The Ledger
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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 …”
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…”
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.”
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”
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.”
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.”