Airbnb - AVC

In one sense, it’s unsurprising that Airbnb would be so adaptable, and that they’d be able to bend their growth trajectory upward despite an ongoing pandemic. The company’s cereal entrepreneurship days have been well-covered—to pay the bills in 2008, they made novelty breakfast food celebrating Barack Obama and John McCain. Less emphasized is the f... See more

Brian Chesky explains how Airbnb solved the chicken-and-egg problem “Marketplaces are incredibly defensible at scale, and maybe it’s because they’re incredibly hard to start. And the problem is simple - they call it the chicken and egg problem.” As Brian explains, it was tough to bootstrap Airbnb in the beginning because travelers couldn’t book h... See more

Our “small giants” approach optimized for mojo over growth. We wanted a small, talent-dense team with a focus on craft, autonomy, and quality of life for all team members. We banished the term “founder” in favor of “partner” and tried to be transparent with all business matters across the team.

We took some capital from investors in order to invest ... See more

Remembering the time one of my investors sent me a competitor’s website and was like have you heard of these guys so I sent back sequoia’s website and said have you heard of these guys.

In February 2011, Doerr began making plans to host a small dinner for President Obama in Silicon Valley. He and Jobs, along with their wives, went to dinner at Evvia, a Greek restaurant in Palo Alto, to draw up a tight guest list. The dozen chosen tech titans included Google’s Eric Schmidt, Yahoo’s Carol Bartz, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Cisco’s J

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Livingston: Are there any lessons that you learned in the Firefox days that you are applying to this new startup? Ross: One is to make sure you are always in communication with the people who are eventually going to use your product. It's very easy to just lock yourself in a room and code all day, and you forget what the real problems are that peop

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