Lessons from the week (22 Oct 2023)

Lessons on entrepreneurship from Airbnb's founder

As an entrepreneur, this conversation inspired me. It is so good that I will do a second round of listening to absorb the lessons better. Below are notes I pulled out from the podcast.

We all want to belong
One of the top psychologists for some very known personalities said that her clients come to her because of two things
(1) they don't feel like they are enough.
(2) they feel like they are different.

We are tribal animals so we want to belong. Not being enough means that you're not good enough for the tribe. Being different would mean that you don't fit in to the tribe.

Purpose and solitude
You had everything inside you probably when the journey started. What you needed most was purpose, health and relationships. It turns out that having a purpose and serving others and being focused on something is good for you. Beyond that no amount of status or power will fill something inside of you. Whatever is missing you need to fill through introspection, solitude, connection to self.

Do it for decades
People tend to overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in ten years. That ten years is a profoundly long period of time if you're disciplined and focused. You can have a small idea. Small dream. Small goal. And you can build something vast. I've only done Airbnb for 15 years. You wouldn't have hired me as your intern 15 years ago.

If you had only 6 minutes to live. What might your greatest regret be?
I think my biggest regret would be the time I didn't spend with the people I loved. Making sure those people knew how I felt about them. I've created many great things but the one that I haven't created which I always wanted is a family.

Start small. Airbnb started because we wanted to make a quick buck over a weekend when a design conference came to San Francisco.
Take any giant company in the world. Nothing large started large. They always started small. They started with a few people. And many times they were making something that looked like a hobby.

One of my early investors said "Brian don't worry about people stealing your ideas because if it's any good, everyone will dismiss it. It turns out a lot of breakthrough ideas don't seem breakthrough at the time, they seem crazy. Or they seem unserious. Or they seem like hobbies. Or they seem small. Airbnb did not design an idea for millions of people to stay in homes. Airbnb started one weekend. A design conference had come to San Francisco. All the hotels were sold out. And we had this idea - what if we just turned our house into a bed and breakfast for the design conference. We can make enough rent. This is 22 Sep 2007.

We didn't have any beds but Joe had Airbeds. So we called it airbedandbreakfast.com. I can assure that we didn't think that Airbnb would be a company which 4 million people every night would use to sleep in. We thought it would be a way for 3 people, 1 weekend, to stay in our apartment, sleep in our beds, make some money, have a cool weekend adventure and then go about our lives.

We thought it would pay the rent while Joe and I thought of the big idea.

It is better to have a 100 people love you, then have a million people just sort of like you.
When I joined Y Combinator, Paul graham had a saying which was the most important piece of advice I got. He said "it is better to have a 100 people love you, then have a million people just sort of like you."

When they love something, they will tell everyone they know. People who love something become your marketing department. So how do you get someone to love something? You can meet with them. You can try to understand what their needs are. You can design something perfectly just for them.

Don't focus on the mountain top. Focus on the first step.
Don't focus on the million. Focus on just the 100.
When you do that. You make the problem small and manageable.
Once you get to a 100, now you get to a 1000.

Don't let go of the intuition, even if you have the data
Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.

I think most entrepreneurs are creative. Most business plans are conceived intuitively. When you have no customers, you have no data. So everything is started with intuition, insight and understanding.

As you get more successful you get more data. And as you get more data, you get more reliant on the data. And as you get more reliant on the data, you get more iterative.

Data is necessary but not sufficient. Why would you abandon something which made you successful? Follow your intuition. You have to refound it, rebuild it, continue to have ideas.

Most companies need more creativity. They need more heart and a soul. We tend to have a bias towards short term financial measurement. There needs to be more heart and creativity in business.

We do something that nobody measures and we cant even measure it. And we don't even know if it works. But the reason we do it is that's what we believe.

You must keep changing even if you find success
The biggest risk is that we don't change in a world that we know will change. No one wants to be the one to make a change, to take a risk. The organization is focused on itself rather than why it exists, to serve other people.

How you do anything, is how you do everything. Design your culture with a vision and lead by example.
The email sent to the team about culture, why it's important and what it is. It's to hire a head of people and culture. A different name for HR.

"Joanie and I have always believed that you must design the culture you want. Otherwise it will be designed for you and you might not like what emerges. The people and the future they create are the heart of Airbnb. Simply put, culture is what creates the foundation for all future innovation. In the long run, the culture is the most important thing you will ever design because it is the engine that designs everything else. 

All good design starts with a vision. And I want working at Airbnb to feel like working at the world's largest startup."

Your culture is the behaviors of the leaders that get mimicked all the way down every single person. 

Your culture is every time you choose to hire someone. Every time you choose to fire someone. Every time you choose to promote somebody. It's the way everyone does everything. The way a leader swings a culture is not by writing out a list of values. It's by basically leading by example every single day and taking a survey of every single thing that is happening and constantly shaping it, pruning it, like a Gardner.

You don't just allow the culture to happen. You design the culture.

The moment I cannot be in the room and the same action happens as if I was in the room. That's the moment where it goes from management to culture. It's like learning a golf swing. And then eventually being able to swing without the instructor.

A company is just people. Resources and strategy. A culture is the what bonds then together. Reduce something to its essence.

You have to love it. You have to be proud to put your name on it. It is about you.
The most important customer is yourself. You have to love it because real artists want
to sign their name to the work. It starts with you. Your values.

Your job as a leader is to flatten the organization to make people feel as close as possible to you. By feeling close to you, they are going to be close to the values because you as a leader, you are the values.

Great companies are defined by a crisis

Bad companies are destroyed by a crisis. Good companies survive a crisis. But great companies, are defined by a crisis. - Andy Grove

I told the board that we are going to be the third category. Everyone was like "why us?!" And I said "No. No, watch us!" This is our defining moment.

Data oriented people really struggle in crisis. Because the data has changed and they don't know what to do. And they are uncomfortable making intuitive decisions. You better do that (take intuitive decisions) in a crisis.

A crisis is a terrible opportunity to waste.

People can read your body language. Be optimistic. Be the force people need.

If you tell yourself - "this is my defining moment" - that creates an optimistic mindset. And that optimism is what everyone looks to. Because the hardest thing to manage in a crisis is your own psychology. Because if you think you're screwed, people see it in your eyes. But if you're optimistic, that optimism is routed in reality.

People still want us to exist and this is why... And then that optimism creates conditions for creativity. Oftentimes in life creativity is that third path. That third road that  doesn't exist that you paved with all the components that weren't ahead of you.

Get as emotionally involved as possible
You should never only make a decision based on purely financial reasons. Some people think "don't get emotionally involved, it clouds decision making." I would say the opposite. I'd say "get as emotionally involved as possible so you understand the consequences of your decisions. And now try to see the whole picture - the finances, the emotions, the strategy. You're a whole person.

Do what you love with people you love

The thing that's going to fill you is not what you achieve. It's going to be what you do every single day. If you do things you love, with people you love, you're probably going to be happy. As long as you don't take those things for granted.

And if you isolate yourself doing things that are painful and you don't love, or along the way you don't make time for people you love, then you might not be happy.

I don't know why it's so simple but that seems to be the case.

Don't follow your passion. Follow your curiosity.
People say "follow your passion" but what if you don't know what your passion is? I think the better thing is to follow your curiosity. But your curiosity is something that you must actively participate in.

You must actively put yourself out there in situations to discover what you love. What you love and who you love. Be open minded that you might not predict what you want.

People will trust you if you know them, know what they want and bring people together
I want Airbnb to not just be a place or a product but the people. I think at the end of the day we're not just a service, we're not just a product. I'd like Airbnb to become more of a global travel community. Everyone will have a profile with a rich identity system. I think that's the foundation of trust. You should feel like Airbnb the company really knows you and your preferences, who you are and what you really want. Our job at Airbnb is to be the ultimate host.

Some of the loneliest people are teenagers because the mall is now Amazon, the theatre is now Netflix, the office is now Zoom. That's no one's fault. But our mission is to bring people together.

* DOAC: Airbnb CEO

Harsh Batra
LinkedIn

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