Brian Chesky Quotations

When you start a company, it's more an art than a science because it's totally unknown. Instead of solving high-profile problems, try to solve something that's deeply personal to you. Ideally, if you're an ordinary person and you've just solved your problem, you might have solved the problem for millions of people.

If you want to create a great product, just focus on one person. Make that one person have the most amazing experience ever.

In June 2010, I moved out of my apartment and I have been mostly homeless ever since, off and on. I just live in Airbnb apartments and I check in every week in different homes in San Francisco.

I think the next big thing in music, and it's kind of because I come from the tech industry, is actually, I think it's the platform... Spotify is incredibly interesting. I think the platform is becoming the star.

The office is the laboratory and meeting your users is like going into the field. You can't just stay in the lab. And it's not just asking users what they want, it's about seeing what they're doing.

I'm not saying the whole world will work this way, but with Airbnb, people are sleeping in other people's homes and other people's beds. So there's a level of trust necessary to participate that's different from an eBay or Facebook.

Build something 100 people love, not something 1 million people kind of like.

Every day I would wake up and think, 'Today is another missed opportunity to do something important.' After enough days like this, you start feeling like you are getting old, even when you are relatively young. We are all natural entrepreneurs, and being manacled to a desk job is not for us.

The stuff that matters in life is no longer stuff. It's other people. It's relationships. It's experience.

Customers are willing to try new things, and if you can survive, you will have fewer competitors. It's like entering the eye of the storm. As long as you are strong enough to survive, you can end up in still water by yourself.

The American dream, what we were taught was, grow up, own a car, own a house. I think that dream's completely changing. We were taught to keep up with the Joneses. Now we're sharing with the Joneses.

What I've been surprised by is not how different people are, but how similar they are. There are certain types of Airbnb people, and they are in every city in the world - it's just that in some cultures, there is more of a generational divide.

Whatever the press is talking about, they want to keep talking about it. So instead of asking yourself, 'How can I get them to start talking about me?', figure out a way to get yourself involved in what they're already talking about.

Culture is so incredibly important because it is the foundation for all future innovation. People with passion can change the world,

It's better to have 100 people love you than to have 1,000,000 people like you.

People went to Dell for the computers, but they go to Apple for everything… That’s the difference between a transactional company and a transformational one.

Culture is simply a shared way of doing something with passion.

A company's culture is the foundation for future innovation. An entrepreneurs job is to build the foundation

[On culture] It's living the core values when you hire; when you write an email; when you are working on a project; when you are walking in the hall.

Brand is really the connection between you and your customersif you have a very strong culture, then the brand will come through.

Do things that won't scale; it will teach you.

Somebody asked me 'what's the job of a CEO', and there's a number of things a CEO does. What you mostly do is articulate the vision, develop the strategy, and you gotta hire people to fit the culture. If you do those three things, you basically have a company. And that company will hopefully be successful, if you have the right vision, the right strategy, and good people.

Having a clear mission and making sure you know that mission and making sure that mission comes through the company is probably the most important thing you can do for both culture and values.

Designers + artists see potential in things where others do not. I think artists in many ways are the original entrepreneurs.

The second thing I had to do was not to be reluctant as a leader...And when I started doing that, I realized that people are thriving from this, and that it's so much more helpful for people.

I had to learn to get comfortable in a role of ambiguity where I had to seek out advisers and learn quickly.

Everyone's got a moment or two in their life where something happens and you make a decision and then your entire life changes.

Whatever career you're in, assume it's going to be a massive failure. That way, you're not making decisions based on success, money and career. You're only making it based on doing what you love.

We start with the perfect experience and then work backward. That's how we're going to continue to be successful.

Our "overnight" success took 1,000 days.

In organizations (or even in a society) where culture is weak, you need an abundance of heavy, precise rules and processes.

In June, 2010, I moved out of my apartment and I have been mostly homeless ever since,

Don't listen to your parents.

The stronger the culture, the less corporate process a company needs. When the culture is strong, you can trust everyone to do the right thing. People can be independent and autonomous. They can be entrepreneurial.

Companies that hire employees..that are deeply passionate create companies that customers are really really passionate about, and those are the companies that have strong brands.

There's no such thing as a good or bad culture, it's either a strong or weak culture. And a good culture for somebody else may not be a good culture for you.