How to Deal with User preference, Assorted Q&A Part 1 | AirBnB Founder Nate Blecharczyk

Certainly different kinds of users with different needs. And so very early on, for example, we came across what we'll call professional hosts, people who wanted to do this at scale, who had multiple properties. And these people have existed for a long time. And they would say, your software doesn't meet my needs. You need to build this for— you need to build features for people doing this at scale. And it was tempting because these people were more easy to find online than people renting their primary homes. Because people renting their primary homes had never done this before, you weren't going to find them online. They were very hard to approach or convince to do this. And so an easier short-term path to growth might have been let's make a website featuring commercial inventory. But as we investigated this further, we realized that that lacked something that was special that was present during the original inspiration for Airbnb. When those 3 people stayed in our homes and the personal hospitality, the connection that was made between guest and host, we thought that was what was really special about Airbnb and we weren't seeing that happen with the professional host. And so we made a decision early on to kind of disregard the special needs of that use case, to not build a sales team and not go after those users. But to stay focused on those people who are renting their primary homes. I think that was a pretty big decision for us.

What was the process of breaking into the 191 countries? I mean, did you find that it was difficult to get people in different countries to kind of see the same vision, or did you find that it was like people from the States that had properties in different countries?

So we first started on New York. We recognized New York is an international destination. It's very expensive. People all over the world want to go. And we had 40 properties. And so we curated those properties. And once we did that, sure enough, they started getting bookings. And once the hosts started making money, the hosts would tell their friends, and their friends would sign up. So very quickly, New York started to grow, more and more properties. And when the new hosts signed up, they saw the quality of what was already in the marketplace. And so they looked to emulate that quality, because there was a high standard. But meanwhile, you have people from around the world coming to New York, staying on Airbnb, and then going home. And when they go home, they would tell their friends about their travels and ultimately about Airbnb. And oftentimes, the guest would become a host or the guest would tell a friend who would become a host. And so even in that first year, so early on in 2009, a global cross-pollination began. And so hosts started popping up in Paris and Berlin and Tokyo, all over the world. And pretty soon those guys started getting bookings. And basically there's a global cross-pollination and network effect that emerged and that's why we're in so many countries today despite having no feet on the ground in most of those countries.

Thanks for coming in. Well, you know you're my favorite company.

Oh.

And I've stayed at Airbnb in 3 different continents and cities before. And my question is how do you see the travel industry evolving? What's next in the community-driven aspect of travel?

Yeah, I think we've given a lot of thought to what's unique about Airbnb, and I would describe it as local experiences, personal hospitality, a magical booking experience, and empowering hosts. And when I say hosts, I mean regular people. I mean, that's the unique thing we're doing, and that's what we want to stay true to, and we think there's so much potential potential within that. More broadly, travel in general, I think personalization is so key. I think we've gone through a period where in order to scale, big brands have emerged and created cookie-cutter experiences in order to scale. We're at a point in time where the expectation is more about individualism and, where possible, personalization. So that's certainly, I think, part of why people gravitate towards Airbnb. They like the idea that every place they stay at is a little different, and that makes it interesting, and they can pick and choose something that resonates with them. And I think increasingly consumers expect that, whether they're picking a movie on Netflix or on Apple TV or anything else. They want stuff that meets their specific tastes, and technology now makes that possible in a lot of cases.

Oh, fantastic story. It's really inspiring.

I'd like to know, Sometimes you would just think about giving up and how you deal with this. I mean, I think your co-founders were really important in this. Yeah, no, good question. So I think it was really key that the 3 of us were friends long before we decided to start a company together, because what that meant was when times got tough and we were considering about quitting and we had competing priorities in our lives, None of us wanted to leave because we understood that if one of us left, the company would probably fall apart. I mean, I like to liken it to a stool. You take away one of the legs of the stool, it would have fallen over because we each played a very unique role, and I think it would have been too hard to replace one of us. And so knowing that, nobody wanted to be the person to leave first, right? It was going to be a collective decision about whether to continue. to continue or to leave. And I think that was grounded in our friendship.

Is your own house on Airbnb?

It is, yes. Yeah.

That's awesome.

Yes. So about a year ago, I bought a house, and one of the requirements was that I wanted a space that I could rent out. And so I have people staying there every single night. Now, they don't know it's me. It's not under my name. Because otherwise I might be a little too popular.

When they come there and you introduce yourself, yeah, I'm the co-founder of Airbnb, do they like appropriate?

Oh, I don't tell them that. I mean, if they ask a bunch of questions like, where do you work, I'm not going to lie. I'll tell them the truth. But if they don't ask, I don't tell. And the reason is I don't want them to treat me differently. This is my way of staying close to the product experience, which is super important as your company becomes bigger. and I now have almost 2,000 people who work for me, I'm removed from a lot of the details in some ways. This is my way to stay super close to the user experience. And it's through the experiences I have like this that I'm constantly writing to the team. I'm like, hey, this little thing on the site, what's up with that? As a host, I notice these things, things I wouldn't notice otherwise.

Do you know which user you are?

As what?

Your team, do they know which user you are?

Many people do, but it's not officially marked off. So if I call into customer service, they're probably not going to know who it is. Yeah.

Can we try this right now?

I'm not going to show you my property on TV. Nice trick though. Good question.

So, hi. This is one of my— possibly one of my best sessions at Draper University. You're very inspiring. Thank you so much. I wanted to ask that you mentioned that all of you were working on different side projects as well. So at that point of time, how you kind of shut down those projects and came together and knew actually where exactly to focus and build Airbnb?

Right. So I mean, there's going to be a lot of competing priorities when you pursue your startup. And if you have 2 or 3 team members, each of you are going to have different competing priorities. One might be your personal life, and in my case, I decided to move back to Boston to figure things out in my personal life, but there's other things too, like opportunity cost. And at the time, for myself, I had another startup idea I was excited about, so I was also working a lot on that. That idea ended up not going anywhere, but it was a competing priority at the time. I was doing some consulting work. I had my hands on a lot of different things, and I was constantly asking myself, hmm, Which one seems to be going better on any given week? And it was very tempting. Maybe I should just focus more on this thing, and that thing might not have been AirBed and Breakfast. Again, it goes back to the fact that I had partners, they were my friends, and I didn't want to let them down. And so despite the fact that I had these other things that were in some cases compelling, I kept it pretty narrow and ultimately decided to stop all of it once we got into YC. And that was why at the end of that first year we asked ourselves, despite things not going well and having spent a year, we hadn't actually given it 100% because we had been distracted with other projects. And so the big decision was during YC to cut all that out of our lives and just stay focused on this one thing.

What was the biggest learning experience you had