you guys exit it was a selling cereal is that right to wing it there take it to keep your keep your company alive but I want to go backwards just for a second my background also grew up as an athlete went to college on a soccer scholarship those beginning football and soccer and I was wondering if you felt any struggle reconciling sports and creativity because for me it like I always thought of myself as a really creative kid and then at some point I realized like oh creative kid is equals strange where I grew up and sure that no one asks any questions of the captain the football team so I'm just gonna go do that and it was really only later and it was actually this skate surf punk culture of Southern California that helped me reconcile sports and creativity together like skating and expressing yourself and music and art and spray-paint all that stuff and so that's how I found some sort of salvation did you ever feel any of those challenges or and yet I also still rely a lot on my sports background for pushing through things and discipline a lot of that stuff so what role did sports you think play for you yeah so many takeaways you you know you you rarely depend on yourself yeah in sports you know whether it's you know some exceptions singles tennis golf golf yeah there's a few exceptions but largely it sounds like you and I played team sports growing up so you learn this sort of depend like like mutual dependence on other people to reach a common goal yeah I mean what a life lesson right yeah certainly the self-discipline of practice yeah in committing yourself to like you know for me with taking that baseball like go to the batting cages you know night after night by yourself are you putting quarters in the machine can I get in the swings in I know one told he had to do that but if you want to get get the next level there's sort of this like you had to put in the effort and so there was just like you learn to just put in the effort even if there was no immediate payoff I think that's hard for some folks this desire to immediately have the payoff the gratification I did this and therefore I can see that and what certainly not to preneur I'll so in art and in creativity there's also there's this it seems so delayed we hear 10,000 hours right here 10 here overnight success we hear um you know all those things how what role does this practice play and being successful as both an entrepreneur innovator i this is such a good topic because i feel like there's a such a parallel to practice in sports and prepare yourself for the game yeah when game time comes that there is prepare yourself as an entrepreneur for when the ideas present in front of you for when the opportunity falls in front of you it would be such a mistake I think for people to think that you know Airbnb we just woke up and there was the idea what what people maybe don't realize is that Brian was had his entrepreneur pursuits long before the company and I was on this my own lineage my own path of constantly trying things out like being in the gym of entrepreneurship and the majority things that I tried you've never heard of right the people watching right now I've never heard of these things but that was okay because it was like tuning of the muscle that you see an opportunity in the world and you're ready to make something of it like you're ready to have like again transition something from your head into a sketchbook and out into the world and the more that you can get in the habit of that cycle it'd be like the the Airbnb concept just happened to come along in this this long lineage of other ideas that didn't go anywhere but where exercises practice the batting cage of entrepreneurship right so I feel like you know one of the best lessons that that I've learned is just constantly be in that moment that act of creation yeah even if it sucks even if it doesn't go anywhere even if nobody in the world knows about it it's like have an idea get it down and bring it to life you can throw it away after that the man that muscle is so so important home yeah it's not a skill it's a habit like really there's this practice or practice that yeah the aspect of repetition and that's what we hear you know in modern or the web or whatever iteration I well you you said it you you shortcut it too there are so many things that prepared you for Airbnb so it's fast forward you get back together with Brian at some point yeah right so he's in LA you're are you out here still or I'm still in East Coast so if you want I can talk about the company I started R after I graduate yeah I want to know the one that they didn't get no not got away I don't know whatever I don't know about that one cuz I don't know I'm learning a lot about you this interview you know I started my first real company the day after literally the day after graduate this story starts again freshman year okay so at RISD we had a drawing class every week that lasted eight hours and the format for the drawing classes that you'd come in I know she'd pin up your assignment from the week before and you do literally spend the entire day critiquing or having a crit of that drawing assignment it'd be the teacher the TA and all the other students and the studio is an art studio its hardwood floors its metal stools maybe you're lucky forgot the one wooden bench it was very uncomfortable it's a bike hour for man you're feeling it and by hour 8 everyone stands up to walk out the door to go back to her dorm rooms and the funniest thing everyone has this is like bun print on the seat of our pants right all the charcoal dust and the pain the ink from the studio surfaces and sure enough I look down and I have one too so I watch every walk out and then I walk back to my dorm room and I'm thinking you know if there's gonna be a couple more years of this critique stuff that's crit has got to be a better way what if we had a seat cushion they could keep it comfortable and keep you clean and so I got back to my dorm and I sketched this funny shape based on the bun print of the seat of people's pants and called it crit buns right a seat cushion for art school students right I had no idea how to make a product though this is just the first year of art school so fast forward it's now your 5 I've done a dual degree in graphic design and industrial design Wow I have a very clear idea of how to bring an idea at least into a prototype and so the last semester I make buns in I make it the 3d file and I make a foam model that's to scale just to kind of shop it around and show students hey what you think about this I actually molded it in rubber and then poured in some polyurethane and then I had the first soft seat cushion but there was only one of them and this is kind of where it was looked like it was gonna end because well I didn't have money to take it the next next phase that's when I noticed that there was a competition on campus for what's called the design diploma it's a gift that they give to the graduating class so I submitted the concept of buns and it won funds won what were you competing against has no idea what woman which meant that the school is gonna pay for the getting creep ones made for 800 graduating seniors you know the only only problem this is great right this is fantastic win here's a problem chase they tell me this on May first graduation is on June 1st I have a month to go from one prototype with the 800 cushions on top of two degree projects for both my majors like thesis projects and I'm like holy crap how is this gonna happen like this is I don't know how to do this but what an opportunity I'm gonna figure out to make this work Wow so funny enough I go to my professors to ask for advice and every single one of them shot it down they said the timelines too short it's gonna take too long I was like okay forget that I'm gonna find another path I get onto Google I called every phone manufacturer on Google for the first 20 pages I was talking to people in India and England in Texas in California and I got the same response said Joe I love love the passion here but sorry sonnets it's gonna take you know four weeks to make the metal mold and another eight weeks for the production of foam I'm like we don't have 12 weeks we have now three weeks the clock is ticking there it is and so the school start to get a little bit nervous and they call me and say hey Joe what's going on here and I'm like don't worry don't worry I'm gonna figure this out is on Wednesday and I'm like well you need to tell us by Friday if this is happening or not we'll give you till five o'clock so here it is it's Friday at 4 p.m. I still don't have an answer and how to figure this out everyone's telling me no no no it can't be done and I go outside the industrial design building by the canal and in Providence and I'm laying on the grass and I'm looking up at the sky I'm thinking and what an opportunity might my product is running the verge of actually being made what haven't I thought of yet and I answered that question by thinking how you know the guy who runs the metal shop in the ID building maybe he knows something so I run back in don't go Steve here's the deal I need to figure out that it uh he goes you know what why don't you call my friend up in northern Rhode Island he runs a metal shop so I get on the phone this guy and I pour my heart out to him like I give it everything and there's this long pause at the end he goes you really want this don't you yeah so whatever you can do he goes all right here's what I'll do if you send me the file today I'll move my projects aside this weekend and I can ship the metal mold anywhere you need it on Monday and I go oh my god I'm gonna call you back so I remembered another conversation I had earlier in the week was a pool float company in Connecticut that told me said Joe we can make the the foam in two weeks but we can't have enough time to make the mold so you find someone make the mold that we can produce the product so I get on the phone I call this pool flow company it's like 4:45 p.m. on Friday the guy the guy picked up was about to leave the office to go home for the weekend he was like clearly like on his way out and I go Kristof what it's Joe yeah I didn't pour my heart out to him if he goes you really want this don't you yes whatever you can do and he goes all right have him FedEx it to this address and we'll take care of it so I literally call the school back at like 458 p.m. to the office student ID from the guys we got it here's what I send the invoice fax it over to this place and I write the time this is 2005 2006 so two weeks later we had 400 read and forage of blue crab buns with screen-printed with Rizzio 5 on the top given out to the graduating class buns it was there are so many nuggets in that I'm gonna revisit a couple really quick asking for help yeah I think that's the thing that so many creators feel alone in this world and they think that it's only up to them you know you've already talked about co-founders and friends and peers and reaching out to instructors but that was central to that you couldn't do it yourself no I mean how about being told no how many times you told no too many many times but enough times to that you were able and willing to push like incredible people yeah and you these are guys who produced many products in the lifetime told me no the fact that you emotionally were able to push through after all of that no and still perform because I mean this is like your it's on the line right obviously this is a microcosm of the startup world of basically any adventure any venture that you're on I'm I was told no or maybe well I've been told no certainly more in my life than I've been told yes but it's the the no was there a world in which you were changing the world not the word no - not yet or what was it about and what was it about that that because you clearly pushed through so in the face of all of this like what what made you do it was it again go back to my other question are you just super stubborn or you know what what is the quality that folks at home can take away from aside from asking for help and oh that was my narrative for it but I mean you obviously have your own I've never really been described as stubborn so I'm sure I think what else what the other quality is scrappy scrappy certain totalitarian I think yeah without sounding you know to generalize like passionate yeah right like each of these stories as an even as I'm talking to him kind of looking back and I'm like wow I was really passionate to see that thing through yeah talk people into seeing some sort of vision that they could contribute to or something bigger than yourself or sure I think you know somewhere along the way where there was building that the sixteen chairs or making a crypt buns happenin you know less than a month it was like people got excited because I was excited yeah people would make exceptions based on the level of enthusiasm that I was communicating to them and if I wasn't passionate about it I don't think I would have communicated the same level enthusiasm that would cause someone to change the project's you know at their metal shop for one weekend or like changed production lines at the pool float company yeah like they make the 800 cushions in two weeks you love it so I as I'm looking back I'm I want to connect the threads here and I think it was just a an intrinsic passion to see these things happen and and to not let someone else decide that for me if they weren't gonna happen it was going to be because I couldn't do something myself I hit some some limit me but certainly would be because somebody said no or somebody said you know you can't do it so I guess it was not not trusting to know or actually if I were to reframe it and this is very true for Airbnb as well which we can get into is that I've learned over the years that no is simply an invitation to keep going and you can accept it or not you know you know you don't have to but like we asked any I'm sure we're all the guys have sat in this chair and talk to you they've always reframed whatever's in front of them and turn it into a positive yeah you kind of have to yeah because whether it's you know a professor telling you you can't be done or very experienced product designers telling you it'll never happen in time or investors rejecting your idea because it's weird yep it sort of like you can stop okay Wow the GZA said no so I should yeah I should do it or gonna be like cool well it's not / - natee find another path that's one of the things that I love about this especially now maybe more than ever before not maybe certainly more than a report there's a million paths right like there's the art-school path now there's the creativeLIVE path you can learn skills and experience in a place that we got no geek gatekeepers relative to even just five or ten years ago and that's another really common theme hey for the show be for the folks at home or listening and I think you those a handful of stories obviously illustrate that if you would have said at the beginning I'm gonna have this guy I've never met who's a friend of a friend in northern Rhode Island and the folks that are gonna manufacture crit buns is a pool a pool little OD foam company like yeah you can't actually make that up right they made like the noodles like the pool you know exactly you can't make it up so I I love that we I want to I want to switch gears because it's sort of like the hit song we've been holding out there's so many folks at home who your journey obviously is incredible still very much ongoing and here you are sitting on top of this idea to use the words you just use that investors told you guys you were crazy not dissimilar to your timeline on great buns and a lot of other things in your life but here you are how did it have how well you know it goes back to RISD as well because after it started career puns have got the product to market the whole whole point of that by the way was just had to get an idea to the Shelf of the store yeah and I cracked that code and I figured that out and that was I was like the equivalent of having 16 chairs in front of you was seeing crib bones on the Shelf of the first story it was like wow what else can we do and so I I was looking for a reason to get to the west coast and we're coming back to like yep so ago though the internet okay how you could have an idea that could reach millions of people overnight and I was always looking for an excuse to go out like some kind of little nudge and I got one in the form of a design fellowship at Chronicle Books oh yeah that's an SF yeah yeah it's an F of this institution yeah a book publishing I often think in those like the Apple of book publishers you know very high quality very great design and they invited me to come join them for six months as an industrial designer in a book publisher interesting history that's what I said so what is an industrial designer Doudna book publisher well turns out all of their high-end books all the package design the retail experience and the time their trade show experience seemed about all the the fixtures and the the physical environment so that brought me give me a reason to come to San Francisco finally now here I'm in Providence moving out of my apartment I'm packing my wife into my Jeep and everything else I decided to have a yard sale and get rid of so one one day I'm on campus have you know whole sidewalk cover to my stuff my art my clothes whatever and it's getting towards the end of the day I'm pretty tired and ready to go home when this guy pulls up in this red Mazda Miata and he gets out I'm like I just want to go but okay he's looking through my stuff and he ends up buying a piece of art that I made poster a silkscreen and we get to talking then I learned that he's on a road trip across the United States before he goes into the Peace Corps and it becomes very clear that this guy doesn't know soul and provenance and so I you know something to me just says why you know when I get a drink later he says yes and we meet up at this place called custom house this old like an old-timey bar in downtown Providence and we're having a drink he's tell me all about is his desire to do service in the world and learning all about the Peace Corps and it's also getting kind of late and so as I motioned for the check I make the mistake of asking him so where you're staying the night and he looks at me and he makes it worse and he goes actually I don't have a place and I'm thinking oh man what do you do right we've all been there yep I've asked you like oh it's this guy my place cuz it's it's the hotels are probably closing Providence and I'm thinking man and before I know it I'm saying out loud why don't you stay in an air bed in my living room and then I'm thinking oh my god what did I just do so he comes back to my place I sent him up I had this one air bed I set him up in the living room and I retired to my bedroom and I'm laying there trying to fall asleep staring at the ceiling going it goes my god this guy's psychotic or not like yeah I just met him I think he's going to the Peace Corps but I don't actually know if he's going at the Peace Corps right and so I'm like if I'm having this like hearts racing I'm like and I leap up out of bed in the darkness and they tiptoe over at the door and I lock the door because there's a strike so the next morning we get up and we got breakfast together it turns out he's you know not psychotic goes to the Peace Corps he sends me postcards while he's off out in the world turns out he came back he's now a teacher in Chicago and the piece of the screen print that he bought for me is now hanging on the wall in his classroom and what a lament oh it was it was a moment and so obviously there's a seed in there of course well who knew but what there was in there was an airbed yep because that's when I packed my Jeep drove cross-country get to San Francisco have this amazing time at Chronicle Books really see a wonderful culture from the inside out an amazing leader of the company Michael kara betta and I see a design team working at scale all those things really my first impression of like a company and a certain point I realized that you know if I'm really gonna take on creating the company like things are getting a little bit comfortable I took a full-time job at Chronicle they offered me a full time and I stayed and it's now a year and a half in meanwhile have buns in the background of course nights and weekends running that I've got a second web startup that I've created Wow inspired by buns I don't have any time to get into it now but it was my first foray into really designing for the internet and really doing like production quality web service that was all premise on the elevator pitch was Google for sustainable materials is in the process of making buns it was really hard to find any kind of environmentally conscious phone yeah and I realized the film didn't exist and there wasn't a website to look for it well I'm not a material science it's not gonna make the phone but you know make a website so buddy and I started this website that allowed any designer Weathers architect fashion design product design whatever you could connect with manufacturers that made these sustainable materials anywhere on the road so here I am I've got these two startups going nights and weekends I've got this day job and I realize I need to pull the cord meanwhile I'm also on the phone with Brian he's living in Los Angeles and I'm like Brian look San Francisco is actually the epicenter for entrepreneurship you have to get here you have to get here I recruited that guy for a year and he finally said yes he finally had the guts and I have to give him a lot of credit for leaving his life behind in Los Angeles with his friends this job packed his life into his Honda Civic drove to San Francisco we both simultaneously quit our jobs it was them like there was so much enthusiasm in the area I think you could feel it it was like the band was coming back together right we had no songs yet we've really had any instruments anybody knew we knew like something something would come of us the the ping-pong of us going back and forth on on ideas and so that very same week that he moves up was the seminal letter in the mail from railway onward I'll never forget it chase I open that letter it says dear Joe your rent has just now gone up 25% I dropped the letter I run to my online banking account and I watch as I have no paychecks anymore and the rent goes like this and we have a math problem it's a very simple equation yeah that's right Brian had the same issue and suddenly a great a dark gray cloud forms over the apartment living in South of Market here in San Francisco and we're like oh my god we're gonna lose our apartment how are we gonna make rent and so it's like we just drop into RISD mode or creator mode and you're like okay well it's let's just coming up that is right and we had a bunch that probably weren't any good and until one day I'm in the living room on my laptop and I'm looking up a design conference that's coming to San Francisco as the industrial designer Society of America okay and it was the international version which meant that there were 5,000 people are so descending on san francisco and on the web site that said the hotels are sold out we're sorry and I saw this and I'm like ah that's terrible people want to come last minute really gonna stay by the airport and I look up into the living room awake we have so much space in her living room and I'm like I've got that you're a bit in the closet so I run up and pull the air bed out blow it up email Brian say what do you think about this notion of hosting designers for this conference in the living room he's like yeah it's awesome it's great idea they run rent this month yeah save on rent and then we realize well we could actually invest in two more air beds and rent three out for the conference to have three guests it's like okay well now we need to get the word out about this so we decide that we would call this not a bed-and-breakfast but the air bed and breakfast and we would design an experience we pick people from the airport we would breakfast in the morning we give a map to the San Francisco and a BART pass to ride the subway and so this idea was born yeah we said okay let's let's make a website so Brian does the illustrations I'm doing the coding I made a four or five page website very simple and we were so proud of our website that we made in just you know a couple of days but nobody knew this website classic Silicon Valley classics a beautiful product oh by the way it had the longest URL you've ever heard air bed-and-breakfast calm 18 character URL or like we have to get the word out so one night right before we went to bed we email all of the design blogs that were covering the conference it's of course 77 Swiss Miss all the all the guys cool hunting and it was like the next morning it felt like Christmas I mean we literally walk up we puppet web sites and they're like Brian we're at the top of the design blocks and these headlines that said need a place this weekend for the conference crash with Joe and Brian and there's some lost on a hairpin at breakfast calm and literally this idea that we had you know not a week or two earlier was suddenly broadcast internationally through these design blocks so we started getting people from Brazil from London from Japan emailing us I need a place to stay for the conference Wow and we had so many enquiries people started sending us their LinkedIn profiles their design resumes trying to become one the lucky three guests one of the other headlines I don't forget said network in your Jam jams stay on air bed-and-breakfast arena IDs a conference in the conference themselves emailed all the attendees and endorsed it we even got some local design firms to email their designers to put up their rooms we had like four or five rooms for that one weekend and so it was incredible to see you have this harebrained idea that you have no idea pretty random idea let's just call it what it is right it's that a survival totally out of survival right we need to make enough cash to save our apartment for that month and you know this whole premise was just seeing two unrelated dots and combining them in a new in a different way it's creativity anybody could have pulled that an ear bin from that conference it made air better breakfast calm there was so technical innovation there was no patent filed there's an especially algorithm it was just like there's a need and we have something that that people want like let's let's do this and it's design it yeah so we end up posting three guests that were all beyond our wildest expectations because who's gonna stay on a tear been somebody's living room right like what kind of person you think would say I'm the crazy person the crazy person maybe their 20s they have definitely like male like what woman would ever write probably low on cash probably on cash maybe college grad everybody who stayed with us was over the age of 30 hooting so a woman from Boston so we had Katherine a mole and Michael Katherine was a web designer from Boston a mole was industrial design grad student from India and Michael was a 45 year old husband and father who stayed on her bed in her living room right they completely blew our assumptions of who might want to stay in somebody's home so they arrived and we proceeded to have the time of her life I mean we took him all around San Francisco to the farmers market at the Ferry Building to our favorite breed a place in the mission we took him to her friend's house party after the kofta the conference each night we were cooking breakfast in the morning cooking dinner in the evening I mean it was incredibly social experience you can imagine the contrast of traveling to city by yourself attending a conference and each night retiring to the seclusion of you know a somewhat generic room by yourself you watching TV in the dark versus the really light of nature of her apartment listening to music cooking food sharing stories they were actually giving these tips on the web design catheters actually helped us with web design in real time from our living room and you know it really had it touched them too yeah they got to experience San Francisco through the eyes of people who lived here that's it's it's an emotional like that's one of the things that I've realized about Airbnb it's an emotional experience like getting excited about seeing your place because I mean yeah there's pictures and that's but there's an there's an emotional connection that you have but doing something different than you normally would done or being a part of a movement that is more ecological and interesting and curated and all these other things and you can even had that on day one that's so powerful well yeah then the powers of the design commonality yeah that allowed us to trust each other mm-hmm went went the distance that was really a really really important part of all it I want to wind it up so you're you're you guys you have this idea and at this point do you say wait let's try and you know if it worked once let's try and do it five more times absolutely not no this is a weekend project that isn't meant to save the department however I do remember saying goodbye to the guests the door latch clicks close I look at Brian and I go did we just get paid to make friends yeah that was incredible so the gears did begin to turn very slowly and that's when that's when this is more serendipity in the story when Brian moved out there started when Brian moved in it's because one of my roommates moved out that roommate was a guy named Nate Bush our zyc Nate I found on Craigslist Nate happened to be a computer science major from Harvard and moved to San Francisco to work at started Nate was one of those guys that is in so many ways the opposite of me but somebody was similar to me it has a computer science background is extremely pragmatic in the best way and at night we both come home and be being the living room working on our own businesses he had his side projects at Curt buns and the other website and I remember looking over my shoulder being like wow this guy loves to work we share the same work ethic yeah little did I know he was saying the same thing about me I was like if I ever need an engineer I'm gonna go tap my shoulder dude he's like if every designer he's going to talk to me so after this one weekend I go to Nate and I share this experience of these three guests and I say you know we're thinking about the next version of this now what do you think and it's like this is awesome he loved the premise of using the Internet to get people offline back to the real world so if you like a month or two passes we're now October 2007 when we house the guests November December we go home for the holiday break and this is important moment cuz you go back I went back to Atlanta the Georgia and of course everyone's asking what are you working on what's going on in San Francisco and you're like well you know you what do you want to preneur nowt there what you're making yeah what you making uh and I remember I didn't have a lot going on but I did tell him about this air bed and breakfast thing and something remarkable happened people went very quickly into one of two camps they either loved it and they're like that's the coolest thing I've ever heard of I would totally stay in somebody's home because I get the local nature and some people are like oh my god what you're weird you didn't you what who into your home but no thank you and they went the other direction and I actually think that was a pretty good sign yeah that's the best like I think I think in the early stages of an idea it's important to have to go to the edges right like you don't have to like serve everybody all at once but like at least have people who get so excited and passionate about it even if they're people who are like no you're crazy that's we don't never do it so Brian had the same experience we came back in January and we're sharing each other like yeah it's time to do this so we call up Nate we're like Nate we have this big idea we want to make air beds for conferences this is the big grand idea hundreds [Laughter] so like what's the next big conference South by Southwest is coming up hotels so out there this is gonna be perfect Foursquare watch their Twitter launch there we're gonna launch there he's gonna take off like a rocket ship so we for two weeks we sprint all-nighters tons of Red Bull we get the next version of era bed-and-breakfast just in time for South by Southwest and we had a total of four hosts and two reservations one of which was Brian wow wow talk about a complete belly flop crickets oh my god like you cannot gone worse so you yo-yo a little bit right success then lack of it you start sharing your idea it's time to raise some money you have enough traction out of two I want to want to go back to the concept of rejection I also want to be mindful of our time I that promise would be out of here in a little bit but to me this is a very pivotal concept for the folks at home for what I know about your story which is there's so many details you're able to fill in for me here sitting face to face but what happens when you tell people your idea and they tell you you're crazy does it go back to the professor atrazine let's go back to mean is this like is this a recurring game the fact yeah I mean because you guys were left out of the room right we were so from South by Southwest we know it looks like the concepts not going to work however we learned two very important things the first is that exchanging money in person in somebody's home is very awkward yeah nobody wants to do that yeah so Australia yeah okay there you go and the second thing is that people are like hey I want to use your site but there's no conference how do I do that and so we had this realization well maybe this is about travel yeah and maybe we bring the convenience of online payments into the equation so we remove the awkwardness of that experience and so we retooled that summer a third time we relaunched for the Democratic National Convention in Denver Colorado because there was a housing shortage of a hundred thousand people yeah coming to the city of 20,000 hotel rooms the mayor wanted to open the city park so that people could pitch tents wow this is a real issue so we really launched in time for that and we're starting get pressed now we're in CNN or in Lomond it goes international we have hundred hosts in Denver like this is crazy we have hundreds of people using her service for that one weekend customer service is blowing up the time was myself literally people calling me like yeah can't find the address how do I get there I'm like oh okay yeah make a left where you like wow like it was all hands on deck but it was working we saw this marketplace actually functioning yeah it's alright this is a great time to raise money what's let's go out into the community here in Silicon Valley so we got introduced to the 20 20 different people in Silicon Valley a lot of names which you know yeah your listeners know ten of them returned her email five of the medes for coffee zero invested in her company they all thought it was crazy they all thought it was weird that would never happen at scale and they couldn't imagine a business model that was based on strangers staying in strangers homes which didn't make sense I mean looking back it makes a ton of sense why because we've all grown up with this bias that we've been taught since for kids yeah this stranger is equal danger and that was the hurdle that we had to overcome people couldn't conceptualize beyond that bias and so in the face of all that rejection which hurt you know that didn't feel good yeah he's incredible these are the guys that went behind YouTube and Google and PayPal and Facebook yeah telling your idea sucks you know like I go back to go back to the gareth factor at the gareth factor you've proved them wrong though well you know i it is a good question like what kept us going yep in the face of credible rejection the only answer that I have is that we had a personal experience of what it felt like to house people in her home and the joy that we felt that we saw her guests take away from their trip was enough to say you know we just believe we keep going if people can see what we saw they'll enjoy it as much as we did so we kept going like we just have to get to that point where people can get a taste and a little glimpse of what transpired in our apartment for those five days and we think if they see what we saw we can go like it too and I think it worked I got a speed round yeah what role did photography play in changing the trajectory of Airbnb huge we might not be here today without it put simply like photographs where the mechanisms by which to sell your product so we're on our last limb the DNC kind of fades away and works crickets again yeah if only there was a political convention every weekend great huge huge we get on a kind of like a Hail Mary pass we get into Y Combinator in 2009 and we're one of 16 companies in my comedy room and this was like literally our last breath we have a conversation before we get for eat the first day we said Bryan Nate and I and me sat down he said you know well we'll give it three months of 110% we'll put everything else in our lives aside girlfriends and side projects and even friends like social life off off 110% focus we became militant during Y Combinator and we said you know if at the end of three months we'll evaluate and if it's not working we'll go our separate ways but at least we'll know we gave it a full effort and so we go into YC with that mentality and Paul Graham on the very first day gives us this incredible piece of advice he says go meet your people go meet your early adopters talk to them listen to them hear what's going on in their minds which was based around his premise of make something people want it's actually what it says on the t-shirt that Y Combinator make something people want and this chase was a seminal moment for us because it completely was orthogonal to the myth of Silicon Valley which is that you have to solve problems in a scalable way that's the beauty of code that one line can serve one customer ten thousand or hundred plus and so us and the dismal trajectory of our business in the ROI days of Airbnb where there was no growth flat this could be was us trying to code or through problem sitting behind the safety of our own computers Paul Graham you mystify that it said go out into the world leave the comfort of your computers go talk to your customers or like whoa we don't really have have many customers but New York City showing some promise we had 30 hosts so he looks isten goes your early adopters in New York City we go yeah because what are you still doing here go to New York City and like what are we gonna do so we brainstorm as we're looking for search results we notice the pattern the hosts well very earnest and what they want to offer we're not the best photographers mm-hm and so the pictures were taken at night the homes were totally staged that well there were dishes in the sink toilet seat was up etc and your takis fellows like I wouldn't really want to stay there never think you know I've done photography throughout my life the classes at RISD what if we just solved this problem ourselves let's actually go for out of New York for one weekend we'll rent a wide-angle lens camera and we'll just go door-to-door Manhattan and Brooklyn taking photos that's exactly what we did this like focusing on pay attention to this this is the most manual like the most non scalable thing was the thing that actually unlocked your business yeah speed round number two advice that or what's something that if people found out about you they would be surprised to know one sentence I've seen Michael Jordan naked in person maybe the best answer of all time in that chair there have been many men and women in that chair that could be the best answer at all time something that you are surprised about every day when you go to work at one of the most successful unicorn whatever accolades we can keep on you multi-billion dollar whatever was what surprises you every day when you go into work the people I get to work with I don't know how but it you know there's so many old adages of hire people who are better than you yep which I have subscribed to you I think we most of us in the company have yeah and I feel really lucky because I get to work with some of the best again seventh grade basketball coach yeah a with people who are better than you so there's so many lessons from your childhood it's like and you're a beautiful storyteller and that there justkeep there's this recurring the eternal return of the same concepts what's next a way well recently we announced that we are leveraging a new portion of the air being the platform to help house those been displaced in the world refugees refugees about five years ago when Hurricane sandy hit New York mm-hmm phew 10,000 plus people went almost overnight we had a host email us and say I want to offer my guest rooms for free how do I do that at the time you couldn't but we said why not it sparked this 24 hour engineering marathon where we reconfigured a platform to wow that capacity so within a matter of days we had a few thousand rooms available to houses in New York we realized that wasn't a one-off that there'd be other situations like that in the world and since then we've been able to provide housing sometimes in a matter of hours - you know victims of typhoons and fires and floods in 65 different situations in 17 countries and it's been incredible this is five years of seeing this generosity of people who have a home and one offer to those who have been rendered homeless and it's somebody happened about a year ago where we decided to shift we said what if we move from being reactive to being proactive what if we tapped into that natural generosity of which there's now three and a half million people with a home on our service all over the world Wow what if we were to leverage that generosity on a daily basis for things that we can plan for and predict in advance certainly the topic of refugees is one of those things they're 65 million displaced people today UNHCR predicts it'll be three hundred twenty-five million in 2044 in our lifetime they'll be as many people the population the United States will be displaced globally and we thought well this is something that maybe we can put a you know a tiny Denton in our own special way so we've been building out the technology that allows anybody who has a spare bedroom down the hall to offer it to them someone's been displaced by a natural disaster or someone who's getting resettled in United States or internationally in France and other countries abroad and ultimately what my dream is that in addition to growing Airbnb which we're doing is to on the side perhaps build the world's largest humanitarian housing platform that can help in these times in need that's that's what's the next arrest you just don't stop what I love about what we just spoke of over the last almost 90 minutes now I've listened to a lot of interviews of the you have been we're both Greylock companies we're ready to the CEO summit not too long ago and you got to sit down with Reid and I feel like I knew a lot about your story I got more gangster details in this 90 minutes thank you so much for sharing stuff I haven't heard elsewhere yeah this is this is too good anything else before we go what else do I mean you've said it all but what well there's a lot more I mean if people want to get involved in any of the the refugee work they gonna learn more by going to air be be calm swash welcome beautiful thank you so damn much for being on the show man I appreciate it thanks Jase for having folks at home that is something you don't get every day lessons from someone who's built a company like that and then at the hard way the way the you and I would do it one step in front of another signing off for another one of these epic shows probably see again and yes tomorrow you

Channel: Chase Jarvis

Views: 20,830

Rating: 4.9732442 out of 5

Keywords: chase jarvis, chasejarvis, creativity, business, entrepreneur, artist, creative, freelance, photography, career, advice, airbnb, joe gebbia, start up, silicon valley, san francisco, failure, sxsw

Id: fJMklceisLw

Length: 79min 56sec (4796 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 06 2017