May 16, 2017
“Since selling his e-commerce company, Viaweb, to Yahoo during the first dot-com boom, PG, as he was called, had become a font of startup aphorisms, such as “It’s better to have a hundred people that love you than a million people that sort of like you,” and “Don’t worry about competitors; startups usually die of suicide, not homicide.” He was in his early forties and typically wore the I-don’t-care-about-your-social-customs sartorial combination of cargo shorts, a polo shirt, and sandals.”
June 3, 2017
“One obvious problem was that hosts weren’t presenting their properties online in an appealing way—the photos were grainy and usually taken with the primitive cell phones of the time. They reported this observation back in Mountain View, and Graham compared it to a challenge he had encountered at the online marketplace Viaweb, where he had to show naive retailers how to sell on the internet. “What they needed to do was teach their hosts how to sell,” Graham says. “That was the missing ingredient.”
June 3, 2017
“But Graham was still having trouble wrapping his mind around the idea of people actually sleeping on airbeds. Finally he identified the real opportunity as “eBay, but for spaces” and urged them to think of their brand as comparable to the auction giant’s. ”
June 3, 2017
“The founders seemed to move slowly on everything. McAdoo remembers them as being a little too “wonderfully frugal,” reluctant to spend their new venture capital, which is ironic considering their later profligacy on elaborate corporate offices around the world. “On the one hand, that is fabulous,” McAdoo told them, discussing the high bank balance. “On the other hand, guys, we need to invest in the business.” They also moved glacially in signing on new employees, declining at first to even hire customer-support help.”
June 3, 2017
“The founders worked seven days a week but there was a spirit of camaraderie and plenty of goofy fun. They would break occasionally to go to the gym or hang out on the roof. Once a week, they went to a nearby park on Folsom Street for “recess,” to play kickball or even a game of tag. On Friday they usually went to a bar for happy hour.”
June 3, 2017
“Chesky was moving slowly, but at the same time, he was frustrated that his imagined success wasn’t arriving quickly enough. “Every day I was working on it and thinking, Why isn’t it happening faster?” he told me.4 “When you’re starting a company it never goes at the pace you want or the pace you expect. You imagine everything to be linear, ‘I’m going to do this, then this is going to happen and this is going to happen.’ You’re imagining steps and they’re progressive. You start, you build it, and you think everyone’s going to care. But no one cares, not even your friends.”
June 3, 2017
“When Nathan Blecharczyk graduated from college, he was not just a skilled programmer but the embodiment of a new Silicon Valley hero: the growth hacker. Growth hackers use their engineering chops to find clever, often controversial ways to improve the popularity of their products and services. Blecharczyk, it turned out, was an exceedingly good one.
That makes the mysterious rise of Airbnb in the year after its graduation from Y Combinator easier to understand. Two other apartment-listing services were far larger: Couchsurfing, which was still laboring under the disastrous effects of its nonprofit status, and Craigslist, the popular and practical online bulletin board that hadn’t changed much in thirteen years. Craigslist had a huge audience; in 2009, it had forty-four million unique visitors a month in the United States alone,7 with active apartment rental and home-sharing channels in many of its 570 cities.”
July 31, 2017
“Blecharczyk pioneered a clever use of Facebook’s fledgling ad system, which for the first time allowed companies to tailor and target ads to the interests and hobbies that members specified in their profiles. If a user said he liked yoga, for example, he would see an ad from Airbnb on Facebook that announced “Rent Your Room to a Yogi!” If a person liked wine, he’d see “Rent Your Room to a Wine Lover!” and so on.”
July 31, 2017
“Airbnb returned to Sand Hill Road, the seat of the venture capital industry, to raise more money. Blecharczyk’s productive Facebook and Google ads were expensive, and Chesky had to keep the coffers full. Seeing the company’s growing market opportunity, McAdoo wanted Sequoia to supply the entire round of funding itself, but Chesky had learned at Y Combinator to be wary of giving too much control to venture capitalists, and he insisted on bringing in another firm.”
July 31, 2017
“Hoffman says he was skeptical at first. Ugh, couch-surfing is not that interesting, he thought. Then Chesky met him at Greylock’s offices on Sand Hill Road over a weekend and spun a compelling vision of Airbnb as the largest hotel chain in the world but one without the expensive burden of maintaining actual buildings or hiring workers like bellhops and maids. “The idea of essentially transforming this massive illiquid asset that existed in most of our lives—the room, an apartment, a house, a unique space—into something that could actually be in an essentially peer-to-peer marketplace is just one of the killer ideas,” Hoffman said. “I was like, ‘Okay, I’m ready.’”12”
July 31, 2017
“Chesky would remember that dinner with Hartenbaum well. It was the first time he heard of the people whose names would soon send shudders down his spine: the Samwer brothers.
“This is probably what’s going to happen,” Hartenbaum told the three founders over steaks that night. “There are these German brothers. If they haven’t already, they will soon see that Airbnb is doing very well. They will then raise a ton of money in a very short period of time to create a company that will copy you. Then they will try to get you to buy them. And they will make your life miserable.”
Notes From: Brad Stone. “The Upstarts.” iBooks.
Check out this book on the iBooks Store: https://itun.es/dk/8nACdb.l
