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.
why aren't all 33 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
French: Airbnb Properties Have Become Commoditized and Undifferentiated
“Airbnbs have been commoditized. They're just, you know, unrecognizable from each other. There's no differentiation.”
Noah Kagan: Companies like Facebook and Airbnb started in a weekend
“Facebook started that way in a weekend. Airbnb did. A lot of other companies can too.”
Galloway: Wealthy individuals should sell concentrated single stocks and buy index funds
“Like you're, quite frankly, you should be selling down your Airbnb and your HubSpot stock and just letting, you don't need the needle in a haystack. You just need to buy the whole haystack because you've got enough capital.”
Shaan Puri: Y Combinator Is Probably the Most Successful Tech Startup
“Paul Graham, who created YC, which is, I think probably the most successful tech startup actually, because it created sure all these other tech startups and like I created Dropbox and it created Airbnb. They probably wouldn't like to say created, but like they…”
Sam Parr: The Sharing Economy Only Works For Rides And Homes
“I am almost positive That the sharing economy only works for like two or three things. Uber and driving Airbnb, home rentals, And maybe that's it.”
Parr: Local food and history experiences can generate hundreds of thousands annually
“It's not easy, but it's fairly simple. They can turn very passionate local experiences into thriving businesses. If I had to guess, you can make many hundreds of thousands of dollars a year doing experiences based off of history and food just like this.”
Sam Parr: Brian Chesky wanted to launch an Airbnb airline before COVID
“He used to say that he wants to launch an airline.”
Shaan Puri: The next major wave of AI applications will be multiplayer
“Every AI tool right now is single player. He's like, ChatGPT is just a tool you use yourself, and same thing with the image creators, and same thing with almost all of the tools are still single player, but the internet has showed us that, like, all the most p…”
Puri: Startup ideas that make founders laugh hold massive breakout potential
“I think any idea that ends with that, like genuinely you would be like, ha, like if that's your genuine field to end of it, there's a lot of potential in those types of ideas.”
Puri: Mike Lynch stayed at my dad's Airbnb during trial
“That guy stayed at my dad's Airbnb when he was on trial.”
Puri: Y Combinator returned 320x in its first decade
“The first 10 years of YC, they basically turned like something like twelve million dollars Into, like, ten billion dollars of value for them, from themselves, because they were writing super small checks early on and getting basically, like, was seven percent?…”
French: $950 Influencer Post Generated $40K in Direct Bookings
“Two days later, they made the post. Seven days later, we had 40,000 dollars of direct bookings through our website. So I whipped up a website overnight and 40,000 of direct bookings and 5000 followers on Instagram from scratch.”
French: Live Oak Lake Would Be Worth $3M-$4M Without Direct Bookings
“Maybe three or four million is my guess.”
Puri: YC's Biggest Wins Came From Founders Scratching Their Own Itches
“The biggest Successes out of YC have typically been that, right? The Airbnb guys renting out their own apartment to make hay, or Brian Armstrong doing Coinbase because he lived in Argentina and dealt with the currency issues and was interested in Bitcoin. Thes…”
Gary Vee: Early Uber and Airbnb rounds were valued at $4M-$8M
“They both probably, believe it or not, this is how much startups were back then, they both would have been priced between four and eight million.”
Gary Vee kept an overlooked pitch email from Airbnb's Joe Gebbia
“I have an email from Joe that says, Gary, we're fans. We want you to Look at our company, and it was joe at airbedandbreakfast.com. And I never saw it, you know, or maybe I did, and just like, but I look at that email, I have it on a separate laptop, and I loo…”
Sam Parr: Elite Olympic Track Athletes Make Very Little Money
“And I was talking to them about money and they don't make anything like some of them like have little Airbnbs on the side or they bought a car to put on Toro. And one of them got is an American record holder in her event. Another one won a gold medal.”
Photo quality is the primary differentiator between winning and losing Airbnb listings
“And my wife works at Airbnb and I think she has told me, I don't remember if who told me, I think it was her that told me that the number one difference between a winning Airbnb and a losing Airbnb is the pictures.”
Mares converted a 14-unit Las Vegas building to Airbnb, tripling cash flow
“We ended up doing this too with an apartment building in, in Vegas where we bought a 14 unit apartment building, could put it all on Airbnb basically like tripled the cashflow and then sold it. 18 months later for, you know, it's 70% more than what we paid.”
Mares made $15K-$18K monthly via Airbnb arbitrage in San Francisco in 2013
“In 2013, we had, like, the number third, like, the third ranked Airbnb in San Francisco, and so we were we were, like, renting out either our living room most nights, or you know, over summers, we'd rent it out for, like, 15, 18 grand a month, and then we just…”
Sam Parr: Airbnb Experiences Does Not Work Well As A Business
“Even Airbnb experiences doesn't really work that well as a business. It works as a nice little add-on thing for them, but that's not, like, where their value is.”
Sam Parr reveals 90% of his net worth is in S&P 500
“Well, no, I own way more just S&P 500 than I do HubSpot and Airbnb. But I would say that 90% of my net worth is in the S&P 500.”
Parr: Airbnb Was Profitable in 2019
“And I think they're also profitable in 2019. This is all public information.”
Puri: SF Rental Regulations Cut Airbnb Listings by 30-40%
“They changed some rules here in San Francisco where it's like, you can only do 90 days out of the year and you have to live in the place. You have to prove that blah, blah, blah. And that, that, you know, it eliminated like 30 or 40% of the listings overnight …”
Shaan Puri: Isaac French sold his seven-cabin Airbnb business for $7M-$8M
“Isaac French came on and he was here to talk about his Airbnb Like business where he built this like a little seven cabin Airbnb business and sold it for seven, eight million bucks.”
Parr: Airbnb rescinded job offer after finding undisclosed DUI on resume
“I had a job offer at Airbnb, which got rescinded when I got there because I'd lied on my resume about getting a DUI.”
Shaan Puri: Airbnb founder Joe Gebbia's sales formula is SW²+WC=MO
“So this is the Airbnb founders sales formula and it's SW squared plus WC equals MO. So I don't know if you can, if you've ever heard that, he's like, everybody heard this for like, no, he goes, no. So here's what it stands for. Some will, some won't. Who cares…”
Parr: My portfolio is 80/20 index funds plus HubSpot and Airbnb
“And then I own HubSpot stock still, and then I own Airbnb stock. That's basically, basically my portfolio.”
Puri: Sam Altman was Airbnb's first seed investor
“He then invested in Airbnb right away and was the first seed investor in Airbnb.”
Parr: Wife became liquid millionaire two months before him via Airbnb IPO
“She worked at Airbnb for a long time, and then it went public in December, and I sold my company in February, so she beat me by two months.”
Parr: First Liquid Million Came From Airbnb IPO and Company Sale
“So, cash, like cash million, I made it when my wife worked at Airbnb, and it went public. And that, that's when we made our first. And then about three months later, I think it went later in December, my company sold in February, and then we made a lot. Leadin…”
Puri: Early Airbnb founders personally photographed New York listings
“They talked about the early Airbnb guys, how they used to go and they themselves would go and call all the hosts of their New York Airbnbs. They would go to their houses. They would take professional looking photos so that the listings look better.”
Sam Parr: Rohin Dhar owns 8 to 12 Airbnb properties across the US
“And this guy, he owns, I think, 12 or 10 or eight, somewhere in that eight to 12 range. He owns eight single family homes in New Mexico, in California, Hawaii, wherever. And you can go and look and he'll kind of show you where they are and I'll show pictures o…”