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Cities are a melting pot for different ideas, and diversity brings a high-energy rhythm that I don't think we'd know was gone until it was too late.
As with any new and innovative industry, entrenched interests - particularly the hotel industry - have attempted to squash the home-sharing movement.
What if cities embraced a culture of sharing? I see a future of shared cities that bring us community and connection instead of isolation and separation.
You must have the ability to recognize good design and good user experience. These are core things at Airbnb. It doesn't matter which department you're in.
As our company has grown, how we configure and design our offices has been a crucial part of how we foster connection and collaboration throughout our teams.
Digital communication is completely different from in-person, face-to-face conversations. One will give you surface insights, and the other really gives you depth.
We believe that the best solutions come from solving your own problem. If you have a real problem, there's likely someone else who can relate. That's how Airbnb was born.
I often stay in Tokyo's Daikanyama neighbourhood. You can go for a peaceful morning run along the Meguro river, and it is particularly incredible during cherry blossom season.
My role is to think about what the future could be for Airbnb - and that includes crafting an effortless and easy-to-use service on any platform, whether mobile, tablet, or Web.
We're a community-driven brand, but at the same time, we want every host in every home to recognize that they're all individuals, and to use Airbnb as an expression of their individuality.
After World War II, communities and the trust they fostered began to erode in the United States. We moved away from dense city centers to fenced in suburban lots separated by broad highways.
For an international business such as ours, you can't localise without a local. That was a hard lesson for us. We had to be closer, physically present, which is when we put teams on the ground.
By helping New Yorkers turn their greatest expense - their home - into an asset, Airbnb is a vehicle that artists, entrepreneurs, and innovators can use to earn extra money to pursue their passion.
What we're doing with Airbnb feels like the nexus of everything that is right. We're helping people be more resourceful with the space they already have, and we're connecting people around the world.
It's about more than making money; it's about connecting people in countries all around the world. Our social mission is to get people meeting each other, and we need people who align with that purpose.
We built a basic website, and Air Bed and Breakfast was born. Three lucky guests got to stay on a $20 airbed on the hardwood floor. But they loved it. And so did we. We took them on adventures around the city.
Given Miami's unique role in Airbnb's roots, I'm particularly proud of how South Floridians have embraced home sharing as an opportunity to earn supplemental income and catalyze economic development in their communities.
We've invented a new marketplace. There was no easy way to rent a person's bedroom over the Internet or book a vacation rental over the Internet. There was no guidebook for us to turn to as we defined this new marketplace.
From natural disasters to the refugee crises, the impact we can have as individuals might seem limited. But as many of our hosts know, sharing your home for even a few nights can make a tremendous difference in someone's life.
Since the very beginning, we wanted to create an experience for our guests: more than just a place to sleep. We wanted to cook breakfast in the morning; we wanted to provide a subway map for our guests. Pick them up from the airport.
Sympathy relies on a common experience. If you're clumsy, you might have sympathy for others who tend to bump into things. Empathy, on the other hand, is the ability to understand another person's feelings even if you've never experienced them yourself.
I have the privilege of working with our in-house design studio, called Samara, and our humanitarian team, called Human. Samara is thinking about the future of Airbnb, and Human is working on ways to leverage our platform outside the cause of day-to-day business.
In the post-war United States, you had this race to the suburbs. Cities shrank, the suburbs got bigger - and the notion of community changed drastically. You went from all being very close together to all being spaced apart and slightly suspicious of one another.
Starting a company in San Francisco when we did usually meant it was destined to be a data-driven tech company. But that didn't seem to fully encompass what we wanted with Airbnb. When we tried looking through a tech lens, it didn't work. The humanity was missing.
We do believe in an inside-out culture. If we hold our hosts and guests to an expectation of acceptance and belonging, it has to start within our company. Otherwise, how on earth do we have the credibility to hold them accountable if we're not doing it to ourselves?
We have seen things in the twentieth century like the ATM machine, the VCR, and even the car. The electric car was invented in 1920, and here we, 100 years later, it is only now becoming an actual thing. So it doesn't surprise me that new ideas are met with a lot of questions.
We started Airbnb because, like many across the U.S. and in New York, we were struggling to pay our rent and decided to open up our living room to fellow artists coming to town for a design conference. Sharing our apartment allowed us to stay in our home and start our company.
Of course Airbnb made mistakes the first year! Some came from our own preconceptions. When we started, we designed our interface for ourselves, Internet-savvy twentysomethings. We never considered the role of good eyesight in our interface - font size, vernacular; it all matters.
When the car was introduced in 1908, people could experience a brand new way to travel that was more efficient than a horse and buggy. Can you believe that cities tried to outlaw cars in the United States? Can you imagine driving a car for a year then having to go back to a horse and buggy?
Dog-fooding is using your own products so that you understand from inside out what it is you're providing the customers. It's another way to gain insights and to gain intelligence. You use it yourself; you eat your own dog food. Every time we do that, we discover something that we can improve.
Airbnb is a trusted online marketplace for people to list, discover, and book unique accommodations around the world. From a private room to a private island, we offer an entertaining and personal way for travelers to unlock local experiences and see their surroundings through the eyes of a local.
How do you convince somebody to host a stranger for the weekend? That's not a trivial thing. It's not something I think you can throw technology at, marketing at, or sales at. We threw design at it because that's all we knew, and in doing so, I feel like we brought a human touch to it, which is so needed.
The question that I can't shake - it's this question that keeps coming up for me - is What does the shared home of the future look like? People are sharing homes at a rate that no one ever predicted, but residences and homes weren't designed for it. They were designed around ideas of privacy and separation.
Scheduled shipping is one of many inventions that has made New York a global capital of innovation and creativity - from Willis Carrier's invention of air conditioning in Buffalo and George Eastman's breakthrough film technology in Rochester to the rise of hip-hop in the South Bronx and the world's first cell phone call in Midtown Manhattan.