Name: Airbnb's founder on disrupting an industry
Uploaded: 2015-06-25
Duration: 4 min 51 s
Description: Fortune's Leigh Gallagher sits down with the startup's CEO Brian Chesky to discuss the apartment rental service's business and the mistakes he's made along the way.

[ MUSIC ] Airbnb has faced a lot of pushback by government, by regulators. Many of whom are quite passionate that you should not exist, that this is not legal. What's your take on that? And how will this Work itself out. We're are 34, 000 cities, so actually I would say the thing that surprised me is how many cities actually embraced us. The country of France last year legalized Airbnb, the country of Portugal did. The queen of England just signed it into law, so I would say that vast majority of cities have welcomed us with open arms. What I've been surprised about is maybe Just some cities haven't, and those cities are cities closer to home. Cities like New York where we've had a lot of challenges. I'm from New York. I would have guessed maybe the challenges would have been in governments in countries far away from where I was born. I understand though. I think we're a new idea. The Internet is just a profoundly new thing. It has a way of changing everything. And the thing about our business, and the thing about a lot of businesses that share an economy is It's kind of like the Internet moving into your neighborhood. The digital world has got a lot of protections. DMCA, and just kinda, people just treat it in a certain place. And they govern the real world in a certain way. What happens when those worlds start to fuse? They don't know how to handle it. Before us, there were people, and there were businesses. What happens when a person operates as a business? If somebody rents their room for two weeks a year, should they be operating exactly like a hotel? Should they have to go thru the same registration process? And the hotel has administers that can pay to go through this process can like an ordinary person. I think every city is wrestling with this in a different way. I think where this place out long term. You can't put this idea back in the bottle. I think people globally want this. This things are governed at the city level usually, not usually national level unless it's Europe So it's gonna take a little longer than I expected, but ultimately, I think that people usually win. You mentioned sometimes there would be this bold, audacious vision. What is that vision? Where can this go? A lot of people look at Airbnb and they see that's a way to rent a room or a home around the world, and I think that is not what we're about. A lot of people rent homes. A lot of people rent rooms. What you get with Air B & B is a sense of belonging. I think a lot of us go through life, having felt like we belong maybe with our families, maybe belonged at our school, at our job. But we go through most of the world a stranger in strange lands. And we're treated like outsiders if we aren't in that environment. And I often wonder, what if you could actually belong anywhere you go? You could truly be yourself. And as you can be yourself, you explore the world and become your best self. And so I imagine one day a world where everyone on the planet can truly belong, anywhere they go. I see us bringing the world together in a profound way, and we're now in 191 countries. We have over half a million people on many nights, staying together and living together, from countries all over the world. Only the power of the community on the Internet Would this have been possible, so I can only imagine how far this could go. Let me ask you to think back a little bit. I want you to tell me your worst day on the job. My worst day at Air B & B was in July, mid July 2011. This woman EJ in the city, In, right here in San Francisco, had her home trashed. And we weren't prepared for it. And it went from a kind of personal fiasco from this woman to a press and eventually company fiasco for us because we just were really slow. We were flat on our feet. We didn't have good customer support. And we got basically pretty much attacked from a lot of people just saying how could you You're a so- called billion dollar company, because we just raised money and a billion dollar value earlier. How could you not be prepared, meanwhile we were in a three bedroom apartment a year earlier. So it's kinda like, we just weren't ready, and I learned a lot of lessons from that, that day or that week was like my worst, darkest time at Air B & B, I remember I would like go home, fall asleep and like kinda wake up and your heart would be kinda racing, you're like wow How did we get ourselves in this situation. Every day, this situation seemed to get a little bit worse, and eventually we wrote this long apology letter and made some changes, and I think we're so much better as a company because of it. You have had the benefit of a lot of counsel from a lot of people throughout the course of this journey, everyone from Warren Buffet, Jeff Bezos, John Donahoe, you name it. Peter Teal. What are two or three pieces of advice that some people have told you along the way that really made a big difference? The most important piece of advice is one I've repeated before. It's Paul Graham. He said, it's better to have a hundred people love you than a million people that sort of like you. Meaning go door to door, work backwards from the few people that deeply love what you do. If you focus on that, you can reverse engineer scale. It's better than just trying to be focused on growth. So many charts today are focused on, you know, curves that are up and to the right. It's kind of like the wrong curve. Growth curves really come from making something somebody deeply loves. It's almost too simple, right? Like The secret to business which is making something people want. Accept that how many people actually focus everyday on whether or not people actually want what they're making? [ MUSIC ]

Fortune's Leigh Gallagher sits down with the startup's CEO Brian Chesky to discuss the apartment rental service's business and the mistakes he's made along the way.