What Seven Years at Airbnb Taught Me About Building a Business

Create strong culture, stay laser-focused on problems, and set wildly ambitious goals

Tips for new employees, painted on the walls during a hackathon. Mural: Andrea Nguyen, Jeany Ngo, Katie Chen; Photos: Lenny Rachitsky

In 2012, shortly after Airbnb acquired our startup, I overheard co-founder Joe Gebbia giving guidance to a designer tasked with redesigning the homepage. He said, “Build something the internet has never seen before.” I vividly remember thinking, What does that even mean? And is this the bar for everything around here? Looking back, I’ve come to recognize that this mindset has been one of the key ingredients in Airbnb’s historic growth.

I first joined Airbnb as an engineer, then became one of the first members of the budding PM team. Back then, there were a couple dozen engineers, a few designers, and two very cute dogs. Over the next seven years, as the company scaled to thousands of global employees, countless cute dogs, and over $30 billion in value, I took on a lot of interesting problems and worked with many incredible people. Since leaving a few weeks ago, I’ve been jotting down my biggest lessons from these experiences. I’ve realized I should share these lessons with anyone else working to build a company. I can’t promise they will all apply to your situation, but they have been core to Airbnb’s success.

Create strong culture, values, and rituals

It’s increasingly common for people to choose companies that connect with their personal values, both as consumers and employees. From day one, Airbnb has been a company obsessed with strong culture, clear values, and quirky rituals. Over the years, I’ve witnessed how effective this has been in creating a competitive advantage, allowing the company to hire the best talent, move quickly when opportunities arise, and push through adversity. Most importantly, it has made it easy for leaders to stay true to the long-term mission and for the team to hold them accountable.

How did Airbnb create a strong culture? Three key ingredients:

Founders obsessed with culture. See Exhibit A and Exhibit B. This is fundamental, especially as you scale. It influences who your first few hires are (who cocreate the culture) and the values you model (knowingly or unknowingly).

See Exhibit A and Exhibit B. This is fundamental, especially as you scale. It influences who your first few hires are (who cocreate the culture) and the values you model (knowingly or unknowingly). A strong sense of self. Airbnb did this through a codified set of core values created by a small task force about three years in. Airbnb uses these core values when measuring success (are we achieving our mission?), hiring (a core values interview group vets all candidates), evaluating performance (it’s baked into the peer-review process), and looking at large deals. Everyone at the company can recount the values verbatim.

Airbnb did this through a codified set of core values created by a small task force about three years in. Airbnb uses these core values when measuring success (are we achieving our mission?), hiring (a core values interview group vets all candidates), evaluating performance (it’s baked into the peer-review process), and looking at large deals. Everyone at the company can recount the values verbatim. Rituals. Cookie time Tuesdays. New hire tea time. Hosted bar. Human tunnels. Fun facts. Silly but regular rituals create space for employees to strengthen bonds and bring joy to the workplace. Don’t overthink your rituals; experiment and see what sticks.

Two early Airbnb rituals combined — Formal Friday and the human tunnel

Here’s an excellent video to help you get started in building your own culture and values.

Main takeaway: Be obsessed with your company (and team) culture.

Nail the problem statement

Crafting and aligning on a problem statement is the single most important step in solving any problem. I’ve consistently seen simple projects with vague problem statements go in circles for weeks and months, while complex projects with strong problem statements sail smoothly.

A few key tools that I’ve found helpful:

This one-pager template is something I’ve refined over the years to crystallize the problem and opportunity for my team and stakeholders.

The situation-complication-resolution framework is extremely helpful in communicating the story to a wider audience.

The jobs-to-be-done framework helps ensure you’re addressing real customer needs.

Main takeaway: Obsess over crystallizing the problem you are trying to solve and align your entire team behind it.

Set wildly ambitious goals

At the end of each year, we were often shocked at how close we came to hitting our wildly ambitious, seemingly impossible goals. And when I say wildly ambitious, I’m making an understatement — Brian, Airbnb’s CEO, is (in)famous for doubling our proposed goals, and often pushing us to 10 times the goal. This ambitious approach has pushed teams to think bigger and rise to the occasion.

Five key ingredients to doing this well:

Set uncomfortable goals. Our approach was to pick a goal that made us uncomfortable, while also clearly understanding why hitting it would be incredible for the business. Two questions we asked were 1) What would need to be true for us to hit this goal? and 2) What could we accomplish without barriers (budget, people, dependencies, etc.)?

Our approach was to pick a goal that made us uncomfortable, while also clearly understanding why hitting it would be incredible for the business. Two questions we asked were 1) What would need to be true for us to hit this goal? and 2) What could we accomplish without barriers (budget, people, dependencies, etc.)? Make sure someone is directly accountable. Hitting this goal needs to be an individual person’s job. If a number doesn’t have a person’s name next to it, it’s not going to happen.

Hitting this goal needs to be an individual person’s job. If a number doesn’t have a person’s name next to it, it’s not going to happen. Think long-term. We generally looked ahead five to 10 years in order determine that year’s goal, both in terms of growth and our mission. Though we didn’t always nail it, we’ve increasingly put a lot of thought into the impact our work has on the many stakeholders we serve, which was recently crystallized by Brian in an open letter.

We generally looked ahead five to 10 years in order determine that year’s goal, both in terms of growth and our mission. Though we didn’t always nail it, we’ve increasingly put a lot of thought into the impact our work has on the many stakeholders we serve, which was recently crystallized by Brian in an open letter. Give a cross-functional team ownership of how to achieve the goal. Your number-one job as a leader is to assemble the right team, point team members in the right direction, and stay vigilant in unblocking them.

Your number-one job as a leader is to assemble the right team, point team members in the right direction, and stay vigilant in unblocking them. Celebrate success, don’t punish failure. Follow through on the original intent of the goal — it was meant to push you, not kill you. If you don’t hit the goal but get close, congratulate the team and move on to the next goal.

Main takeaway: When setting goals, think bigger.

Start with the ideal and work backward

A variation of Amazon’s working backward methodology that I’ve seen work exceptionally well at Airbnb starts with envisioning the perfect user experience. A classic example was a project code-named Snow White. Inspired by the approach Disney took in developing the original Snow White film, the founders began looking at Airbnb not as just a website or a service, but as a story with a beginning, middle, and end.

Snow White was one of the first films to use the technique of storyboards, and thus the team developed a set of storyboards of the ideal guest and host experience, identifying key emotional moments along that journey. These storyboards quickly became a key tool in identifying our biggest gaps and opportunities, and informed the early company strategy. You can read more here and here, and watch this great video of the team discussing the process.