Culture is so incredibly important because it is the foundation for all future innovation. People with passion can change the world.
If you want to create a great product, just focus on one person. Make that one person have the most amazing experience ever.
Our "overnight" success took 1,000 days.
The stuff that matters in life is no longer stuff. It's other people. It's relationships. It's experience.
A company's culture is the foundation for future innovation. An entrepreneurs job is to build the foundation
It's better to have 100 people love you than to have 1,000,000 people like you.
Build something 100 people love, not something 1 million people kind of like.
We start with the perfect experience and then work backward. That's how we're going to continue to be successful.
Brand is really the connection between you and your customersif you have a very strong culture, then the brand will come through.
Everyone's got a moment or two in their life where something happens and you make a decision and then your entire life changes.
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.
Do things that won't scale; it will teach 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.
Designers + artists see potential in things where others do not. I think artists in many ways are the original entrepreneurs.
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 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.
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.
I had to learn to get comfortable in a role of ambiguity where I had to seek out advisers and learn quickly.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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'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.
