Airbnb

“If Airbnb's founders said, we want to create Marriott for millennials, that would have been a remixed idea like what I just described. And it probably would have had limited opportunity because it's, I would say, low-hanging fruit.”

“If Airbnb's founders said, we want to create Marriott for millennials, that would have been a remixed idea that would have probably had limited opportunity.”

“The first really important point, networks, and especially the most valuable networks, are fascinating in that they connect millions or even billions of people, but they do not own the underlying asset that is exchanging hands. Airbnb doesn't own any homes, wh…”

“They have a product marketing function versus a product management function.”

“Brian now operates in an extremely hands-on way, where he is involved in every single project in the company, and the company only does as much as Brian can personally focus on.”

“And Brian was sharing on the episode that Airbnb lost 80% of its business during the pandemic.”

“So the way that Airbnb organizes its product function is there's basically three roles within product at Airbnb. There are product marketers, and these are senior product managers, and they're responsible for Marketing of the products that Airbnb has, as well …”

“Intuition isn't this arbitrary thing. It's not just gut. These 20 really smart, immersed people have millions of data points that have fed through their brains to inform their intuition. It's leaning on Kind of the human brain computer as a collective to make …”

“So what he ended up doing is he went through with his team and he storyboarded out all 150 screens from the Airbnb app. So Airbnb has 150 screens. They literally laid out all 150 screens. They also laid out all 72 user policies, which my understanding is there…”

“I didn't have an exact reference point for is that a lot or a little, but he basically shared that on a percentage basis, Airbnb is more efficient than Apple or Google when it comes to how much cash they actually generate for how much revenue they do as a busi…”

“During the pandemic, Brian rethought the entire organization's design so things could move faster, so he could be closer to the product, and so the company would operate on one single product roadmap. And so what he did is he moved the company from being divis…”

“So in the last three years, Airbnb has shipped 340 upgrades and innovations to its product.”

“And last year he said the business did 3.5 billion dollars in free cash flow across 5300 employees.”

“So yeah, that's an exception, but like your B to B accounting software, you know, whatever, like, no, not that that can't be a great business. It can be, but it doesn't need the same kind of approach as Airbnb or Uber.”

“And what you get out of hourly, just like Uber, just like Airbnb, just like instances on AWS, you get efficiency. You get much better utilization of these assets.”

“I think one of the most important things for a founder or leader to do is set the pace of the team. I think the pace of the team is one of the most important things you can do, and that pace is sometimes governed not by how hard people work, but how decisive t…”

“And we lost 80% of our business in eight weeks.”

“The problem with finding a negotiation between how you want to run a company, the people you want, Is that's a good way to make everyone miserable? Because what everyone really wants is clarity. What everyone really wants is to be able to row in the same direc…”

“One of the best ways to get unstuck from a problem is to imagine a 10 x scale, or 10 x better, or 10 x faster, where you can't do the current process to do it. You have to think differently about the problem. And to think differently about the problem means yo…”

“And I think there's a difference between micromanagement, which is like telling people exactly what to do and being in the details. Being the details is what every responsible company's board does to the CEO. It doesn't mean the board is telling them what to d…”

“If you want to see what it looks like to recognize and also remove a poisonous org chart, I highly recommend you listen to the podcast interview between Lenny Rachitsky and Brian Chesky, who is the CEO of Airbnb, and he recently went through this exact exercis…”