The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 88 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Alex Schultz: Tech employees naturally build products for power users
“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…”
Maples: Floodgate passed on early-stage investments in Airbnb and Datadog
“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.”
Hoffman: Greylock invested in Airbnb's Series A at a $60M post-money valuation
“Well when I did the Series A of Airbnb. Sixty million. Post.”
Saarinen: Airbnb and Coinbase had no sales teams during his tenure
“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”
Carter: Interview Assignments Should Take Under Two Hours on Ubiquitous Companies
“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 …”
Hartz: Airbnb is distributed storage for people, mirroring enterprise cloud architecture
“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…”
Hartz names Airbnb, Pinterest, and Bitcoin as his top investment drivers
“Airbnb, Pinterest Bitcoin.”
All Hyper-Growth Startups Are Chaotic Hot Messes
“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.”
Zaparde: Brian Chesky's Pixel-Level Micromanagement Set Airbnb's Product Quality Bar
“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…”
Lerner: Airbnb turned trust and safety into an offensive growth driver
“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 …”
Singerman: Founders Fund clearly saw Airbnb's huge network effect early on
“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.”
Kanovich: Requests from Airbnb and Uber drove dLocal's expansion into payouts
“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.”
Rabois: Airbnb is likely his single best-returning investment
“I've never actually exactly tracked it, but probably Airbnb.”
Senkut: Passed on Airbnb at a $2.5M valuation cap in 2008
“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.”
Thomas Tull passed on early Uber and Airbnb investments
“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…”
Partovi passed on early Airbnb pitch, later invested at higher valuation
“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…”
Greylock took a 6% to 7% initial ownership stake in Airbnb
“When I did the investment in Airbnb, you know, I was, I think it was like six or seven percent ownership,”
Every mega consumer internet giant defines its own unique pattern
“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.”
Tech founders must view society as a customer, not just individuals
“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…”
TPG backed Airbnb in 2014 at a $10B valuation
“We then followed that in 2014 with an investment into Airbnb when it was at a ten billion dollar valuation.”
Kutcher lived exclusively in Airbnbs for six months after investing
“Like when I invested in Airbnb, I went and lived in Airbnbs for six months.”
Shah: Tech operational experience replaced university degrees as founder talent signals
“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…”
Airbnb, Uber, and Amazon all launched in seemingly small niche markets
“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.”
Airbnb's review ecosystem creates defensibility that competitors cannot replicate
“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. …”
Airbnb struggled for its first three years to build marketplace liquidity
“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”
Real estate tech represents $250B+ in public and private market value
“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 …”
Felicis passed on investing in Uber, Airbnb, and Pinterest
“Passed on Uber, passed on Airbnb, passed on Pinterest.”
Major tech companies scaled without traditional sales or marketing
“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.”
Arabshahi: Most horizontal marketplace opportunities have already been captured
“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.”
Hommels: Invested in early Airbnb after pitch from Guy Oseary
“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…”
Brian Chesky calls Index the best partner that never invested in Airbnb
“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.”
Taussig: Airbnb spends 18% of revenue on marketing versus 30% for competitors
“Something like 18% of revenues on marketing, whereas bookings and Expedia spend 30%, and that's because they have unique inventory.”
Harley Miller considers missing Airbnb in 2011 to be his biggest miss
“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.”
Brian Chesky hired a full-time Pixar artist to storyboard Airbnb's experience
“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.”
Less than 1% of Airbnb guests used Rachitsky's initial travel feature
“The metrics were just like not great. It was like less than a percent of travelers in Airbnb were opting into this thing”
Garg: Gobble originally launched as an Airbnb-like peer-to-peer food marketplace
“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”
Jim Scheinman missed out on investing early in Airbnb
“As soon as I saw Airbnb, missed that one too, but I thought an Airbnb for food idea was a big idea”
Eniac Ventures acquired its Airbnb equity by selling an early portfolio company
“Airbnb is a situation where we sold a company to them early on.”