Designing for Trust with Airbnb's Joe Gebbia and Reid Hoffman | The Scaleup Offsite 2017

it is my privilege and honor to be on stage with Joe who actually in fact I have learned a bunch of different interesting product and design things from among other things I haven't done this yet as your furniture stuff out yet or no next month next month okay there's some furniture stuff that's coming out that I recommend to you and whatever degree we can we can talk about that we'll get to part of the reason I wanted to do this section with Joe was that a kind of a key theory around scaling is actually in fact first doing things that don't scale across a set of different key places in the business and then working out to how to get that part to scale and Airbnb is like you know the canonical example of being super design intentional on this and so let's start a little bit with kind of like how you guys got to thinking about you know going door-to-door in New York what that experience was like why you did it clearly not scalable having the founders dodo dodo in New York or anywhere and then what's the design process that you run for beginning to think about everything from that initially super hand crafted into kind of more scalable process yeah cool well first of all thanks for having me it's great to share these stories from like the early days of Airbnb when it was like truly like you know you're at war trying to get product market fit trying to get people to adopt this crazy weird service that no one would invest in and I think you know reflecting back on that that time of like right before we tipped into into scale it's like how do you how do you push so hard to get that that I guess inflection point right and for us up until that point I feel like we had subscribed to this this this myth of Silicon Valley which is that you have to solve problems scalably right because that's like that's the beauty of the internet this beauty of code one line of code can you know touch an infinite amount of people and for many for far too long we tried to code our way through these these problems that we were facing and we were getting nowhere they is the quintessential Paul Graham trough of sorrow like totally flat I call it the Midwest of analytics like there was just zero growth and it was really depressing and it wasn't until we had this this session with Paul Graham where for the first time somebody said to us like it's okay to do things that don't scale it's okay to step outside that that myth and to try any and everything and the minute that that happened it was like the creativity too started to flow and are like okay well what could we do and it was looking at the this pattern on our search results that hosts in New York of which we had about 30 at the time had really bad photos like they just didn't know how to take a good photo the pictures at night pictures with dishes in the sink pictures the toilet seat up I mean you looking at your like I would want to stay there so no wonder we're not growing known why would somebody pay for this kind of accommodation based on these images and that's where like we're in a session with Paul Graham it's Nate Bryan myself and we're all just like all those around were like well if we don't if we can do things that don't scale why don't we just go take better photos I've done photography my whole life took some classes at art school like let's just go to New York for one weekend and we have no idea what's going to happen we'll e-mail our community in advance and we'll say hey you know we want to come meet you we want to send a professional photographer to come shoot your place so we'd fly out we rented this this wide-angle lens camera from a place in Union Square and you guys with a professional photographer that was the aha moment for a lot of hosts come the show up at the door hey hey I'm Joe it's nice to meet you and they're looking over your shoulder like where's the photographer here you go oh it's also me too and then they put this look of disbelief on their face but then something really interesting happened we go in we take photos and we'd show them on the back of the camera and say hey what do you think and they were blown away they're like oh my god my part looks so good do you want to stay for some tea or coffee and so they're sit down on the couch and our earliest customers much like yours where our zealots these are the people who were willing to take a risk try a new weird crazy product be kind of outcast amongst their friends which meant that they had a lot of knowledge they had a lot of insights into this kind of activity because they were already doing in other websites they were on Craigslist that our unsub let's calm their on home away blah blah blah and we're sitting down with them they plot their laptop and they start showing us and start asking questions like show me how you log into your talent show me how you evaluate a guest if you feel like you can trust them enough to let them into your home how do you put your calendar and all of a sudden read right in from my very own eyes I saw UX user experience train wrecks of people trying to navigate our beautifully design products but not being able to do nearly what we intended them for the do I take them 12 steps to do something we thought was going into take two for example people did know how to update the calendar they were like we even reviews the wrong way all of these train wrecks that we just had no idea or even a problem right because at this point we're just in San Francisco trying to code our way through problems or shipping code around the world we never took the time to go out into the world and actually meet the people using our service do you think it's worth talking at all about the kind of the experience not just being the websites but the entire experience around it as part of that sure I mean a lot of things I learned from you guys I think even going back to the very origins of the kind of that core weekend whether three guests in our living room I won't go through that that story other than to say from the very beginning we thought about this more than just a place to put your head at night to place the lay down even from that very one weekend really well what if we pick them up from the airport what if we provide breakfast in the morning what if we gave them you know Bart pass to get around the city with a map to San Francisco and even from the beginnings of this weird weekend project was this idea of like how do you think about everybody's experience from end to end and that's I mean often like a designer's job like this water bottle is a great example of that a lot of people might look at this like oh cool design the water bottle a designer will look at this and say like actually this is just one instance of a much bigger design the design of this started with thinking about the no the shelfs experience inside the store or maybe even further than that the first time you heard about the cg brand and you think about each sequential step that somebody goes to this just happens to be an instance on a much larger holistic kind of arc of how people experience products so it's considering all those things that you call design thinking that's all that is it's just consideration for each of the touch points that leads up to the moment when someone consumes your product including what happens to this afterwards right like a good designer we consider will the materials in this and the labeling to show what you can do with it which bin it goes in so that has like a life cycle beyond its consumption would be like how we think about design of the company and then how do you move from those initial steps because obviously the reason why Silicon Valley has this kind of classic only do things at scale is because you're worried about getting trapped in like oh the founders have to go take all the pictures or we have to hire all the photographers I'm going to do this and you get worried about well that will never scale on some of our work so you shouldn't even started as a they get the kind of learning about really talking customers really getting sense of it helping build that initial kind of like not just like the love experience yes but that coming and so how do you go through the process where you then because there you have another design experience you say okay we figured that out now we're designing the scale yeah well you know there's something that magical that happened during that first weekend when we're taking these photos we're seeing our customers use our product in their natural habitats right we're in little we're living in their living rooms you call this ethnographic research or you go out into the world and you study something in its natural environment and it was through those interactions that we saw the the distance the gap between our product and our market there was this invisible gap that we couldn't see and by going and talking to our earliest most passionate customers they helped shed a light on the distance between those two years of a product and market coming together and so a couple things happened we take the pictures we'd come home and upload them we'd also take their feedback and actually implement changes very very quickly right so Nate would Gatti's a genius he would take these ideas that would come back from from you guess suppose they start implementing them like the same night so imagine you're like this customer of this website and you get this email that says hey it was great to meet you here's the photos of your place we uploaded them for you and by the way the idea you have for the calendar we've implemented it tell us what you think and these 30 hosts that we met over the course of a couple weekends doing it started to use the word Airbnb and love in the same sentence and something magical started to happen a couple things the first is that revenue doubled from all of $200 a week to $400 which was huge but we started to see more listings popping up in New York this is a time we had no press we had no online marketing there was no possible way that somebody heard about it from us this was like the most pure word-of-mouth we'd probably have ever had because when I feel like when people fall in love with something you tend to tell others in life about it your neighbors your colleagues your co-workers your family your friends and so we started to see that 30 listings become 40 to become 57 become 65 and what was really cool is that these new hosts coming on board would see the quality of listings and be like wow I guess I need really good photos so they would upload really good photos so we had quantity and quality going up at the same time and when that happened people started booking they're like oh I see what I can put on paying for and they have the locations that I'm looking to stay in this idea of like traveling around the world to take photos of apartments obviously he's like that can't last forever and so it was always our intention to really understand what that operation was from the inside out so that from any dimension we would understand the needs of like the timing like how long does it take to shoot an apartment how long does it take to get between two apartments in the city what kind of systems you need to upload photos quick like all these different things that you have to figure out we did ourselves so eventually over time like we through product and engineering at it and today we have got like tens of thousands of photographers all over the world contract photographers that shoot in every major city in the round the world it's a free service that any host can can one-click and the photographer's up in about two days take three photos replace and then I'll start just like bumping into walls and stumbling through it and trying to figure it out big professional photographer showed up here where the three co-founders or to talk to you and actually and that was another lens of the kind of the photography services and other lenses saying look yes we're investing in this cop there's heavy cost human touch way of doing it but it leads to a compounding effect within the marketplace in the network and that's another angle of the unscalable things but then later lead to scale as a way of doing it on your TED talk you talked about designing for trust right and I actually think that's one of the things that I think all the companies is super important for because part of encountering a new company a new experience going and staying at someone's home except for but all of us have this experience what are some of the takeaways you think that the that kind of founder is heõs and so forth when they're saying look I am trying to provide this new experience what are some of the principles either as stories of Airbnb or general principles of designing for trust Wow yeah I mean this is I think people probably know the early stories of we've tried raise money it didn't work out and we were just like scratching our heads like why is this not working why will people not see what we can see that this is like there's a much more authentic way to travel and I think what we ran up against looking back I know what we're going up against was the the age-old stranger-danger bias that we've all been taught since to her kids we just didn't realize it at the time and like we had to figure out some way to navigate this bias in the world that well of course like what investor would invest in a company whose business is about having strangers sleeping each other's homes like that's crazy right back in the day and so we really had to get smart and clever and try a ton of different things to figure out how do you create a condition where people feel comfortable saying yes right like what information do you need to provide I mean we had to create you could say olympic-sized trust between people and it was for us you know I think when you face the challenge we face the problem you fall back on what you know and we we fell back on design because that's what we know and again when you think about design it's about the whole experience not just the Wilkin feel of something so for us it really begged that question can you design for trust can you actually create a condition where people feel comfortable saying yes something like this we weren't actually sure if you could I think through a ton of iteration there's some classic stories of the amount of disclosure that somebody provides when you're exchanging a message with a potential host has a there's a lot of leading indicators to tell how much that house might accept your reservation request into your home for example if you send a message that just says yo the acceptance rates dropped if you had a message on the other side that was way too long like I'm having issues as my mother and like all these things like expect miss rates also dropped so there's this sweet spot in the middle that's like hey I'm coming for vacations my family loved the art on your walls etc where there's like the right amount of disclosure so people feel comfortable saying yes and that's something that like once you understand that you can look at the data and look at the design you could actually create you know guidelines to help encourage people to enter that kind of middle part of the bell curve I think smart companies look them there believes that the very top of us realize that customer service is not just a you know is luck there's cost some house but it's your branding moment and obviously we all tracking what's going on we not united big enough said for what disaster there so one of the key things that I think also is an interesting part of scaling that this touches on is how do you essentially preserve a culture as you're scaling and one of the things that Airbnb has done an exceptionally great job at is preserving this kind of design and Trust culture what are some of the things that you're doing as a way to say as we as we scale our employee base and obviously something that's how you interview and who you hire and so forth and is interesting it is more on that but what are the kind of some of the key kind of ways that you operate to keep that focus on designing experience making sure everyone's putting trust at the very top of their yeah thinking it's a great question I mean I think we do a pretty good job there's there's areas where we don't you know this is a really tough topic especially when you're scaling if you're in hyper growth you're blitzscaling whatever the term you use I'm immediately think of advice that that Tony Hsieh gave us way back in 2009 he said if you care about culture make sure you get it right from the beginning make sure that something investment up front and use the metaphor he said it's a lot easier to mold concrete when it's still wet than to chip away at it later when it's dry and so the DNA that you said in the early stages of company can have tremendous impacts on how the culture plays out over time and so we really took that to heart I think we're really impressionable around culture at that time we really want to get it right and we just started putting the Norn amount of emphasis into the people that that that we hired these other pieces of Isis that culture doesn't make your people it's the people that make your culture so get the people right in the culture will follow not the other way around and so I mean Brian and I were involved in every interview for certain period of time until a couple years in the recruiting team one that had our throats we're slowing everything down and then we needed to figure out a way to scale that well how do we make sure that that our voice in our our presence is still involved in the recruiting process an interview process so greatest thing called core values interviewers which is scaled phenomenally well for us where we train people inside the company how we would interview and they get to effectively sit in interviews on our behalf and really screen candidates to to openly make sure that at the end of the day people believe what we believe which is the most important part I think is hiring is that you know we don't want people who are interested in the dollar signs around a company or you know the next big technical challenge themselves but people who is specifically geared towards our specific mission in the world so how do you find people who believe what you believe which is what Brian and I would do in every interview and I think by training others to to look for the same signals arresting questions we've been able to scale that now we have I think hundreds of core value interviewers in all of our offices around the world one of the things that funny little hack but subtly very important that I learned from you guys was making the conference rooms and the meeting spaces into exact you know kind of work pretty close to what you key host and experiences look like because the thing I I had this kind of just amazing kind of epiphany walking into it the very first time I recognized hadn't told me about it hadn't showed up in any of the board meetings you know Strangelove board room is not designed that way it's the one that I normally go into and I wanted to - a meeting room was you or someone else oh my god this is awesome because part of what you're doing is you're reminding everybody in the meeting space your and these are the people we work with these are the things that matter these are the experiences that matter and you're in them - right here as you're doing them right um I don't know which you know can such an obvious design insight that I then been reflecting into but about sometimes I become on my linkedin office I'm beginning to change my logo it was more misdirection and and part of the thing is like one of the kinds of like design hacks like that they said this is how it keeps us focused on what's important in terms of what we're doing that's a great question I think for those I don't know we we turn any available space we have into a replica of an exact listing summer in the world on our service part of it was just to differentiate and say like how do you know when you walk into our office that it's our like where you are in the world and we thought well our listings are pretty unique to us and maybe we'll use those two to inform our spaces it also just reminds us that while we're behind computer screens all day like probably most of us hear that there's a physicality to what we offer that like at the end of the day were coding and designing to facilitate a connection for people to enjoy really magnificent spaces around the world and so that's that's like the other kind of subtle reminder behind this um and I think Brian credit because he came up with that idea yeah but it was all today yeah yeah so what else do we do I think dogfooding is really important so make sure that we give opportunities for anyone with company to continually stay engaged with the service we highly encourage anyone with company to be an active host not everybody can various reasons but we are constantly trying to find ways that you can be in the customer shoes so that you're connected to the people that you're serving at the end of the day I think if you're not careful then there have been times that to admit in our company's history where we have this gap has emerged with our guests and hosts and we've lost touch and so there's this constant battle to try to like always stay connected so we give people um stipend credits to travel every quarter on the site just to make sure people have you know no excuse yes to be using the product and service and ultimately when people come back everybody has some insight or some bug that they found and the product it is you know it's part of like you can say like our intelligence network all right like constantly Honi and iterating making the product better by having their own people go out into the world and use it so I'm going to ask two more questions and then we're going to open up for questions from the audience and if you guys don't have any I only got two three of the 15 questions and I written down and I have something you too oh great I haven't do that too Manaka monster with one of those well I'm just curious because you've been involved in the company since such an early stage like I don't I don't think we had quite hit hockey-stick at that point though though you could sense that we were about to what have you seen from your cookie of a such unique lens into the business what did you think that would be relevant for that sort of conversation for here and additional things you said so I think that one of the things that we've gotten a little bit well a little bit of the question is is you guys collectively as part of the design thing this is a multiple star thing which is you go to if we design the perfect experience and everything will be perfect what would that be that's probably not economically the little role and not scalable but then start ratcheting back from that and actually in fact I think that's a good design exercise for everyone to do right because it kind of gives you a product and a product market fit North Star but then you begin to try to answer what is economically feasible what is scalable feasible which are not exactly the same things related and they'll work back from that and that also gives you an iterative and dynamic road chart for doing it and that was actually one of the things where I had always been more that can't build up like start here and yes I know I'm kind of roughly going but I didn't design the perfect experience I kind of like Ian we're going to need to be there eventually one of the things we can do now and that kind of question was one of the things so then I'm gonna only ask you one of my questions before I open it up and then even alves as we go describe how you do your vacations like how you do the kind of a walkabout remember the thing that we were we had dinner and you were about to to go and travel what's that and why do you do that and how does that how does that how does that lead to how you think about design interesting Surrey is referring to every December between the basin between Christmastime and New Year's we give the company time off it started a couple of years ago and started 2009-2010 we've done it every year since it was really the first time where it was like oh my god if a week to go travel where could you go and I started this thing about six years ago where I on December 26 I'd pick a destination on December 27th I'd be on a plane somewhere in yets take one bag and you get the book one Airbnb always for the first day and it's sort of this kind of stepping into the unknown you kind of you don't know where you going to go get one bag so you can't really pack that much can't overthink it you just have to just have to go so I it's not fondly called jet pack that's the thing that happens every year and that stay with amazing hosts from in Uruguay to Japan one time I ended up in a I ended up staying with a Japanese Buddhist monk in his his temple on a Tommy mat for $60 a night you can read this guy's tatami mat in his temple in southern Japan middle of nowhere barely a cell phone connection and it was one of the most phenomenal experiences of Arab and it took like five minutes of planning yeah the two things I think are great is it's a real deep way of walking your customers but also like actually than guy like what I learned was always asking afterwards what was the last one you did because I learn a bunch about the human condition as a parchment so now let's open up for questions we have a few minutes in case there are any questions there's one here and one here so great Hey thank you so earlier Brett was talking about how he scaled engineering for quip and particular around and hearing managers technically and sort of how the structure of the team changed over time I'm curious for Airbnb how is the product process changed over time good question I think in the early days we were if I remember back we were really adverse to hiring two senior to soon have something like we would often say to each other and and if I could go back I would have I would have changed that I think that bringing in senior leadership bringing in senior management when you know that you're going to scale like it's actually I wish we'd gotten ahead of that like knowing that we were going to scale I wish we had just said okay what's let's like hire like a roller - that seems out of reach today but because of how quickly things are moving in six months like that's going to be the perfect like role for what we need an organization so that would be one piece of advice I give myself as I go back is like it's okay to hire senior even in early stages of the business dilemma was one of the questions I was going to have to given keeping the right kind of supply it seems like from my perspective Airbnb will be at supply limited market place so curious how you think about the different types of supply from folks that have for example a spare apartment they want to run out versus people that are running out their own home kind of how you think about the user experience for the different groups and how you think about the scaling each one up yeah since the beginning we've been supply constrained because if you think about the demand supply side demand side people have been booking travel online since the internet was around grid-like since Expedia and the realities of Orbitz etc so that was like a known behavior but people were not with seeing their homes on the internet to rent out to people haven't met before it so that was like a whole can of worms to try to unpack I'm still we've always traditionally been supply constrained and there have been you know all sorts of twists and turns over the years of how we think about getting to apply what our best supply is I have to admit in the very early days of Airbnb back in gosh 2009 we thought that these these property managers were like the best the best thing on earth because in one phone call you could have 50 properties all at once and for any marketplace like trying to grow like you need to get that momentum going right and so like so we built all these tools because if you have 50 properties it's a very different need than if you're renting extra bedroom room you know down the hallway so we had to build all these special tools and like what we discovered pretty quickly is that customer service started to ring off the charts because these property management companies in big property groups were in it for very different reasons right these were businesses these these are people that needed to maximize every you know pay for their dollar they need to gag squeeze out every bit of efficiency of that unit that they rented or purchased and say they cared less about the actual experience of the guests and we heard it loud and clear from things like bait-and-switch and like all kinds of crazy stuff that these guys were doing it and we realized pretty quickly over the course of a couple of months that yeah it's great for supply but it's not great for the customer experience and if guests are staying with us in order like having a horrible stay like that's not good for the long-term of our business so we after a couple of months as experience since we dropped that and we went back to our core is really people primary homes maybe they have a second home up in you know Tahoe or some of the vacation destination but it's really about the core primary home experience and what will keep the marketplace open and wide enough such that kind of like eBay like if anybody lists any kind of thing like whether that's the tree house or whatever they could do that but I think like really having that experience knowing we didn't want to refocus us on on what our core offering is is it like the beauty of the service is you get to experience somebody's home in a local neighborhood versus you know some sort of more touristy kind of part of town that's more of a generic experience so I think from a supply perspective its content figured out how do we how do we find those those primary residences people who want to you know need to make ends meet for various reasons actually one of our fastest growing segments right now are empty-nesters which kind of makes sense you know they've got an extra room their kids are off maybe it's a little bit you know less lively in the house maybe they've always dream to open a better breakfast one day it's a kid retire in Sioux and suddenly in five minutes they can have the bed-and-breakfast experience in their own home actually just very quickly because it falls on that and almost out of time how did the the sense of the whole magical trips thing come out of that kind of social connectivity like how did you when did you guys really start thinking this is what we have to launch that so we knew since 2012 that accommodations is just one of many decisions that we all make and we're putting trip together right if think about or too long ago what's the purpose of the trip where am I going to stay how many to get there what am I going to do with them on the ground and actually in the city that I'm traveling to for the country and so what we've known for a long time that's again like designing the whole experience accommodations was just like one instance of a much bigger journey that people go on when you take a trip and so as always our ambitions from starting in early 2012 that one day we wanted to design the whole trip like what if we could imbue every part of the travel experience with the same values that we've put into the accommodations experience and so that's that's informed what launched in November which is experiences so when you travel to the city you can now within the Airbnb community find really cool local things to do provided by hosts sharing their passions skills and interests of people exactly all right well let's thank Joe for coming what's up cool because you

Channel: Greylock

Views: 10,504

Rating: 4.9058824 out of 5

Keywords: tech, airbnb, growth, product

Id: NbIhjZLvmBU

Length: 30min 50sec (1850 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 06 2017