Airbnb founder Brian Chesky on “living your product” and why slow growth can be invaluable

When you're starting a company, it never goes the pace you want or pace you expect. You start it and you imagine everything to be linear. I'm going to do this, then this is going to happen, and this is going to happen. This is going to happen. And you're imagining, like, steps, and they're progressive. And you start, you build it, and you think everyone's going to care and no one cares. Our first hundred users I was related to, or maybe Joe was related to, those are our first users, which is great. Though it actually turned out to be really good that we were so unpopular in the very beginning because I had the opportunity that I can meet every one of our early customers. I actually think it made us a better company. If we took off in the early days, I would have never known all them. But the early days, we were so unpopular, we had so few users that I got to meet every single one of them.

Part of being a good founder is you're focused on the product. You're focused on the experience of the user. And one of the things that was kind of the, oh, yeah, this is the reason why I invested in this guy. You want to talk about living on day two, Airbnb?

I literally, for almost a year, lived on Airbnb in San Francisco. And every three to five nights, I stayed in a different family in a different neighborhood in San Francisco. I learned all the issues about our website. I probably learned issues about the neighborhood. I felt like I'd run for mayor at the end of it. I was learning, like, what the education problems were and, like, who was angry about their water. But it was like, that is how you. Your customers aren't going to email you the things that are truly important. You almost have to, like, be with them and get that really subtle signal. It's all about living your product. And if you work at Facebook, it's pretty easy to use your product every day. If you are using a site that allows you to go somewhere else in the world, you got to be creative.