Lecture 10 - Culture (Brian Chesky, Alfred Lin)

Key ideas

Chesky argues that culture is a long-term investment: write distinctive values early, hire and fire by them, and accept that it slows you down in the short term.

From a machine transcript of the audio. Quotes link to the moment they are said.

1. 1

   Culture costs now and pays later

   Chesky says culture rarely gets discussed, is hard to measure, and does not pay off quickly. He says that if the goal were to build and sell a company within a year, he would advise ignoring it, so the case for it rests on wanting a company that lasts.

2. 2

   Write values before you hire

   Chesky recounts Tony of Zappos telling him he wished he had not waited until 100 employees to write down core values, and says Airbnb began drafting its own around Y Combinator, before its first hire. He separates values everyone should hold, such as honesty, from the few things unique to a company, and only the second kind count for him.

3. 3

   Treat early hires as company DNA

   Chesky describes looking for the first engineer for four or five months, asking whether he wanted to work with 100 or 1,000 more people like this one. He wants diversity of background and age but not of values, says he interviewed the first 300 employees himself, and uses values interviewers from outside the candidate's function.

4. 4

   Let values settle the hard calls

   Chesky describes 2011, when a heavily funded clone offered to sell itself or fight Airbnb internationally. He says the pragmatic answer was probably to buy it, but he declined because he did not like its culture, believing that missionaries would outlast mercenaries. He also turned Airbnb's breakfast cereal story into a value about constraints bringing out creativity.

5. 5

   Perfect it for one person first

   Passing on advice he credits to Paul Graham, Chesky says 100 people who love you beat a million who mildly like you, and that reaching those 100 means doing things that don't scale. He designs the experience for one person, then separately works out scale: the photography service started with him and Joe Gebbia shooting homes by hand, and tools came only after they knew what the service should be.

In Brian’s words

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