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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Rubin: Indiegogo board replaced him as CEO after growth debate
“Definitely not. No, I mean, that was me having a debate with the board as to how we needed to grow. I really wanted to create a massive company, and I really thought we had the opportunity to create the Airbnb of crowdfunding, because it should all be consolid…”
Chesky: Travelers will shift from crowded cities to outdoor destinations
“People are gonna, instead of traveling to the same 20 cities, going to the same hotel districts that are really crowded, and then standing in line, To get their selfie photo, instead of the same landmarks, to put it on Instagram, say, look, I got that too. The…”
Chesky: Remote work will shift travel to long stays in smaller communities
“I mean, maybe the most fundamental change that I see in our world that's going to happen, if you're so fortunate enough, typically upper middle class person or upper class, not everyone can do this, but for those who can, They're realizing, maybe I'll go a mon…”
Donnel Baird: BlocPower will forfeit profitability to scale for IPO
“Over the next two to five years, as we prepare to like go public and IPO, we will not be profitable. If I'm doing my job, like we will be investing in R&D and expansion, just like Uber did, right? Or Airbnb or any other tech company, because we want to take th…”
Chesky: Airbnb is likely one of the world's largest RV rental platforms
“Without having intended to be in that business, we're probably one of the largest, largest RV rental companies in the world. As far as they're not our RVs, it's the communities, but yeah, I'm sure thousands and thousands of RVs.”
Chesky: Airbnb bookings rebounded from an 80% drop to 2019 levels
“So it dropped by about 80%, and I mean, you know, nobody knows if this is pent up demand or not, but no, we're around last year's levels.”
Chesky: Airbnb will be ready to IPO in 2020 if markets allow
“And we don't know when we'll be public, but I basically said, we'll be ready this year if the market's ready for us. If the market's not ready, we'll be ready when they are.”
Chesky: Airbnb gave $250M directly to hosts during the pandemic
“We took a quarter of a billion dollars, two hundred fifty million dollars, and we sent it to our host. Just didn't loan it, just sent it to host.”
20 investor introductions yielded zero seed funding for Airbnb in 2008
“We get introduced to 20 investors in Silicon Valley. 10 of them reply to our email. Five of them meet us for coffee. Zero invested in us.”
Paul Graham accepted Airbnb into YC for founder hustle, not the idea
“The reason we got in wasn't because of our idea. It was because through the breakfast cereal, we had proven to him that we had hustle, we had grit, we had the, if we could figure out how to sell breakfast cereal for 40 dollars a box, we could figure out how to…”
Leventhal: Airbnb agreed to both invest in Resy and partner commercially
“At some point in that conversation, we said, you know, we'd like this to be both an investment and a commercial partnership, and they agreed.”
Chesky: Airbnb customers canceled over $1B in bookings at pandemic start
“First thing is we had over, we had customers cancel over one billion dollars of reservations.”
Chesky: Airbnb raised $2B in emergency financing in 72 hours
“Then we quickly raised two billion dollars... Thankfully we had some great investors step up but we had to do that deal, and that was like over the course of 72 hours to like get that deal done.”
Chesky: Airbnb lost 80% of its business in eight weeks during COVID-19
“We spent 12 years building Airbnb, and then we lost 80% of business in eight weeks.”
Chesky: Leaders should reject robotic corporate playbooks when executing layoffs
“There is no playbook, I don't think, to lay people off, and that's the kind of thing that if there was a playbook, you should never use it, because the thing that people want more than anything is, They want humanity. They want compassion, and that means that …”
Chesky: Airbnb slashed over $1B in planned marketing spend during COVID-19
“We cut over a billion dollars of planned marketing spend.”
Chesky: Airbnb will refocus on core connection rather than travel or real estate
“We didn't start this company to be a travel company. We didn't start this company to be a real estate company. It was about connection, and if it took a crisis for us to get back to that core truth, then that's what we're going to focus on.”
Chesky: Hotels require density and cannot serve smaller communities efficiently
“The smaller the community, less likely they have a hotel because a hotel only works with density, right? You need a bunch of rooms, you need efficiency, and so people are basically traveling and going to small communities.”
Gebbia: Airbnb formalized an existing informal way of traveling
“People are already traveling this way. It's just not formalized. It's not easy.”
Gebbia: Early startups can relaunch repeatedly because nobody notices initial flops
“The good news, though, is that if you launch and it's a dud, you can launch again because nobody knew about the first one, so.”
Gebbia: Top VCs behind Google and Facebook said Airbnb would never work
“I can tell you all the times and show you all the emails from really credible investors, like people that, these, they're investors that picked Google and PayPal and YouTube and Facebook and all of the kind of internet greats that came before us, and so sittin…”
Airbnb's weekly revenue doubled from $200 to $400 after improving listing photos
“Our numbers, that second week, Went from 200 dollars a week in fees, which is what we were making for six months, right? Which is not sustainable. Three guys cannot live off that in San Francisco. Our numbers jumped to 400 dollars in one week.”
Airbnb founders made $20,000 selling $40 novelty Obama O's cereal
“Well, it almost didn't matter, because at 40 dollars a box times 500 boxes, we made 20,000 dollars in breakfast cereal.”
Chesky: Airbnb was stretched thin and sprawling across businesses pre-pandemic
“Before a pandemic, Airbnb was stretched thin. We were sprawling. We were going into all these businesses, you know, just kind of feeling pressure of trying to make everyone happy.”
Chesky: Airbnb planned to file its S-1 in March 2020 before pausing
“We were, we're going to file it late March. We put on the shelf and recently we've been dusting it off, you know, and you have to update it because the business has changed.”
Gebbia: Airbnb failed through four consecutive launches before finding product-market fit
“So, our next iteration for South by Southwest in 2008 was literally a conference website. After the dud of that launch we regrouped and listened to people's feedback, and then we launched again for the DNC, and that flopped, and then we launched a fourth time …”
Hoffman: There is a very low probability I will start another company
“I think so. You know, it's kind of this never say never thing, but you know, there's a wide variety of really important organizations that I sit on the boards of. Microsoft, obviously, one of them. Airbnb, Convoy there's a set of these different you know, kind…”
A five-acre private Fiji island listed on Airbnb in 2010
“Somebody out in the South Pacific listed a five-acre private island on our site. Complete with personal chef complete with, you know, water sports”
Airbnb’s SXSW launch yielded just six listings and two bookings
“We actually had six people put up listings in Austin, and we had two people book those listings. One of them was Brian.”
Sequoia Capital proactively approached Airbnb to lead its funding round
“We had offers coming in from a variety of different groups, and the one that shocked us the most was Sequoia Capital, which was a pre, it is a preeminent Venture capital firm in Silicon Valley that we thought, well, maybe one day, like a year from now, we'll g…”
Airbnb had just 30 hosts in New York when entering Y Combinator
“We have 30 hosts in New York who are renting their extra rooms out in their homes”
Over 100 million people have stayed in Airbnb homes worldwide
“So, I think the world is ready for our invention, given that there's been over a hundred million people that have stayed in homes all over the world.”
Early Airbnb listings lacked bookings because host photos were terrible
“People just generally didn't know how to take a good photo of their home. So the photos were really bad... They were taking pictures at night. It just wasn't, they weren't merchandising their home in a way that you would want to stay there. So, therefore, no o…”
Airbnb scaled from zero to 800 home listings in four weeks
“We ended up going from zero to 800 homes in a matter of four weeks.”
Airbnb had about 100 paid bookings during the 2008 DNC launch
“Well we did a live interview with CNN from our living room, and we had about a hundred people actually book and pay with a credit card through our service, which, this was like the first sign of a working, viable marketplace, even to the point where we were ge…”
First prospective guests submitted resumes and LinkedIn profiles for airbeds
“People actually started sending us their resumes, their LinkedIn profiles, to vie for one of these limited three airbeds.”
Airbnb survived early on by maxing out binders full of credit cards
“You know those binders where you keep baseball cards? I had one of those, except there weren't baseball cards in it. They were credit cards. We would go through visa after visa to MasterCard and then final to Amex. Just maxing out credit cards, and that's how …”
SpotHero was originally conceived as the Airbnb of parking
“What we looked at is, we're like, there's all this parking that you can't have access to, and if we bring all of this parking supply, we're gonna start the Airbnb of parking.”
Gebbia: Airbnb Pitched 20 Early Investors and Received Zero Offers
“And so, we get introduced to 20 investors in Silicon Valley. 10 of them replied to our email. Five of them eat us for coffee. Zero invested in us.”
Chesky: Airbnb raised $20K-$30K selling novelty cereal boxes in 2008
“Yeah, like 20 or 30,000. It was yeah, something like that. Joe told the story. We had to raise collectible breakfast cereal. We were air, bed, and breakfast. So we said, well, let's do collectible breakfast cereal for the Democratic-Republican National Convent…”
Gebbia sold 2,000 branded discarded proof books before founding Airbnb
“For like a year and a half, I just gathered these books, and I had the 2000 of these books in my garage down the street that I collected, and the cool thing is, everyone was different. No two were exactly the same, and then I came up with a rubber stamp. I gav…”
Gebbia used his personal phone number for early Airbnb customer support
“In a last minute decision, I threw my number up on the website as customer service. And my phone almost immediately started ringing. And from that point, for the next probably, gosh, I don't know, year and a half, I was very closely associated with customer se…”