What's up everyone? Welcome back to another episode of the crazy ones. This is Alex, one of your co-hosts

and I am back with a founder's journal style episode where I break down a topic ranging in length from five to 20 minutes

and it's something that either I've been dealing with in one of my businesses or a recent

podcast I listen to or book that I read that I feel like I have to share with you and today I'm talking about lessons

I learned from a podcast I listen to specifically a conversation between Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb and Jason

Calakannis, the host of this week in startups. So I'm going to share nine lessons from Brian Chesky and Airbnb. Let's hop into it.

What's up everyone? I'm Alex Lieberman. You know, this is Jesse Pooji and this is the crazy ones.

So this conversation between Brian and Jason was super interesting. There are a lot of takeaways I have. I'm going to go through nine of them.

But first of all, if you want to hear the full conversation, we'll include a link to the podcast in the show notes. But let's hop into the lessons.

Lesson number one, Brian, Joe and Nathan, the co-founders of Airbnb or what I like to call cockroaches.

Early on as they were funding Airbnb with literally a binder full of maxed out credit cards, they ended up selling a thousand boxes of election theme cereal.

So they were selling Obama O's and Captain McCain's. They sold a thousand boxes of these to raise $30,000.

Not only did they raise money so they didn't have to just keep maxing out credit cards.

But also these boxes of cereal was how they got into Y Combinator.

The story goes that they were interviewing with Paul Graham to get into Y Combinator when the accelerator was in its early days.

And it seemed like people were pretty uninterested by the idea of strangers staying in your home.

And as they were leaving the interview, I believe it was Joe who left a box of cereal with the interviewers and they were basically like, what is this?

And they went on to tell the story of how they had raised $30,000 selling these thousand boxes of cereal that were themed for the presidential election.

And then on the spot, they got an offer to be part of Y Combinator because they had just shown so much grit in doing anything humanly possible to keep the business alive.

So that's an early on example.

But to me, them being cockroaches spans the entire length of the company up until most recently the pandemic.

I mean, you think about a pandemic basically world travel and hospitality went from 100% to 0% in a day.

...