Name: At Home With the Billionaire CEO Behind Airbnb | The Circuit
Uploaded: 2024-12-08T23:28:18.000Z
Duration: 24 min 2 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The imperative

Let's just say this isn't your typical Airbnb.

This is the infamous Airbnb of all Airbnbs.

I'm, like, really into coffee table books.

There's a lot of, like, cool design books here and, like, a lot of memorabilia.

This is literally how we funded the company.

You'll see that one's autographed by the actual President Obama.

And I literally hot glued this one myself.

And it's a nice balance because, you know, I live alone.

I don't want, like, a, you know, weird tech McMansion.

But, you know, people my age buying $100 million homes.

She's a nearly one-year-old, two-year-old golden retriever.

It's been cool because I haven't really hosted that much since the early days.

You're running a multi-billion dollar company.

Like, what made you want to make time for this?

I never wanted to be one of those CEOs that's kind of an ivory tower just looking at data and spreadsheets all day.

When you first build a company, you make something usually for yourself.

And that means that you need to be emotionally connected to what you're doing.

I understand when hosts are complaining about something or your customer is complaining, what do they mean?

So that's, like, the main reason I did it.

But then there was another reason I wasn't expecting, which was it's fun.

It was crazy to think you were going to rent your house to a stranger or that you were going to stay in some stranger's house.

Does the level of human openness to that idea still surprise you?

I think I'm less a visionary than an expeditionary in the sense that I didn't have a vision.

I decided to let people in my house only to make money for the most part.

And I ended up becoming friends with these people.

And it made me realize that, like, these homes are these private spaces that you never let anyone in.

And we thought, well, if we could solve a system of trust and make them not feel like strangers, this would be an idea that spread around the world.

I think we have trouble imagining sociological changes, sometimes harder than technological changes.

We can all imagine things getting bigger, faster.

But it's hard to imagine us changing behavior.

But Airbnb has actually been a big part of, like, maybe a major sociological change.

I mean, it's been now been used 1.4 billion times.

And if you had told me when we first started that 1.4 billion people from 220 countries and regions would live together, that on a typical night we'd have nearly the population of Los Angeles staying together.

Like, cultures you wouldn't necessarily think mixing together.

I think we all would have said you were crazy.

It's like most tech companies have to understand laws of physics.

And we also have to know a different law, which is a law of human nature.

And if you can start to understand that, then you can start to design for people.

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At Home With the Billionaire CEO Behind Airbnb | The Circuit

ultimately

pandemic

basically

crisis