When roommates Nate Blecharcyzk, Brian Chesky, and Joe Gebbia were developing Airbnb, they didn’t always see eye to eye. While they had a bond, they had plenty of differences, especially surrounding their different worldviews. Blecharcyzk looked at things through the perspective of an engineer, while Chesky and Gebbia were designers.
In order to maintain the strength of their working relationship, the three roommates chose to live together again, even after they’d separated into their own separate living spaces. During this time, they did everything together, from eating meals to going to the gym to working all day under the same roof. He told a crowd at Startup Grind that he felt this 24/7 working relationship created a bond that helped the three partners create a stronger product.
Core Values
From the start, Blecharcyzk and his business partners had core values in place that remained as the company scaled. As the company scaled, he found communication became one of the most important factors in ensuring the entire team stayed on track.
“When you can all sit around the same table, everything is super easy,” Blecharcyzk says. “You never even have to think about communicating because everything that’s happening, you hear and see yourself. But the minute you’re sitting at different tables, it actually starts to get a lot tougher. At the point of about eight people, you’re probably sitting at two tables. That’s when things got a lot harder.”
One Airbnb
Each year, Airbnb brings its entire staff into San Francisco for an event called One Airbnb. This is a big investment for the company, since approximately half of the company’s staff of 1500 must be flown in for the event. But the event is well worth the expense because of the results it brings.
“I can’t even put into words what this event is like and the kind of energy it produces and the camaraderie,” Blecharcyzk says. “At the end of the day, it’s not necessarily about the idea, it’s about the execution. And what’s going to be the gating factor on the execution? The people. So getting smart people who gel together well and are equally committed and passionate is worth everything.”
The Growth of Airbnb
From its early days in New York City, Blecharcyzk and his partners saw great response to Airbnb’s interface. In order to grow, however, they knew they would have to take Airbnb international. First the team did research on the top cities for tourists across the world, then they identified three things they needed to make the site as valuable as possible:
- At least a couple hundred properties
- Photographs of each property
- Reviews for each property
- Local expertise
“When you are doing something that touches real people and it requires their cooperation—their mental buy-in—we found it was extremely helpful to have locals to help us get introduced to certain networks, influencers, get partnerships, explain why certain things are different,” Blecharcyzk explains. “Today we have almost 20 offices globally in our key countries staffed with locals who promote Airbnb in the country.”
The Sharing Economy
Airbnb’s team recognizes that at its core, the sharing economy is about trust. In the beginning, Airbnb was challenged with establishing trust between two people conducting transactions through the site. They accomplished this through requiring members to provide comprehensive profiles that included photos, as well as working to create a payment system that provided a save environment for users to exchange money. When reviews were factored into this, Airbnb was able to create a recipe for trust with its site that kept customers coming back.
“When I think about what we and the sharing economy are accomplishing, I think back to the days when people were afraid to use their credit cards on the Internet,” Blecharcyzk says. “Or they were afraid to upload their real identity into Facebook. I think there’s a day in the future where the vast majority of people are suddenly much more trusting of others. Think about what we all could do together if we all could trust one another.”