Airbnb

Brian Chesky

Sold cereal to fund the company and photographed the first listings himself.

The clearest working example of doing things that do not scale until you are forced to.

1. Go and meet the first users.

   He flew to New York and photographed hosts' apartments. Listings got better, and he learned the product from the inside.

2. Fund it however you can.

   Selling novelty cereal boxes during the 2008 election is absurd and it worked. Early money is about not dying, not about elegance.

3. Design training is business training.

   Coming from industrial design not engineering shaped how Airbnb treats trust and detail. Non-obvious backgrounds are an edge.

4. Design the extreme version to find the good one.

   His eleven-star framework asks what an absurdly perfect experience looks like, then walks back. It finds ideas that incremental thinking cannot.

5. Trust is a product feature.

   Persuading strangers to sleep in each other's homes was the actual problem. Reviews, photos and payments were the mechanism.

6. Handle the crisis in public.

   Airbnb's worst moments were handled with direct, named communication. Hiding is what turns an incident into a pattern.

7. Rebuild the company when the model changes.

   The 2020 restructuring was brutal and clear. Slow, kind ambiguity would have been worse for everyone.

8. Found it with people who complement you.

   A designer, a designer and an engineer. The composition of the founding team determined what the company was good at.

9. Live in the product.

   He has repeatedly stayed in Airbnbs as a customer. Founders who stop using their own product stop understanding it.

10. The idea sounded bad, which helped.

    Renting a room to a stranger was easy to dismiss. Ideas that are obviously good are already crowded.