On this episode, I’ll make the case that the only way an organization can truly scale, is to first do things that don’t scale at all. HOFFMAN: I’m Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, partner at Greylock, and your host. In order to scale, you have to do things that don’t scale. I’d argue that painstaking, handcrafted labor is actually the foundation of his success. HOFFMAN: But what was a good sign was Brian’s willingness to work with his hands - burns and all. At one point in the middle of the night I remember, “I wonder if, when Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook, he had to hot-glue breakfast cereal?” The answer was “no,” and this was not a good sign. I literally had to hot-glue 1,000 boxes of cereal. I had a perfect one-to-one ratio of burn to box. No one told me I had to hot-glue breakfast cereal - and they should call it “burn glue,” because every time you get it on you, you burn.
But it came at a cost.ĬHESKY: We had to physically make the breakfast cereal ourselves, meaning we get a printed poster board and we had to fold it and hot glue it. What if we created a Barack Obama-themed breakfast cereal? And we thought, what would a Barack Obama-themed breakfast cereal be called? Obama O’s like Cheerios, “The breakfast of change.” We thought, “Well, we want to be a nonpartisan website so we’d also need a John McCain themed cereal.” John McCain was a captain in the Navy, and so we came up with Cap’n McCain’s, like Cap’n Crunch: “A maverick in every bite.” We ended up making a thousand boxes of collectible breakfast cereal. So we thought, the presidential campaign is coming up. What’s a non-perishable breakfast? Cereal.
Maybe breakfast will.” So we thought, what if we could sell breakfast? Maybe we can make some money. Brian was at the Democratic National Convention, hatching a PR campaign for Airbnb - one that could rescue the company and their credit card bills.ĬHESKY: Joe and I look at each other and we said, “We’re ‘Air Bed and Breakfast.’ The air beds aren’t going so well. Barack Obama was running against John McCain. HOFFMAN: It was 2008, an election year in the United States. So for anyone who’s worried their company doesn’t have enough traction, that was our traction. By the way, we’ve been working for a year and a half. Eight years ago? A very different picture.ĬHESKY: We have this website and maybe 50 people a day are visiting it, and we’re probably getting like 10 to 20 bookings a day. REID HOFFMAN: That entrepreneur in need of a lifeline? That’s Brian Chesky, co-Founder and CEO of Airbnb, a service that lets you rent a couch for the night. Joe is tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt. At this point I am $25,000 in credit card debt. You know those binders that you put baseball cards in? We put credit cards in them. We’re losing weight, and I didn’t have a lot of weight to lose. Chapter 1: Handcrafted work is the foundation of successīRIAN CHESKY: Joe and I are broke.
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