Airbnb

“I think Uber and Airbnb have done a really good job of talking and sort of having to launch points a year to talk about their products and innovation.”

“I'll get involved with one or two deals a year. Like a deal like Airbnb. I was the, you know, the front person you know, deal like Real Madrid with, you know, my partner, Rich Berlati. I'll get, Get involved with some of the deals, like the bigger deals, I'll …”

“The second thing is they wanted to get it done. In seven days. So we had a team at Sixth Street in Asia, a team at Sixth Street in the US, a team at Sixth Street in Europe, literally working.”

“One of them in the case of Airbnb, it was like, we're assuming a way that that there will be a cure. We can't all be locked in our houses forever. We were willing to take that risk, but we had to think about that because that was part, part of the investment”

“So we and our friends over at Silver Lake basically gave them a billion dollars a billion dollar financing. It was in a loan form. It's all public, had some warrants attached to it.”

“He you know, he was in the three million dollar post-money valuation round of Airbnb. He was the first dollar into Pinterest. He was early in Uber. He was early in PayPal.”

“Our fifth Graders last year or two years ago ran an Airbnb.”

“You do not want to learn on the job how to be a CEO. In other words, trial and error is bad for a CEO. You know why trial and error is really bad? Because you hire somebody, they build an empire, they leave, and now you get to unwind their empire, and it takes…”

“You know, we have like, 40% free cash flow margin. We're very profitable. We do a hundred billion dollars in sales. Customer sales.”

“I don't think people managers will have any value in the future. What I mean people managers, people that only manage people. I think everyone's gonna have to be a hybrid people manager or manager IC.”

“I mean, almost every app on my home screen has not changed fundamentally since AI, including Airbnb. I think that's going to change in two years.”

“They ended up Delivering the equivalent of, I think in year one, two, three hundred million dollars in kind of revenue for the company. The following year was like four or five hundred million dollars. Now, you know, we're at a run rate of like over 600 basis …”

“And the reason our stock has been flat is because we only do one thing, and we have kind of, you know, we've started to saturate a little bit of the core idea, so we've had to reinvent ourselves.”

“And the way to get to product market fit is to just create a six or seven star experience. But you can't create a six or seven star experience without going beyond. In other words, go beyond the edge of reality and work backwards.”

“Every investor wants to go into big markets. I don't like big markets. Big markets have a lot of competition. Go into a small market and make it big.”

“The better the people, the less they need to be managed. The more time you spend on recruiting, the less time you have to spend on management. It's one to one.”

“I am the co-hiring manager for the top 200 people in the company. This is very radical. A lot of CEOs think it's their job to hire their executive, and their executive team hires their team. I think that is fatal.”

“The best businesses are ones that founders run and they reinvent and they create so much equity in such a great moat that then when they hand it off, they will endure and grow after them.”

“The bedrock of Airbnb is gonna be identity, Profile. The person's preferences. I want to develop the most authenticated identity on the internet.”

“For every thousand dollars spent in the world, one dollar was spent on an Airbnb.”

“When I tell somebody it's not good enough, I'm not saying you're not good enough. I'm saying I see potential and you don't see in yourself. That is the most motivating thing you can do, to say I believe in you and I believe you can do even more. And people wil…”

“Paul Graham made an exception to let me in early YCometer. He believed in me. I was an engineer, and he almost never funded non-engineers. He thought the idea was not a good idea, actually. He said, people are actually doing this? I go, yes. He goes, what's wr…”

“And then the pandemic happened, and we lost 80% of our business in eight weeks.”