The Airbnb Story

They decided that at South by Southwest, they would introduce Airbedandbreakfast.com as an entirely new site, to try to get another round of press. (It’s a tactic Chesky has since advised to other entrepreneurs: “If you launch and no one notices, you can keep launching. We kept launching, and people kept writing about it. We thought we’d just keep launching until we got customers.”) (Location 425)

Thinking creatively, the founders pitched to the smallest local blogs they could find, on the principle that the smaller they were, the more likely they were to pay any attention to them. (Location 539)

The founders would get the $20,000 in seed funding that came with admission, in return for a 6 percent stake in the company, and they would enroll in the next three-month term, which would begin in January. They were due to report for a welcome dinner on Tuesday, January 6, 2009. After what Chesky would later refer to as an “intervention,” Blecharczyk finally agreed to relocate to San Francisco for three months and moved back into the Rausch Street apartment. The band was back together. They had been given another chance. (Location 629)

First, he asked them how many users they had, and they told him not many at all — only a hundred, if that, they said. He told them not to worry, that it’s much, much better to have one hundred users who love you than one million users who “sort of like you.” (Location 659)

the most successful companies always end up being the ones that participated most eagerly. “It’s not that the most successful thought they were too good for this,” he said. “It’s always the crappy companies.” (Location 703)

“The biggest enemy of a start-up is your own confidence and your own resolve. (Location 737)

With the Sequoia funding, they started paying themselves an annual salary — $60,000 each, (Location 746)

“It was exciting and in hindsight it’s nostalgic and romantic, but at the time it wasn’t at all. It was actually very scary.” (Location 751)

One thing the founders noticed was that all the companies they admired had a strong mission and a set of defined “core values,” a somewhat overused term for the general principles that guide an organization’s internal conduct as well as its relationship with its customers, shareholders, and other stakeholders. Core values are a bit of a “thing” in Silicon Valley. But they are seen by organizational-behavior experts as being critical in helping a company define the kind of people it wants to bring in, and they are especially helpful when shaped during a company’s formative days. (Location 799)

Chesky, Gebbia, and Blecharczyk decided to compose their core values before they hired anyone. They came up with ten traits, including “Hard-working Olympic animal,” “Builds family spirit,” and “Passionate about Airbnb.” (Location 803)

Blecharczyk created a one-click integration tool whereby Airbnb users could click a button embedded in an e-mail sent to them and instantly rebroadcast their listings on Craigslist. Their listing would be viewable by Craigslist’s millions of viewers, but the tool brought the actual bookings back to Airbnb. (Location 841)

They experimented with Craigslist in ways that drew criticism, too, at one point hiring contractors who set up automated targeted e-mails to Craigslist users who’d listed their homes on the site for rent, soliciting them to try Airbnb instead. (The company says leveraging Craigslist was common back in those days but it wasn’t aware the contractors were engaging in the spamming, which didn’t result in meaningful business, and that when they found out they shut it down.) (Location 847)

This is the company’s revenue. For travelers, fees range from 6 percent to 12 percent; the higher the subtotal, the lower the fee. Hosts pay a 3 percent booking fee to cover the costs of payment transfer. (Location 856)

Hosts can get their money via direct deposit, PayPal, or prepaid debit card (Location 861)

Anytime Airbnb enters into a new market, it has to grow both sides, but the supply, or host side, is inevitably harder to grow. This is why almost all of the fee structure lies on the guest side. The 3 percent host-booking fee basically covers payment processing only; if anything, Airbnb subsidizes hosts with not just the fee but also its free-professional-photography policy and many other forms of coddling, from mailing out free mugs to featuring stories about some of the hosts on its website to flying certain hosts to its occasional launch events and annual conventions. (Location 868)

the founders wanted their users to never be more than three clicks away from a booking. (Location 905)

some hosts like to book months ahead of time, while others are more comfortable with eleventh-hour planning; it tries its best to match a last-minute booker with a host who has shown a willingness to accept those kinds of reservations, to reduce the chances of a guest trying to book and being rejected. (Location 943)

“Different kinds of businesses require founders with different primary strengths,” he says. “And one of the strengths for marketplace founders is a willingness to think out of the box and be scrappy.” (Location 985)

Chesky’s primary takeaway from this experience: stop making decisions by consensus. “A consensus decision in a moment of crisis is very often going to be the middle of the road, and they’re usually the worst decisions,” he says. “Usually in a crisis you have to go left or right.” From then on, “add a zero” became a euphemism for taking one’s thinking to the next level. He would later call the experience a “rebirth” for the company. (Location 1113)

Airbnb, he wrote, would stand for something much bigger than travel; it would stand for community and relationships and using technology for the purpose of bringing people together. Airbnb would be the one place people could go to meet the “universal human yearning to belong.” (Location 1265)

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the environment. The unreasonable man adapts the environment to him. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” (Location 2448)

“At the end of the day, do people like using Airbnb? Do millions and millions and millions of people want Airbnb? Yes,” he says. “Everything else is a solvable problem. It’s solvable with the application of smart people, time, and money.” “What you can’t solve for,” he says, “is if you built something nobody wants.” (Location 2477)