Airbnb

“I think startups raise way too much money. The less money you raise, the more control the company you keep, but more importantly, the more constraints you create. They develop a scrappy culture. The scrappy culture requires you to build more novel solutions, u…”

“I often find that to reinvent an industry, you do not take inspiration directly from that industry, that you need to look at orthogonal industries.”

“If I say, what can I do to make this better, they'll say something small. If I were to say, Reed, what would it take for me to design something that you would literally tell every single person you've ever encountered? So you start to ask these questions, and …”

“The point of the process is that maybe nine, 10, 11 are not feasible, but if you go through the crazy exercise of keep going, there's some sweet spot between they showed up and they opened the door and I went to space. That's a sweet spot. And you have to almo…”

“We had a saying that you would do everything by hand until it was painful. So Joe and I would photograph homes until it was painful, then we got a photographer's. Then we'd manage them with spreadsheets until it was painful, then we got an intern.”

“It's really hard to get even 10 people to love anything. But it's not hard if you spend a ton of time with them.”

“The biggest leaps you ever get is when you're small. And another way of saying it is your product changes less the bigger you get, because there's bigger, more customers, more blowback, more systems, more legacy. The most innovative leaps you'll ever make, oft…”

“The roadmap often exists in the minds of the users you're designing things for.”

“All startups go through a valley of the shadow. All of them, PayPal, LinkedIn, things that I've done personally, things that I've invested in, Facebook, Airbnb, all have valleys of the shadow where you're like, why did we think this was a good idea?”

“Daniel is a disruptor, but most disruptors don't actually work with the industries they're disrupting. Most of these disruptors just reinvent, push things aside, and create their own closed loop. Uber Doesn't work with taxi companies. Airbnb doesn't work with …”

“I have this kind of interesting way I do to-do list. I make a list of, like, long tasks, and I try to be as exhausted as possible, and then I try to group them. And I say, it's like a game of leverage. What one action can take out of those three? And then I do…”

“If Google was cheaper or Facebook was more efficient or people could do marketing themselves, like there wouldn't be AppSumo. There wouldn't be Airbnb if you could just promote your home yourself.”

“So for example, Airbnb, which I foolishly passed on, I noticed that Airbnb was a movement.”