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.
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Omaze Beat WME, CAA, Airbnb, and Groupon in Celebrity Campaigns
“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'…”
Founders Fund sold Spotify at $8B to double down on Airbnb
“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.”
Uber, Airbnb, Meta, and Revolut didn't use event tracking early on
“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.”
Sorting search results by price always reduced Airbnb's conversion rates
“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 …”
Uber, Airbnb, and Twitter Could Be Profitable by Cutting Spend 10%
“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…”
De Masi: Uber and Airbnb are burning massive cash defending network effects
“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.”
Top VC firms will be forced to adapt to new funding models
“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…”
Johannes Reck says Airbnb tried and failed at experiences in 2015
“Airbnb had tried experiences From 2015 onwards, they had failed.”
Hyman: Over 90% of Airbnb's traffic is organic
“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.”
Jordan: Airbnb Was Cashflow Positive Early Due to Upfront Payments
“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…”
Jordan: Upfront customer payments made Airbnb cash flow positive early
“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…”
Levine: Sequoia's seed deals in Airbnb and Dropbox are history's best
“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.”
Vlad Magdalin: Users will build full software products on Webflow within five years
“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.”
Motschwiller: Series A rounds for top consumer decacorns occurred pre-2012
“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.”
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”
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 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 …”
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.”
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.”
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.”