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.Collection: Sympathy
Airbnb has proven that hospitality, generosity, and the simple act of trust between strangers can go a long way.Collection: Trust
Airbnb is about the nexus of the online and offline to create the perfect customer experience.Collection: Experience
In a lot of ways, the real learning at RISD happened after-hours when you're working side by side with your colleagues.Collection: Learning
Airbnb is about travel.Collection: Travel
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.Collection: Food
Everything we do, every decision we make, is to ensure the best possible Airbnb experience for our community and grow the love.Collection: Experience
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.Collection: Communication
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.
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.
You have to know what your users are experiencing.
In general, we believe in regulation - just as long as it is fair and balanced.
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.
In the future, we will see living experiences curated around a shared lifestyle.
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.
There's this misconception globally that the platform is about property groups and big property owners renting out entire buildings full-time.
When we go city by city, country by country, the majority of our hosts, our owners, are simply renting out their spare bedroom.
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.
What people demand is what the policies serve.
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.
The story of Airbnb is really the underdog story in many ways.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Design has always been a driving force in my life: it's the lens through which I experience the world.
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.
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.
Design is an expression of one's most deeply rooted internal values.
Bringing words to life, storyboards show you things that words can't.
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.
Creating the future means having a global vision and an extreme focus on the approachability of what we're creating.
I feel triumphant when our moms can use Airbnb without their technically inclined kids.
A world-changing vision often necessitates a profound simplicity in the user experience.
We didn't invent anything new. Hospitality has been around forever.
What I've realized is that the joy of meeting and greeting people from all around the world is universal.
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.
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.
Airbnb has grown thanks to our hosts creating memorable experiences and inspiring their guests to be hosts in their hometowns.
Ultimately, the power of the Airbnb platform is that it motivates guests to blend into communities, belong anywhere, and live like locals.
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.
Design helps shape our everyday interactions through products, furniture, objects, or experiences.
We hire people who are smarter than us.
To me, 'design thinking' is another way of saying empathize with the customer. It's consideration for the person you're designing for.
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.
The sharing economy is out of the bag - and it's not going to go back in.
Airbnb was born out of necessarity. Our rent went up. It was born out of a problem.
High reputation beats high similarity.
Technology moves so quickly; you can't get comfortable with the business you have today because technology will progress.