Words matter. These are the best Joe Gebbia Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Airbnb is about the nexus of the online and offline to create the perfect customer experience.
For me, one of my personal inspirations was designers in the mid-20th century named Charles and Ray Eames.
We encourage employees to ship new features on day one, which immediately encourages them to come up with something creative and different.
Everything at Airbnb is a continuation of what it’s like to be a guest in somebody’s house. We think about how each stage makes people feel.
As with any new and innovative industry, entrenched interests – particularly the hotel industry – have attempted to squash the home-sharing movement.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
What I’ve realized is that the joy of meeting and greeting people from all around the world is universal.
In general, we believe in regulation – just as long as it is fair and balanced.
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.
Design is an expression of one’s most deeply rooted internal values.
The fear of mistakes is the fast track to irrelevance.
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.
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?
In the future, we will see living experiences curated around a shared lifestyle.
There’s this misconception globally that the platform is about property groups and big property owners renting out entire buildings full-time.
Ultimately, the power of the Airbnb platform is that it motivates guests to blend into communities, belong anywhere, and live like locals.
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.
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 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.
At Airbnb, we’re trying to build a culture that supports details, celebrates them, and gives our teams creative license to pursue them.
Every apartment I’ve ever lived in has had a space to make, create, and get stuff done within eyesight of my bed.
Bringing words to life, storyboards show you things that words can’t.
You have to know what your users are experiencing.
When trust works out right, it can be absolutely magical.
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.
Airbnb is about travel.
We didn’t invent anything new. Hospitality has been around forever.
Design has always been a driving force in my life: it’s the lens through which I experience 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.
To me, ‘design thinking’ is another way of saying empathize with the customer. It’s consideration for the person you’re designing for.
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.
When we go city by city, country by country, the majority of our hosts, our owners, are simply renting out their spare bedroom.
The sharing economy is about making use of any idle resource out there. We do love seeing other sharing-economy companies flourish.
Design helps shape our everyday interactions through products, furniture, objects, or experiences.
I’ll never forget my first Art Basel.
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.
Staying at Airbnb listings gives me the opportunity to truly understand and experience the local culture of the countries I visit.
I feel triumphant when our moms can use Airbnb without their technically inclined kids.
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.
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.
Any time there is a new idea, it can take some time for policy to catch up to it.
The story of Airbnb is really the underdog story in many ways.
Everything we do, every decision we make, is to ensure the best possible Airbnb experience for our community and grow the love.
As Chief Product Officer, I lead our product team to create simple, intuitive user experiences.
There’s no reason any company should be limited by its physical environment.
We expect Seoul to be one of our most important markets not only in Asia but around the world.
Technology moves so quickly; you can’t get comfortable with the business you have today because technology will progress.
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.
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.
