Airbnb

“So you can put in your credit card, and we had this saying, three clicks to the book it button. Had to be three clicks to the book it button.”

“It, the long story short is we ended up getting in Y Combinator, and I remember on the interview, he brought the cereal, and, you know, Paul Graham said, I remember him saying, like, he wasn't entirely sure of the idea. He said, well, it sounds different, but …”

“And the other idea, and this is actually something that Paul Buckeye is one of the speakers at Wycombe as well, he said, He said, make something that a hundred people love. And it may take a year, it may take two years for a hundred people to love it, but that…”

“And, you know, the kind of thing we tell people whenever we're giving advice is don't go for the Super Bowl launch. Don't go for one single thing. You don't have to worry about exclusive story.”

“The answer that it was, it always started as like an invert, like a pyramid and you always start at the bottom. And you work your way up to mainstream media. And the top of the pyramid is CNN, or New York Times. The bottom of the pyramid are all, any person th…”

“So, you know, when you're a really small company, like, you have the opportunity to retell your story many, many times. As long as every time you tell it, there's something different about it.”

“That, for that vision, Did not have online payments like it has now. It was merely to provide housing for conferences, and that was our, kind of, the first entry into the market.”

“Barry Manilow's drummer changed the course of our company forever because we met Barry Manilow's drummer. He, we realized that he didn't want to just list his bedroom. He wanted to list his entire apartment. Why? Because he goes on tour with Barry. And they go…”

“All of a sudden, we actually became profitable over the course of Y Combinator. You know, our, the revenue we're making was then funding our operations.”

“While we don't list the number of listings we have listings in 2200 cities in a 110 countries, and we've got about 75,000 travelers on our site.”

“Paul Graham says, make something people want, and we kind of, You know, tweak that a little, and our kind of saying in the company is, make something people need. Like, we absolutely should make something people need”

“So we did a limited production run to make it a collectible item, and we actually sold these through the website. It just so happens that We ended up selling out of the Obama hose. Each box sold for 40 dollars.”

“I think if you don't, if you're not willing to do things that don't scale, you may never get to the point where you have to scale to begin with, right?”

“On couch surfing, you saw the photo of the person. On Craigslist, you saw the photo of the place, but on no website did you see both, like, the person and their place. I think that was one really important ingredient that made it really compelling.”

“Our strategy, you know, from where we came from, and I think it kind of explains where, you know, we started off just getting a lot of press, and we relied on press and word of mouth to grow.”

“At the time, we were just housing for conferences. You had to list a room to an event. When the event was over, the listing went away.”