Nathan Blecharczyk: The Raw Truth of Scaling Airbnb to a $75B Empire | E122

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Okay, so let's dive in.

It's better to have a hundred users that love you than a million users that kind of like you, right?

Like, you need to have evangelists, people who feel really passionate about what you do.

Nathan Letervik is the co-founder of Airbnb, which is a platform that redefined how we travel, how we connect, the way we create experiences, how we experience the world with millions of hosts and guests across 220 countries valued at around $75 billion today.

A whole year has gone by.

Our actual business isn't making any money.

It's not growing despite all the work we're doing.

We are having trouble paying our rent again.

You know, when do you quit?

When do you quit?

Why continue?

So we made an agreement.

And this in itself is a pretty interesting story and a lesson.

I bet there isn't a single one of you that doesn't know the company that Nathan co-founded.

So, buckle up and get ready for a fascinating story that you'll absolutely love.

Nathan Letchervich is the co-founder of Airbnb, which is a platform that redefined how we travel, how we connect, the way we create experiences, how we experience the world.

And I can tell you, my family is using Airbnb all the time, and it completely changed the way we travel as a family and the way we consume experiences.

But Airbnb became a global phenomenon.

Millions of hosts and guests across 220 countries valued at around $75 billion today.

So take us back in time.

You've been like tinkering with code, building things from a very young age.

How did that shape you?

Take us back in time a little bit.

Yeah, I got started at a very young age.

Like, you know, many young people, I was into playing computer games and such.

And one day at the age of 12, I was homesick from school.

And my dad

is an electrical engineer and he had books about computers.

This is like the mid-90s right now.

So computers are still kind of newish.

Internet's definitely new.

Anyways, I start looking through his books and start learning how to write simple scripts based on these books.

And I was interested in that because it was relevant for playing my games.

Out of that, though, that Christmas, I asked for a programming book.

And I got one that was, you know, basically how to how to program program in 21 days.

And it's a 500-page book.

I actually managed to complete it in about 30 days while also going to school and doing other things.

So I devoured the book.

And from there on, I just kept going to the bookstore at that time, Barnes and Noble, and buying more computer books, oftentimes, you know, 500-page books, reference books that were probably not meant to be read from front to back, probably not by a kid.

But I was just super curious and hungry.

So I was teaching myself how to to code.

It became a hobby of mine.

I was posting my work on the internet.

I said, if you like my work, please send me $5.

Nobody ever sent me $5.

But better yet, at the age of 14, I got a phone call.

So a couple of years later, I got a phone call.

It was a guy who said, I saw your work on the internet and I would like to pay you $1,000 to make something similar for me.

So I'm excited.

I tell my dad, hey, somebody from the internet wants to pay me $1,000.

And he's like, son, nobody from the internet is going to pay you $1,000.

I mean, this is the mid-90s.

So this is all very novel.

It's weird.

It sounds like a fraud.

It sounds like a scam, right?

Totally.

It still sounds like a scam.

It sounded like one back then, too.

But I said, like, whatever, dad, like, this is my hobby.

I'll do it just for fun and we'll see what happens.

So I did the work.

And sure enough, 30 days later, I got paid, which is pretty cool.

But better yet,

I got introductions to other people who needed.

uh similar things made and so this began kind of like a consulting business where i was writing code for contract and then i i kind of had an aha moment where i said, you know, it feels like people are asking me to write the same thing for them.

Like instead of creating a bespoke product for each person and reinventing the wheel, like, why don't I just create a software product and sell licenses to it?

And so this began a business that I ran throughout high school for about four or five years.

Before that, Nathan, were you exposed to entrepreneurship?

Like, as far as I'm concerned, I was in Intel at the time.

And entrepreneurship, even the word didn't exist.

Like, how did you, were you exposed to it?

Were you inspired by anything?

Yeah, I think, I think ultimately, my parents and my dad in particular, like, kind of instilled the key ingredients.

You know, it wasn't by the name of entrepreneurship, but you know, he taught me definitely a few things.

I mentioned he was an electrical engineer's electrical engineer, but he one taught me to be curious.

Like, he was always bringing home stuff from work for me to take apart and tinker with.

And, you know, he's very much about like, you can teach yourself anything.

You can just go to the library, get a book.

He never hired anyone in his life, I think, to do anything for him.

He is a very, you know, handyman.

That's amazing.

And yeah, I think just kind of, you know, a work ethic as well, you know, work hard.

So yeah, I think, I think this kind of, you know, led me towards the entrepreneurship journey.

So then you have a consulting at age as a teen.

So where did that go, Nathan?

Right.

So I started off as consulting, became a software business, selling licenses to products, made almost a million dollars basically in high school.

And it was just me, really.

I didn't have any employees.

I had a few software products I was selling.

More important, though, than the money was kind of the lessons lessons that that imparted on me.

I mean, one, I taught myself all the skills.

So that gave me confidence that I could just, you know, learn whatever I needed to know on my own.

And then second was simply that I could do things that other people valued, you know, and I'm like a teenager.

So like, you know, you don't necessarily think of yourself as an adult or capable of that.

And yet I was doing it and I was getting a lot of positive feedback.

And so that was just fuel for the fire.

And out of that, I think came my love for entrepreneurship.

The satisfaction of building something for someone gave me a taste of entrepreneurship.

And that's when I became, you know, effectively a lifelong entrepreneur.

Which is interesting because also as a teen, when you make so much money, you could also decide that maybe you want to get lazy.

But it sounds like that was not in your books.

But tell me, so what happened next?

So you have this like business.

How did you get into Airbnb?

And how did that start?

A few things happened there.

So like I started this in high school, then I went to college.

I went to Harvard.

The first year was actually pretty easy, but my second year got pretty hard.

And in the second year, I made a decision to shut down my business, actually.

I know some people drop out of school and pursue the business.

Many of my peers have done that.

But for me, I thought, you know what?

Like, this is an experience I want to have.

It's a period of my life.

I'm going to do this.

And, you know, there'll always be other.

entrepreneurial opportunities in the future.

And so I actually shut down my business, focused on having the college experience for those four years.

And then it was a question of like, well, what do I do after college?

And I ended up getting kind of what I'll call a normal software engineering job at like a mid-sized company.

That might sound surprising given my entrepreneurial activity.

You know, they had come recruiting on campus and the kind of work they were doing fit some of my academic interests.

So I thought it was cool and interesting.

And so I went with it.

And I thought, you know, this will give me like just another perspective that will presumably be valuable.

I don't have to do it forever.

Well, it ended up being very short-lived.

I only stayed there for about seven months.

By the time I showed up, which was like five months after I interviewed, a few months after graduating, by the time I showed up, they needed me to do something completely different than what they had sold me on.

So that was a little disappointing.

And it turned out that the pace of what they were doing was very slow.

And I just found myself, you know, being bored and not really engaged with it.

It wasn't stimulating for me.

And

you know, I went to quit.

And my boss said, oh, you can't quit.

You're our most productive engineer.

And that was really funny slash alarming to me because actually what was happening was I had an office all to myself and I only had one meeting a week.

So for the most part, nobody knew what I was doing in the office.

You know, my routine was I'd come in and I'd code the first half of the day.

The second half of the day, I'd be like trading stocks, reading blogs, you know, not working effectively.

And then to be told that you're the like most productive engineer.

That's scary for a high-end.

I think it reinforced the point, yeah, that I was not being challenged.

I was not growing.

I wasn't gaining skills that I thought was going to further my career or my entrepreneurial ambitions.

And so I quickly made the choice to leave.

And I think that's a really important, just general lesson.

Like, I don't think there's any wrong career choice as long as you learn in the process and you're being stimulated and that you make the decision when it stops becoming challenging, it stops becoming interesting.

That's when you move on.

And so that's what I did next.

But that's also very brave, Nathan, right?

Because I mean, I don't know.

I mean, you're, you're young, but you're, you still have a salary was it scary i had just a lot of confidence in my my ability so i always knew that i could always get a job you know if and when i needed one and i could also do consulting um i had also saved a bunch of my money from my high school business i i did not go and spend uh much of it at all you know i had some some cushion there to allow me to take risk um and then you know i also just had confidence too so you quit yeah what happened i quit and you know at this point i had grown up in boston I went to this job that was in the greater Washington DC area.

So I'd been on the East Coast exclusively.

And, you know, I made the decision that it was time to go west.

It was time to go find other people like myself.

Because especially back then, I found not a lot of people like me, not a lot of entrepreneurial tech people in Boston or even D.C.

at that time.

It's different now, but back then, I really felt alone.

You know, all my friends from Harvard were going off to medical school, law school, business school, getting high-paying jobs.

You know, know, they'd ask, hey, Nate, what are you doing?

And I'd say, I'm working on my projects.

And they'd be like, you know, you just kind of get, it would kind of like be a dead conversation.

You know, they didn't understand that.

And

so you felt a little out of place.

And Silicon Valley definitely had this.

Yeah, it definitely had this the bug.

It's the opposite.

You know, there, everybody is an entrepreneur, which means they're quitting their jobs and pursuing their passion.

And that's like, you know, that's the cool thing to do.

It's not to go down a more traditional path.

Yeah.

And so i went to the west coast to try to you know find people like myself what year was that this is 2007 okay 2007.

and so through a friend of a friend i got connected to a startup opportunity this is not airbnb this is something else i like to say from this opportunity i learned everything not to do when starting a company which is actually a super valuable experience i mean it was definitely stressful but it was super super valuable give me an example what were like a lesson that you decided to take with you?

Well, I think the most obvious thing is being overly confident in your business outcome, right?

This was a company that they just were so confident that they were going to make $7 million in their first year that they could therefore afford to spend any sum of money in order to just move faster.

And of course, you know, I

know of very few, if any, people who in the span of 12 months made $7 million when starting a company from scratch.

Right.

That doesn't, that's not how it works.

It takes longer.

And so, you know, they just ultimately ran out of runway.

But when I joined, I was joining as an engineer, as soon as I joined, the two lead engineers quit.

That probably should have been a warning sign, they had already seen enough, but it ended up being a really great opportunity for me nonetheless, because I got to step in and work with the founders to take their big vision, distill it down into a product specification, hire an engineering team, and go build it all in the span of 11 months.

So, it was a highly concentrated learning experience that didn't end the way that I had hoped, but also didn't necessarily negatively impact me.

Minus, you know, the sense that I had put a lot of effort in.

But it's also the first kind of management role that you had, right?

I mean, it's kind of like when were you?

That was a lot of responsibility.

That was a lot of responsibility.

And it included hiring people for sure.

And I learned a lot of skills that were then relevant to Airbnb, which is what comes next at this point.

So when I moved to San Francisco in 2007, I, of course, need a place to live.

So I go on Craigslist and I find a roommate.

And through Craigslist, I find Joe Gebbia, you know, who later became one of the co-founders, but he was had a apartment in south of Market, San Francisco that looked nice.

So I applied and showed up.

And I actually got a call the next day.

And he said, oh, you know, sorry, but we gave it to somebody else.

There was another designer that we really liked.

And so we're sorry, we can't offer you the room.

So I was bummed.

But actually, then like a few days go by and the person they had chosen that Joe had chosen fell through and backed out.

And so Joe called me back and said, hey, would you like the room?

And I said, oh, yes, I'm still interested.

So he and I became roommates living in San Francisco together for quite a few months.

And

during this time,

we made some important observations about each other.

One, after working on the weekends, we would come home and work on our passion projects.

We had a lot of things we were into and we would just work hard on them late into the night.

And so we saw in each other a passion and a shared work ethic.

And then second, we realized we had complementary skill sets.

Joe is a designer by background.

I'm an engineer by background, software engineer.

So we started helping each other with our projects because we had complementary skill sets.

I was building websites for him.

He was building UIs and marketing material for me.

We saw the power of putting different skill sets together and what we could build when you do that.

Right.

So, you know, those were two observations that really led to the creation of the company because.

And maybe I'll jump in when you say

observations, the work ethics is, you know, basically like working your asses off.

Like you guys worked all day, all night.

Am I understanding correctly?

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

Okay.

But I think, you know, choosing your co-founders or business partners is such a high risk thing.

It's a professional marriage.

And so many companies fall apart because the founding team breaks up.

We had the opportunity to be friends, be roommates, observe each other's habits before getting serious about doing a business venture together.

And so, yeah, I think it gave us a lot of confidence that we'd make a good team.

When are we starting to invent Airbnb?

The aha moment, right?

Is leading up to October 2007, the rent on our apartment is raised 25%.

And they say, that's too expensive.

I'm moving out.

And another one of the roommates moved out.

But Joe wanted to stay in the apartment, but he had his job to become an entrepreneur, also known as unemployed.

So he didn't have the money to pay the increased rent either, but he wanted to stay.

He calls up Brian,

our other co-founder and CEO.

And Brian and Joe had gone to Rhode Island School of Design together.

So they were good friends from back then.

Brian had been living in Los Angeles, working a more traditional job.

And you know, Joe gives him a pep talk about, you know, quitting his jobs, becoming an entrepreneur and joining him in San Francisco for, you know, an adventure of entrepreneurship.

So Brian gets inspired, quits his job, moves to San San Francisco, I think without asking the cost of the rent.

That whole part was,

I think, not spoken about until he showed up.

And now there's two of them and they're realizing they still don't have the money to pay the rent.

And so they're both designers by background.

And they noticed that an international design conference was coming to San Francisco and they noticed that all the hotels were sold out.

And so they had this idea, why not take the extra bedroom, the bedroom that I had vacated, and rent it to designers who might need a place to stay that one weekend as a way to make some extra money.

Now, this room is completely empty.

It doesn't even have a bed, but Joe sets up an airbed.

And instead of calling it a bed and breakfast, he calls it an airbed and breakfast.

So, air being be a short for airbed and breakfast.

They create a simple blog advertising the room and the airbed.

And they're expecting guys like themselves.

So, 25-year-old, you know, male, probably.

And instead, they get a father of four from Utah, a man from India, and a 35-year-old woman from Boston.

So, like, eclectic group.

These guests get an affordable place to stay when hotels are otherwise sold out.

And Joe and Brian make, I think, like $80 a night, you know, times, I think, three or maybe four nights times three people.

So almost a thousand bucks.

And they all go to the conference together, have a really great time.

And Joe and Brian introduce them to their friends and they get meals.

So it's, you know, it's really actually a whole experience that created immense connection.

And it was really just meant to be a one-weekend way to raise a couple extra bucks.

But, you know, know, one of the guests a month later checked in and said, like, hey, you know, that was so much fun.

Like, what are you doing next with Airbed and Breakfast?

And they're like, well, nothing.

Like, there was just a one-time thing.

And he's like, no, no, no, no.

That was too cool to walk away from.

You know, you should do something more there.

In parallel to this, the three of us had been brainstorming.

At this point.

I had now quit my job.

So now three of us are unemployed, all wanting to be entrepreneurs, all wanting to work together.

And for two months, we were brainstorming ideas of what we could do together.

And we had some ideas around like a roommate matching service or something like that that seemed relevant to, you know, what we had just recently gone through trying to find roommates.

You know, we went for two months brainstorming ideas without ever talking about the story that I just shared with you.

That's like how it's like so obvious in retrospect that like one thing led to another.

But in the moment, you know, it was sitting underneath our noses.

And for two months, you know, we didn't even realize it.

It wasn't until we got that call from the guests encouraging Joe and Brian to kind of take the idea forward that they then shared it with me and the three of us got enthused to go make it possible to book a home just as easy as a hotel all around the world.

And that's what we set off to do in early 2008.

And that's incredible, Nathan.

So first of all, I love that you shared the story that it wasn't as obvious, right?

Because I think sometimes we,

especially the high achievers, are driven.

We want to tick all the boxes.

We want all the evidence up front.

The evidence is not there because you, you didn't didn't get there yet, right?

So I love that you share that.

But from that moment, like you get this idea, but initially everybody thinks it's crazy.

And I was in Silicon Valley at that time.

Like everybody was just like, there's no way on earth that somebody will stay with a stranger in the house or let a stranger in the house.

Like it's just absolutely not possible.

So what made you continue to try, right?

Like, because you guys go to investors.

Tell us a little bit about that beginning.

yeah well a few things i think one we knew the three of us wanted to work together on something right and then this happened to be the idea and the story was you know pretty pretty awesome uh and so it seemed like a cool enough thing to work on now i at the time did not think this was going to be a big idea I actually famously like wrote a like end of year note, which I would do every year to all my friends.

And I described all the things I was working on.

And this was like in the footnote as like

something that was kind of fun, but probably not a big deal, you know?

um much to the chagrin of joan brian who also got the letter did not appreciate that characterization of our serious effort i have to be honest i was also a little a little cautious about jumping in at this point because i felt like i had a lot of opportunities as an engineer i had like skills that were very much in demand so there's like a high opportunity cost with what else could i be doing and it's it's very easy to be tempted like you know should i go work for this company get paid a lot of money or i have like three other ideas i'm working on like which which where do you focus?

And what do you, what do you double down on?

I was partnering with two designers.

And on the one hand, they had complementary skills.

So that was compelling.

You know, on the other hand, I felt a little outnumbered, right?

I felt like I was the, I was the only engineer and these guys would probably dream up things faster than I could go build them.

You know, I was hesitant, but, you know, ultimately, a couple of things.

I think, you know, one, you know, we were able to come up with a kind of scoped down version of the vision that was manageable.

So in the span of, you know, I think five weeks, we built our first iteration of the product.

And it's different, a little bit different than what you see today.

But, you know, very quickly, we were able to get something and put it out there.

You know, second, it did kind of come down to having somebody to work with because, you know, I had some other ideas I was also working on, just myself.

And I remember building something that I was frankly more excited about.

And I was so excited to like launch it.

And when I launched it, I realized that this was just the beginning of building a business.

Like I built a technical thing, but that's not a business.

That's just like a product or a proof of concept.

And there's so much more that needs to happen in order to turn into a business.

I need like employees or business partners.

And so suddenly I felt kind of very lonely.

And I valued that with Airbed and Breakfast, I had Joe and Brian, you know, people who are equally excited and passionate and, you know, willing to work.

That was part of what propelled us, you know, in

that first year.

You know, even aside from the fact that the idea was crazy, this is what kind of set it apart from, you know, other things that were also on my mind that I was also excited about.

Now, you know, you point out like, how did we have confidence in this idea when it was, in fact, so counterintuitive at the time?

You know, how can you trust a stranger?

In other words, and you know, it was based on the first-hand experiences that we were having.

I mean, of course, that story I just shared from October 2007 is very compelling.

But we had other experiences, you know, shortly thereafter, as we launched the product.

We didn't have many people use it, but when they did use it, you know, magic did happen quite a lot.

And those stories are really powerful.

And so, it can work.

The question is, just how to help more people take the leap, you know, and embrace meeting somebody new and having this kind of value exchange that makes a lot of sense.

That's what we understood.

That, you know, nobody on the outside really did, right?

And again, you had a level of conviction that allowed you to basically go to investors, hear a lot of no's, and

continue what, like designing cereal boxes, like

a little bit like I mean, you had enough stamina to continue.

Honestly, when investors heard the idea, they would have like almost a visceral reaction.

Like, it wasn't just that, like, it was a bad idea.

It was like a scary idea that was almost revolting.

Like, they honestly didn't see themselves as customers, right?

They, they're investors, they probably have a fair amount of money.

They were not looking to, you know, necessarily save money on a hotel and stay in someone's extra bedroom, at least not at that time.

So, yeah, they would have a pretty strong reaction over that first year.

No one was willing to invest.

No one would even give us a second meeting.

And then give me a second.

Take me there for you.

Because again, you have other options.

I mean, this is, you know, anybody that is at your caliber can go anywhere at this phase.

Why did you decide to continue?

And how did you guys together take those rejections?

Because that's not easy.

Yeah.

And there was other stuff going on that was not easy.

You know, for one, actually, during this time, I had moved from San Francisco back to boston so suddenly i was uh working remotely with my my co-founders and that was to be with my my then girlfriend who had been dating you know for a long time who was now my wife uh we've been together for you know a couple decades now but you know it was time to get serious and and spend some time together and so i went back to boston to to be with her but that obviously strained you know, my ability to work with Joe and Brian.

And also led to some funny, funny dynamics about just how to handle rejection.

because

as the engineer who had a lot of other opportunities, I was very busy with the coding and I was not going to all the investor pitches.

They were doing that out on the West Coast while I was on the East Coast working.

So I would be eager to hear how the meetings went.

And, you know, they would always kind of frame it in more positive terms than was probably the actual reality.

And they were like, oh, you know, they thought it was interesting and curious, and they'll get back to us.

And they need a little more time.

You know, they didn't tell me the part that they were like, like the investor.

kicking us out yeah and so you know i also remember one time i was i was in san francisco during one of these meetings and we were practicing the night before the pitch deck and we come to this slide that is basically how much revenue you know will we be generating three years from now and the number was 200 million And I did some quick standing checks and I said, like, there's no way we can ramp to 200 million from zero.

You know, it just makes no, no sense.

Like 20 million is more realistic.

Why don't we put 20 million on the slide?

And so Brian's like, Yeah, okay, sure.

And then the next day, we're in the investor meeting and we covered this slide.

And the slides was not 200 million, not 20 million, but it says 2 billion.

So instead of decreasing it, he increased it.

It was at that moment in time where the investor totally just like looked out the window and stopped paying attention.

And so, you know, afterwards, I asked Brian, like, why, why did you change it?

And we had talked about 20 million and now you changed it to 2 billion.

Why did you do that?

He said, oh, well, you know,

I was talking with Sam Altman, altman you know open ai sam altman so we knew him way back then he had been a y combinator and kind of in our network and so we got some advice from from sam altman that uh investors don't want m's they want b's baby you know meaning investors don't want to invest in million dollar opportunities they want to invest in billion dollar opportunities and so you know it's a prerequisite that you have to sell a big idea which is actually of course true you know the problem is in our pitch we didn't really connect the dots between what we were doing and it being a billion dollar idea so i think you know both perspectives were, had some validity to it.

But bottom line is the pitch did not go well.

And I got to see that firsthand and was definitely very alarmed by that.

Out.

So tell me the story about designing cereal boxes with Obama's and Captain McCain's.

Is that true?

Yeah, no, it's very true.

And so like what led up to that was it's now summer 2008.

And we're going to launch the company officially at the Democratic National Convention.

This is the event that took place in Denver, where Barack Obama received the nomination of his party to be the presidential candidate, a historic event, first African-American presidential candidate.

The stadium where it's going to be held holds 80,000 people.

And we know Denver only has 17,000 people.

So we know there's going to be a need for alternative accommodations.

And so that's why we, you know, made a whole goal of being ready to launch two weeks before then.

And, you know, sure enough, it was a big success.

Like, locals were looking to get out of town.

They were putting their stuff up on Craigslist and ultimately then on Airbnb.

And we ended up hosting hundreds of people for this event.

And

also the newspapers and blogs and TV were doing stories about the event, of course.

And of course, one of the storylines was historic event, but people have no place to stay.

They're like, you can't be out in parks.

So

we wrote to the reporters and said, hey, actually, we have 800 confirmed available homes on our platform still available.

And they would say, oh, that's an interesting story.

I'm going to to feature you because we rode the media wave, right?

We didn't create the story.

The story was out there already about the event.

And we made ourselves,

we made our product relevant to that event.

And so that was a great, that's a great strategy in general for getting media attention, right?

Like you can't make the wave, but you can ride the wave.

So you just got to identify the wave and make yourself relevant to it.

So that's what we did very successfully.

And we were on, you know, CNN and, you know, just getting amazing coverage.

And we sold hundreds of bookings now a week later you know the convention's over and nobody cares about us anymore right like there's zero business and so this got us thinking you know we had met all these reporters during the previous week and now they didn't care about us anymore but how could we get back in touch with them and make ourselves relevant to them and get featured again because that was so amazing so i don't know how it happened but you know basically joe and brian got this idea to create a presidentially themed breakfast cereal uh and you know it was partially because the name of our company was Airbed and Breakfast.

And so, you know, obviously the product is Airbeds, but they thought it'd be funny to do something with the breakfast concept.

That was also part of the name at the time.

We weren't Airbnb yet.

We were still Airbed and Breakfast.

And they said, we should create a presidentially themed breakfast cereal.

And then we should mail these physical boxes to all the reporters.

And if they get.

a box of our presidential cereal, they'll be so curious, they'll call us back and we'll start talking to them again.

They come and tell tell me the story and I just think it's ridiculous.

And I said, guys, you know, do whatever you want, but just promise me that you won't spend any money.

You know, I was like heads down writing code and I had a backlog of things I needed to do.

And I said, oh, you guys can spend your time doing, doing that, but just don't spend any money.

So to their credit, they were super scrappy.

They didn't spend any money.

They got friends and people in their network to help.

print off the boxes and you know being artists themselves they were able to create amazing artwork for these boxes and super witty concepts

and uh hot glued all these boxes together stuffed them with cereal um so they're super scrappy and they made it you know in the span of like a month and a half they made presidentially themed breakfast cereal obama o's tagline was hope in every bowl and uh captain mccain's the maverick and every bite and so the first 100 of each of these boxes they mailed in the physical mail to the reporters and then the extra boxes that they had had printed they decided to label as a limited edition collector's item.

So they numbered each one, one, two, three, four, you know, all the way up to 400.

And

we made a little website to sell them on.

So, anyways, the reporters get these boxes.

And sure enough, you know,

this is in the lead up to the election.

So there's obviously a whole hysteria about the election and excitement and people doing wacky things.

And so, like, we're an example of a wacky thing that's going on.

So, sure enough, like, we get back on CNN

and Good morning, America, talking about the breakfast cereal, talking about airbed and breakfast, what this is all about.

And that day, we become the number one political video of the day on CNN.

And we sell a $40 box of our cereal, the limited edition collector's item on our website, $40 a box.

We sold a box of cereal every three minutes until we sold out.

So that week we made like over $30,000.

We sold out of Obama O's.

We never sold out of Captain McCain.

So I guess we could have predicted the election.

It was so exciting.

and like we made more money that week than we had all year in our core business.

And we thought, well, if only there was a presidential election every week, you know, we could just be making cereals.

Um, but clearly, that wasn't a repeatable strategy.

And you know, once that passed, we were kind of once again, kind of back at square one with like making no money.

A whole year has gone by, and we're asking ourselves, when do you quit?

You know, 12 months in, made no money except this, you know, kind of hoax, kind of not hoax, but uh, you know, like bad thing, you know, pr stunt um but our our actual business isn't making any money it's not growing despite all the work we're doing and you know we are having trouble paying our rent again you know when do you quit when do you quit and so when do you quit nathan because again this is when you know you actually went to white combinator and things started changing but when do you quit why why continue yeah well i mentioned you know earlier like you know

starting a business with other people is kind of like a professional marriage and like they often fall apart and so you know choosing your founders is really important and also part of that is making sure you're kind of like in the same stage of life too right we're obviously young guys um you know i had a girlfriend but uh and a serious one but we didn't have kids yet and you know we were able to take risk and so you know we had made it this far and that was pretty great but you know we were all getting a little desperate and because we were all friends with one another before doing this, you know, we really didn't want to quit and leave the other guys hanging, you know, like we kind of needed to decide this together.

You know,

no one person wanted the jump ship.

So we made an agreement.

We said, you know, we've worked really hard this year.

We need to give it one more shot.

And we need to give it our absolute all.

The truth is, like, I had been doing some consulting on the side.

I had been in Boston.

Like, they had also some side projects.

So we weren't completely focused.

And we agreed that we were going to apply to Y Combinator, which is a well-known accelerator program even back then.

And that if we got in, we would do it, of course.

And the thing about Y Combinator is it's about a 12-week program.

And so it's very finite.

And we said, we're going to do Y Combinator if we get in.

At the end of the 12 weeks, if the company isn't in a better, materially better place, we'll all quit together and not have any hard feelings about it.

Like we'll just pre-agree up front that that's the condition for quitting.

We'll see how it goes.

But before we could do Y Combinator, we had to get into Y Combinator.

And this in itself is a pretty interesting story and a lesson it's very selective y combinator oh yeah even back then so we did a lot of practicing and rehearsing and like practice like stressful interviews like where you know we're shouting questions at each other and like throwing phone books around the room and you know just trying to like make sure that we could stay on point you know even in a stressful situation so we did a lot of preparation and we go to the interview and the interview is only five minutes it's super fast Two minutes into the interview, Paul Graham is like, what?

Strangers staying in other people's houses?

It's like, I would never do that.

You know, like he had the same reaction that everyone else did.

He did not like the idea.

He was almost like angry about the idea.

And at that point, the conversation goes sideways.

And he kind of says, you know what?

I really don't like that idea, but you are handling payments between guests and hosts.

And so maybe you should become a payments company.

So he basically takes the next three minutes to try to convince us to do a different idea, which sounded a lot like what Strike eventually became, actually,

which is kind of funny.

We're five minutes is up and we're walking out of the room, realizing we had blown it, right?

Like we completely like went off the rails here.

And, you know, as we're going out,

Joe takes out of his bag a box of the Obama O's.

And it's funny because before we had left for the interview, I saw Joe putting the Obama's in his bag.

And I said, Joe, don't bring that to the interview.

Because for me, the Obama O's and that whole serial story I just told you about.

To me, it represented a distraction.

Although it was like super clever and, you know, made 30,000 bucks, it obviously did nothing to drive our core business.

And it took about like a month and a half of like Joe Bryan's time.

And so I felt like that did not really communicate that we were like a serious tech company and focused.

But Joe brought the Obama O's anyways.

And as we're walking out, he takes it out of his bag and gives it to Paul Graham.

And Paul Graham says,

Yeah, yeah.

But Paul Graham looks at it and says, What is this?

Did you buy me a gift?

What is this?

And Joe said, no, we made this.

And Paul Graham's looking at him.

He's like, I don't understand.

You made this?

He's like, come back in and tell me how you made this.

So we sit down and we get five more minutes with PG and we tell him how we made the cereal.

And later that day, we got a call saying that we were accepted into Y Commitor.

And later on, Paul Graham told us that we were accepted not because he liked our idea, he hated our idea, but he knows that the ideas can change.

And, you know, instead, he's really choosing people based on

the founders and who he thinks will have the tenacity,

the perseverance, and the ability to create and build.

And so from that story, what he saw was that these are guys who would not give up.

They would be very resourceful and scrappy and figure out a way to do things.

And so, you know, that met his criteria for admitting us.

And I think, you know, it's also just a lesson for anybody when it comes to pitching yourself.

You know, the idea is one part of it.

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Now, back to the show.

I absolutely love this story because, again, at the end of the day, the ups and downs are insane, especially the downs.

So, being able to continue, I think that's the big thing that Y Combinator is trying to figure out, right?

Like, are you going to be the founders that will continue?

And I think they also gave you some ideas around being closer to your customers, right?

Like eventually in Y Combinator and going more towards New York.

Can you share a little bit about like some of these big learnings that you had in Y Combinator and how did that shape Airbnb as a whole?

We heard a lot of advice,

you know, during Y Combinator and from other people too, but especially during Y Combinator and from Paul Graham.

He always has interesting things to say.

And, you know, the thing I'll say about advice is obviously not all advice is good advice.

Like there's all kinds of advice.

And, but advice is thought-provoking.

Amongst all this advice we were getting, there were some real nuggets that we latched onto and thought about.

Actually, let's go there just for a second, just for a second, because I think with advice, it's actually really...

complicated because the grass sometimes always looks greener on the other side.

And if somebody really smart tells you, go this route, like you might find yourself, and I see founders do that, right?

Like they just start going all around.

How did you continue your North Star and know what to take from which advice?

I think it's not about like necessarily following advice because some of it's good, some of it's bad.

It's about reflecting at the end of the day.

You know, advice causes you to reflect.

Is this true?

Is it not?

Is this a good idea?

Is it not?

You know, it's, it's a stimulus.

It's an outside stimulus.

It sparks creativity.

And this is important because when you're starting something, you know, so many people are secretive about what they're doing.

You know, they don't want someone to steal their idea, you know, and so it leads you to like not share.

And I think it's a missed opportunity because it's important to hear different perspectives, get different,

reactions, and then reflect on that.

And it just, I felt that every time we engaged someone about what we were working on, we came away with new thoughts that we wouldn't have otherwise had.

And we made a point to go to every single office hours that Y Committee are held.

And we were always the first ones there, spent the most time with Paul Graham just because.

you know we we wanted to hear his reactions you know even though he didn't necessarily like our idea at first you know we still wanted to talk with him and understand that and unpack that and get you know new ideas so anyways you know one of the things that gets said is that it's better to have 100 users that love you than a million users that kind of like you, right?

Like you need to have evangelists, people who feel really passionate about what you do.

And then also like to do that, you know, you kind of need to meet your users, right?

Like you need to deeply understand their needs and how they're using your product.

And both those things are a little counterintuitive, at least for us at the time, because we thought we were building an internet company.

And, you know, internet companies are built for scale.

And if you're doing scale, of of course, you can't go meet your users individually.

And it's all about bigger numbers.

And so these ideas kind of led us to think more about product market fit and actually spend time meeting users.

And so that's what we did based on that feedback.

And Paul Graham said, well, where are your users?

Why aren't you meeting them?

We said, well, you know, like our platform, people are based all around the world.

And there's not many here in San Francisco.

Actually, most of them are in New York.

He's like, well, why don't you go to New York?

We're like, well, we're here doing Y Combinator.

We don't have any money.

He's like, I don't care.

Go to New York.

And so, you know, Joe and Brian, like back then when you did a Y Combinator, you got $20,000.

That's it.

It wasn't like $100,000 or $200,000 like they do now.

Like they do big numbers now, but back then it was $20,000.

So we used much of the $20,000 going to New York for a few different weekends.

And when we went to New York, we realized that a lot of people had photos of their homes.

Well, some had no photos and others had photos, but they were poorly lit.

They were poor resolution, especially back then.

You know, camera phones weren't very, uh, very good.

And how do you meet your users when you're an internet company?

We would call them up and we'd say, Hey, you know, we saw that you put your apartment on Airbnb.

Um, would you like a professional photographer to come to your house and like, you know, take some professional photos of it for your listing or whatever other purpose you might like?

And I think people were a little surprised to get this like offer out of the blue, but a lot of them said yes to that offer.

They were curious and they fine.

Yeah, sure, that's a great deal, free.

So, you know, knock, knock on the door, and it was actually Joe and Brian themselves showing up.

Did they know that it's the CEO that is coming to

take photos?

Not until they showed up.

And, you know, we didn't have any money.

They didn't own an expensive camera, but they would actually rent.

a camera on the weekends just for this purpose.

And they'd go and they'd take the photos.

But while they're with the host, they would also sit down at the computer and like watch them use the product and get ideas from them, give them tutorials, and then also invite them to to get a beer later on.

And so we get a few hosts together later on for beer.

And, you know, over beers, we would tell them our entrepreneurial journey, the stories that I'm sharing now.

And, you know, people do love those stories.

They love a good story.

And this was a way in which we started to build rapport with our early community and develop a following of people who loved.

Airbnb.

You know, at this point now in New York, we have good photos on the properties.

We've met the hosts and built a rapport.

And with that rapport, we're able to call them up and say, you know what, that price you set, would you mind

lowering it?

You know, if you get too much interest, you can always increase it.

But we think like starting at $400 a night feels a little, a little too high at this point.

You know, you don't have any reviews yet.

So could you start it low and raise it up later?

And, you know, if you had asked someone out of the blue to do that, they would say like, you know, who are you to suggest that and no?

But because they had met us and they liked us, they said, yeah, sure, we would love love to help you out.

And so, you know, now we have well-photographed properties at attractive prices in New York City, a place that people all around the world want to go to, but it's, you know, really expensive.

And these properties start getting bookings.

The hosts start making money and they tell their friends, and their friends come to the site and they see the effort that the other hosts have put in.

And they look to emulate that because that's the recipe for success.

And so we get more and more hosts in New York.

Meanwhile, these guests from around the world who are coming to New York are flying back home.

And they're thinking to themselves, hey, that's cool.

Maybe I could be a host in my own home city in Paris in Berlin and so very quickly there's a cross-pollination happening and you know this is when things started to take off and like I mentioned earlier why commentary was about 12 or 13 week program and we had agreed at the start of it that if things didn't materially improve we would quit at the end of 13 weeks so Before Y Common, we were making $200 a week in revenue.

And that had been true for five months.

Nothing we did seemed to increase it.

Our goal during Y Commoner was to get to to get to $1,000 a week.

And literally, in the span of 13 weeks, we got to $4,200 a week.

So past our goal, quite a lot more than $200 a week.

You know, we are also during this time introduced to Sequoia Capital, one of the best investors in the world.

And we ended that 13-week period not only with a great ramp in revenue, but Sequoia Capital investing $600,000 in our seed round, leading that round at a paltry $3 million post-money valuation, which is funny.

And it doesn't even seem real by today's standards.

Oh my God.

But back then, this was during the recession, the financial recession in 2009.

So

this is the kind of valuations that were out there.

But we were stoked.

Now we had our first investor.

And before every investor had basically laughed at us and not taken a second meeting.

And now here's Sequoia Capital, one of the best names in the world, investing in us.

And so that was a huge boost in confidence.

And it meant we never had to to have that conversation about quitting.

And, you know, from there forward, it was a rocket ship.

So from, you know, March, April 2009

onwards, you know, began that more positive part of the story because that first year was so painful.

And at that point, are you trying basically, I mean, you as

CTO and then chief strategy officer, then you're leading international expansion.

Is that kind of when you're starting to move from New York only to starting to expand?

Because you also expanded to really complicated markets like China.

And like, is that kind of when this is starting to happen?

I mean, after it stabilized?

I mean, a lot of years,

you know, I have to say

2009.

Yeah.

So there's a sequencing to it, right?

So 2009 was really defined by our growth in New York City and then also just starting to build the team, right?

So it was still just the three of us.

And, you know, I was the only engineer until basically August of 2009.

So that's now 18 months after having started.

And at this point, the company is doing really, really well.

It's, I think, making like $12,000 a week by August.

So it continued to ramp.

We hired our first engineer besides myself.

That's August 2009.

By 2010,

we are now growing and like, let's say, Paris, Los Angeles, let's say four or five cities are now, you know, thriving.

So still small.

And then comes 2011.

2011 was another inflection point where just everything happened all at once.

So what kicked it off was competition.

Up until that point, we had been very quiet about our success.

And even when we fundraised money, we didn't announce our fundraisings because we didn't want to tip off other people that this was a good idea.

And so we kept it to ourselves and we would share it, but we basically staggered the news by four or five months.

By the start of 2011, or let's say late 2010, word of our Series A funding, which had happened in April 2010, had gotten out.

So by the end of 2010, that happened.

So it was like five months staggered.

And our Series A funding was a $7 million raise at like roughly, I think, a $72 million

post-money valuation, something like that.

That is so fun.

That got the attention of people and specifically some serial entrepreneurs based in Europe who are well known for cloning successful Silicon Valley companies,

including the Sambo brothers, who have a company called Rocket Internet that famously cloned Groupon and attempted to clone Facebook.

And, you know, basically every company they try to clone and they decide to try to clone Airbnb and become the Airbnb of Europe, as does another serial entrepreneur based in Europe.

So suddenly

we see competition.

We know that travel is inherently global.

We know that to be a relevant travel company, you kind of need to, you need to be in Europe too.

That's like a very important part of the travel jigsaw puzzle.

So, you know, we become determined to be, you know, just as local as these these guys.

I guess before we do that, though, like they, they come to us and say, you know, look, if we work together, if you acquire us, like we can combine our strengths and our skill sets and like, you know, definitely be a global company.

We entertained it.

We had to.

I mean, we had a fiduciary duty to at least consider this this offer.

And it was, it was.

totally shocking because at this point we have 40 employees.

I remember flying to Berlin, touring their offices, and they have like 200 employees in their office.

And they had just started.

And, you know, partially that's because they had like a pool of people, you know, working at other companies that they could pull from and basically bootstrap this new company overnight.

But it was super intimidating to see all those people, so many more than we had.

Ultimately, though, we realized like these guys are a little bit kind of like mercenaries, is what we call them.

Like, and we viewed ourselves as missionaries, like we really loved the business we were in, we were really attached to it, we lived the product,

and you know, we felt that our competitors were out to make a quick buck.

And so that didn't appeal to us.

And so, so we declined the offer, but we realized we needed a plan B.

We needed to get into growth mode and go from like what I'll call peacetime to wartime, like, you know, not just like going along the lazy river, but like really start sprinting.

We need to be more local than these European companies.

How do you make those decisions?

Like you're, this is a new type of decisions for you.

I guess everything is new for you, but I mean, these are types of, like, these are big decisions.

Who helps you?

Is that Sequoia?

Is it someone else?

Like, how do you make those decisions?

They're they're big decisions and we definitely um

you know going back to like the idea of getting advice you know we would always reach out to different mentors to get their perspective and call other founders and get their perspective but you know specifically in this case yes you're right like our our partner at sequoia the original partner his name was greg mcadoo you know we would at that time

get brunch with him every two weeks and just tell him what was going on with the company.

So he was like, you know, spending a lot of time with us, just being a thought partner.

But, you know, for this, for this trip, he came with us.

You know, he saw everything we saw and we had conversations about it.

And, you know, together we made the decision of like, we're actually going to turn down this offer that, you know, on the one hand, felt like it would lead to obvious success because these guys were so experienced operationally and they had so many people and they had Europe to going it alone, which felt very risky.

But we made that big decision and,

you know, quickly through our network, started, you know, reaching out to people who had helped other companies to scale internationally.

And, you know, in the span of a couple months, hired country managers for, you know, eight to 12 countries and opened offices in those countries and hired local teams.

You know, when I say local teams, you know, maybe a dozen people to basically, you know, bootstrap the market.

and get super hands-on and meet the hosts, like I told you before, we did in New York and photograph the properties and all this hands-on stuff that is necessary when attracting your first users and building your initial credibility.

Unbelievable.

So, you guys are starting to expand all over Europe and, again, other countries than at this point, including complicated ones.

I don't know if we're going to go into exactly how, but I mean, some places like China are a whole different gambit of things, right?

Because a lot of things are just not allowed there.

I don't know if you want to go over a little bit, but then I do want to go to 2020 at some point.

So, yeah, I mean, there's a sequencing here.

So, like, this competition kind of kicks off in 2011.

And I say 2011, 2012 was really defined by, you know, this race to win Europe specifically.

And, you know, we were also starting to plant the seeds in Asia too, simultaneously, but Europe was the initial focus.

But by like 2014, 2015, having, you know, managed to have success in most of the other markets if not all the other markets you know we also started to uh explore china which um you know was was a whole adventure in itself probably a show of its own yeah

yeah you know a very unique market uh because of how big the ecosystem is and because of the government and all these different things but we are incredibly popular in in china uh amongst travelers you know we used to think like will this only work in new york will this only work in north america everywhere we went people said okay that might work where you're coming from but this will never work in my country.

You know, and it was just so amazing to see that not be true, to see it actually work in every country of the world.

All around the world, people have a curiosity to meet people from other places, especially other countries, and see how other people live.

And so we tapped into that in a way that was also affordable.

And so, yeah, I think it's been remarkable to me to see how, you know, we are now ubiquitous for home sharing in every country of the world.

It works in every country of the world where we're allowed to operate.

And, you know, more than 2 billion people have now stayed in other people's homes.

So like, you know, this idea of strangers

is no longer.

It's interesting because we got to know you guys roughly around 2007.

2007, my son was born.

After that, you know,

my daughter.

And at that point, it's like, I'm not going to have two babies in a second room or in a

hotel.

And, you know, I think at that 2010 or whatever, we started staying in Airbnbs.

You know, I mean, it's like

it was a must for families.

Like, I actually don't know what families do without it.

Like, if I'm being really honest.

So, we were very, very early.

So, I could see which countries are already on Airbnb, which are not, because we were big travelers.

And, and, you know, it was really interesting as a family.

Like, I literally don't know what families do,

which was kind of a whole different story.

So, take me back in time to 2020.

What did that look like?

Again, these are you guys in the like exactly where the hospitality is, travel is like you're right there in COVID hits.

Right.

Well, going into 2020, you know, we're now coming on like at that point, 12 years of growth and building the business and had tons of success.

And

we were planning for our IPO in early 2020.

And so, you know, in 2019 already, we had written, you know, the draft S1 and done all this preparation.

2020 comes and we're, you know, planning to do this.

And then, and then COVID happens, you know, and in early March, uh who declares a you know a pandemic and um

our business drops 80 in just eight weeks i mean it just it just disappears that's super scary because like at this point we have i think 8 000 employees maybe a little more we're a big ship you know we have a big expensive burn rate the costs don't stop you know the revenues stop but the costs are there and probably people are asking for refunds or i don't know like how did you cope with that Like, take me there.

A lot was happening all at once, right?

Like, obviously, travel was deeply impacted.

That's why no more new bookings were coming in.

But also, we had existing bookings.

Guests were wanting to cancel.

And, you know, that might not have been acceptable by the host cancellation policy.

So there's billions of dollars of bookings

that had to be sorted out in terms of whether to honor the booking or not and how to navigate that.

So that's complicated.

There's just a burn rate situation.

And the issue there is not just that there's no money coming in, but we don't know how long this is going to go on for, right?

Like, is this a two-week thing, a two-month thing, a two-year-old?

Nobody knew anything, yeah, right?

So, like, in terms of planning how much, how long your bank account is going to last, you know, we had no idea.

We knew we had to raise some money quick, but of course, this is exactly when the market, you know, basically froze up and you know, no one was willing to give you money at this point because nobody knew anything, right?

I mean, it's like so everybody needed money all of a sudden.

Yeah, yeah, and so it's a terrible time to raise money.

And we have to make basically a bunch of choices.

And I think a couple of things.

One is, you know, we realized right away it's a crisis.

This was not like something to be managed away or kind of like not buy a little time.

Like we said, we're going to treat the super serious like from the get-go.

We're going to be bold.

We're not going to take half measures.

So, you know, we had to first right-size the ship a little bit into financially.

We did a layoff.

relatively quickly, one of the worst days that, you know, I've had to experience.

We lost 1,800 employees, but it was necessary to

do that quickly, or else everything was in jeopardy.

And we did that with a lot of humanity too.

You know, we found ways to help employees.

Like on the one hand, you know, we needed to help the company.

The company was in jeopardy, but we also understood people also were going through their own situations during this pandemic.

And so, you know, we found creative ways to help people find new jobs at other tech companies.

We created a whole directory that people could opt into and we shipped off those names to other companies that were hiring because, you know, some companies were actually doing well during the pandemic.

You know, we helped people transition and find new jobs, but we also went out and we raised some more money on terms that were tough, but ultimately necessary and great.

Can I take you to a personal question?

Like at that point, when you go to sleep at night, do you know it's going to be okay or are you terrified?

Like where is it taking you?

It's definitely a scary thing for sure because there's so much uncertainty and there's so much at stake.

And, you know, everything you thought you had accomplished, you know, is suddenly poof, like gone faster than you thought it was possible or, you know, feeling like it could be gone.

And so, you know, super scary.

You know, at the same time,

you know, I think we all got into kind of the wartime mentality, which is like, we're going to buckle down and get super focused, super disciplined.

We're going to operate differently, right?

We're not going to operate the way we were weeks ago.

You know, we're going to meet as an executive team every single day to discuss the status of everything.

You know, we're going to get really clear on tracks of work, ownership.

We're going to make decisions quickly.

We're going to act with boldness.

You know, we came up with principles that were going to kind of guide our decision making.

We moved incredibly fast to deal with the situation.

And then, you know, something we've learned along the way is that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

There's a quote from Andy Grove, the former Intel CEO that we really liked, which is like, bad companies are destroyed by crisis, good companies survive them, and great companies effectively thrive or come out stronger from a crisis and so we had experienced this before in earlier years where you know what started off as a crisis was actually a little bit of a call to action that we ultimately not only survived but came out stronger because of and came out as a better company and so as we quickly identified that this was a crisis we were also trying to understand how can we come out stronger as a result what is the lesson and so you know as we were having to cut down on our projects because we had fewer people you know we got really clear about like what was important in the long term and not to sacrifice those things and we also thought to ourselves like in this pandemic you know it turns out people still wanted to travel they couldn't get on airplanes they couldn't go to other countries but they wanted to go out to the countryside and they wanted to have a home where they could socially isolate you know maybe with some other family members and make a little bubble or whatnot so we realized that like the desire was still there It's now just taking a different form.

And so we became very agile and adapting our product to, you know, help people, you know, find these opportunities and, you know, travel in this new way.

And so, you know, actually very quickly, within, let's say, two or four months, we stabilized our business and started growing again by, you know, meeting some of these new consumer behaviors, you know, through our agility.

And actually, you know, by the end of 2020, we completed our IPO.

So the IPO that was supposed to happen in, let's say, March, and instead of pandemic happened, and instead we thought the company was about to implode, we stabilized it, returned to growth, and then, you know, followed through on the IPO by the end of the year, you know, quite successfully.

So, you know, it was a remarkable turnaround in the span of, you know, 12 months.

It's absolutely incredible.

Like, I remember even thinking, like, how is it possible that Airbnb not only that it's not syncing with this crisis, like, it's actually like IPO.

I mean, it was just incredible.

And I think a lot of the experiences and the services that you have now,

you know, kind of started flourishing, if I'm not mistaken, during this time, right?

And again, right now you're expanding into experiences and doing all these things in such a bigger way.

Was that kind of the accelerator?

And how is that these offering starting to evaluate, you know, kind of shaping the future of travel, you think, right now?

Yeah.

So, you know, we've gotten to a place now, you know, it's 2025.

It's, you know, five years after the start of the pandemic and, you know, certainly three years since, you know, the pandemic was dominating our attention.

And the pandemic caused us to put a lot of things on hold because we had to get more focused.

We had to get focused on our core business again.

And, you know, so a lot of things that we believed in, you know, were paused.

And, you know, one of those things that we had at the time was experiences.

And it's not that we've stopped offering them, but we weren't leaning into it as much during the pandemic.

Cause, I mean, look, people were socially isolating.

They weren't getting together in person.

So that product offering uh kind of i don't want to say stalled but you know it grew more slowly during the pandemic and subsequent and uh you know we recently relaunched experiences and also added to it with something we call services and services are basically thinking about all the conveniences that you could find in a hotel and making sure that those things are available to you when you rent a home So, you know, if you want a personal trainer or a spa or a chef, how can we connect you to one of those those people who can do that for you in your home, even when you're in a foreign city, for example, and you don't know who to call and don't speak the language?

And how can we make this just as easy to book as a home, you know, all through the app?

And so we, you know, relaunched experiences and relaunched services with a completely new app integration.

And, you know, that's been really exciting to be in a place where, you know, we can start to...

to innovate and expand you know into other aspects of travel incredible because i think I think there's so much more we can do.

And as we think about growing our business, we always think about like, well, like, what can Airbnb uniquely do?

And how can we leverage our host community and work with our host community to empower people to provide travel services in new ways?

And so I think experiences is a great embodiment of that.

Amazing.

What do you think the travel of the future holds?

Is it a lot around community and experiences?

Is that kind of the big focus, you think?

Or is it something else?

I think since the beginning, we realized that the magic is in the people, right?

Like that started from October 2007 when Joe and Bryan hosted those three in their apartment.

Like it wasn't just about the affordable place to stay.

Obviously, it started with that, right?

But it ended with friendship.

It ended with like Joe and Bryan being invited to this guy from India, his wedding, you know, like two years later, you know?

So it was pretty powerful on a personal level.

You know, I think travel at its best.

you know, transforms your perspective and makes the world a smaller place and makes creates friendships that cross borders.

That's the future and vision we're excited about um trying to create and we do that through a product that you know creates you know first trust you know it's a framework for how you can establish trust with someone you don't know you know through their reputation through how we handle the money you know through the various protections but i also think about inspiration too And, you know, we have a lot of inspiring spaces that are super fun.

And, you know, like you never knew these things existed.

And suddenly you realize on Airbnb they do.

And that's inspiring.

But, you know, I think likewise with the experiences product, right?

Like it's a whole new travel offering that's, you know, very different from, let's say, the tourist bus that, you know, has traditionally been available to show you around town.

And so I think we,

we think there's so many different ways in which we can reinvent the travel offering and open up new destinations that weren't previously on the map, maybe because they had no infrastructure, maybe they had no hotels.

But I think, you know, through the lens of a local, you can really unlock what's special about the place and make something, you know into an experience that wasn't previously and so yeah this is what excites us and we think there's a lot of new ways to continue to do that amazing and so i mean based on everything you know now nathan and you guys built like such an extraordinary company and and you know unbelievable value across you know so many countries what would you want to tell yourself um when you were younger like based on everything that you know now, what were some of the biggest lessons or things that you wish somebody told you?

You know, I was often preoccupied with opportunity costs.

I mentioned it earlier a little bit, but like this idea that there's so many opportunities.

And like, you know, what if I miss out on an opportunity?

It can be a little paralyzing.

You know, like, which direction do I go in?

And, you know, I shared a little bit of the criteria.

And there's some more things too.

You know, one is I think as long as each experience or direction you go in is

challenging and you learn,

then it's just one step in a journey.

It's not necessarily your final outcome.

It's building your skill set for that ultimate thing that you do.

And so I did a lot of things that were frankly not

successful, like a lot of side projects.

I didn't mention them here.

But, you know, in retrospect, all those things that I did that were ended up being, from one perspective, a waste of time because they didn't work out as I anticipated were actually super valuable, like

skill-building opportunities.

So that's one.

And, you know, a funny vignette is like, yeah, I went, I was at Harvard and Mark Zuckerberg is a year younger than me.

He was at Harvard too.

And I remember he that first summer when he started the Facebook put an ad out, you know, on the computer science solicitor saying, you know, who wants to join me and go to Palo Alto to work on this thing?

And I was like, I told my roommate, that sounds kind of cool.

Maybe I'll apply.

And my roommate was like, no, that sounds stupid.

Don't do that.

And I was like, yeah, you're right.

That sounds like not like not like a serious thing.

So, I didn't.

And so, then, you know, a year or two goes by, and I'm like really kicking myself.

I'm like, I could have been like one of the Facebook co-founders, you know, had I gone to Palo Alto and not listened to my roommate.

You know, and then, you know, fast forward a few years, and I have some friends working at Facebook, and they invite me to lunch and tell me what they're working on a little bit and try to convince me to join.

And, like, at this point, they have like 40 engineers.

And I'm like, I don't know, you guys are so big already.

Like, already you're used in all the colleges and high schools.

Like, what, what, what more is there to do?

You know, like, you guys are done.

You're mature as a company.

uh and obviously that was not the case they were still just getting started and so again i was kicking myself for like not going down that path and yet you know had i gone down that path i wouldn't have done airbnb and so i think look there's many right paths i think the important thing you can always course correct and as long as you're learning on whatever path you're on you're building your skill set to that ultimate thing there's this article in the new york times i read a number of years ago about like the nature of luck and you know what it says is like you know luck is like two things i mean there's of course some serendipity to it but, you know, it's also happening like there's opportunity around you all the time.

You just have to notice it.

Right.

Right.

And so, so, yes, of course, there's serendipity, like me finding Joe on Craigslist.

There's some serendipity there or the other roommate falling through.

That's some serendipity.

But, you know, there's also moments where we saw opportunity.

For example, like applying to Y Combinator and getting the cereal out.

Like, you know, Joe recognized the moment to make an impression right at the right moment.

And so I think you can train yourself to notice opportunity that is right before you.

And I think, I think we're all surrounded by opportunities.

We just fail to notice it.

And so I think that's a really kind of important lesson that would have put me at ease as a younger person when I was like so preoccupied with like, how do I become successful?

Like, which, which is the right path?

It's like, just, you know, don't worry.

Like, actually.

any of these can be right paths.

Just do one thing at a time, learn, you know, move on when you stop learning and be observant, you know, be observant to what's happening around you so that you're ready to pounce when, you know, the right one comes across your desk or in front of you.

And create your own luck, which you guys are doing again and again and again, which is so beautiful.

Yeah.

Oh my God.

Nathan, this is so good.

I can talk to you probably for many, many more hours about leadership or whatever, but seriously, thank you for everything you guys are doing and for changing the world.

And

just this incredible episode that I know is just pure gold.

Thank you.

It's a lot of fun for me, too.

So thanks for taking the time to have me on your program.

I really enjoyed it.

I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did.

If you did, please share it with friends.

Now, also, if you're feeling stuck or simply want more from your own career, watch this 30-minute free training at leapacademy.com/slash training.

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See you in the next episode of the Leap Academy Wuzzilana Golan Show.