The Ledger, every show

“It's absolutely true. I actually gave an unconference talk about this topic. And the conference talk was all of the strange things that Swedish people do and why. And if it would summarize it like, yes, we do that. I actually experienced that. I went to a frie…”

“We have multiple Weiss companies who say we want to be a billion dollar, 10 person company, and we have six slots left.”

“Like most startups don't have most of the PMs being former founders, but that I believe that was the case for the first like 10 or 12 or 15 PMs that there'd be. A lot of us were former founders. And I think that that made a big difference for how you make deci…”

“Like if you look at like startups on a typical YC batch, there'll be a couple of billion dollar companies.”

“I don't think we're going to have as many gas As many gas stations as we have today and different networks, we're not going to have the same in EV charging. It's going to be a lot more consolidated around the use experience of the end user and the app they ope…”

“Some of the early ones like Amplitude, Stripe, Front, they were doing up on sales emails, just like the one we described to get started. Those founders were doing those sales emails as they get started.”

“The first one here has 30% after two months and 21% after 20 months. This is pretty good. So you kept a fifth of your users 21 months later, or 20 months later. It's DoorDash. DoorDash have a monthly retention of 20% two years later, a year and a half later.”

“So 80% retention after one month, and then 30% after 60 months. This is really good. This is a really good product. Very sticky. People like this product and they don't stop using it. It's GitHub.”

“We got 2.6% more bookings from iOS by making people sign up through a sign-up wall in the app.”

“In the early days of Airbnb, we used to automatically log you out after, like, I think two days. And we were like, why we do that? Well, security reasons. That makes sense. So then we would run an experiment. We set the kind of expiration date of that cookie t…”

“But if you look at the composition of growth of Airbnb word of mouth is by far the biggest driver. So I think it was, like, way over 50% on the guest side, and way over, like, 70% on the host side of people that heard about me for the first time through a frie…”

“At Airbnb, really the entire product team is now a growth team, and the goal of the data team that have built these tools is to get everybody to use them. Like, they're, Literally measured by how many people using experimentation frameworks.”

“When that model came out, a lot of companies that were building, say internal tools were like suddenly working, and they weren't really working before.”

“When Brex was in Wicomner in winter of 2017, they recruited the first 10 customers directly from the YC batch.”

“Customers just had a virtual credit card and Enrique from Brex actively onboarded every one of the customers himself.”

“They didn't start by running Google SEM or Google SEO. The referral program did not bring in the first 2000 customers. They did things that didn't scale, and they look different than what they do at scale.”

“Still today, Brian and Joe gets calls from hosts on their personal cell phone numbers. I remember them telling me that on the first day I worked at Airbnb, Why do they do that? Well, it's the number that they put on the website and share with all of their host…”

“When asking YC founders how they found their early users, some of the most common answers were LinkedIn, Reddit forums, Slack or Discord communities, and sometimes in-person events.”

“Early days of Gmail, users were asking Paul Buchheit, the founder of Gmail, to view both the inbox and the actual email that they were reading on the same screen. Now, why would they ask for that? Well, the reason was simply that Gmail was too slow and people …”

“In early Airbnb, a lot of guests wanted to have the phone numbers of the host, so they can call them. And we were like, why do you need that? It just turned out that they didn't fully trust the platform. Like, we had not displayed enough trust in Airbnb, so th…”

“We used to do this at Airbnb all the time. We'd go downstairs in our office, and we'd find some people that were waiting for an interview or waiting for getting a coffee or something, and we'd just show them the latest version of the app. This would be an InVi…”

“One common idea that a lot of YC companies are using is to create a Slack instance or a WhatsApp group for, with their customers.”

“This is one of the, I think the, probably the request for start, request for startup that generate the most amount of press interest of anything we ever done.”

“They claimed to be hired photographers for Airbnb, Airbnb and breakfast. So when they met with all the hosts, they said, we want to come by your home and take photos. They didn't say that they were the founders because that made the company sound much smaller.”

“In the case of Airbnb, we call the homepage P-one. The search results page, P two, and then the booking page, and the listing page, P three, and then the booking page was P four. Four pages. That was the entire website. Now what's the funnel? What percent of p…”

“If you think of Pinterest, SEO is the re, the real way how Pinterest is going. You type something in on Google, there already exists a Pinterest board for that, and you land on that Pinterest board. That's how they acquire new users.”

“So at Airbnb, we launched, ah, a new sharing sheet for the mobile app. And this was the old version, which was the native share sheet that you've seen on iOS. Ah, you click on share, and then you see a bunch of sharing options. And then we just tried this new …”

“In many cases, actually the majority of cases in the early days the request was not confirmed. So you wanted to book something, and sorry, it didn't work out.”

“We actually made the mistake of going all focusing on the onboarding for the homepage, because they're like, well, that has the biggest scale by a long shot, but it turned out that only like, 10% of the people that come to the homepage actually have a booking …”

“If you look at the evolution of the online marketing team at Airbnb, it went from like one or two engineers to when I left, I think we were a 15 or 20 engineers on online marketing. And they were building everything from attribution system to automated bidding…”

“We found that the amount of friends that you have when you open the app that were the very first time on the app and how you display them was absolutely, absolutely key to whether they were going to use the app or not.”

“Brian is the co-founder and CEO of Airbnb. On the left side of the photo is Amol. Amol was the very first guest on Airbnb. They actually spent a weekend together in San Francisco when Airbnb kind of launched.”