for starting a business, due largely to its high living expenses, according to data compiled by Inc. That year, San Francisco was only the fifth-best city in the U.S. 'You can be anywhere.'Īirbnb is still based in San Francisco today, but Silicon Valley has seen an exodus of tech companies in recent years, with high-profile companies like Oracle and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise relocating their headquarters out of California in 2020. Unfortunately, Graham also gave Airbnb's co-founders 'the worst piece of advice' they ever received, Chesky added - that they'd need to move to Mountain View, California, where Y Combinator is located, to succeed. Much of that early growth was from word-of-mouth marketing, Chesky said. In its first decade, Airbnb became larger than Hilton, which started in 1919 and currently has a market capitalization of $36.43 billion. The small number of people who deeply appreciated the Airbnb experience, guests and hosts alike, became the company's 'marketing department,' Chesky said at the Stanford event.īy his estimation, the strategy worked. Shortly after launching the company, the trio of co-founders visited a group of Airbnb rentals in New York to personally photograph the listings and get a better understanding of hosts' perspectives, Chesky told LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman's ' Masters of Scale' podcast in 2017. It also meant simultaneously figuring out what would make hosts happy and comfortable. The trio took their research seriously, even hiring a Pixar storyboard artist to help them map out what five-star stays would look like from check-in to check-out, Chesky said.

Such a recommendation 'actually runs counterintuitive to almost everything everyone says,' Chesky said.įor early Airbnb, that meant creating experiences for guests that stood out from staying at a hotel or crashing on a couch. It came courtesy of Paul Graham, the co-founder of tech startup accelerator Y Combinator, who advised Airbnb's co-founders - Chesky, Joe Gebbia and Nathan Blecharczyk - to focus on a tiny audience of potential customers as they built their company. The advice: 'Focus on 100 people that love you, rather than getting a million people to kind of like you,' Chesky said.

Airbnb business