Dave Peterson: The Journey of Category Design

So one of the most common things when you think about these categories, kings and the development of categories we all enjoy today is these designers take us on a journey, and one of the things is kind of a trick. I think most of the time you don't hear about the king or the leader of the category until it springs on you. First time you see Pinterest, it's millions of people are using it. First time you hear about Uber, there's Uber vehicles all over the city. So you kind of hear about it late and you feel it late. But the reality, these journeys are hard. They don't happen overnight. There's teams of people working very, very hard to kind of bring what they see in their heads and turn it into a great product and a great company. And one of the companies that we did a lot of research on, we wanted to kind of unlock the kings. What happened? What's the story behind the story? This is not our graphic, but it's a great thing. You can Google the Airbnb story, hear what happened. One of the big aha's for me, and I didn't realize this is, did anybody know where the air and Airbnb came from? Air mattress? Yeah, three of them. Right? And they rented them for $80. And what else? Where'd the breakfast come from? Had breakfast, right? And they advertised three beds and breakfast for $80, and three people showed up. And that insight led to a very long path to what we now consider a brand new alternative in our life. That alternative is another thing, as Al said, another place to go, another choice when you go visit or actually now when you go live in another city, in somebody else's home or somebody else's room, and that's Airbnb. And they created this category of private hospitality. It started with three air mattresses. Long journey.