- The speaker is on stage with Joe, who he has learned from in terms of product and design.
- They discuss the concept of doing things that don't scale in order to achieve growth.
- They talk about Airbnb's experience of going door to door in New York to take better photos of hosts' properties.
- This hands-on approach allowed them to identify user experience issues and make improvements.
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of considering the entire user experience, not just the website.
- They discuss the transition from the initial steps to designing for scale.
- Through this process, they were able to close the gap between their product and market, leading to increased revenue and word-of-mouth growth.

- Airbnb initially faced challenges in gaining trust from investors and users due to the concept of strangers staying in each other's homes.
- They focused on designing for trust by providing the right amount of disclosure in messaging to potential hosts, creating guidelines to encourage trust, and emphasizing customer service.
- Airbnb prioritized culture from the beginning and invested in hiring the right people who believed in their mission.
- They created Core Values Interviewers to ensure that candidates aligned with their mission and trained employees to conduct interviews on their behalf.
- Airbnb's office spaces are designed to resemble listings on their platform, reminding employees of the physicality and purpose of their work.
- They encourage employees to actively use the service to stay connected with their customers.

- The company aims to stay connected to its customers and avoid losing touch with them.
- They give employees a stipend credit to travel and use their own product, which helps improve the product through feedback and bug reports.
- The speaker discusses their annual tradition called "Jetpack" where they travel to a random destination with limited planning, which helps them understand the customer experience.
- The company initially focused on property managers for supply but realized it was not good for the customer experience, so they shifted their focus to primary residences.
- They recognized that accommodations are just one part of a larger trip experience and have ambitions to design the entire trip.

In 2012, Airbnb had the ambition to design the entire travel experience. In November, they launched "experiences" which allows travelers to find local activities hosted by Airbnb hosts.

- The speaker discusses the concept of doing things that don't scale for growth.
- Airbnb went door to door in New York to improve user experience and identify issues.
- The company focused on designing for trust and prioritized culture from the beginning.
- Employees are encouraged to actively use the service and provide feedback.
- They have a tradition of traveling to understand the customer experience.
- Airbnb shifted their focus to primary residences and aims to design the entire trip experience.
- In 2012, they launched "experiences" to allow travelers to find local activities.

Co-founder of Airbnb, Joe Gebbia, sits down with Reid Hoffman to talk about scaling the product for Airbnb, and how they thought about designing the full chain of the travel experience (not just the accommodations element).

This conversation took place at The Scaleup Offsite, a private CEO gathering hosted by Y Combinator Continuity and Greylock Partners in April 2017.

It is my privilege and honor to be on stage with Joe, who actually, in fact, I have learned a bunch of different interesting product and design things from.

Among other things, I haven't done this yet.

There's some furniture stuff that's coming out that I recommend to you and whatever degree we can talk about that we'll get to.

Part of the reason I wanted to do this section with Joe was that kind of a key theory around scaling is Actually in fact first doing things that don't scale across a set of different key places in the business and then working out to how to get that part to scale an Airbnb is like, you know the canonical example of being super design intentional on this.

And so let's start a little bit with kind of like how you guys got to thinking about, you know, going door to door in New York, what that experience was like, why you did it.

Clearly not scalable having the founders go door to door to New York or anywhere.

And then what's the design process that you run for beginning to think about everything from that initially super handcrafted into a kind of more scalable process.

Well, first of all, thanks for having me.

It's great to share these stories from like the early days of Airbnb when it was like truly like, you know, you're at war, trying to get product market fit, trying to get people to adopt this crazy weird service that no 1 would invest in.

I think reflecting back on that time of right before we tipped into scale, it's like how do you push so hard to get that, I guess, inflection point, right?

For us, up until that point, I feel like we had subscribed to this myth of Silicon Valley, which is that you have to solve problems scalably, right?

Because that's the beauty of the internet, that's the beauty of code.

1 line of code can touch an infinite amount of people.

And for many, for far too long, we tried to code our way through these problems that we were facing, and we were getting nowhere.

It was the quintessential Paul Graham trofasaro, like totally flat, I call it the Midwest of analytics.

And it wasn't until we had this session with Paul Graham where it was the first time somebody said to us, it's OK to do things that don't scale.

It's OK to step outside that myth and to try any and everything.

And the minute that that happened, the creativity just started to flow.

And we're like, OK, well, what could we do?

And it was looking at this pattern on our search results that hosts in New York, of which we had about 30 at the time, had really bad photos.

Like, they just didn't know how to take a good photo.

There were pictures at night, pictures with dishes in the sink, pictures of the toilet seat up.

I mean, you're looking at it, you're like, I wouldn't want to stay there.

Why would somebody pay for this kind of accommodation based on these images?

And that's where we're in the session with Paul Graham, it's Nate, Brian, myself, and we're all just huddled around.

We're like, well, if we can do things that don't scale, why don't we just go take better photos?

I've done photography my whole life, took some classes at art school.

Like, let's just go to New York for 1 weekend, and we have no idea what's gonna happen.

We'll email our community in advance, and we'll say, hey, we wanna come meet you, we wanna send a professional photographer to come shoot your place.

So we'd fly out, we rented this wide angle lens camera from a place in Union Square.

And you guys were the professional photographers.

That was the aha moment for a lot of hosts.

They show up at the door, like, hey, I'm Joe, it's nice to meet you, and they're looking over your shoulder, like, where's the photographer?

And then they put this look of disbelief on their face.

But then something really interesting happened.

We'd go in, we'd take photos, and we'd show them on the back of the camera and say, hey, what do you think?

They're like, oh, my God, my apartment looks so good.

Do you want to stay for some tea or coffee?

And so I'd sit down on the couch, and Our earliest customers, much like yours, were our zealots.

These are the people who were willing to take a risk, try a new, weird, crazy product, to be kind of outcast amongst their friends, which meant that they had a lot of knowledge.

They had a lot of insights into this kind of activity, because they were already doing it on other websites.

They were on Craigslist, they were on sublets.com, they were on HomeAway, blah, blah, blah.

And we're sitting down with them, they pull out their laptop, and they start showing us, and they start asking questions like, show me how you log into your account, show me how you evaluate a guest if you feel like you can trust them enough to let them into your home, how do you update your calendar?

And all of a sudden, Reed, right in front of my very own eyes, I saw UX, user experience train wrecks of people trying to navigate our beautifully designed product but not being able to do nearly what we intended them to do.

It would take them 12 steps to do something we thought was only going to take 2, for example.

People didn't know how to update the calendar, we were giving reviews the wrong way.

All of these train wrecks that we just had no idea were even a problem, right?

At this point, we're just in San Francisco trying to code our way through problems, we're shipping code around the world.

We never took the time to go out into the world and actually meet the people using our service.

Do you think it's worth talking at all about the experience, not just being the website, but the entire experience around it as part of that?

Because this is 1 of the things I learned from you guys.

I think even going back to the very origins of that core weekend with the 3 guests in our living room, I won't go through that story other than to say from the very beginning we thought about this more than just a place to put your head at night, a place to lay down.

Even from that very 1 weekend, we're like, what if we picked him up from the airport?

What if we provided breakfast in the morning?

What if we gave him a BART pass to get around the city with a map to San Francisco?

Even from the beginnings of this weird weekend project was this idea of how do you think about everybody's experience from end to end?

This water bottle is a great example of that.

A lot of people might look at this and say, oh, cool design of the water bottle.

A designer will look at this and say, actually, this is just 1 instance of a much bigger design.

The design of this started with thinking about the shelf experience inside the store, or maybe even further than that, the first time you heard about the Fiji brand.

And you think about each sequential step that somebody goes to, and this just happens to be an instance on a much larger holistic arc of how people experience a product.

So it's considering all of those things that you call design thinking.

It's just a consideration for each of the touch points that leads up to the moment when someone consumes your product, including what happens to this afterwards.

Like a good designer would consider, well, the materials in this and the labeling to show what you can do with it, which bin it goes in, so that it has a life cycle beyond its consumption, would be how we think about design at the company.

And then how do you move from those initial steps?

Because obviously the reason why Silicon Valley has this kind of classic only do things at scale is because you're worried about getting trapped in, like oh the founders have to go take all the pictures or we have to hire all the photographers who want to do this, and you get worried about, well that'll never scale and so it'll never work and so you shouldn't even start it.

And they get the kind of learnings about really talking to your customers, really getting a sense of it, helping build that initial kind of like, not just like, but love experience.

And so how do you go through the process where you then, because you have another design experience where you say, okay, we've figured that out.

Well, you know, there's something that magical that happened during that first weekend when we're taking these photos, we're seeing our customers use our product in their natural habitat.

They call this ethnographic research, right?

You go out into the world and you study something in its natural environment.

And it was through those interactions that we saw the distance, the gap between our product and our market.

It was this invisible gap that we couldn't see, and by going and talking to our earliest, most passionate customers, they helped shed a light on the distance between those 2 gears of our product and market coming together.

We'd take the pictures, we'd come home and upload them.

We'd also take their feedback and actually implement changes very, very quickly.

So Nate would, thank God he's a genius, he would take These ideas that would come back from guests and hosts, and you start implementing them like the same night.

So imagine you're like this customer of this website, and you get this email that says, hey, it was great to meet you.

Here's the photos of your place, we uploaded them for you.

And by the way, the idea you have for the calendar, we've implemented it.

And these 30 hosts that we met over the course of a couple weekends doing this, started to use the word Airbnb and love in the same sentence And something magical started to happen.

But we started to see more listings popping up in New York.

And This is the time we had no press, no online marketing, there was no possible way that somebody heard about it from us.

This was like the most pure word of mouth we probably have ever had.

Because I feel like when people fall in love with something you tend to tell others in your life about it, your neighbors, your colleagues, your coworkers, your family, your friends.

And so we started to see that 30 listings become 42, become 57, become 65.

And what was really cool was that these new hosts coming on board would see the quality of listings and be like, wow, I guess I need really good photos.

So we had quantity and quality going up at the same time.

And when that happened, people started booking.

They're like, oh, I see what I'm paying for.

And they have the locations that I'm looking to stay in.

This idea of traveling around the world to take photos of apartments, obviously is like, that can't last forever.

And so it was always our intention to really understand what that operation was from the inside out so that from any dimension we would understand the needs of the timing, like how long does it take to shoot an apartment?

How long does it take to get between 2 apartments in the city?

What kind of system do you need to upload photos quickly?

Like all these different things that you have to figure out.

So eventually over time, we threw product and engineering at it.

And today we have, God, Tens of thousands of photographers all over the world contract photographers that Shoot in every major city in the around the world And it's it's a free service that any host can can one-click and a photographer's up in about 2 days to take free photos of your place.

And that all started with just us like bumping into walls and stumbling through it and trying to figure it

The professional photographer shows up and says, here, we're the 3 co-founders, we're gonna talk to you.

And actually, and that was another lens of the, kind of the photography service was another lens of saying, look, yes, we're investing in this, this heavy cost human touch way of doing it, but it leads to a compounding effect within the marketplace and the network.

And that's another angle of the unscalable things that then later lead to scale as a way of doing it.

On your TED talk, you talked about designing for trust.

And I actually think that's 1 of the things that I think all the companies is super important for, because part of encountering a new company, a new experience, going and staying at someone's home, et cetera, but all of us have this experience.

What are some of the principles, either as stories at Airbnb or general principles of designing for trust?

I mean, I think people probably know the early stories that we tried to raise money, it didn't work out.

And we were just like scratching our heads, like why is this not working?

That this is like, there's a much more authentic way to travel.

And I think what we ran up against, looking back, I know what we ran up against was the age-old stranger danger bias that we've all been taught since we were kids.

And we had to figure out some way to navigate this bias in the world that, well of course, what investor would invest in a company whose business is about having strangers sleep in each other's homes?

And so we really had to get smart and clever and try a ton of different things to figure out how do you create a condition where people feel comfortable saying yes?

We had to create, you could say, Olympic-sized trust between people.

And it was, for us, I think when you face a challenge or you face a problem, you fall back on what you know.

And we fell back on design, because that's what we know.

And again, when you think about design, it's about the whole experience, not just the look and feel of something.

And so for us, it really begged that question, can you design for trust?

Can you actually create a condition where people feel comfortable saying yes to something like this?

And we weren't actually sure if you could.

I think through a ton of iteration, there's Some classic stories of the amount of disclosure that somebody provides when you're exchanging a message with a potential host has a lot of leading indicators to tell how much that host might accept your reservation request into your home.

For example, if you send a message that just says, yo, the acceptance rates dropped.

If you had a message on the other side that was way too long, like, I'm having issues with my mother, and all these things, acceptance rates also dropped.

So there's this sweet spot in the middle that's like, hey, I'm coming for vacation with my family, love the art on your walls, et cetera, where there's like the right amount of disclosure so people feel comfortable saying yes.

And that's something that like once you understand that, you can look at the data and look at the design, you could actually create guidelines to help encourage people to enter that kind of middle part of the bell curve.

I think smart companies, and Airbnb is at the very top of this, realize that customer service is not just a, you know, there's costs and everything else, but it's your branding moment.

And obviously we all, I'm tracking what's going on in United, I think enough said for what disaster there.

So 1 of the key things that I think also is an interesting part of scaling that this touches on is how do you essentially preserve a culture as you're scaling?

And 1 of the things that Airbnb has done an exceptionally great job at is preserving this kind of design and trust culture.

What are some of the things that you're doing as a way to say, as we scale our employee base, and obviously some of it's how you interview and who you hire and so forth, and interesting if there's more on that, but what are some of the key ways that you operate to keep that focus on designing experience, making sure that everyone's putting trust at the very top of their thinking?

This is a really tough topic, especially when you're scaling, if you're in hyper growth, if you're blitz scaling, whatever the term you use.

I immediately think of advice that Tony Hsieh gave us way back in 2009.

He said, if you care about culture, make sure you get it right from the beginning.

Make sure that it's something that you invest in up front.

And he used the metaphor, he said, it's a lot easier to mold concrete when it's still wet than to chip away at it later when it's dry.

And so the DNA that you set in the early stages of the company can have tremendous impacts on how the culture plays out over time.

I think we were really impressionable around culture at that time.

And we just started to put an inordinate amount of emphasis into the people that we hired.

Because the other piece of advice is that culture doesn't make your people, it's the people that make your culture.

So get the people right and the culture will follow.

And so, I mean, Brian and I were involved in every interview for a certain period of time until a couple years in, the recruiting team wanted to have our throats, so we were slowing everything down.

Then we needed to figure out a way to scale that.

How do we make sure that our voice and our presence is still involved in the recruiting process and the interview process?

We created this thing called Core Values Interviewers which has scaled phenomenally well for us where we train people inside the company how we would interview, and they get to effectively sit in interviews on our behalf, and really screen candidates to ultimately make sure that, at the end of the day, people believe what we believe, which is the most important part, I think, of hiring, is that we don't want people who are interested in the dollar signs around the company or the next big technical challenge for themselves.

We want people who are specifically geared towards our specific mission in the world.

And so how do you find people who believe what you believe?

Which is what Brian and I would do in every interview.

And I think by training others to look for the same signals or ask the same questions, we've been able to scale that.

Now we have, I think, hundreds of core value interviewers in all of our offices around the world.

1 of the things that I think is a funny little hack, but subtly very important that I learned from you guys, was making the conference rooms and the meeting spaces into exact, you know, kind of, we're pretty close to what do key hosts and experiences look like?

Because the thing that I had this kind of just amazing kind of epiphany walking into it the very first time.

You guys hadn't told me about it, hadn't showed up in any of the board meetings.

You know, strange love board room is not designed that way, which is the 1 that I normally go into.

And I went into a meeting room, was you or someone else, and I went, oh my God, this is awesome.

Because part of what you're doing is you're reminding everybody in the meeting space you're in, these are the people we work with.

And you're in them too right here as you're doing them.

And I don't know which, you know, because it's such obvious design insight that I've then been reflecting into.

Matter of fact, sometime you have to come by my LinkedIn office.

I'm beginning to change my LinkedIn office more in this direction.

And part of the thing is, what are the kinds of design hacks like that, you said, this is how it keeps us focused on what's important in terms of what we're doing?

I think, for those who don't know, we turn any available space we have into a replica of an exact listing somewhere in the world on our service.

Part of it was just to differentiate and say, how do you know when you walk into our office that it's where you are in the world?

And we thought, well, our listings are pretty unique to us, so maybe we'll use those to inform our spaces.

It also just reminds us that while we're behind computer screens all day, like probably most of us here, that there's a physicality to what we offer, that at the end of the day, we're coding and designing to facilitate a connection for people to enjoy really magnificent spaces around the world.

And so that's the other subtle reminder behind this.

And I have to give Brian credit, because he came up with that idea.

I think dogfooding is really important, so making sure that we give opportunities for anyone in the company to continually stay engaged with the service.

We highly encourage anyone in the company to be an active host.

But we are constantly trying to find ways that you can be in the customer's shoes so that you're connected to the people that you're serving at the end of the day.

I think if you're not careful, then there have been times, I have to admit, in our company's history where we have, this gap has emerged with our guests and hosts and we've lost touch.

And so there's this constant battle to try to always stay connected.

So we give people a stipend credit to travel every quarter on the site, just to make sure people have no excuse to be using the product and service.

And ultimately, when people come back, everybody has some insight or some bug that they found in the product that is part of, you could say, our intelligence network, Constantly honing and iterating, making the product better by having our own people go out into the world and use it.

So I'm gonna ask 2 more questions and then we're gonna open up for questions from the audience.

And if you guys don't have any, I only got to 3 of the 15 questions that I'd written down.

Menarak, do you want to start with 1 of those?

Well, I'm just curious because you've been involved in the company since such an early stage.

I don't think we had quite hit the hockey stick at that point, though you could sense that we were about to.

What have you seen from your, because you have such a unique lens into the business.

What have you seen that would be relevant for the conversation?

For here, in addition to the things you've said.

So I think that 1 of the things that, well, we've gotten a little bit, well, a little bit of the question is, is you guys collectively, as part of the design thing, this is the multiple stars thing, which is you go to, if we were to design the perfect experience and everything would be perfect, what would that be?

That's clearly not economically deliverable and not scalable.

But then start ratcheting back from that.

And actually, in fact, I think that's a good design exercise for everyone to do.

Because it kind of gives you a product and a product market fit North Star that then you begin to try to answer what is economically feasible, what is scalably feasible, which are not exactly the same things but related, and work back from that.

And that also gives you an iterative and dynamic road chart for doing it.

And That was actually 1 of the things where I had always been more of a build up, like start here.

Yes, I know where I'm roughly going, but I didn't design the perfect experience.

I went, yeah, we're going to need to be there eventually.

That kind of question was 1 of the things.

Actually, I'm going to only ask you 1 of my questions before I open it up.

Describe how you do your vacations, like how you do the kind of the walkabout.

Remember the thing that we had dinner and you were about to go and travel.

What's that and why do you do that and how does that lead to how you think about design?

So Reed's referring to every December, basically between Christmas time and New Year's, we give the company time off.

It started a couple of years ago, and it started in 2009 or 2010, and we've done it every year since.

And It was really the first time where it was like, oh my God, you have a week to go travel.

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Scaling Product | Fireside with Joe Gebbia and Reid Hoffman