I think the key that makes Airbnb is the fact that we're a community, not just a series of commodities.
— Brian Chesky
When you are in someone's home, in their bed, you see the world from their eyes. You understand 'the other' is not so other.
CEOs are often chief product officers. But for me to say I'm a chief product officer when my product is a community, I really should be thinking of myself as head of this community.
Never assume you can't do something. Push yourself to redefine the boundaries.
Travel is a new experience that can transport you out of your everyday routine to create memories with the ones you love.
My life is longer because of the journeys I have taken.
Airbnb is different from most brands. We're a community of individuals, and yet there's a consistency holding us together through the values we share. We have a common belief in belonging, but everyone's expression of it will naturally always be a little different.
Our culture is the foundation for our company.
The office is the laboratory and meeting your users is like going into the field. You can't just stay in the lab. And it's not just asking users what they want, it's about seeing what they're doing.
I'm not saying the whole world will work this way, but with Airbnb, people are sleeping in other people's homes and other people's beds. So there's a level of trust necessary to participate that's different from an eBay or Facebook.
The stuff that matters in life is no longer stuff. It's other people. It's relationships. It's experience.
What I've been surprised by is not how different people are, but how similar they are. There are certain types of Airbnb people, and they are in every city in the world - it's just that in some cultures, there is more of a generational divide.
Every day I would wake up and think, 'Today is another missed opportunity to do something important.' After enough days like this, you start feeling like you are getting old, even when you are relatively young. We are all natural entrepreneurs, and being manacled to a desk job is not for us.
The people with the passports, the people who travel more, tend to be the most understanding. And it's ironic that the people who travel the least have the strongest opinions about the people they've never met.
People don't use Airbnb overtly to trust people more. They use it because they want to get a better sense of the culture and to save money. A by-product was that they live in someone else's shoes.
Unless you have fixed costs, you don't need any capital to create a prototype. Ideally, your co-founders, with sweat equity, can create the product themselves.
Think of the imagination as a giant stone from which we carve out new ideas. As we chip away, our new ideas become more polished and refined. But if you start by editing your imagination, you start with a tiny stone.
Our perception of time is really driven by our perception of the unfamiliar, vivid, and new.
When we started Airbnb, I had no idea about the people we would meet or the friendships I would make.
Belonging has always been a fundamental driver of humankind.
Culture is simply a shared way of doing something with passion.
Whatever the press is talking about, they want to keep talking about it. So instead of asking yourself, 'How can I get them to start talking about me?', figure out a way to get yourself involved in what they're already talking about.
I think the next big thing in music, and it's kind of because I come from the tech industry, is actually, I think it's the platform... Spotify is incredibly interesting. I think the platform is becoming the star.
If you want to create a great product, just focus on one person. Make that one person have the most amazing experience ever.
In June 2010, I moved out of my apartment and I have been mostly homeless ever since, off and on. I just live in Airbnb apartments and I check in every week in different homes in San Francisco.
Culture is a thousand things, a thousand times. It's living the core values when you hire; when you write an email; when you are working on a project; when you are walking in the hall.
No matter how certain I am about some culture or some group of people, my opinions are only as accurate as the amount of time I've spent with them.
I think I've always been pretty shameless about seeking out people much smarter and much more experienced than me from the very beginning.
In summer of 2008, I meet a guy named Michael Seibel. And Michael Seibel says, 'There are these people called angels, and they'll give you money.' The first thing I thought is, 'I can't believe this guy believes in angels.' That's how naive I was.
As children, we have vivid imaginations. We stay up late waiting for Santa Claus, dream of becoming president, and have ideas that defy physics. Then something happens. As we grow older, we start editing our imagination.
Repetition doesn't create memories. New experiences do.
Our shared vision of belonging is the thread that weaves through every touchpoint on Airbnb.
The culture is what creates the foundation for all future innovation. If you break the culture, you break the machine that creates your products.
I think we go through our lives limiting our potential, and when times are tough, it's easy to convince ourselves that something isn't possible, but if you start there, then you limit yourself and the possibilities of what you can create.
When you start a company, it's more an art than a science because it's totally unknown. Instead of solving high-profile problems, try to solve something that's deeply personal to you. Ideally, if you're an ordinary person and you've just solved your problem, you might have solved the problem for millions of people.
The American dream, what we were taught was, grow up, own a car, own a house. I think that dream's completely changing. We were taught to keep up with the Joneses. Now we're sharing with the Joneses.
Build something 100 people love, not something 1 million people kind of like.
Customers are willing to try new things, and if you can survive, you will have fewer competitors. It's like entering the eye of the storm. As long as you are strong enough to survive, you can end up in still water by yourself.
