Airbnb's Brian Chesky: Do things that don’t scale

Masters of Scale

WaitWhat

Entrepreneurship, Business, Management, Reid Hoffman, Mindset, Diversity & Inclusion, Jeff Berman, Bob Safian, Startups

4.6 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 3 May 2022

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In honor of our five year anniversary of Masters of Scale, we're revisiting our first episode ever, featuring Airbnb's Brian Chesky.

If you want your company to truly scale, you first have to do things that don't scale. Handcraft the core experience. Get your hands dirty. Serve your customers one-by-one. And don't stop until you know exactly what they want. That's what Brian Chesky did. As CEO of Airbnb, Brian’s early work was more akin to a traveling salesman. He takes us back to his lean years — when he went door-to-door, meeting Airbnb hosts in person — and shares the imaginative route to crafting what he calls an "11-star experience.”

Read a transcript of this episode: https://mastersofscale.com

Subscribe to the Masters of Scale weekly newsletter: https://mastersofscale.com/subscribe

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hi, it's Bob Safian. You've been hearing me as the host of rapid response in this feed for a few years now,
0:07.8	with short newsy interviews alongside the deeper dives of Masters of Scale. Well, I'm excited to share that rapid response is expanding into its own feed.
0:17.0	We'll be putting out shows twice a week, focusing on the urgent issues that business leaders are dealing with in real time.
0:24.8	So search for rapid response in your podcast player and subscribe to make sure you get all our episodes.
0:31.2	I'll see you on the other side.
0:34.0	Joe and I are broke, we're losing weight, and I don't have a lot of weight to lose.
0:38.0	You know those binders that you put baseball cards in?
0:41.0	We put credit cards in them.
0:42.0	At this point, I am $25, we put credit cards in them.
0:42.6	At this point I am $25,000 in credit card debt.
0:45.9	Joe is tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt.
0:48.3	So this is like make or break.
0:50.4	We need the lifeline.
0:56.0	That entrepreneur, in need of a lifeline? That's Brian Chesky.
0:58.0	Co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, a service that lets you rent a couch for the night or a cabin or a castle.
1:05.0	Today, Airbnb is valued at $30 billion.
1:10.0	Eight years ago, a very different picture.
1:15.0	We have this website and maybe 50 people a day are visiting it
1:20.0	and we're probably getting like 10 to 20 bookings a day.
1:22.0	So, and by the way, we've been working out for a year and a half so for anyone who's worried that your company has enough traction that was our traction.
1:28.0	It was 2008 an election year in the United States.
1:31.0	Barack Obama was running against John McCain.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from WaitWhat, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of WaitWhat and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.