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 62 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
Tan: Foundation model giants won't build vertical applications due to inefficiency
“If you treat OpenAI as the Google of the next 20 years, you want to invest in Google and all the things that Google enabled, like Airbnb. Google could do Airbnb, it probably won't. Just from, like, I don't know, Coase's theorem of the firm, probably. It's just…”
Reinhardt: Reaching product-market fit through multi-year iterative grinds is extremely rare
“My feeling is that that's extremely rare and that, again, this is a really dangerous place to be because you can stay in this iterative mode for years. And it is unlikely that the iterations are going to get you to a good place. So I remember very clearly earl…”
Altman: Chesky asked if candidates would work with one year to live
“He used to ask people before he hired them at Airbnb if they would take the job if they got a medical diagnosis that they had one year left to live.”
Zaparde: Airbnb needed conflict to stop promotion-driven projects
“There was like, there was a need for change, right? And like a need for like creating conflict within the company to actually ask the hard questions and say, Hey, do we need these folks or are, or, you know, are we actually doing this project because somebody …”
Caldwell: DoorDash and Airbnb would have failed using outsourced dev shops
“But I think if you just look at the facts of the companies we funded, like literally DoorDash or literally Airbnb or any of these folks, they lived and died by their speed of shipping software. And if they, what they did was buy white label software or have so…”
Rusenko: The best startups create new markets, rendering market research useless
“The best companies will create a market. So if you look at sort of what Weebly's done, if you look at what Airbnb's done, if you look at what Dropbox has done, all, all companies have created their own market. I say this because by definition here, market rese…”
Altman: Seed investors must evaluate founder growth rate, not current polish
“If you look at a founder who comes to meet you for a seed round and compare that founder to Brian Chesky, you'll be disappointed a hundred percent of the time. That is the wrong comparison. You will never write a check. However just like startups, you look at …”
Alströmer: Only 5 to 10 countries are dramatically different from the US
“There are not that many countries in my experience that are dramatically different. There are maybe five or 10 that are quite different than the US, but most countries are not that different.”
Graham tried to change Airbnb's core idea in their YC interview
“During the interview, ah, Paul tried to change their idea. We thought this idea of, like, renting out airbeds was a little weird.”
Caldwell: YC's best startups often launch during economic downturns
“Some of the best companies we've ever funded happened when either there was a full downturn or at least a blip.”
Seibel: Rental marketplaces win by maximizing host supply, not charging listing fees
“If you think about the core insight of this market, it's that hosts are the game. If you can get the most hosts, you win. You have the best inventory. But if you charge them up front to be on your site like you're probably doing it wrong.”
Seibel: Airbnb, Coinbase, and Stripe beat dominant incumbents by being 10x better
“For each of these companies, there was a pre-existing product. Pre-existing competitor, dominant, you might say, but there was an opportunity to make something that was 10 X better than what existed.”
Seibel: Investors initially thought Airbnb, Coinbase, and Stripe were horrible ideas
“Most people, founders and investors thought these ideas were horrible, either because they were too hard to execute or because they just were bad ideas.”
Alströmer: Referral emails should name the inviter as sender to drive opens
“First, who's the sender of the email? If it's just Airbnb, I probably have never heard of Airbnb the first time I get this email. If it's Gustav that sent the email, and I sent it to my friends, they have heard of me, that's the reason to open the email.”
Alströmer: Startups should copy Pinterest and Airbnb's authentication flows
“Look at the best websites in the world. Look at Pinterest. Look at Airbnb. Look at some of those sites. They have teams optimizing these flows the authentication flow. Copy what they do. They probably figure it out. They spend a lot of time optimizing.”
Alströmer: 'Accept invitation' CTA outperforms generic 'sign up' in referrals
“Well, I could sign up, which is a undefined thing that you can do sometime in the future, or I can do what we did here, was accept my invitation. This sounds more exclusive. It sounds like something that is just for me. It doesn't sound like something I can do…”
Alströmer: Mandatory signup wall increased Airbnb iOS bookings by 2.6%
“We got 2.6% more bookings from iOS by making people sign up through a sign-up wall in the app.”
Adora Cheung: Marketplaces must measure metrics where both sides receive value
“Well, you pick a value that actually represents them both getting value. So in Airbnb's case, it would be nights booked, right?”
Alströmer: Airbnb boosted total revenue by over 1% by extending session length
“In the early days of Airbnb, we used to automatically log you out after, like, I think two days. And we were like, why we do that? Well, security reasons. That makes sense. So then we would run an experiment. We set the kind of expiration date of that cookie t…”
Alströmer: Startups should control A/B experiments by user account, not visitor
“The thing you want to decide early on is who, sort of like, what is the thing that you're controlling the experiment on, and I would recommend that it's going to be user accounts. If you're doing it on visitors or something like that, it's going to be typicall…”
Alströmer: Early growth wins come from high-intent flows, not homepages
“The early wins are often in the high intent flows. So like where people actually thinking about booking or actually about to book. So search conversion is important one. Signup conversion is important one. Sort of like online marketing traffic was an important…”
Alströmer: Word of mouth drove over 50% of Airbnb guests and 70% of hosts
“But if you look at the composition of growth of Airbnb word of mouth is by far the biggest driver. So I think it was, like, way over 50% on the guest side, and way over, like, 70% on the host side of people that heard about me for the first time through a frie…”
Alströmer: Airbnb would not be as big today without early online marketing
“Like, had we not done online marketing early on we were certainly not being as big as we are today. So that was critical.”
Alströmer: Airbnb's market fit came from core experience, not funnel optimization
“So I would say that the story of Airbnb was basically we had probably one of the best market fits that I've seen but not necessarily thanks to, like, an amazing user flow, an amazing onboarding, or even an amazing acquisition channel. It's just, like, a really…”
Ralston: Top investors prefer backing startups before they gain expensive traction
“Interestingly, the very best investors want to get you before you have all that stuff, because you're expensive by then. The greatest, best investors are Airbnb before they're Airbnb, before they have traction.”
Adeney: Many San Francisco residents pay near-zero rent through special arrangements
“There's a lot of people who live in San Francisco for little to no rent just through special arrangements, like they're friends with somebody who has a space or they're trading services for rent or they own a place and then Airbnb out the rest of it or whateve…”
Bernstam: Investors don't need to rush into deals on Demo Day
“Like say Dropbox and Airbnb, they took like over a year to go from Demo Day to their Series A. So you don't have to actually rush into things at Demo Day. There's a lot of room in the post seed world where you can kind of invest like maybe at a slightly higher…”
Alströmer: Airbnb Measures Data Team on Experimentation Tool Adoption
“At Airbnb, really the entire product team is now a growth team, and the goal of the data team that have built these tools is to get everybody to use them. Like, they're, Literally measured by how many people using experimentation frameworks.”
Altman: Brian Chesky spent 20 nights a month dining with non-reporting employees
“I can't, I'm not a hundred percent sure who told me this.
I think it was Brian Chesky.
he used to spend, or still does spend, like, 20 of his 30 nights a month taking key Airbnb employees that don't report him out to dinner.
And is just like, let's talk, I…”
Altman: Evan Spiegel and Brian Chesky are both lightly technical founders
“So first of all, I'd say they're both lightly technical, both of those guys. They both know a little bit. Brian is a great designer and was able to design the first version.”
Livingston: YC's Investment in Airbnb Was Primarily a Bet on the Founders
“I have to admit it was more of a bet on the three founders. They seemed really good. I did sort of like the idea of being able to stay in people's homes, but I have to admit I was not thinking it was going to be huge.”
Livingston: YC funded 632 startups valued at over $20B by 2014
“So fast forward to today, and Y Combinator has funded 632 startups that now have a combined valuation of over twenty billion dollars, including Dropbox, Airbnb, Weebly, and Stripe.”
Airbnb maintained a minimum technical staff ratio to prevent stalled productivity
“At Airbnb we had this metric, which was percent of technical people that work at the company, and the reason we had the metric is, at some point you have too many non-technical people all they do is request things from the technical people, and then you can't …”
Zaparde: Airbnb revenue dropped ~95% during initial March 2020 lockdowns
“I think Airbnb revenue dropped like 95% the week he left, which was, you know, quite a change for the company.”
Zaparde: Airbnb grew from ~30 to over 100 PMs in under three years
“I think I was the, if I remember, I was like the 30th or something product manager. And then when I left almost three years later, two and a half years later, there were like a hundred something product managers.”
Garry Tan: Airbnb Launched Three Times Before Getting Attention
“Airbnb launched three times before anyone started to pay attention, but each time they launched, they learned something new, improved the product, and kept going.”
Mañalac: Airbnb launched three times before getting traction
“Airbnb launched three times before they really started to get users.”
Airbnb's YC Application Description Explained Its Marketplace Directly Without Jargon
“Here's the actual description Airbnb used on their YC application. We built the first online marketplace that lets travelers book rooms with locals instead of hotels.”
Alströmer: Airbnb's referral program didn't bring in its first 2,000 customers
“They didn't start by running Google SEM or Google SEO. The referral program did not bring in the first 2000 customers. They did things that didn't scale, and they look different than what they do at scale.”
Airbnb co-founders still receive host calls on their personal cell phones
“Still today, Brian and Joe gets calls from hosts on their personal cell phone numbers. I remember them telling me that on the first day I worked at Airbnb, Why do they do that? Well, it's the number that they put on the website and share with all of their host…”
Never guide users when testing interactive product prototypes
“The key thing, if you're doing this tactic, is to not tell them what to do. Do not tell them what to do. Just watch them play around with it. You can tell them a specific goal, like try to make a booking at Airbnb, or try to do a search with dates on Airbnb, o…”
Airbnb tested unbuilt features by handing phone prototypes to lobby visitors
“We used to do this at Airbnb all the time. We'd go downstairs in our office, and we'd find some people that were waiting for an interview or waiting for getting a coffee or something, and we'd just show them the latest version of the app. This would be an InVi…”
Early Airbnb guests demanded host phone numbers because they lacked trust
“In early Airbnb, a lot of guests wanted to have the phone numbers of the host, so they can call them. And we were like, why do you need that? It just turned out that they didn't fully trust the platform. Like, we had not displayed enough trust in Airbnb, so th…”
Seibel: Airbnb did not even process payments when it first launched
“Airbnb didn't realize the insight around facilitating payments, around accepting payment, when they launched. They didn't have that insight when they launched.”
Seibel: Early Airbnb customer service routed to Joe Gebbia's cell phone
“Another famous one was Airbnb where customer service was one of the co-founders Joe's cell phone number.”
Alströmer: Airbnb founders posed as hired photographers to hide small team size
“They claimed to be hired photographers for Airbnb, Airbnb and breakfast. So when they met with all the hosts, they said, we want to come by your home and take photos. They didn't say that they were the founders because that made the company sound much smaller.”
Alströmer: Custom share sheet outperformed native iOS sheet by 40% at Airbnb
“So at Airbnb, we launched, ah, a new sharing sheet for the mobile app. And this was the old version, which was the native share sheet that you've seen on iOS. Ah, you click on share, and then you see a bunch of sharing options. And then we just tried this new …”