Happy Monday!
I hope you had an amazing weekend.
Allow me to give a brief about Brian Chesky before I share 1 interesting story, 2 quotes to think about and 3 short lessons from him for you to read this week.
Brian Chesky. Co-Founder and CEO of Airbnb, a service that lets you rent a couch for the night. Or a cabin. Or a castle. Today, Airbnb is valued at $30 billion.
1 STORY FOR YOU
Cereal Entrepreneur
Joe and I are broke. We’re losing weight and I didn’t have a lot of weight to lose. You know those binders that you put baseball cards in? We put credit cards in them. At this point, I am $25,000 in credit card debt. Joe is tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt. So this is make or break. We need a lifeline.
We have this website and maybe 50 people a day are visiting it and we’re probably getting like 10 to 20 bookings a day. By the way, we’ve been working for a year and a half. So for anyone who’s worried their company doesn’t have enough traction, that was our traction.
Joe and I look at each other and we said “We’re Air Bed and Breakfast. The air beds aren’t going so well. Maybe breakfast will.” So we thought, what if we could sell breakfast? Maybe we can make some money. What’s a nonperishable breakfast? Cereal. So we thought the presidential campaign is coming up. We just launched at the DNC. What if we created a Barack Obama themed breakfast cereal? And we thought, what would a Barack Obama themed breakfast cereal be called? Obama O’s like Cheerios, “The breakfast of change.” We thought, “Well, we want to be a nonpartisan website so we’d also need a John McCain themed cereal.” John McCain was a captain in the Navy and so we came up with Cap’n McCain’s, like Cap’n Crunch: “A maverick in every bite.” We ended up making a thousand boxes of collectible breakfast cereal. We sold them for $40 a box.
We literally commuted to New York from Mountain View. So we would be in Y Combinator for Tuesday night dinners and then Wednesday Joe and I would go to New York. We literally would knock on the doors of all of our hosts. We had their addresses and we’d say, “Knock knock. Hello. Hey, this is Brian, Joe, we’re founders and we just want to meet you.”
2 QUOTES FROM HIM
“It's really hard to get even 10 people to love anything. But it's not hard if you spend a ton of time with them."
“It's better to have 100 people love you than to have 1,000,000 people like you.”
3 LEARNINGS FOR YOU
Where’s your business?
Paul asked us, “Where’s your business?”
And I go, “What do you mean?”
“Where’s your traction?”
And I go “We don’t have a lot of traction.”
He goes, “People must be using it.”
I said, “There’s a few people in New York using it.”
And he said something I’ll never forget. He said, “So your users are in New York and you’re still in Mountain View.”
I said, “Yeah.”
And he said, “What are you still doing here?”
And I go, “What do you mean?”
He said, “Go to your users. Get to know them. Get your customers one by one.”
And I said, “But that won’t scale. If we’re huge and we have millions of customers, we can’t meet every customer.”
And he said, “That’s exactly why you should do it now because this is the only time you’ll ever be small enough that you can meet all your customers, get to know them and make something directly for them.”
When scaling quickly, every 6 months it's a different job
Brian has shared that someone once told him when scaling quickly, every six months you keep your job it's a promotion. He further stated that you can even say that every six months it's a totally different job. It's hard to be the right person to start a company and also be the right person to manage it when it has 1,000 employees because you have to be different types of people. The most important thing thus becomes being adaptable, because no one is an expert at everything. He has seen people who have been able to scale, and those who haven't. From that, he's identified two points on those who were able to scale. One is having general intelligence and talent. If you are over your head when you start it's hard to ever not be over your head when scaling. The second point is being curious and adaptable, We have to be kids at heart at start-ups, I find. In the sense that you're curious, you're open-minded, you're welcoming and adventurous and you're not a know-it-all. Know-it-alls will never scale in start-ups because if someone is a know-it-all, they know everything, so they'll never know more, so they're not going to scale. If you're not a know-it-all you're shameless about getting feedback.
A universal decision will land you in the middle of a road
It was in 2011 that Airbnb had to face its first client horror story. A renter had destroyed a woman’s house in San Francisco and taken off with her valuables when she was away for business. The victim had used her personal blog to make this story public and it went viral in no time. The media, of course, was eagerly awaiting Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky’s response.
This crisis caused Chesky to learn his most important leadership lesson thus far. Weeks after the disaster, Brian finally wrote something on the Airbnb blog.
To take things in control, Brian made an announcement that Airbnb would give a sum of $50,000 to all renters in protection. This guarantee was announced by Chesky against the advice given within the organization to first conduct testing.
The frustration and embarrassment that came with the disastrous experience taught him his greatest lesson as a leader. In a crisis, a universal decision will usually land you somewhere in the middle of a road. These are typically the most horrible decisions. A crisis calls for either going right or left.
Question for everyone - Should I write about people that are not very known yet or people about whom a lot of readings are already available? Reply back to the email.
That’s it from me, until next Monday!