August 12, 2017
“Despite this optimism, Jordan and his partners identified four risks to their investment:
Safety: What would happen if a guest trashed a home or apartment?
International competition: Would overseas entrepreneurs clone the site?
Regulation: Would cities allow hosts to continue to rent their homes without restrictions?
Executive recruitment: Chesky, Gebbia, and Blecharczyk were running the company as a triumvirate—a council of equals. It was an arrangement that couldn’t last. Could they find new executives they trusted?”
August 12, 2017
“A host using only the initials EJ had written on her WordPress blog that her San Francisco home had been burglarized and trashed by a guest who had rented it for a week via Airbnb.12
They smashed a hole through a locked closet door, and found the passport, cash, credit card and grandmother’s jewelry I had hidden inside… They rifled through all my drawers, wore my shoes and clothes, and left my clothing crumpled up in a pile of wet, mildewing towels on the closet floor… Despite the heat wave, they used my fireplace and multiple Duraflame logs to reduce mounds of stuff (my stuff??) to ash… The kitchen was a disaster—the sink piled high with filthy dishes, pots and pans burnt out and ruined… The death-like smell emanating from the bathroom was frightening.1”
August 12, 2017
“EJ had also raised fundamental questions about the safety of users on its site and Airbnb’s role as an arbiter between hosts and guests. Until that incident, Chesky had subscribed to the purist’s view of online marketplaces: Users were supposed to police one another by rating their experiences. Untrustworthy actors would be drummed off the platform by bad reviews, rejected by the web’s natural immune system.”
August 12, 2017
“ Jeff Jordan, the partner at Andreessen Horowitz who had joined Airbnb’s board of directors, had introduced a similar program at eBay, called Buyer Protection, that adjudicated disputes between buyers and sellers and gave refunds to aggrieved customers. Jordan suggested it could work here as well. Chesky intended to set the guarantee at a modest five thousand dollars. Then Marc Andreessen visited the Airbnb office one night to support the beleaguered founders and suggested they should add a zero to their announcement and reimburse hosts for up to fifty thousand dollars. It was a significant risk at the time, since the company didn’t have insurance and would have to cover any costs itself.
Airbnb was effectively betting its enormous haul of venture capital on the premise that tragedies like the one that had beset EJ would be rare. (The following year the Airbnb Guarantee would grow to a million dollars, insured by Lloyd’s of London.)18”
August 12, 2017
“Finally, in late summer, Jung called Chesky to check in, and Chesky delivered the news: He had decided not to partner with the Samwer brothers and their clone Wimdu. Summoning up his resolve, Chesky had told his co-founders, employees, and investors that “he would rather not negotiate with a terrorist and go fight and lose than give in,” according to Alfred Lin, a partner at Sequoia. ”
August 12, 2017
“Jung flew to San Francisco the next day and was thunderstruck when he arrived at the Rhode Island Street office and witnessed its quirky rituals, like lunchtime yoga and a weekly company-wide kickball game. He had heard about the frenetic offices of Wimdu and its “army of ants.” This was the opposite. “It felt to me like only thirty people were there and everyone was very relaxed,” Jung says. “Some people were playing table tennis. Then someone brought a dog out, and it was its birthday. Everyone celebrated the birthday of the dog.”
August 12, 2017
“In January 2012, Airbnb publicly announced the opening of its international offices. The three founders hit the road, each attending a launch party in a different city and coming together for blowouts in Paris and Berlin. Chesky recalls hardly sleeping for eighteen days. They trained their new employees, gave speeches about the warmth and potential of the Airbnb community, met hundreds of hosts, and doled out countless hugs. “It gave you a feeling that it was not business oriented,” said Nalin Jha, one of the earliest hosts in Delhi, India, who joined the service that year after attending the company’s first local meet-up and recalls being immediately embraced by the general manager Jung had hired. “It was just a small hug, but it suggested there was a soul in the business. That was a very attractive thing, that I was becoming part of a community.”
August 12, 2017
“Wimdu stuck around but would become an inconsequential player in the home-sharing market. In 2013 it shuttered Airizu, the Chinese subsidiary, and pared back its ambitions outside Europe. Airbnb had shown Silicon Valley that it was better to fight cloners than to accommodate them. “The worst thing you can do to a cloner is to let him keep his baby,” Chesky joked to Oliver Jung. “The cloner doesn’t want his baby. They build the baby to get rid of it.” ”
Notes From: Brad Stone. “The Upstarts.” iBooks.
Check out this book on the iBooks Store: https://itun.es/dk/8nACdb.l
