Transcript
0:00 Hi everyone. I'm Jessica Livingston. I am a a partner with Y Cominator and the author of Founders at Work. lots of people have suggested to me that I do founders at work like interviews, but with Y Cominator founders, and this is a great idea, but it's so kind timeconsuming that I never really got around to it. So when I was watching Andrew Warner's interviews on Mixer, this sort of inspired me like what a great idea. This could be the perfect format. So this will hopefully be the first of a series of interviews with Y Combinator founders. The big problem I was trying to solve with founders at work was that there was a whole bunch of information trapped in the heads of founders and I was trying to get that out for the world to see. now Y Combinator has funded 172 startups. So, each one has an interesting story and the Y Combinator founders are so great about helping each other out and sharing all kinds of advice and stories for the new groups that come in. So, I wanted to try to share that with future startup founders. I just want to thank everyone at Justin TV for setting me up and giving me the royal treatment, especially Randall Bennett who just went above and beyond the call of duty.
1:25 so thanks. So, I'm here today with Brian Chesy and Joe Gibbia. They're two of the founders of Airbnb. for those of you who aren't familiar with the site, the easiest way to describe it is the as the eBay of space. using Airbnb, anyone can rent out any space that they have, whether it's an extra bedroom, an entire apartment, or even an air mattress on the living room floor. we funded them about a year ago, and they're just doing fabulously. so, hi guys. Thank you for being my first interviewees.
2:01 >> Hey, how are you? >> I'm doing well. >> before we even get started, tell me about this backdrop that you have. It's fabulous. Yeah. Well, the backdrop that you're looking at is results of a brainstorm that we had companywide brainstorm last week. we brought everybody together and we just started to brainstorm some really fun ideas for certain section of Airbnb that we're looking to improve. So, we've got it goes way beyond what you see here. So, there's a lot of lot of ideas, a lot of creativity.
2:32 >> Well, I love it. so how I usually get started with people for founders at work is that I ask them to take me back to when their company got started. But for you guys, I'm going to ask you to take me back even further because the story of Airbnb, I know, starts about a year before Airbnb started. >> Yep, it did. Yeah. Yeah. So, it literally all happened in this apartment that we're sitting in. So, the people watching this, we're not seeing an office. This is our office, but it's actually a three-bedroom apartment. This is the reason we actually started this business. And the way it all worked out was that you know, Joe was living here in San Francisco in this apartment.
3:15 I was living in Los Angeles. Joe's other roommate here in San Francisco in this apartment who they met on Craigslist was Nate Parsik. So, Nate was a third co-founder. and you know, of course, the concept hadn't started yet. I literally moved up here from Los Angeles and here we were. We had maybe a month, you know, like of runway left. In other words, like, you know, we had to figure, we had very little money in the bank. We had to figure out how are we going to make the next rent check. So, our story is a little different than some of the other Y Com maybe been aspiring to start a company, get funded by Y Cominator for a really long time. We was completely independent of that. There was a design conference coming to San Francisco and here we were thinking we need to make money. we need to meet people because you know if you don't have a job you better start networking and so we put the two together and decided why not create a little designer bed and breakfast for these people coming to this international design conference from San Francisco. It happened to be that first weekend coming up when Joe and I first moved in together and you know we noticed on the hotel website or the conference website that all the hotels were sold out. So they had like they had listed like three or four hotels. They all said they were sold out. Sold out.
4:22 >> Big red letters. Sold out. Sold out. Sold. >> And that was the light bulb for us. It was like, well, why don't we create a little designer bed and breakfast. We pulled out a couple air beds. And we had the original idea. Air bed and breakfast. And what we always tell people is we weren't trying to start a business. We were trying to solve our own problem. And we did. What happened next, Jess? It was pretty amazing. we learned some lessons early on on how to get press. And we took that little rinky dink website airbabandre.com an 18 character URL and we sent it out to every design blog that we knew on the internet and when we woke up the next morning we were posted on core77 swissmiss.com some of these prolific design blogs around the internet. In fact, the conference themselves, the IDSA even even endorsed us and emailed all the conference attendees about what we were doing because the problem was that big. There was actually no place to stay in San Francisco. So, the solution that we came up with simply to pay our rent was actually solving the problem for all these other conference attendees coming to town.
5:26 >> And we hosted three people and the three people that we hosted changed all assumptions about our website. And that's something that's kind of interesting because when often times you're starting a you know anyone who's in like comry can tell you that the users they thought they were starting this business for may not be the users they end up with because they they they have certain assumptions. This is our assumption. Our assumption was that this was a business that other people like us, other guys early 20s were willing to do. Kind of like quote like they call them backpackers, but really you mean people with no money, people like that are really young willing to use this.
6:00 The idea that somebody over the age of 30, the idea that a woman with and they would stay with a couple guys, I don't know. I mean, a lot of our friends didn't think that was going to happen. And the three people stayed with us, the first person was a 35year-old woman from Boston. Immediately broke our assumptions. was a woman over 30. Okay, there's maybe a bigger market here. The second guy was a designer from India. He would like scope out our site. He was a huge fan. He was already like a passionate user and we had just come up with a concept like a day ago. So, which is amazing that that could happen. And the third guy was a 45year-old father of five from Utah. And as soon as that happened, we said there's absolutely no like this is three totally different demographics. It's can't one time is a fluke, but there's obviously a bigger market here.
6:44 Wow. It's kind of funny because it kind of encapsulates two of the bits of advice we give, which is to make something that solves your own problem. and also, you never really know how people are going to use your site until you actually launch it, >> right? >> If you asked us a month before if we could predict that a guy would pay $80 a night to sleep on our kitchen floor, I would have told you you were crazy.
7:11 >> Okay. By the way, I need to apologize if I seem a little bit off. It's because I've done like tons of tests on this and everything's always been fine. And right now there is this crazy like echoing going on and I can barely understand myself. So, I apologize if I seem a little bit stiff, but tell me you launched the site, you have three guests come that weekend. what are the next big turning points for you guys? Yeah.
7:37 So, you know, we literally weren't trying to start a business. Created this tiny website, Joe and I, in a couple days, launched it. Here we were. we made close to $1,000. We had a like an amazing time, these three people that we went around the whole city with. Basically created some new friendships. At this point, we started re-evaluating. In other words, maybe airbend breakfast wasn't a way to make rent one weekend. Maybe there were other people that would be interested in doing it. We met people at the conference like first of all a couple little blog designer blogs had picked it up. you know other other people started saying that's such a cool concept. And the way you know something's good is you know we would go home for Christmas right this is a couple months later and this is how you know something's good when you go to like a party or you're with your relatives or you're with an average person and ask you what are you up to and of course it's not just one thing because when you're not really like doing just one big thing you're doing like three things. So we'd each tell them, "Oh, we're doing this and we're doing do a little consulting. We're doing this." And then we get this other thing, air bed and breakfast. They say, "What? What's that?" It would completely monopolize the conversation is. So here you were just trying to tell them a few things we're doing and suddenly like they the whole dinner table, they want to talk about that. You go to a party, that's what they want to talk about. You start to realize maybe that is what we should be spending our time on. If everyone else seems to think it's interesting, they start saying, "I would do that." On top of that, Jessica, I remember specifically getting emails from South America. I got an email from London. I got an email from Vancouver, an email from Japan. And these are people who read about us on the internet and they wanted to participate in this idea of airbandre.com.
9:13 And I think it was those emails along with what Brian just said that kept us going with the idea like there there actually is something bigger here. People want this. Like they keep writing us about it. >> So basically what happened next? What happened next is we realized we wanted to build a site where you could book a room anywhere around the world. But to start off with, we had this kind of fear or you know there's a bit of uncertainty. We didn't know if people would be comfortable booking rooms with strangers all over the world. And since we launched at a conference previously, we'd say why don't we instead create a site where you can book housing for conferences all over the country.
9:49 And so that was the original concept. So we basically at this point we needed to get another person to help us build a site. Nate happened to be Joel's old roommate. I remember looking at Joe and saying who's the most talented engineer that you know. Nate was the person he happened to be the person that was brought together through this proximity and of this apartment. We brought Nan on and we basically created the next version of the site to provide housing for South by Southwest. This was in March of 2008. and you know, at that time we thought, you know, I remember meeting the guys at we remember we were we met the guys at Justin.tv. And I remember you know, we saw all the success they were having. We figured, oh, we're just going to build this site and like a couple months from now, we're going to have like the traction that Justin.TV has. We're going to have like millions of users. Everyone's going to love it because we're like, it's such a good idea. And because it's such a good idea, everyone's going to love it. And all I can say is that that was the beginning of a very, very long road before we actually started getting a lot of traction.
10:47 So we sometimes refer to this period where you're not getting a lot of traction as the trough of sorrow. Can you tell me a little bit about how it felt and how you kept yourself going through this time because a lot of founders would give up >> the the trasar was a very generous term for this time of air bed and breakfast because as Brian mentioned we thought the market opportunity was housing for conferences and that's how we labeled the website airbed and breakfast housing for conferences and we thought that we would target conferences around the country around the world and people could post rooms to those conferences and then travelers could book those rooms and we could make a great connection and people could sleep air bed and save money. what happens though is that conferences have an end date and at that end date they're over until the next year. And so what we found ourselves doing was kind of like marketing in a hamster wheel from conference to conference. We put all this effort into marketing to specific event. And when the event's over, all those rooms that had got posted to our website were lost. so we found ourselves just kind of overworking ourselves. really just trying to get the website to stick. We totally believed in the idea. We knew that one day people would use this. We just needed to find the right sort of application for it. and that brings up a great story that Brian has about his trip to South by Southwest, which fundamentally changed the website forever.
12:05 >> Yeah. Yeah. So, >> what happened? >> This is the first time we really used it, right? We remember we started the site as host to make money. So, for South by Southwest in March of 2008, we decided to use it now as a traveler. And remember at the time, you know, on now on Airbnb, you can just put your credit card in and book a room anywhere around the world just like you're booking a room on orbits. I mean, it's not too much difference. It's a a little bit different, but back then it was a bit closer to Craigslist. In other words, we just connect you with people, then you would message them. We didn't even have a robust messaging system. So, you'd eventually email them and you'd have to work out the payment. Basically, you'd have to show up a money. So you know I booked a room with this guy named Is that you're saying I I booked a I booked a room with this PhD candidate from University of Texas at Austin named Tiandong. He was this Vietnamese student. He was really really cool guy. He picks me up the airport. they had like him and his girlfriend had prepared a like a a traditional Vietnamese dinner for me.
13:04 They had like this nice air bed laid out in the river living room and it was awesome. But then an inevitable awkward scenario happened. He asked me, "Okay, where's my money?" And he didn't ask it exactly like that, but it did feel a bit like a you know, pretty it was pretty awkward. And I remember I remember telling Joe after like we have to really address this, you know, and of course, you know, looking back now, it's a great business model, right? Handle payments through the site, take 10%. You have a business model from day one. But that wasn't how we were thinking about it back then. And how we're thinking about back then was, man, this is going to be really weird if we end up becoming really big and we have all these users just exchanging cash in person. I mean, what value are we really adding? So, we took that experience, Jessica, and there were two things that surfaced to the top. The first was that it's super awkward to exchange money in person, so let's bring it online with a credit card. And the second thing was more email started to flood in. I remember we got written up on Mashable and some of these other tech blogs based on our South by Southwest site and we started to get a flood of emails again from people all around the world and people were saying I want to list my room or travel through your website but there's no event that's taking place.
14:09 How can I do this? And so we started to kind of broaden our perspective of what the site could actually be. And we said two things are going to change for the next relaunch. We're going to make it really easy to pay online credit card and we're going to open it up to be a travel website. Events can participate if they want to, but you don't have to have an event in order to travel or host on air bed and breakfast. I also want to make one random comment and that is that you can't tell because we're not going to move the camera. But where we're sitting right now, we're not, you know, we're sitting in an actual bedroom. So, and part of the company works in this bedroom. This is like soundproof.
14:42 Anyone working in the phone is in this bedroom. Behind us, behind this wall is a living room. And this is where the rest of the company works. Well, the reason I bring this up is that this bedroom was a bedroom that of other old roommate Phil Reer. And Phil worked for Justin.tv. So you ask us like what was our connection to Justin TV? Well, it was because that we one day randomly met a guy on Craigslist that needed a bedroom.
15:07 And so this was separate from Airbnb and breakfast. This is actually before airbend breakfast. Joe, you know, he he this guy Phil, he's working for adjust TV. He ends up becoming a roommate and so here independently we start this website. We find out that Phil is working for this company that is like getting a ton of traction. We didn't really know what Y com at the time and that that was pretty much our introduction to the startup world. You know we you know we did not come from a background. We we're like you know you you know so that that was really our background and I remember at that point we then met up with Justin, Michael, EMTT and the guys and it was over the course of that summer that you know we really got inside view of like what it would be like to have a real startup.
15:45 I remember we go to their offices and they had like I think 10 or 12 employees at the time that seemed like a ton of people when you're just two two or three guys with a few guys working on a project you know really struggling your living room >> and so they were really important to us. over the course of that summer we we basically said okay now we're going to build a site where you can book a room anywhere around the world with three clicks three clicks to a book button and that was the vision and that and and so I think everyone thought that was awesome and the next thing people said is when we said guys we're going to build this amazing site three clicks of booking but you're it's going to be so easy to use everyone says makes sense but how are you going to get people to use it in other words it's a marketplace anyone who knows anything about certain marketplaces the hard part is a chicken the egg problem. Buyers only want to go where sellers are. Sellers only want to go where buyers are. It was a really, really challenging problem. And for a few months, we didn't know how to crack it. We're really chopping away at this point. you know, I mean, at this point, I think my bank account was in the negative zone. You know, we're like at this point probably living on credit card debt for months at a time. It was like really, really challenging. you know, we just, we just believed so much in this idea that like things like that.
16:53 Those were like distractions. We weren't letting that stop us because we knew this big opportunity was so so big. And so I remember one day we're we're sitting at home and we see this like blog post and it's a photo of Barack Obama in Portland, Oregon. This was during the Democratic primaries and he's speaking in front of 70,000 people. And at that time like all the candidates are speaking in front of like 5,000 people. And so this is the first this is like the first big speech he had, right? And it was so many people. Everyone started saying this is like a phenomenon. It's like the really in the beginning stages of that. And then it became clear he was going to win the nomination. And so when it we became clear where he was going to win the nomination, it also became clear to us opportunity right here. We started noticing there were news articles, housing crisis in Denver, there are 27,000 hotel rooms. Barack Obama's getting such big crowds that they're moving him from the Pepsi arena, which is 20,000 people to this huge 80,000 seat Invesco field. So the New York Times, CNN, they're all doing these headlines. Housing crisis in Denver. At that point, we said, "That's our that's our chance. What we're going to do is we're going to get a ton of press by having an answer, high-profile answer to a high-profile problem." And it was within a matter of a couple weeks that here we are sitting in a living room with no money, right? Like like just a tiny little website that no one ever heard of to a few weeks later sitting in a living room with no money, but we were being interviewed by CNN and the New York Times. So, it really changed our trajectory.
18:17 Yeah, it was it was pivotal that we timed the launch specifically with the DNC in Denver. It was a big big problem as Brian just said and we ended up getting I think close to about eight or 900 people in Denver to list their properties on on the website and this is the first time where we actually had like like serious inventory like serious selection. So people were coming to the website and they could actually find what what they were looking for whether you know their family was coming to the DNC indiv individual traveler. so we got our first taste of what the website would be like if it actually we had 800 listings in every city around the world.
18:52 And that was enough to inspire us to to keep going forward. >> The wiggles of hope. >> The wiggles of hope. >> And that was a little wiggle for sure. >> So the Justin TV guys told you about Y Combinator, right? Is that Are they the ones who encouraged? How did that happen? >> We have to give them a lot of credit. yeah, they they exposed us to the the Y Combinator philosophy, I guess you could say. in the sense that they were they were so giving.
19:22 >> here we were, two design guys didn't know too much about starting a web startup and they they really took us under the wing and said the guys like you're making these are all the mistakes you're making. If you want to correct them, you you have the option to do these different things. And they they really just were very giving of their knowledge and and very open to to meeting with us. And it it's very reflective of of Y Combinator.
19:48 >> So you apply and I remember our interview. I remember specifically you showed up with the serial boxes. >> So So this this leads into so yeah I think we can we can transition from the DNC to the start of Y Comer and in between the DNC and the start of Y Cominator is Yeah. Yeah. So a lot of companies fail because even though here's the thing, right? Like you have this amazing idea. You're working for so long. For so long you have no money. But what keeps you hopeful is that you're going to launch in Techrunch. You're gonna get this huge spike. Everyone's going to know about you and you're going to be living happily ever after. Right?
20:21 That's what keeps you going. The hope. So very few people I mean some people never even get to the launch. They quit. But a lot of people get to the launch, they get a ton of press and then you know you know you guys have this famous graph where it goes like like you're you're struggling, you get this tech crunch, right? Spike and then you crash, right? And then then you find out where your where your real traffic is and then you've got this really long trasaro. And that's the true trasaro. I mean the one before you launch is just get your product out there release. And then after that so here we were you know we we were so excited to DNC. We had all these people using in Denver and I remember it was so exciting. We were at the Democratic National Convention. We come back to San Francisco and we had no users. Like we like that that that was entire user base. It it was back to almost nothing. And so, you know, we had to basically figure out, okay, we made a little money for the DNC. We have more red checks coming up. You know, we hadn't taken any investment at this point. And, you know, it was it was absolutely no business going on. I remember at the time we were talking about for fun, what would we do if we could give like hosts a little like a little breakfast kit or something that they could give to the travelers coming to the Democratic National Convention.
21:29 We did the same thing for Republican National Convention as well. And we decided it would be a we we'd give them a non-p perish breakfast. Well, what is a non-perasel breakfast? It's probably cereal. There's not many other things you could do. And the great thing about cereal is if we designed these cereal boxes, you know, it'd be very easy to brand it. And so we started like, and this is mostly for fun. We weren't like thinking this as a huge business opportunity. It was just for fun. So we like we're just like late at night one night, we were thinking like, well, what would a Barack Obama cereal look like?
21:54 What would a John McCain cereal look like? And so for Barack Obama, it was just so obvious, right? What would a Barack Obama cereal be? it would be Obama O's, right? It' be so essentially Barack Obama would be Obama owes the breakfast of change and Captain John McCain, he was a captain in the Navy. So that's when we said it would be Captain McCain's just like Captain Crunch. And so we start designing this box and before we knew it, we had this like because we're both design you know, grads, we had this really really cool design box. Let's just say one thing led to another and we ended up collaborating with an illustrator, a photographer, a printer, and we put together the the now famous Obama O's and Cat McCain's serial box collector's items. And we proceeded to not only sell these on the internet, but we sent these to every major press outlet across the United States. So Jay Lennon has a a box of these. Oprah has a a pair of these boxes. NBC, name a press outlet, they got a a pair of these boxes. We thought it was be great exposure for the website. That's that's why we made the box. Yeah. And there's some really cool stories about the box itself. First of all, here's like a secret to getting press. If you want to get press for something, imagine if we just emailed somebody a screenshot of that cereal as compared to somebody in the mail getting this, right? And then you suddenly you open this. This is on your desk. Not everyone that we mail these do we get stories from. But of course Techrunch picked this up. But I mean this was gone on CNN. It was on I believe Good Morning America >> Today Show or I'm sorry it was on Today Show. It was on like >> is in Fortune magazine. It was in a publications and and broadcast. It was on like 30 or 40 different like local news stations all around the country.
23:36 >> And the coolest part about this is that these cereal boxes we sold them because they're collector's edition, right? They're all you can see here this one's unnumbered, but it's like an extra one, but I'm sorry. Yeah, I'm holding the wrong part. So, we we would have these individually numbered and we sold them because there were like really they're not just regular ser cereal boxes. They're like really premium boxes and there were very few of them. So, we sold them for $40 a box and we weren't sure if we'd be able to sell very many.
24:02 But because, you know, we couldn't do a big run. We couldn't just sell them for $4 cereal boxes. We're like, "These are you're not going to open these. You're going to save these because we've like spent so much time on them." Sure enough, because we got all this press, we end up selling 800 boxes. That's over $30,000. We sold $30,000 of cereal. The cereal was actually gave us more funding than Y Combinator when you think about it.
24:23 >> So, it's actually pretty funny. And I remember at one point my mom asked me because like the business was making really very not very much money. The cereal made us all this money. At some point, mom asked, "Are you guys still a website? Are you a serial company now?" And at some point there we were like we had to think about it like >> people people were very confused at this point like what kind of company are you?
24:42 We're pedaling serial on the internet and we're trying to like get a web startup going but you know I think this is like this speaks to the nature of our website company the way it's run like we're extremely frugal because we started with nothing like we literally had our credit cards to run our company off of from the early days. So, we've always had to like get creative to figure out ways to make money. >> You guys hustle, that is one thing that is very distinctive about you guys.
25:11 about your art backgrounds, you guys both graduated from Risie. What have you done in addition to designing these gorgeous cereal boxes? What else have you done that from a design standpoint to help make Airbnb so successful? Well, I I think I I hope that one of the greatest contributions that we make I think there's maybe two contributions that this company like two major contributions. One is the just general travel industry if we can like hopefully kind of turn it on its head and make people think about the space differently. I think another big contribution that we can make though is that we change the perceptions of what the importance of design is to a startup. I think that I've heard I feel like I get this impression from other companies that they think that maybe I've heard this that sometimes designer is is thought of as a headcount, right? Like you hire a designer and they do design. And what they mean by design is making it look like quote unquote pretty or making it look nice. And we don't think of design as something that just makes it look nice. Design isn't how it looks. Design is how it works. I think that some really important people have even said it. I mean Steve Jobs himself said design is how it works and technology enables that to happen. so so you know when we're like coming up with things I think that's the most important distinction because the company two of the three founders are designers. We're really thinking about problems from a design perspective.
26:29 >> What's really unique Jessica is that both Brian and I studied product design or industrial design. and when you focus on industrial design, like designing the product, you're really designing an experience and it just takes the shape in the form of fill in the blank, a computer mouse, a laptop, a shoe. and I think a lot of those same principles that you are going through your mind as you're designing an experience for somebody as they open a package and pull a product out and turn it on for the first time. The same thing is running through your mind as you're thinking, okay, somebody comes to our website to search for accommodations.
27:01 How, how, what happens next? and you're just in this mindset of like, how can I make this experience so easy for them, so simple that they don't have to think about it. >> Design allows you, I think, to or it trains you to empathize with your users. You're constantly putting yourself in their shoes, thinking, "If I were them, what would I be feeling right now? What would I be doing right now?" And so, you know, not to say that we're not analytics driven or metrics driven, but we also do a lot of things that designers do. Well, what are some of the things designers do? They do a lot of field work. That's what they call field work. going into the field. So what was our version of that? Well, I told we told this a little bit on our mix interview and part of it was inspired by Paul Graham. I mean, we generally believe this anyways. we just thought because no one else that we knew in startup culture were like they weren't meeting their users. They weren't like doing getting their hands dirty. Paul Graham really gave us permission, but what do you tell us to do? Paul Graham told us do things that don't scale. It's kind of a designer's philosophy anyways, right? In other words, you know, if you're like, you know, our background in industrial design, so like I remember one of the things I used to design, I used to design medical equipment. So, if we were designing medical equipment, this is like actual hardware, right? Like you would go to the hospital, watch the patients, right? You would observe and you'd try to even empathize. Maybe you'd be laying down on the table like you wouldn't just be like giving them like five samples and doing like AB testing and the different samples. You would actually have to put yourself in their shoes. We decided we have to do that with this company as well. on the version of that was we went to New York City and we during Y Commentary and this is kind of leading into the where Y Cominator started taking off. I remember we're sitting in Mountain View, California at where probably you are now. and we're s we're meeting with Paul Graham and he he asked us where are all your users and at this point after the DNC we didn't have a lot but the few that we had were in New York City. We said, "Well, our users are in New York City." And we're talking about how our users are meeting in person. And he says, "So all your users is in New York City. That's where you're making all your money, but you're here in Mountain View. Why are you still here?" And I kind of almost like went over our heads like, "What do you mean why are we still here?" It's like, "Why are you still here? Go to New York." And of course, this is in the context of we told him that we went to the to Washington DC for the inauguration. We told him how we did a party, like a meetup, kind of a Yelp style meetup. We met our users. He said, "Do the same thing in New York." We went to New York and we decided to do one other thing. And the other thing we decided to do is we wouldn't just have a party. We wouldn't just meet our users.
29:16 We because we're both designers, we'd take photographs of their place. We knew how to take really great photographs. And the excuse of photography was basically to let you into their homes, right? And so over that process, you'd be sitting there, you'd figure you they'd tell you about the space, how they were having rent problems. They'd tell you their story. They'd pull up the website. They'd show you them using it and like all the problems they're having. They were never going to email you this, right? you can have a big feedback button on your website. You're not going to observe things because they didn't know they were doing those things. You had to observe them. And so that was like the the kind of fieldwork that we did was really important. I came from a design background. And this this was again Paul Graham's advice is, you know, I remember specifically going into office hours with PG and having 12 really well thoughtout strategies to present to him of how we were going to spend our Y Combinator weeks together.
30:02 And he basically looked at all 12 of them and said, "These are crap." and we looked at each other and we're like, "Oh crap, what how what are we going to do?" And he said like, "Go to where your market is, like go to New York." So, I remember that weekend we we booked tickets to New York City. Brian and I, we had this camera equipment. We're trudging around the snow in Manhattan and Brooklyn going door todoor to our users homes and sometimes you'd end up spending like hours with them, right?
30:26 They'd have just so much information and and so so many good insights on like what we were doing wrong with the website. And so, we were just soaking it up like a sponge. We come back to San Francisco literally just in time for the Y Combinator dinners. I remember we'd be the first ones there to at Mountain View. We'd run in with our luggage. We we'd get dinner and then head back to San Francisco. and we we take all that knowledge that we got from New York and we we'd start to apply it here in the office and we we'd make changes very quickly to the website. We were a threeperson team at that point.
30:57 So we could and I remember emailing some of our users that we met in New York and they were so thankful. They they couldn't believe that the co-founders of company flew across the country to meet them to take photos to listen to their problems and then they fixed the problems within like a week. So right away we were starting to get really passionate very loyal user base in New York City and we learned from that. we continue to grow it out. That's another thing is a lot of people when they have a website if you ask them like very few people just anywhere in the country have met a founder of a website that's like that they use maybe on a daily basis and so you know I think we take it for granted living here in in Silicon Valley right like everyone seems like they run into people that start websites but even in New York City and especially if you're just talking about other cities outside of New York and San Francisco very few people have ever met somebody that started a website that they used on a daily basis and so that's actually really really meaningful like you can't take little things like that for granted. And also, you know, your users will do work for you. That's another thing that's really really important. And they will tell you what you need. but like they're not just going to be like giving you feedback through email. Like you're you're you're you're getting 10% if you're waiting for feedback to decide what users want. And if you're looking at the data, you may or may not be looking at the right thing. So you've got to really balance your the feedback emails you get and the data you get you're you're reviewing with like the observations because the observations will tell you a story that it's very very difficult.
32:26 >> So I think I remember you guys like coming to dinner with a rolly bag. I just have that memory in my head. tell me a story about when something went hilariously bad. >> Oh god. Oh god. >> Which one? >> Yeah, we had we had so many stories. So this is a story that we haven't told in a in a a public forum before. so this is the first time. We told it once at a Y commentary dinner. So let's go back to exactly a year ago. It was January 2009 and you know I was going to go to New York City and I'm on my way to go to New York City for a meetup, right? So we we do meetups all over the country right now and we go from city to city doing a meetup. Well, this is our going to be our first one in New York City. We had just went down one in Washington DC. So, I figured our New York City meetup is going to be huge.
33:18 And you know, when you're you're just starting up, you tend to like think things are going to be way bigger than they are. And so, we thought we're going to have this huge meet up in New York City. So, I remember calling Joe up. So, what happened? I get a call from Brian on the morning of December 31st. He said, "Joe, I'm going to have the meetup tonight in New York City." We put an email out the night before to all of our hosts and we're thinking, you know, there's a couple hundred hosts in New York City. we'd be lucky to get half of them. So, like 200 people could come to this meetup. 100 people to 200 people.
33:45 And Brian says, "Joe, I want you to get me some press. I want you to to see about getting your news to show up." I'm thinking, "All right, Brian, I'm back here in San Francisco. It's like 9 in the morning, just waking up, and I'm I get on the internet, and I Google all the local news stations in New York City. I find the numbers for all the producers and all the hotlines at these local news stations in New York and I call every single one of them and I tell them that there's this amazing website called airbendre.com and there's hundreds of people in New York City hosting New Year's Eve travelers tonight and they're going to get together for a meetup. There could be 100 to 200 people there. So I go down the list and you know producer is saying I'm going to call you back maybe can you do a story and then one person says this sounds really cool I'm going to call you back and and I think what Joe's leaving out is that is that you know so one of the tricks we do is we'll go to a city and the way you get press in a city is you basically it's you you you use the scarcity principle and that we're going to be here just tonight. This is your one shot. They didn't know they were going back to New York every single weekend. So we told them we're here just tonight, right? if you want to do this interview, you have to do it tonight.
34:52 So, they can't mold it over. You have to make a yes or no decision. So, Joe start at the top of the list and I'm sure the first time he told them, he told them, "Meup's going to have like a hundred people. It's going to be really interesting." They probably said no. So, the next person he calls up, the next press, he calls up another local television station. He probably tells them now he's getting a little more excited. It's going to be 150 people.
35:09 It's going to be really crazy. We have people from all over. They still say no. >> The number the number did tend to grow a little bit. I'm sure by the last time he the last person he promised here I'm telling Joe we're going to have like 50 people and he probably told the person we're going to have hundreds and hundreds of people from all over the world. Of course I still thought we're going to have about 50 people. So remember here we are. I'm about to host our first meetup in New York City. We're going to supposedly have users from all over the world at this meetup. This brand new concept and press has now committed. Joe got what channel?
35:40 >> it was one of the the channels in New York said we're going to send a crew out. We're gonna do the story. We'll meet him at the bar. >> So Jude calls me up and says, "I got it, buddy. I did it. We got press. They're coming. They're going to cover the party. So you're going to have this meet up in this bar." And this is New Year's Eve, by the way. All right. So you can imagine like New Year's Eve, and I'm We think we're going to like a huge turnout. So I get to before the the press gets really early to the party, and it turns out that there are hosts right next to the bar. and so the we we basically tell the press, well, since you're waiting an hour, why don't you do a quick interview at this apartment and you can meet the these two hosts. They're the Rad Brothers and they're like our most prolific hosts in New York City. These two guys, u, Michael and David Rad. They're rabbit bar. They're, I think, like 25 years old. And so they end up hosting a brother and sister at the time from Paris. And so they decided to cut a little B-roll basically to kill time.
36:34 Say, "Okay, cool. We're going to film basically like this experience, this this Parisian brother and sister staying at this apartment in in the East Village. And then they're like, I know they're like I can see them looking at the clock. Okay, when's this big party? When's this big party? So, we go back to the meet up. It's supposed to start at 7:00. I'm expecting to walk in. This place is going to be packed, right? We're about to walk into a bar. There's going to be people everywhere. They're going to be cheering. I walk in the bar and I see two older obese guys with like hats on slumped over a bar like just drinking like like a beer in each hand and I'm thinking, "Holy shit." Excuse my language, but like we were I was pretty nervous at this point. I'm like, "Oh my god." First thing I'm wondering is, "Do we give them the wrong bar? Did we give them the wrong time? Where are all of our users?" And so the the the the press reporter of this woman, she's probably like in her early 30s and she's like really really anxious cuz they had that big van outside the bar, right? you know, with the human antennas and they had a camera guy, they had a sound guy, they had a lighting guy plus her and this is with their story. They were going to have like the it was the evening news on New Year's. This was a big story. They were going to have the story about us hosting and there's no one in the bar. And it also turns out that the Rad Brothers, I told them ahead of time, make 50 gift bags so I can give out and I can give them out on camera.
37:49 And they didn't tell me what was in the gift bags. So the Rad Brothers make these 50 gift bags. So, I have these 50 gift bags sitting next to me. And it turns out that in the gift bags are just energy drinks and condiments. And they didn't know press was going to be there. So, they thought they just trying to do something really funny. They thought that'd be funny. I thought it wasn't quite as funny when I'm on camera and I look like a total creep and the local news a guy with 50 bags of condoms at a bar by himself. Like, it doesn't come out the same way. So, anyways, we're thinking, all right, well, won't look as bad if all these people come and I don't look like some random guy. But no one ends up coming.
38:23 So, here we are sitting at a bar. I had ordered like I think 10 or 20 shots for like all the people that come in. I'm just a guy with a bag of condoms and 20 shots of like vodka. It's like not going real well. And I'm like sweating. I'm like, "Oh my god, this is so embarrassing." Everyone's pissed off at me. The bartender's pissed cuz like like the camera crews in there. The press people are so angry at me. They're like, "All right, let's just get this over with." And they basically said, "We'll just do an interview at the bar." So, they try to put the light on the camera and we're in the bar and the bar says no, you can't film in here. They kick us out. The like the light the sound guy's like yelling at me like this is so unpro like they're just like really angry because like they're waiting for hours want to do a story. So, I end up going in the street and we're we're trying to stand like I'm trying to stand in the entryway of the bar and they're going to finally film me and the bar is like no you can't film even the bar. So then they decide well let's just film you walking down the street. We decide because we have no users showing up to the party, we end up just coring people on the street and asking them to like pretend like they're our users and like walk down the street with us and actually they end up doing a real piece and the Rad Brothers end up showing up and then there's a whole bunch of random people that are walking behind us and the news made it look like they were our users but they were just random people.
39:37 They needed a story and yeah, so that was that was a pretty interesting thing. You know, it turns out at the end of the day it was a great story. Why? because they couldn't do a story at the meetup. There was no meetup. What they end up showing they end up doing going back to the B-roll of the Parisian couple or the brother and sister staying in apartment in the East Village. And to us that was actually the perfect story because that was promoting the website not some party. So it worked out for us but in a very unexpected way.
40:05 >> That is like my favorite story. I have to say the gift bags with the condoms and the energy drinks is just really out there. but the interesting thing about that story though is that it shows what kind of hustle you have. Like Joe, it's not easy to get a TV producer to come and do a story on you with no notice. And Brian, like you had a series of disasters and like it turned out you figured out a way for it to turn out well for you guys. So that that's a good startup story.
40:34 >> We have a good update for you, Jessica. So our first New York meetup had zero to one person show. That was our New York meet up. >> And our New York meetup this past year in in December of '09 had over 150 people. So we made some progress. >> Wow. >> And and there's a lesson there. And that is that when we first started, we grew so much slower than I thought we would. We were looking at the guys at Just Night TV and everyone else. We heard these stories about how, you know, Facebook was building two weeks and within like that a period of that time like a certain percentage of the hard population was using it. You hear all these romantic stories. You think you're going to build something and everyone's going to love it. We came up with the idea in October of 2007. It was like 16 months from the time we had the idea the time we had any momentum. I mean 16 months. It may even been longer than 16 months. So in general when you first start you think like you're just going to have the idea like first of all your idea is going to change. Our idea changed. Our original idea was airbs for conferences and our idea maybe changed less than a lot of startups common air but we are not airbabs for conferences.
41:33 you know, it's very different than what it was when we started. And I think that, you know, we were pretty close to to being pretty focused. The other thing is that you're going to just struggle and that you're going to have this trough. No matter how good your idea is, even if you are going to be that home run, that like one company is going to become hugely successful, there's a very good chance that you're going to be struggling for months and months. It could be years before something really takes off, especially something that like is a a network player, is a platform play like ours. So, you know, now I can say that I think maybe things are happening faster than we expected, but things are always happening way slower than you expected until one point you reach this like kind of tipping point and then they start just accelerating and then at that point it is that like that those are stories you always hear. You always hear the stories about how it's growing so so fast. I think people sometimes gloss over the trough of sorrow, but I don't think it's that unique. I think it happens all the time. I just think it's not super interesting. It's not the most exciting part of the story. So, it's usually condensed. It's like, oh, they struggled for a little period of time. They didn't you don't get the sense of how long it was.
42:31 >> So, you guys I remember when you came to interview and when I first started to get to know you, you guys definitely had a strong sense of corporate culture. can you talk about some of the things that you think are really important for your your culture? >> We'd love to. and I think a lot of these things stem from the fact that our home is our office. And for me personally at least, I know that when I wake up in the morning and I walk down the hall to work, it better be a hell of a lot of fun because I'm doing it every day for 12 plus hours a day. I think that's kind of like one of the roots of this idea of creating a super fun workplace that everybody can have a great time working in. You when you you don't even feel like you're coming to work. You feel like you're coming to a team that's working on an exciting project together. And so along with that, we we come up with some extremely fun ideas to keep the workplace you know, loose and creative.
43:27 >> Yeah. >> so, you know, for example, we every Wednesday we take a recess and we go to a park that's about a block and a half away and we will do different activities together as a team. Usually it's kickball, sometimes it's ultimate frisbee, but it's very much something that's along the lines of like elementary school. And it's just something that breaks up the day. We get outside, get some fresh air, get some sunshine, and everybody comes back really energetic and really enthused.
43:52 >> every, it just so happens today is a Monday, and every Monday is actually we call mustache Monday. And so, I actually have my mustache right here. At least if I can put it on. There we go. >> Oh my god. >> So, we'll actually be in the open office like this. And, it >> mustache Monday. >> Oh my god. Look at this, you guys. Does everyone wear a mustache? >> yeah. Even the girls have a mustache, but you know, you don't have to wear it all day. It's actually hard to talk on the phone with a mustache, but >> a fake mustache.
44:23 >> Yeah, a fake mustache. Yeah, I think you could talk with a real one. But yeah, so I mean I I think the the key is it's going to be hard for me to keep talking with this thing on, so I'm going have to take this off. But I think I think the key is just like just like having fun. You know, a lot of people are motivated by doing like like I think a couple things. Number one, they want to do something they feel like is important. So, we want to be able to tell people that what we're doing if we're recruiting is we're doing something really important that are affecting people's lives. And number two, we're gonna have fun doing it. And what do we mean by that? Like the mustach thing is just an example of saying that we don't take ourselves maybe too seriously. That we also have fun doing it. That we don't want it to to feel like you're in high school again, like sitting in a room, you have to be like accountable and all like you you can do things of significance and have fun doing it. so, you know, we also take trips together. We hit milestones. We travel. you know, I know that Google, you know, they have their 20% time and Google's 20% times, you can work on a project of your interest. Now, our 20% time, it's not to qualify. It's not 20% time. It's probably more like 5% time or 10% time, but our equivalent of that is traveling.
45:25 So, we have everyone in our company travel and you spend a portion of the year just traveling using the product. And in fact, everyone in the company had to book, you know, had had to book a room this month and travel and stay somewhere. a lot of the trips were local, but we really try to make sure that we get to travel and really have a lot of fun. >> That's fabulous. I wish you guys were around when I was before I was doing Y Combinator.
45:49 >> so you guys had a really unique way of motivating yourselves and tracking your progress if I remember during YC. Can you tell me a little bit about that? >> We did. Well, when we went to YC, we were we were struggling. I mean, we were on life support. The company had almost died like four or five times before that and we we had to get we had to do something. and we knew that by the end of Y competator our our goal Nate Brian and myself we committed to being a ramen profitable company which is the the term that that PG coin. Yeah. I remember actually PG said I I think we're meeting in the very beginning of Y Comer and I remember PG he you know this is when people were not that they're not nervous about the economy now but exactly a year ago they were even more nervous. there was a lot of uncertainty about people's ability to get investment. And he basically said the one two things. Number one, you better not need investors right now because it's going to be very hard to get money.
46:41 And number two, even if you do want them, you better be able to stand up there on demo day and be able to show a graph going up and be able to say this is in traffic. This is money. In other words, you better be able to say by demo day you're profitable one way or another. And to us, that meant ramen profitable. We had to get ramen profitable by demo day. And so that was our goal. And that's when during Y Cominated, the three of us like transformed into soldiers. And I remember Nate was sleeping on an airbed in my room because he he didn't even live in San Francisco. He lived in Boston at the time, but for 3 months, he slept on an air bed on the floor in my room. We all we woke up together. We ate breakfast together. We worked throughout the day together. We got dinner together. We went to the gym together.
47:19 We came back and we worked until we couldn't keep our eyes open anymore. And it was that day in and day out for the entire Y Combinator experience. And when we woke up in the morning and when we went to bed at night, there was something waiting for us on our bathroom mirrors. And it was a graph of our our revenue. And it each time we looked at it, it brought us back thinking it encouraged us to reach that Romney profitable mark by demo day. So we drew a red line of where we need to be ramen profitable on this graph. And we looked at it obsessively. So I'm going to show you this graph now.
47:52 >> Okay. >> It was on our our bathroom mirrors. It was on my bedroom door. It was everywhere around the office that I could possibly be. And we looked at this graph like incessantly. and so then you can see like right before demo day, we over here, sorry. we we hit the red line and it was like an amazing experience. I just, you know, we went up to the roof to drink champagne and celebrate. Yeah. >> Because it was such a milestone for us then.
48:19 >> What accounted for that huge spike there? I forget. Well, I think it was a number of things, but one of the most important things was that well actually here's a great another I have I have another amazing story actually this segus into one of my favorite stories and that is that I think a big part of it was meeting our users and there was one user in particular that I think changed the trajectory of our business forever. So here we were. Remember our vision was air beds for conferences. When we opened it up, it wasn't just air beds for conferences. It was air beds and bedrooms because you didn't have to just put air bed. It could be a real bed all over the world. And that was the vision.
48:56 And that was the vision in the beginning of Y Cominator until one day we go to New York City. We meet up with this user. This guy decides to put his entire apartment up. He has this beautiful penthouse apartment across the street from Carnegie Hall. His name's David. He decides to put it up. I remember we had a debate. Should we allow people to put up entire apartments? Yeah. In other words, should we allow people to put up space when they're not there? Do they have to be there with the person? And at first, we had the assumption they had to be there. That was that's airbed and breakfast. We're still calling and breakfast at the time. And just for because so many people wanted to do this and we met up with this guy, David, who turns out he was a musician and he was touring around the country. And so he told us every day, he says, "Brian Joe, every day I'm not home. I'm losing money because I'm paying that rent. Plus, I got to get places to stay on the road.
49:42 I'm losing money every time my room's not empty. We realized his hair is on fire. Like, we needed to solve help pro problem for him as well. And he was an amazing host. Well, it turns out that this guy, this drummer, he was a musician. He was a drummer. It was Barry Manalow's drummer. This wasn't just any drummer. This was Barry Manalo's drummer. And I can say with confidence that Barry Manalow's drummer changed the trajectory of our business because of him. you now don't you you now not only can rent out an extra bedroom or a living room but you can rent anything anywhere on the website and he was the one that really changed that assumption for us. It was the idea of meeting.
50:17 Well, suddenly what happened in the middle of Y Commonary, instead of having a whole bunch of bedrooms for $40 a night, we also let people put up their entire apartments for like a hundred bucks or 80 bucks a night. And suddenly started getting all these bookings. So this these rooms we never these apartments we never thought would ever even be on our site. And that really increased the revenue. I think that's one really important story. Y >> that was great. so in terms of your users, I know for a fact you've changed a lot of people's lives. can you give me one example of of a user who let you know what an impact Airbnb has had on them?
50:53 >> Yeah, I think when you meet you when you when you meet your users, you get a lot of stories and they'll tell you they're doing fun and they'll tell you all different reasons. The really important thing about our site is that you know we started right around the time that the economy started really you know going down and a lot of people you know of course the the the economy was very much driven by a housing crisis and that was very much related to us because here you had people who couldn't afford their mortgages they were stuck in these places and they or they couldn't afford to make their rent. They were laid off from a job and we hear these stories all the time. We're traveling around the country hearing these stories and it starts to resonate. You know, Paul Graham says, "Make something people want." And I think that for many people, Airbnb is something they want. We started realizing that for many other people, Airbnb was something they needed. It wasn't just something they wanted, it was something they needed.
51:45 And I remember this is actually two months ago right before Christmas, we get this email and it comes in our inbox. It went to all of us and it's from this host in New York City named Kendra. And I'm just going to read this email. It's a very short email, but you'll see what I mean. So, Kendra wrote to us and she said, "Hi, Airbnb." I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that you literally saved us. My husband and I just married this past May after having lost both our jobs and our investments in the stock market crash last year. We slowly watched our savings dwindle to a point where we didn't have enough money to pay our own rent. At that point, I re recently listed our New York City apartment on your site and was receiving so many requests that we decided to rent out our place and seek lowc cost of vacation accommodations for ourselves elsewhere. We even saved enough money to rent another apartment across the hall that we've now listed on your site as well. You gave us the ability to keep our home, travel together, and have the peace of mind knowing that we are going to make it through this challenging time in our life. Thank you so much.
52:51 Oh, you guys, that is so fabulous. Oh my gosh. Well, I'm going to try to wrap up soon, but I want to ask a couple specific questions about Y Combinator. think back. I know it was a year ago, but what would you say surprised you most about Y Combinator? Your experience with it? Well, I mean, the first thing that just came to mind when he asked that question was Paul Graham's permission for us to to do things that don't scale. I I never would have expected somebody of his caliber to say something that seemed so obvious or unapplicable to what we were trying to do, but I I remember that advice completely shocked me.
53:33 I think another thing that surprised us I had this perception before Y cominator that Y cominator was this thing that you do when you have an idea and you enter Y cominator with an idea and you know by you know over the course of like three months you build a product and over those three months it just takes off. The thing that surprised me was that we weren't the only ones. You know, we had an advantage in that we launched before Y Cominator, but a lot of the most successful companies, a lot of them had already launched or had already been working on their product. And I think the reason why is that there's this general notion that like it's a very very short process, but you know, it's such a long process. It it really is like a year kind of game, not a month kind of game before you even get any traction. And so I I think the fact that like having a built product going into Y cominator and even having users is a huge advantage. just being a little more mature that that was a big difference for us to just know that we that that was important. you know remember with Justin I TV they entered I think at a much earlier stage but for us it was a big difference.
54:37 >> and do you remember who your favorite dinner guest speaker was? >> Favorite dinner guest speaker. You had a couple of them that were really really good. I really liked was it Yuri from Google? He was the director of Google search. >> Oh, Udy Mambber. >> Thank you. Yeah, Udy was great. Greg Macke from Sequoia was really really great because he had really simple advice and we really liked a lot of the I I wasn't at the dinner but Javi Kurim from YouTube told some I guess some amazing stories about the early days of PayPal.
55:12 >> That's right. Jav had some really kind of detailed stories that you know about the early days of YouTube and how they hit this amazing like unprecedented growth through YouTube just things that you don't read about in a book. I I think the other thing that surprised us about Y Com is it felt like and not in a bad way but in a really good way it felt very competitive. In other words, we have you have these things like prototype day. Halfway through Y cominator, it's prototype day and you have to basically simulate demo day. And so or actually maybe prototype day is the one right before demo day. But what's the halfway point one? It's >> prototype day is the halfway point.
55:49 >> Okay. So prototype is the halfway point. Okay. And so what prototype day is is every single company has to get up there and basically do their demo day pitch. It's like only like a five or 10 minute pitch and they have to pitch to all the other Y comor companies. And Paul Graham doesn't ask you who's your favorite startup. What website would you use? He said if you could own 10% of any company, which company would you buy 10% stock in? And that was a really really good question because you had to you basically think like an investor and like you know they basically then there were rankings and so he'd announced the winners because everyone got three votes. it was very very competitive and then right before demo day he'd do the same exercise with the founders and so I think you know we were all like there's like it was a combination of on one side a ton of camaraderie because every single week we didn't we weren't really competing against each other it was more like they were pushing us we'd see all the work that some other startup would do and we're like man they really like like their whole website changed like two weeks ago you didn't get what they're doing suddenly it all came together and now you're like wow I thought we were like the big company but they're actually looking really really good and it pushed you to work really really hard. I think that starting a company can be in the early days one of the most solitary things you could ever do because starting a company when you have no business, there's a fine line between being an entrepreneur and being unemployed. I mean, what's really the difference when you're starting up? It's like a state of mind. If you have no customers, you have an idea, you're basically unemployed except you're telling yourself you're an entrepreneur at that point. And so, you know, the tropos was incredibly lonely point.
57:15 I think the press things kind of kept us going, but >> then we had each other. We had each other. >> Yeah. >> you know, I I think though that the camaraderie of Y Cominator, it's just it's just so so important. >> A that's nice. One other thing, Jessica, that came to mind that that surprised me about Y Combinator is actually how much it models a semester at Risie because a semester at Risie is this incredibly kind of stressful creative time where you have this like project that's due at the end of the semester and every week there's a weekly critique where you come in and present what you're working on with the rest of the class to get feedback and you're all kind of in it together, but at the same time you also want to be the best in the class. It all culminates the final critique where you present to advisors and critics and your classmates and teachers and that's very much what like demo day was like where you're presenting in front of you know the who's who of Silicon Valley and your peers. so I just felt like the same creativity that that Risy pulled out of me Y Cominator did the same exact thing.
58:17 >> Oh and the other really good thing about Y Cominator is the deadline right? I think there are so many people that are working on a website, they could probably just launch in a month if they had to. And you know what? They're not going to launch in a month. They're going to launch in like six months. And why? No good reason. They think it's not ready yet. Having that deadline means that you need to like know you're at a certain level. It's like it's like the right amount of pressure and you it's hard to simulate that, right?
58:40 >> and I I think it'd be really cool to ask yourself like what are other ways to simulate that kind of pressure? And we try to keep doing that ever since. But the people often tell you the hardest time they ever worked was during Y Cominator because you go from like nothing to this huge like Super Bowl type event for founder. I mean it just feels like a huge thing and you have a very short period of time and so you've got to work super super hard and you know that you can't just push. It's not like meetings that you can push back.
59:02 Oh, I'm going to wait to meet with investors like another month or I'm going to wait to launch. You've got to launch. You've got to you've got to do it by that date. I think that that pressure makes you do things you wouldn't have otherwise done. It puts you in an uncomfortable position. It makes you take chances. >> Yeah. Launch early and launch often. >> Yeah. >> Okay, guys. Last question. when you come talk to the new Y Combinator founders, you give a lot of really great advice. If each of you had to say sort of one bit of advice you'd give to aspiring founders out there, what would it be?
59:36 >> Specific to Y Cominator? >> No, anything. >> Just specific to starting a startup. There's so much. >> Just think of one one thing you like. >> Just think of one thing. You want to go? Okay. I'm just going to guess this is coming more streams of thought. a few a few things come to mind. so these aren't like just one thing, but I would say number one, the most important thing will ever pick is not your idea. The most important thing you will ever pick is your founder. That is my that's getting finding a founder is like being married. You're you're probably going to spend more time with your founder than you will your future wife. It's true. So, I would say like pick a founder that like you ideally you've known for a while. So Joe and I have known each other for 10 years, right? So it was like and we worked together previously. I think that the most important thing that we ever did and Nate I want to include him as well.
60:37 You know we also live together and we are all friends. the most important thing we ever did with Airbnb. And I hope the cereal proves that, you know, there was an element of luck here and there was an element of us stumbling upon a really good idea, but I hope we shown with like just the the cereal that you know there was something special with the team and that like if we had to start a different business with this team, we probably also would have been successful. I don't know about as successful, but we probably also would have been successful. So I think maybe that's just the one thing that stands out me is pick amazing founders. And I we met a number of people who they don't have any founders and and you ask like what do you do? And that's a little bit more challenging advice except that you know finding an finding finding founders is like finding a wife. You got to do a lot of dating. You've got in other words you've got to and and what that means is you have to spend a ton of time with a lot of different people and just you know if you're if you're like sitting in your apartment by yourself, you're never going to find another founder. So you have to just be out there and be like just being around other people that are also doing things that interest you.
61:31 >> There's so much trust that's involved. It's you know it's like in everything that Brian just said. I think a piece of advice that I'd give is to to really solve a problem that that you can empathize with. Like solve something personal to you so that you actually like really care about it. I have people that come up to me and they they have an idea for a company and it's an idea that their friend gave them because it was a friend's problem and immediately I I'm a little hesitant about about it because they haven't experienced it themselves. I think you know even going back to product design some of the best products come from solving your own problem. and I just think that you know if for somebody who's looking for an idea to start a company like just look around you like where do you feel pain throughout the course of the day? Like where's there a point in time where you're just like super frustrated like why is it why is this like this? It could be better. I think that's like the the perfect jumping point for an idea to start a company.
62:27 >> Yeah. And there's a few other things about that. you should probably not open an Excel spreadsheet before you have users. Like why are you opening a spreadsheet if you don't have users? And in other words, what that what what I think that really means is not like like reading about like really big market sizes and like trying to back into a really interesting business based on what you think in a macro level a really problem is and like trying to model what your exit could be. But like as Joe says like we stumbled upon this business, we were solving our own problem. solve your own problem and you probably have all different things on a daily basis that are annoying that if somebody would just come up with something for millions of people would probably want that as well.
63:07 >> Well, that is great advice you guys. I I'm going to let you go back to taking over the world. thank you enormously for letting me interview you. This was a lot of fun and hope to see you guys soon. >> All right. Thanks, Jessica. >> All right. Talk to you later. Bye.