Brian Chesky

To go public, you write a securities document called In S One. It is a 300 page page turner that will not compete with American literature as Sunday night reading. They were going to file it late march, put it on the shelf, and have been dusting it off.

People got in a car and drove to a remote destination within about 200 miles, staying at Airbnb. That produced a major surge in bookings in non urban areas, small towns, and rural communities, with people staying longer.

They took 1/4 of a $1,000,000,000, under $50 million, and sent it to hosts. They did not loan it; they just sent it to hosts. The hosts would have needed even more, but it was the most they could do.

Air bed and breakfast made collectible breakfast cereal for the Democratic Republican National Conventions in 2008. Joe and he made Obama owes from Cheerios and Captain McCain's, and they were literally hot gluing the cereal boxes in the kitchen.

When he was a kid, his dad used to say things are never as good as they seem and as bad as they seem. If that is true, things were not as good as they seemed in January, and they are probably not as bad as they seem in July.

For the last five months, a weekly Q and A has been the point of connection. No matter what question people ask, he uses a Mac and stares into the little green light next to the camera every week, telling them everything he can.

They did 14 weeks severance plus a week for service. They felt this is a health crisis and people need health insurance, so they made sure everyone had at least one year of health insurance even after never getting laid off.

Andy Grove said bad companies are destroyed by a crisis, good companies survive a crisis, and great companies thrive or are defined by a crisis. The decision was not to be the kind of company destroyed by this, and to take care of each of the stakeholders.

After 12 years building Airbnb, the company lost 80% of business in eight weeks. It had looked like one of the success stories, and then suddenly those eight weeks brought all sorts of concerns about what would happen next.

He is closer to some people than he has ever been in his life, probably closer to co founders Joe Nate, and they talk all the time. Crazy periods of time bring you closer together, but they also make your bubble a little bit smaller.

The weekly growth chart on bathroom Post-it notes is why Airbnb raised from Sequoia before demo day. Garry Tan says they needed revenue on the site to grow 10% every single week, and they nailed it.

He says the number one thing is that objects in motion stay in motion, and objects at rest stay at rest. Y Combinator is the moment founders learn to run fast. Billion dollar companies look back when a thousand person company is going slow and try to tap the energy of the first week and the first eight weeks. Airbnb got rejected by all the legends too. Brian Chesky used to obscure who the people were. Mike Maples later posted that he was the one who said no. He is one of the biggest legends in v

In the face of the crisis, it was important that Airbnb as a company was going to survive. Although it was so painful for Brian to let go of the people, there were many more employees and customer that depended on Airbnb's future success.

No one knew how long the crisis was going to last, and the new round of funding was simply a bandaid meant to help in transition. It alone was not going help without serious cost-cutting.

Instead of making decisions based on circumstances, choose a principle that will be your guiding star, and make decisions based on it.

In Airbnb's case, Brian knew that by overwriting hosts' cancelation policy to return money to his guests was going to be a big challenge, but choose "health and safety" as the guiding principle had enabled him to justify it as the right path forward.

To smooth out the impact, Airbnb then ended up using their cash on hand to partially reimburse the hosts who lost out on income.

0. Setup a war room. Make sure that your board and executives meet on regular basis. Communicate extensively. Then, focus on the following:

1. Be decisive. 2. Preserve cash. 3. Act with all stakeholders in mind. 4. Emerge on the right side of history. 5. Play to win the next season 6. Don't trade in the future, think long-term.

In the earliest weeks of Covid19, sometimes around March 2020, Bryan saw their user base in Europe started to shrink, an event that had not happened in the history of the company. That same week, big sports events started to get cancelled. That's when Brian new they were heading in a bad direction.