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
Alströmer: Only 1% to 2% of Airbnb homepage visitors reached booking page
“In the case of Airbnb, we call the homepage P-one. The search results page, P two, and then the booking page, and the listing page, P three, and then the booking page was P four. Four pages. That was the entire website. Now what's the funnel? What percent of p…”
Adora Cheung: Early Airbnb founders fixated entirely on missed growth targets
“This is in fact what the Airbnb founders did in the beginning. And if they hit the numbers, great. Ah, if they did not, then that's all they would talk about.”
Alströmer: Only 10% of Airbnb homepage visitors had booking intent
“We actually made the mistake of going all focusing on the onboarding for the homepage, because they're like, well, that has the biggest scale by a long shot, but it turned out that only like, 10% of the people that come to the homepage actually have a booking …”
Alströmer: Airbnb scaled its online marketing team to up to 20 engineers
“If you look at the evolution of the online marketing team at Airbnb, it went from like one or two engineers to when I left, I think we were a 15 or 20 engineers on online marketing. And they were building everything from attribution system to automated bidding…”
Alströmer: Most early Airbnb booking requests were not confirmed by hosts
“In many cases, actually the majority of cases in the early days the request was not confirmed. So you wanted to book something, and sorry, it didn't work out.”
Bernstam: Modern seed rounds exceed Dropbox and Airbnb's Series A rounds
“The seed rounds today, Are bigger than, like, the Series A that Dropbox and Airbnb did with Sequoia, which I think was roughly a mil each.”
Zapier flies new hires to Bay Area Airbnbs for in-person onboarding
“So we do this thing called Airbnb on boarding, which when we hire folks within the first month, we actually do like to have them spend a week in person out here in the Bay area. So we'll, we'll rent an Airbnb. We'll bring their manager out here, them out here …”
Alströmer: Airbnb Held Bi-Weekly Experiment Reviews Where Teams Guessed A/B Test Winners
“Every two weeks, the growth team gets into a room, and we show experiments that we've shipped and gotten significant results on in the last, last month, say. And the engineer will go on stage, show the experiments, show the control and the experiment. Before t…”
Altman: Airbnb took 1,000 days before adoption began trending upward
“In Airbnb's case, it was a thousand days before the graph started taking upward.”
Altman: Airbnb took five months to hire its first employee
“Airbnb spent five months interviewing their first employee before they hired someone. And in their first year they only hired two people.”
Livingston: Airbnb pitched investors during YC as 'the eBay of space'
“I remember specifically during YC, Airbnb said to themselves and I think, ah, to investors, we plan to become the eBay of space. Like, they were nowhere near the eBay of space at that point, but they had that vision, and they were working toward that.”
Livingston was impressed by Airbnb founders hand-gluing custom cereal boxes
“In fact, sometimes I wonder if we funded them because I was so impressed by the fact that they, like, hand glue gunned their cereals, the Obama O's and the Captain, you know, campaign. Skills. I was like, whoa, these guys are scrappy. They're selling cereal on…”
Brian Chesky spent a weekend with Airbnb's very first guest
“Brian is the co-founder and CEO of Airbnb. On the left side of the photo is Amol. Amol was the very first guest on Airbnb. They actually spent a weekend together in San Francisco when Airbnb kind of launched.”
Elman: Airbnb's growth team expanded from 3 to over 100 people
“Ed joined Uber to start the growth team when it was five people, and then over the three and a half years became kind of VP of both product and growth for kind of all of Uber, and Gustav joined, and the Airbnb growth team was him and two other people when he g…”