Airbnb

“This also reminds me at Airbnb, this was actually one of the biggest wins is adding a snooze feature to your listing.”

“A common mistake people make is they do all questions in home court. Hey, you know, if you're joining Airbnb, what would you do about X? And then, you know, what is the candidate going to say? They can't, clearly can't be as thoughtful as you. They haven't tho…”

“Brian also has another one that's in the book. That's about how to rank your to-do list by finding leverage. That's a really fun one as well. And like don't rank your to-do list, but a lot of people do like importance versus urgency or so on. And I guess he so…”

“Actually at Airbnb, we had an improv teacher come and work with the PM team. It was like for months, we did like improv games every once a week and played all these fun things.”

“Airbnb, Apple's coming out with Apple TV, I think it was, and they're just like, hey, Airbnb, you should make an app for Apple TV. It'll be huge. And there's a team put on it, I don't know, they spent a month building this app and did not, a bunch of nothing a…”

“Like he used to review every product launch and every screen of every new product. Like we had to show him, here's what we're launching this week and just kind of went through and either blew it up or let it pass.”

“I would almost frame it as working backwards from sort of like a moment in time or a launch, like you said with Amazon versus working backwards from a quality standard in some sense of an 11 star experience.”

“Airbnb hired a full-time Storyboard artists from Pixar to draw these keyframes.”

“I do think if you go to a place that is low frequency, It comes with all kinds of new challenges because without frequency, customers forget about you. And so what is the hook to get them to come back? Do you have to reacquire traffic? It creates a whole other…”

“It took, I think a year and a half for them from start to finish to get to something they were really excited about, ready to launch.”

“It reminds me it was time at Airbnb where we had these meetups for engineers. Every month or so, or it's like a tech, oh, it's a tech talk, and then all the engineers get a target engineer that is coming to the end. They get their profile, their picture, and t…”

“Well, I would say that if you have a certain approach, now you may be, you believe it's the right one. It may be the right one, but if you don't build the support and the relationships, you know, that they're going to help carry that out and execute on that st…”

“So at Airbnb, we actually had a similar program where Brian wanted everyone to be a host at Airbnb.”

“Because we actually did something like this at Airbnb and it was a tiny bit successful when for host onboarding, but it wasn't anything big.”

“Those kind of ideas, like the ones that end up succeeding often don't make sense to people. And there's something, there's some reason that they, that no one has done this before, because they're just not natural next step of the world.”

“The last thing I would say is like, F&B had an incredible business model, an incredible business from early on, and it was hard to fail. And what I mean by that is, it's hard to fail with a company. You can fail with individual things inside the company, but t…”

“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…”

“They basically hired a Pixar storyboard artist to draw out key frames of the journey of a host and a guest. And that became a central element of the strategy of like, let's make each of these moments as amazing as possible. And it was based on the movie, Snow …”

“There was a period where product managers were actually called producers because one of the founders was like, we just, we don't want to manage product. We want to produce beautiful experiences and like a movie producer. And so that was like a year and a half …”

“That reminds me at Airbnb, the photography team found, and actually the photography team was initially including people in the photos of listings. And that was like the hero images of listing photos. And it turns out when there's no people in the listing photo…”

“And they ended up drawing these key frames of the journey, as you described, and they became, they put it right in the center of the office. Here's the journey of a host and a guest. That's like 12 frames of that journey. And that actually became the strategy …”

“And it was actually indeed a Pixar storyboard artist that they hired for like a year. That was his job. Draw these keyframes.”

“And I don't know if you know this, but actually at Airbnb, The product management function has been renamed to product marketing. So all the product managers are product marketers because Brian is so big on, you're not just building product, your job is also…”

“So for example, Airbnb, we weren't that strong in operations. We, again, we're this platform with this marketplace, right? And so if you don't have that muscle and then you're asking the company, the teams to essentially build it from the ground up, that's rea…”

“And so I, yeah, I personally don't believe the unit economics ever would have really worked out. I think we should have known that we should have dug into that more at the very beginning and then to get very tailored instead of like one blunt instrument to sol…”

“So I think that that same lesson would apply to Airbnb would have in my head, like change the way we invested. I think we would have gotten more returns as opposed to spreading ourselves and then like having things that like sort of work, but then didn't quite…”

“And I explicitly, you know, moved off the team and I was like, I'm going to work on the review system. I'm going to continue to evolve this and make it better because that is the actual scalable way to do this as opposed to keep going at it in the very manual …”

“Another example that I am allowed to speak about from Airbnb Is the fact that we ran some 250 experiments in my tenure there in search relevance. And again, small improvements added up. So this became overall a six percent improvement to revenue.”

“In fact, if you look at one investment, one big investment that was done at the time was online experiences, and the initial data wasn't very promising, and I think today it's a footnote.”

“One is in my team in search relevance, everything was A-B tested. So while Brian can focus on some of the design aspects, the people who are actually doing, you know, the neural networks and the search, Everything was AB tested to help. So nothing was launchin…”

“And then at Airbnb this 92% number is You know, the highest failure rate that I've observed. Now I've quoted other sources that, you know, it's not that I worked at groups that were particularly bad booking Google ads, other companies published numbers. There …”

“At Airbnb early on. There was a big social attempt to make like, here's your friends have stayed at these Airbnb's completely not, had no impact.”

“I think if Airbnb stayed the course, did nothing, the revenue would have gone up in the same way.”

“I believe that had Airbnb kept people like Greg really, which was pushing for a lot more data driven and had Airbnb run more experiments. It would have been in a better state than today, but it's the counterfactual. We don't know.”

“When I worked at Airbnb, one of the things we did is we said, okay, if you're less than .5, but above .1, rerun, replicate. When you replicate, you can combine the two experiments and get a combined p-value using something called Fisher's method or Stauffer's …”

“If you're at Airbnb where the success rate of, or Airbnb search where the success rate is only eight percent, if you get a statistically significant result with a p-value less than point oh five, there is a 26% chance that this is a false positive result. Righ…”

“I think, you know, one of the things that I will say at Airbnb is the analysis was relatively weak. And so lots of data scientists were hired to be able to compensate for the fact that the platform didn't do enough.”

“When Airbnb launched the rebrand, even that they ran as an experiment with the entire homepage redesign, the new logo and all that. And I think there was a long-term holdout even, and I think it was positive in the end from what I remember.”

“If you don't have data to tell you exactly what every single person is doing in your product in aggregate, you can still talk to 10 customers and probably get a clear sense of what's happening and why it's happening, which you wouldn't even get from the quant …”

“That's exactly the same transition Airbnb went through. Initially it was focus on hosts, make sure hosts are the happiest people and do everything we need to make them happy. And then eventually realize like the business is the customers buying the product and…”

“One of the biggest wins for Airbnb's search experience was this very small idea of just what if you open each listing in the search results in a new tab. Ended up converting like one percent, like increasing conversion by one percent.”

“Most of Airbnb back in the day was you request to book with a host. You're like, Hey, can I stay in your home? And turned out, 50% of the time the guest was ignored or rejected, and the host was just like, nah, no thank you.”

“That's actually at Airbnb exactly how the team did that to understand what percentage of growth was right about. It's just a little interstitial pop-up when you visit, say, airbnb.com. How'd you hear about us?”

“Now, over 80%, as far as I know, of bookings or instant bookings, where you just book and it's done, just like every other place you book online.”

“Brian basically focused on that full time for a while, for like a year. That's the thing he was focused on. We're going to make this thing work. And I'm going to PM this thing and make it work and make it awesome. And when they launched, the easy thing to do w…”

“You have two t-shirts. You have the design t-shirt and you have the like marketplace t-shirt or whatever, you know, cross-disciplinary team that you work on because both are really important communities to build for slightly different reasons.”

“At Airbnb, you know, Brian Chesky is like the editor of all the things that, you know, come together”

“And then, you know, a couple months later, we had the best engagement scores in the company.”

“Performance equals potential Minus interference.”

“At Airbnb, one of the core values at Airbnb for time was simplify is this idea that we should always try to be simplifying. And then it turned out the founders realized we're not actually great at this. And it's unfair for us to say this is a value for not doi…”

“I also led the review system flows for a while at Airbnb. And one of the things I'm most proud of is launching what we call double blind reviews, where you don't see the other person's review until you leave your review. And we, the intention was to create mor…”

“When I think about the distinction about two different, between two different ranking algorithms, I don't want to be only comparing them in terms of how well they recreate the choices people made in the past. The way I'm really going to evaluate those is in my…”

“So those are frictions and what the marketplaces are selling you is taking the friction away. That's what you're paying them for. And it's an important observation because what that means is the marketplace's customers aren't just the people buying the rides o…”

“We ran an experiment showing the badge to some people and some not actually, which no, no impact at all, which is like super roast itself had no impact at all on the business. As far as we could tell initially, which is also bittersweet because it felt like wi…”

“What we did is we combined what one might call the inbound product development responsibilities of product manager with the outbound or marketing responsibilities of product marketing.”

“We got rid of A function called UX writing, and we combined it with marketing writing.”

“Now what we do is we do, we have a rolling two-year roadmap. We don't even really do an annual plan. I mean, we, as you remember, Lenny, when you were at Airbnb, we would have like three month planning cycles. Now, planning cycle is just a budgeting cycle, and…”

“And by 2019, We're spending a billion dollars on AdWords.”

“I don't think I could have ever done what I did if I wasn't an industrial designer. I think industrial designer is different than a graphic designer, because an industrial designer, you have to actually understand, you know, you have to work with engineering i…”

“We built this AI powered photo tour where we created our own AI computer visioning language that we trained on a hundred million photos, and it can basically scan all your photos and organize them by room.”

“We took three hundred and seventy million reviews on Airbnb, plus millions of customer service tickets, plus all the host cancellation data, and we use all the signal to create the top two million homes.”

“If you decide to be in the details and get very, very hands on, like I did, it might be a lot more work for about one to two years. And so for one to two years, it was way more work than the old way. But once we turned the corner, suddenly everyone started row…”

“So we use production partners, but we don't use Widening Kennedy or Shite or any of those anymore. We actually build our own in-house agency, so to speak, which is a creative group.”

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

“I make significantly more doing what I do now. I try not to talk about the income of this stuff, but it's significantly more than I made at Airbnb as a very senior product leader.”

“And so I, yeah, I personally don't believe the unit economics ever would have really worked out. I think we should have known that we should have dug into that more at the very beginning”

“Airbnb is a physical product. Uber is a physical product. Basecamp, Monday, Asana, they're available everywhere instantly anyway. I don't know what you need the money for other than marketing.”

“There's such heterogeneity in the supply for Airbnb that that's what has let Airbnb really close and escape competition.”

“They were like, listen, we have all these different people throwing insights over the transom. And it's great. We want to hear from the data scientists, from the product specialists, from the customer service people and the voice of the customer, whatever, all…”

“We changed the text on the button with help from our amazing content design or UX writing team. We basically changed seven characters and made Airbnb millions of dollars.”

“So at Airbnb, we had six values initially. One of them was simplify. And a year or two later, everyone just realized we're not actually good at this. We want to simplify, but we're not great at the skill and value should describe who you are, not who you want …”

“Airbnb is actually in that same model. Most of the stuff they announced every couple of times a year is already out or in an experiment to most people.”

“I recently got a Rivian, which is amazing that they did an absolutely beautiful job. You know, they're kind of the Airbnb of car companies because the founder is a designer and it is just imagine if a designer designed the next generation car, it's a phenomena…”

“I've written about it here and there, but honestly, very quietly is one of the biggest transformations Airbnb went through shifting from, I'm going to go request a book to basically every booking now on Airbnb is instant. And that was a very difficult and pain…”

“Just because you got to level four on your main product doesn't mean product market fit is free on all these new products. Right. And you've been inside Airbnb and I've been inside, you know, Dropbox and Twitter, like getting new products to be successful is h…”

“The earlier you go, the less it matters. And some of the most phenomenally good startups, if you were really pedantic about it, the TAM would be like tiny. Like the TAM of Uber would be like nothing, right? Like how the TAM of Airbnb would have been nothing.”

“When they probably should have shut down like three or four times before they got into YC. It objectively wasn't working. They were basically ruining their lives. They were disappointing their parents. Everything was wrong. And it was a purely irrational act f…”

“Like if it's not going well and you're out of ideas, that is usually a good time to pivot. But when there's a, you know, you have like half a dozen or a dozen really good growth ideas that you haven't tried yet, try them, right?”

“Companies like Airbnb and Pinterest Were leading an industry, and they were leading not just because they, like, built technology and made it accessible, but because they were really using the interface layer to differentiate.”

“The logout example is interesting at Airbnb. We found the logout was actually causing a lot of churn also. And the, but they went there initially they went with the simple solution of Just extend the session logout link instead of like a week, make it two week…”

“Something like 70% of Airbnb growth is word of mouth. And frequency of use is actually really low. It's like once or twice a year.”

“Like we hated their idea and Paul tried to get Brian and Joe and Nate to change it.”

“I mean, if there's one piece of goodness about us passing on air bed and breakfast design, Ann and I were like, man, you know, nobody's gonna want to stay in a stranger's house. That's crazy.”

“They benefited, I think, from a couple of things. One was the proliferation of customer reviews online and people's trust of reviews as a substitute for trusting the brand of a hotel. But then also Facebook connect made it possible to pass people's profile inf…”

“I think he offered me a chance to invest in a 1.5 million dollar valuation.”

“Slide one, you say what you do as if I literally know nothing. So it's not, we're Airbnb, we're a marketplace for unused residential housing space. Bad. But you'll get advice that says to do that because VCs think marketplaces are hot, residential real estate'…”

“Rotating between different metrics is so not efficient because you get good at, we're going to move this metric and your team's like, cool, we totally understand this lever, like cancellation rate. We've become really smart at cancellation rate. And then three…”

“This on average in the U S is, is something people do once in seven years. You know, I'm sure the average had opened doors, something similar. And so it's a little bit harder to like be a customer. I took Uber every day, probably used Airbnb a number of times …”

“I think it surprised people to learn there's like at least a hundred people at Airbnb just working on like pricing, optimizing pricing recommendations.”

“I don't think You should copy another company's ways of working. Like the reality is it is How a company operates is so unique to the founders, to the leadership team, to all the employees and the domain, potentially the moment in time”

“What I've seen as an organization scales, people transition from saying, I can do X. And they transition to saying, Can the other team do Y so that I can do X? And I think that's a very dangerous place to be because at the end of the day, like you just need to…”

“Oftentimes it's about also like being able to be impactful at a company that is in hyperscale and is growing quickly. A lot of it is actually just psychological. So it's not like there are these like core skills that sure, like you gotta have some baseline ski…”

“If you find yourself in a situation where you're not working on a top priority of the company, like you should probably get a different job because it's at the end of the day, you're spending so much of yourself and so much time at your job. You might as well …”

“Every single project that we worked on at Airbnb We did back of the envelope math with assumptions. To help us understand the impact that something would have. And you needed to at least, now those assumptions could be completely crazy and could be very challe…”

“Basically, mission over domain expertise, mission over skills. I think that if you have like a raw, like that raw horsepower, and you're deeply, like, you just love the mission so much, you can build whatever skills are necessary for the job.”

“And a lot of his like secret sauce is not being afraid to ask people for help who are experts in the thing that you're trying to learn.”

“So I would say the rebranding of Product manager. It did do some important things like shed project management and establish an entire function that focused on, on making sure things are moving in their, like the right direction from a project perspective. And…”

“If you have a strong view after you've really grounded yourself in the truth and you feel like you've done your homework and you've asked all the questions, if you still disagree, if you still feel like we're going in the wrong direction, don't be afraid to po…”

“Instead, what I've learned over time is instead of trying to find people that are good at everything, you need to look for people who spike on specific things and then add them to a team with different spikes. So there's no single person that is like spikes on…”

“Large companies, things are growing. Lots of things are happening as a leader. You miss so many things. And so Hearing actually what's happening and the reality of what you're dealing with. It was just so, so helpful.”

“The quality like of what we were releasing kind of suffered because we were just push, push, push, ship, ship, and people were shipping across the board. And I did feel as a leader, like I wasn't proud of some of the things we were shipping. And so I appreciat…”

“There's just something very disarming when you embrace the questions, you embrace the negativity and you have an open mind that maybe there are some things that you missed and some things that you didn't consider.”

“It's like the anti-sell, sell where I will share the worst day or what I think you will think as a candidate, what the worst day would be at Airbnb, and then still ask you if you want to join the team. And I would basically tell people, we're going to work day…”

“Something they learned about core values that I thought is really interesting is they shouldn't be aspirational. They should be who you actually are. And so there's a period where the founders are like, we're not actually amazing at this thing. So let's just r…”

“The process breaks, how you hire breaks, how you spend your time breaks, the projects you work on, everything breaks. And you gotta reinvent yourself.”

“At Airbnb, we had core value interviewers up until, I mean, my entire tenure, basically, even when we had thousands of people already at the company, when we were hiring people, everybody had to pass core values interviews. So it was very ingrained in how we h…”

“At Airbnb was, our North star metric was Knights book. And so it's similar to Amazon. It's not like the money Airbnb made from bookings, but it's like Knights booked. And it was really, and basically every experiment we ran is like, is this increasing nights b…”

“At Airbnb when I was leading a lot of the April Fools jokes year after year, and one of the best ones we did was we launched, it's basically we did the opposite of what you did. We launched Airbrb, which was a desk sharing service, and we made like a whole lau…”

“The Airbnb example is exactly the way we did at Airbnb is we looked at people that are searching with dates as intentful users, and then how many of them convert to a booking.”

“He was very anti-process at the beginning of Airbnb. He's like, we're not going to have a process. I hate process. We're going to run. That's the big company stuff. And then it just, It's chaos constantly. And then eventually it's like, okay, we need to have u…”

“I make much, much more than I made as a product manager at Airbnb. And also it's a lot more, it's a lot less stressful.”

“What made me realize this back in the day was thinking at Airbnb, especially thinking about people looking at our flow and being like, this is, they got it all figured out. We're just going to copy what they've done. Cause they're so thoughtful and have tested…”

“We did a test of all the PMs at Airbnb while I was there, like a personality test, and it's interesting how it was all over the map, and there wasn't, like, you need to be this, like, energetic, charismatic person. You could be just a thoughtful, quieter perso…”

“I had this other theory that a startup is still a startup until the founder moves aside. So by my definition of even meta is still a startup in a way that Amazon's not. And, you know, an Airbnb is still a startup in a way that Pinterest is not because Ben's mo…”

“And Apple does, Airbnb does. I don't get the sense that Google does. And I don't get the sense that Amazon does. And that's not a critique on them. I don't think that those organizations are competing on design in the same way.”

“There is a big launch coming up and there was a designer sitting at late in the office, trying to read, update the website to include this new product. It was a launch of Airbnb neighborhoods, like, I don't know, 10 years ago. And he's, and she was just like, …”

“I was 52, the average age was 26.”

“I'd never used a Google doc back then when I joined Airbnb.”

“If we'd started a little earlier, maybe in New York, it wouldn't have gotten to the point where it has been toxic in New York, the whole, for the last dozen years ever since I was there.”

“And I think one of the things that we did at Airbnb about a year after I joined and when Jonathan Mildenhall was joining is we really tried to ask ourselves, are we in the home sharing business or are we in some kind of business that is Even bigger and broader…”

“The difference in age between our hosts and our guests was Probably about 10 years maybe, and over time it actually got higher because we started actually reaching out more aggressively to, you know, boomers and Gen Xers to be hosts.”

“The HR department was reporting to me at one point and she was running HR and she was 25 and had no background in HR at all.”

“For the product team, my God, I mean, a product meeting with Brian would keep people up the night before not just because they were actually working all night long to get prepared, but also the, they knew they would work all night long because they probably wo…”

“Brian said, I want you to come in for and work 15 hours a week as a consultant, I want you to be my in-house mentor for both me and Joe and Nate and.”

“In fact, Airbnb saw it, I think when with Amazon people Apple people have resonated pretty well at Airbnb, Amazon people less so.”

“I remember back in 2011 when the, you know, the big debacle happened with the apartment getting trashed by a guest and. And so Brian decided he was going to go to find, you know, George Tenet, the former head of the CIA.”

“I remember one point there was a conversation that was going on about taking Airbnb so it was mobile only.”

“Interestingly, it made hosts really happy like you, just like, I want to be super host. I don't know why, but I want to be a super host. It didn't actually move any metrics, which is interesting. Might have changed over the years, but it was an interesting, in…”

“I'd probably find another company to start and I probably would have failed considering most startups fail. So I'd probably be in this like, oh no, is this thing a thing I should be doing? I'd be in a, on the struggle bus of startup life probably. And then pro…”