Airbnb

“I think the valuations right now are very, very high. But I don't believe so, and the reason I don't believe there's a tech bubble is because I believe that the period of time we're in right now is a period where you're going to see a lot of disruption, meanin…”

“Most horizontal infrastructure that is going to be disrupted by big marketplaces has probably already been done so, right? So like Uber Airbnb, like the, you know, I think taxis are pretty much taken care of at this point.”

“At the end of the day, the investors want to be investing in the next Google, the next Airbnb, the next Facebook, and if they believe that this company is going to be that, then They should want to put their money in at pretty much any price, because it's a sl…”

“Matt is Director of Seed Investments at Betaworks, who have invested in the likes of Tumblr, Airbnb, Groupon, and Twitter, and have internally built startups such as Chartbeat, Bitly, and Socialflow.”

“There's a bunch of companies like PayPal, Airbnb, Facebook, Hotmail, Twitter, LinkedIn, Dropbox, WhatsApp, Quora, Reddit. A bunch of companies who've gotten really big, really fast, without doing any traditional sales or marketing.”

“Airbnb is a situation where we sold a company to them early on.”

“Sequoia, Benchmark, Andreessen Horowitz, they're not going away anytime soon. This isn't like, we're out to beat them and kill them. Not in the same way Airbnb is not going to delete hotels overnight. It's going to change how hotels work. I think that's a bett…”

“As soon as I saw Airbnb, missed that one too, but I thought an Airbnb for food idea was a big idea”

“Other than Uber and Airbnb, I can't think of you with the same sort of network effects. And you can see how much money it's taking them to defend that. I mean, even the private company info that's leaked there is they're all hosing through cash.”

“Passed on Uber, passed on Airbnb, passed on Pinterest.”

“I think over time, Airbnb is probably going to take over, like, where people just live. Like, they will become the property manager for people who own homes, and it will become the place, like, the Craigslist for people who want to find a home.”

“I think it's quite possible that those become multi-hundred billion dollar companies.”

“The rest of it is probably on the order of a trillion dollars in value that's being created if you were to compare it to what happened before.”

“So like Airbnb is a great example, like a ton of investors passed on them because they didn't understand design as a differentiation for them.”

“So if you just look at, you know, two of the three largest unicorns today are real estate and hospitality tech. We work in Airbnb after Uber. And then beyond them, there's another two hundred and fifty billion of real estate and hospitality tech companies out …”

“Kevin's also a prolific angel investor, with one of the most successful angel portfolios in the valley, with the likes of Airbnb, Uber, PayPal, Pinterest, and Yammer, all in Kevin's personal angel portfolio.”

“Today, Uber or Airbnb want to be profitable, or Twitter wants to be massively profitable. If they were to cut their spending 10, 20%, all of a sudden those companies look massively profitable. The only reason they're losing money is because they've chosen to c…”

“It is less likely that Airbnb would have been created had Michael Seibel not recruited the founders to Y Combinator, introduced them to Paul Graham, the program had been set up in place, the investment been available, demo day being available”

“One of the things that really strikes me about both Larry Page and Mark and, you know, a lot of the YC founders like Patrick Collison or founders of Airbnb is they just have a level of conviction that I think ordinary humans just don't have. They believe in th…”

“The second thing is that if you are launching a token and you're a private company, you should be ready to stop extracting any revenue from your network. So however you were extracting revenue from the network, whether this was advertising or paid subscription…”

“A product that's not like Facebook, but it has that same network effect is Airbnb, right? Because it's a marketplace and obviously it's a matching of hosts and guests, but over time they've built so many reviews and ratings, both about the guest and the host. …”

“So Airbnb, when they first launched, I mean, they didn't have vital growth. I mean, they really struggled for the first three years to build liquidity in their marketplace, but”

“I think that's bogus. I think that's definitely not true of Amazon. It's definitely not true of Airbnb, and it shouldn't be true of a service marketplace either.”

“You look at the series A Funding times of the consumer decacorns that are out there, the Ubers, the Lyfts, the Airbnbs, the Snaps, the Pinterest, the Spotifys, those series A's were all done pre-二零 12.”

“All of those companies look small in the beginning, you know, Airbnb, Dropbox, Pinterest, like the lists, you know, even Uber in the beginning, they all looked like they were going after something small in the beginning, Amazon just doing books.”

“And the first version of Gobble was what we called peer-to-peer lasagna, and it was a marketplace similar to Airbnb, but for home cook to make food and deliver to everyday people”

“The pedigree of what people look for as a signal of talent now has shifted where if you are, you know, it doesn't even matter where you went to high school or college. If you were working for five years on the infrastructure team at Stripe in the early days, o…”

“So I can imagine five years from now, people building the next, not just MVPs, but entire software products on top of Webflow, like the next Airbnb, whatever that idea is, the next Twitter, the next product hunt, all of it.”

“Like when I invested in Airbnb, I went and lived in Airbnbs for six months.”

“Brian Chesky at Airbnb at the time is called Airbed and Breakfast pitched me And I passed, and I had an opportunity to invest 250,000 dollars that would now be worth close to a billion.”

“We then followed that in 2014 with an investment into Airbnb when it was at a ten billion dollar valuation.”

“Two of the best deals of all time were seeds by Sequoia. I think an initial almost 600,000 dollar investment in Airbnb and a million dollar investment in Dropbox to get very large ownership positions.”

“When I did the investment in Airbnb, you know, I was, I think it was like six or seven percent ownership,”

“David turned to me and said, look, every venture capitalist Has to have a deal that they cratered, and it is a disastrous amount of work, and that doesn't work in order to learn, and Airbnb can be yours.”

“Each of the consumer internet giants at size is its own unique pattern, right? You don't go, I'm going to build another big consumer internet business, and it's going to be like Airbnb. It's like, no, Airbnb is the pattern like itself.”

“That I would love to add to the culture, and some people haven't, like, for example, the Airbnb founders, you know, all of Brian, Nate, and Joe, is not only to think about the success of your individual products, and the success of your business, which both ca…”

“The only case where I know this might potentially have worked was I think it was paloaltodelivery.com or something, which then became DoorDash. I think it's the only sort of recorded case of this ever actually working, but if you look at all the other sort of …”

“I wouldn't put too much on an Airbnb or DoorDash valuation. I'd wait until you get, you know, three to six months past the lockup release when you have full of”

“Yeah, I think one of the most destructive myths in Silicon Valley is the Airbnb story and myth, because the story is basically that they hung on and didn't have product market fit, and then just eventually things started going well, and they didn't really chan…”

“Now I've never stayed on Airbnb, but I supported the investment, but people of your generation, the Gen Z generation, you know, they go Airbnb first.”

“It was a lack of optimism that cost me some money in the beginning when I met the Airbnb guys in And I pulled them aside and was like, look, somebody's going to get raped or murdered, and the blood is going to be on your hands.”

“So I think if somebody's unwilling to do a case study, you probably have somebody who wants to be running growth at a large established business like Airbnb, and they just want to come over and take over a team of 50 or a hundred people and not be at that leve…”

“It was a lack of optimism that cost me some money in the beginning when I met the Airbnb guys and I pulled them aside and was like, look, somebody's going to get raped or murdered and the blood is going to be on your hands.”

“I didn't invest in Airbnb the first time I met Brian. Brian was hustling because Airbnb was, this was pretty early on. I was at lunch with somebody else. I was having lunch with a Wall Street Journal reporter, Rob Guth, and Brian was at the table next to us. A…”

“He hired a full-time storyboard artist from Pixar that worked at Airbnb for over a year that helped develop these storyboards, these key frames along the journey of a host and a guest.”

“The metrics were just like not great. It was like less than a percent of travelers in Airbnb were opting into this thing”

“One of the most common requests that Airbnb gets is, and this has come from like day one, is like, I wish I could just sort my listing search results by price. Just like, show me the cheapest one, because I want to book that. So many teams have tried to build …”

“I had an opportunity to invest in Uber and Airbnb early. And to be honest, I completely missed the shared economy. I just thought, that's strange. You know, you would go and rent someone's room or you would, and obviously completely blew that and didn't have a…”

“If I had to say it was probably Airbnb circa, 2011, 2012, right as I was getting my footing in this industry and having done some deals.”

“I still have an email from 2008 from Brian Chesky. I didn't. We really like you. You sure you don't want to invest at like 2.5 million dollar cap, right? Like I just overthought the risk.”

“I've never actually exactly tracked it, but probably Airbnb.”

“Airbnb came to us and Uber came to us and say, we want to do the opposite flow. We want to do payouts. Great. That's our product strategy. We are now going to do payouts.”

“We definitely saw at the time that the network effect on Airbnb was, at the time, was huge, and yeah, the market was it was clear that they could penetrate into the travel market, or even the lodging market, which I guarantee you, Harry, is huge.”

“I wish I had written 500, I wish we had written a five hundred million dollar check into Airbnb at the, you know, one and a half billion dollar round instead of a, whatever, a hundred and fifty million dollar check.”

“Airbnb raised way less money than, you know, the other leading marketplaces at the time. It's got a couple of characteristics and that are very nice. One of which is they get paid in advance. And so, you know, when you make your summer vacation over the holida…”

“Airbnb raised way less money than, you know, the other leading marketplaces at the time. It's got a couple of characteristics and that are very nice. One of which is they get paid in advance. And so, you know, when you make your summer vacation over the holida…”

“Most markets, even successful marketplaces typically are supply constrained. You know, Airbnb always is looking for new supply to enhance the user experience.”

“Airbnb has said, let's forget everything about paid marketing. Let's take all of our dollars and invest it into the brand, into PR, into product innovation that's actually going to breed loyalty, and I think now, like, over 90% of Airbnb's traffic is organic.”

“Airbnb is a good example, actually, where trust and safety becomes offense because like a core barrier for Airbnb is this idea that like, I mean, somebody else's home, right? Like that's a core barrier to value delivery for your product. And so that's a place …”

“They have the best network effect business I've ever seen.”

“Something like 18% of revenues on marketing, whereas bookings and Expedia spend 30%, and that's because they have unique inventory.”

“If you look at any of the big outcomes across our portfolio, whether it's you know, Spotify, Stripe, Airbnb, Palantir, SpaceX, Andrel stem centric. So if you look at all of these big outcomes for us, every single one of them, there was someone on the team bang…”

“Brian Chesky you know, CEO of Airbnb, just how the level of attention to detail when it comes to the Airbnb product I mean, I, you know, you remember, remember design reviews where to his credit, he would be able to detect that, you know, some of the spacing i…”

“Having done this at PayPal, having done this at LinkedIn, having done this at Airbnb, having done, like all of this stuff, it's always a chaotic hot mess.”

“One is Spotify, another one is Snap, another one's Airbnb, another one's LinkedIn. Those are the four that we had real opportunity in some fashion or another to manufacture the opportunity for Index to be in the round, and we failed for different reasons.”

“Most companies that have been successful, be they enterprise or consumer in the tech space, The marketing has been a byproduct of a great product or service. Really, the exception to the rule would be Apple, and probably Airbnb, and I'm, and I scratch my head …”

“When one of the big lessons on Airbnb was when we were evaluating it, we were thinking, how many hotel rooms is Airbnb going to cannibalize? Rather than thinking, actually, Airbnb is going to create an entirely new market, an entirely, entirely new amount of i…”

“Brian, Brian Chesky from Airbnb repeatedly loves to say, you know, Index is, is the team that they wish they, they're, it, Sorry. He says Index is the best partner that never invested in the company.”

“I actually think that if you look at Uber, Airbnb, Meta, they don't use events, or at least not in the early days. We didn't use events at Revolut.”

“I was angel investing with Keith Rubois and Javid Karim, and Javid is the co-founder of YouTube. And, you know, we just fell in love with those guys and made them an offer. And Sequoia out, out did us and got the lead, but they cut us in nicely because, you kn…”

“It was Peter and Brian Zingerman and Napoleon that took what did they take? I think they sold Spotify at the eight billion dollar price, pissed off, what's his name? Daniel. Daniel Ek, and rolled it all into Airbnb at the two and a half billion.”

“I like to think about Airbnb as kind of distributed storage, but not for bits, or images, or sound, or video. It's distributed storage for people. You know, you can have a EMC big drive like on-prem in your enterprise, Or you can have things distributed, and i…”

“Airbnb, Pinterest Bitcoin.”

“Little known secret is Keith, Javed and I gave an exploding term sheet to Airbnb, and Paul Graham said no bueno, and teed off on us.”

“What I found works best is pick an assignment that truly shouldn't take more than an hour or two before you hit diminishing returns. On, you know, spending more cycles on it. And that number two is either more of like a hypothetical scenario or it's a company …”

“Airbnb and Coinbase, they weren't very like go to market driven companies. They're not sales cult. Like you didn't have sales people in the company”

“In the case of Airbnb, it was a discussion I had with Guy Ozieri with the manager of Madonna, and we were chatting, and he basically was advertising it so heavily and tried to convince me, and I think at the end, I followed his logic, and luckily I made that d…”

“Well when I did the Series A of Airbnb. Sixty million. Post.”

“Our biggest failures have been failures of imagination. You know, it's like when I passed on Airbnb, or you know, what, what's another one we passed on, we would have done really well. Data dog.”

“It creates this internal funnel of your best employees moving from your HQ to Silicon Valley. Which by itself is not a problem. The problem is then they get recruited away by the whatever the hot Silicon Valley company is at the time. You know, like it could b…”

“At one point we were producing 400 celebrity videos a year, you know, and our team, like, figured out that process, was really good at learning from that process. Like, that's why we, like, that's why we were the only ones who did a celebrity that made it. We'…”

“Airbnb had tried experiences From 2015 onwards, they had failed.”

“All the ones that were put in place in 2021 Are stranded, because all those price targets, like the Airbnb price targets, ain't ever going to happen now.”

“The general company, in my experience, every company, whether you talk Amazon, whether you talk Google, whether you talk Meta, whether you talk Airbnb, they, as employees, tend to be power users of the product, and they, by nature, optimize for people like the…”

“Capital concentration limits are the enemy of great venture returns, and that's why they have 33% of their fund in Airbnb.”

“Something like an Airbnb, you know, you can have all the vibe coding in the world. Like, their network effect is incredibly powerful.”

“So many breakthroughs rely on a little bit of pushing the boundaries. I mean, Uber did with taxi regulation. Airbnb did with regulation. You're right. Polymarket did in terms of how they're regulated. So I'm actually going to get off my high horse and say you …”

“Brian Chesky got kind of roasted, but I thought it was an insightful point when he said, it's not clear to him that like the right interface for hotel booking is a chat interface. And he was kind of called a Luddite and this and that, but like, I think he was …”