A world-changing vision often necessitates a profound simplicity in the user experience.
— Joe Gebbia
My role is to think about what the future could be for Airbnb - and that includes crafting an effortless and easy-to-use service on any platform, whether mobile, tablet, or Web.
Airbnb has proven that hospitality, generosity, and the simple act of trust between strangers can go a long way.
Design has always been a driving force in my life: it's the lens through which I experience the world.
Airbnb is a trusted online marketplace for people to list, discover, and book unique accommodations around the world. From a private room to a private island, we offer an entertaining and personal way for travelers to unlock local experiences and see their surroundings through the eyes of a local.
When the car was introduced in 1908, people could experience a brand new way to travel that was more efficient than a horse and buggy. Can you believe that cities tried to outlaw cars in the United States? Can you imagine driving a car for a year then having to go back to a horse and buggy?
The story of Airbnb is really the underdog story in many ways.
The sharing economy is about making use of any idle resource out there. We do love seeing other sharing-economy companies flourish.
When we go city by city, country by country, the majority of our hosts, our owners, are simply renting out their spare bedroom.
Design helps shape our everyday interactions through products, furniture, objects, or experiences.
How do you convince somebody to host a stranger for the weekend? That's not a trivial thing. It's not something I think you can throw technology at, marketing at, or sales at. We threw design at it because that's all we knew, and in doing so, I feel like we brought a human touch to it, which is so needed.
The question that I can't shake - it's this question that keeps coming up for me - is What does the shared home of the future look like? People are sharing homes at a rate that no one ever predicted, but residences and homes weren't designed for it. They were designed around ideas of privacy and separation.
You must have the ability to recognize good design and good user experience. These are core things at Airbnb. It doesn't matter which department you're in.
We hire people who are smarter than us.
The fear of mistakes is the fast track to irrelevance.
When it comes to technology and the home, I really don't want to see any of it.
For me, one of my personal inspirations was designers in the mid-20th century named Charles and Ray Eames.
I feel triumphant when our moms can use Airbnb without their technically inclined kids.
Bringing words to life, storyboards show you things that words can't.
As our company has grown, how we configure and design our offices has been a crucial part of how we foster connection and collaboration throughout our teams.
As Chief Product Officer, I lead our product team to create simple, intuitive user experiences.
We believe that the best solutions come from solving your own problem. If you have a real problem, there's likely someone else who can relate. That's how Airbnb was born.
For an international business such as ours, you can't localise without a local. That was a hard lesson for us. We had to be closer, physically present, which is when we put teams on the ground.
Everything at Airbnb is a continuation of what it's like to be a guest in somebody's house. We think about how each stage makes people feel.
What people demand is what the policies serve.
There's this misconception globally that the platform is about property groups and big property owners renting out entire buildings full-time.
Technology moves so quickly; you can't get comfortable with the business you have today because technology will progress.
Airbnb is about travel.
In general, we believe in regulation - just as long as it is fair and balanced.
It's about more than making money; it's about connecting people in countries all around the world. Our social mission is to get people meeting each other, and we need people who align with that purpose.
We encourage employees to ship new features on day one, which immediately encourages them to come up with something creative and different.
Cities are a melting pot for different ideas, and diversity brings a high-energy rhythm that I don't think we'd know was gone until it was too late.
Every apartment I've ever lived in has had a space to make, create, and get stuff done within eyesight of my bed.
I have the privilege of working with our in-house design studio, called Samara, and our humanitarian team, called Human. Samara is thinking about the future of Airbnb, and Human is working on ways to leverage our platform outside the cause of day-to-day business.
Creating the future means having a global vision and an extreme focus on the approachability of what we're creating.
Design is an expression of one's most deeply rooted internal values.
Starting a company in San Francisco when we did usually meant it was destined to be a data-driven tech company. But that didn't seem to fully encompass what we wanted with Airbnb. When we tried looking through a tech lens, it didn't work. The humanity was missing.
Everything we do, every decision we make, is to ensure the best possible Airbnb experience for our community and grow the love.
The sharing economy is out of the bag - and it's not going to go back in.
Since the very beginning, we wanted to create an experience for our guests: more than just a place to sleep. We wanted to cook breakfast in the morning; we wanted to provide a subway map for our guests. Pick them up from the airport.
In a lot of ways, the real learning at RISD happened after-hours when you're working side by side with your colleagues.
I often stay in Tokyo's Daikanyama neighbourhood. You can go for a peaceful morning run along the Meguro river, and it is particularly incredible during cherry blossom season.
Airbnb is about the nexus of the online and offline to create the perfect customer experience.
High reputation beats high similarity.
In the future, we will see living experiences curated around a shared lifestyle.
You have to know what your users are experiencing.
We've invented a new marketplace. There was no easy way to rent a person's bedroom over the Internet or book a vacation rental over the Internet. There was no guidebook for us to turn to as we defined this new marketplace.
Of course Airbnb made mistakes the first year! Some came from our own preconceptions. When we started, we designed our interface for ourselves, Internet-savvy twentysomethings. We never considered the role of good eyesight in our interface - font size, vernacular; it all matters.
People assume that the smarter your home, the better your life, but in reality, technology so often gets in the way of leading a good life.
We built a basic website, and Air Bed and Breakfast was born. Three lucky guests got to stay on a $20 airbed on the hardwood floor. But they loved it. And so did we. We took them on adventures around the city.
