Brian Chesky’s response to the Samwer Brothers cloning Airbnb: Missionaries will outlast mercenaries

In mid-2011, we had this. So we were mostly in the United States and we had this Internet clone funded by these guys called the Samwer brothers. I don't know if anyone heard about these Samler brothers. They basically clone. Yeah, Rocket Internet. They just went public and they basically copy American websites quickly and they try to sell it back to you, and if you don't, then they just try to. So it's kind of like putting a gun to your head. And they had basically done this to Groupon. Groupon at this point was like the fastest growing company in the world ever. First coming billion dollars in revenue. And then they stopped doing Groupon. This is when Groupon is on top of the world. And they cloned us and we had 40 employees, we had raised $7 million. They cloned us and they raised $90 million. And in 30 days they hired 400 people and they wanted to sell the company. And if they couldn't, they were going to like, destroy us around the world. And the problem with Airbnb is if we're not everywhere around the world, like a travel site not being in Europe is like your phone not having email. It doesn't actually work. So we were kind of in trouble and we had this conversation and there was the pragmatic decision of should we acquire them? And then there was the kind of values decision. The pragmatic one should have probably said, buy them because you can't risk losing international, so just guarantee you're going to get international. But we ended up not buying them. And the reason we ended up not buying them is I just didn't like the culture. I didn't want to bring in this 400 people. I. I felt like we were missionaries and they were mercenaries. I didn't think they were doing it for the beliefs. I thought they were doing it to make a lot of money very quickly. And I believed in a war, missionaries would outlast and out endure mercenaries. And I also felt like the best revenge against an Internet clone was just to make them run the company long term. It's like you had the baby, now you gotta raise it. So that's what we end up doing. And that was a very controversial decision. A lot of people were telling me, you should buy this company. We didn't. And I think it worked out.