Transcript

#326: Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, Brian Chesky of Airbnb, and How to Scale to 100M+ Users

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Check it out. Well, hello, hello, this is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job normally to deconstruct world class performers through interviews, whether they're from business, sports, entertainment, military, otherwise, to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that you can use. In this episode I'm going to let someone else do the heavy lifting. And he's very, very qualified. Reed Hoffman? On LinkedIn and Twitter.

as Reed Hoffman R E I D is a Frequent flyer of sorts on this show, he is often referred to as the Oracle of Silicon Valley by tech insiders who look at his company building and investing track record with awe. The companies include Facebook, Airbnb, Zinga, Flickr, and many, many, many others. Reed is well known as the co-founder of LinkedIn, which has more than three hundred million users and sold to Microsoft for 26.2 billion. dollars. Prior to that he was exec vice president at PayPal, which was purchased by eBay for one point five billion, and at Paypal he was nicknamed Firefighter in chief by the then CEO Peter Thiel, who's also been on the podcast.

And uh Reed is widely considered one of the most successful angel investors of the past decade. He is now a partner, a Greylock Partners, a top tier venture capital firm. And on my phone, there are very few podcasts that I listen to multiple times. There are very few podcasts that I recommend over and over and over again to other people, especially entrepreneurs. And what I'm going to showcase in this episode is A conversation between Reed And uh Brian Chesky, who is a co founder and CEO of Airbnb. And there are a couple of other cameos. And I'm doing this for a number of reasons. Number one

If you want to learn how to scale your company from whatever the number might be to hundred Million. two hundred million users. Uh Paradoxically, you can increase the likelihood of success by doing things that do not scale. And this is a really critical

concept to understand and it's best done through examples. And that is why I want to showcase this discussion, which is from the first season of Masters of Scale. And I really, really Hope you enjoy it. Uh I loved it and Joe Gebia, co founder of Airbnb, has been on this

podcast before and we covered his development as a designer and an entrepreneur leading up to the original development of the business model for Airbnb. That was part one, and I promised a part two. So this is in some ways that part two Exactly. And uh Masters of Scale is a great show. If you haven't seen it, it uh showcases famous founders and innovative leaders and so on sharing their lessons for success. And there is a brand new season out right now. The new season includes episodes with founders of Spotify, Instagram, TaskRabbit, Shake Shack, and Glossier, among many, many others. You can subscribe to Master of Scale on Apple Podcasts or learn more at mastersofscale.com. So without further ado, please enjoy.

This Short episode. with Reed Hoffman, Brian Chesky, and many others. And if you've heard me recommend one thousand true fans to you many, many times before, As the article you should read if you're only going to read one article on marketing, which is by Kevin Kelly. You can find it on KK.org. This is the

Audio. Compliment. to that. So With much further ado, much further ado, w much further ado.

Please enjoy. I Joe and I are broke. We're losing weight and I don't have a lot of weight to lose. You know those binders that you put baseball cards in? We put credit cards in them.

At this point I am twenty five thousand dollars in credit card debt. Joe's tens of thousands in credit card debt. So this is like make or break. We need a lifeline. 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. Or a cabin. Or a castle.

Today Airbnb is valued at thirty billion dollars. Eight years ago? A very different picture. We have his website.

And maybe fifty people a day are visiting it. And we're probably getting like ten to twenty bookings a day. So and by the way we've been working on for a year and a half. So For anyone who's worried your company doesn't have traction, that was our traction. It was two thousand and eight. An election year in the United States. Barack Obama is running against John McCain. Brian was at the Democratic National Convention.

hatching a PR campaign for Airbnb, one that could rescue the company And their credit card bills. Joe and I look at each other and we said, We're airbed and breakfast. The airbeds aren't going so well. Maybe breakfast will. As we thought what if we could sell breakfast? Maybe we can make some money.

What's a non perishable breakfast? Cereal. And so we thought. The presidential campaign's coming up. We just launched the DNC. What if we created a Barackle Balm themed breakfast cereal? We thought, what would a Brackabom theme breakfast yell be called?

Obama owes. Like Cheerios, The Breakfast of Chain. We thought, well, we want to be a nonpartisan website, so we'd also have to need a John McCain themed cereal. And that's a no-brainer. John McCain was a captain of the Navy. And we came up with the Captain McCain's like Captain Crunch, a Maverick and every bite.

We ended up making a thousand boxes of collectible breakfast cereal. We sold them for forty dollars a box. That's forty thousand dollars. Not bad for pocket change. And it got them through a cash crunch. But it came at a cost.

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. No one told me I had hot glue breakfast here. And they should call it burn glue because every time you get on you, you burn you. And I had a perfect One to one ratio of burned a box. And so I literally had to poclu a thousand boxes cereal.

At one point in the middle of the night, I remember reading I wonder if when Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook he had the hot breakfere. The answer was no, and this was not a good sign. But what was a good sign was Brian's willingness to work with his hands, Burns and all. I'd argue that painstaking handcrafted labor is actually the foundation of his success.

In order to scale You have to do things that don't scale. You gotta have incredible talent at every position. Huge push. There are fires burning when you're going out. Can you believe it? Such an idiot. And then you go back to this is totally gonna be amazing. There are so many easy ways. I have no idea what to do. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right.

Like, well that's just how you do it. We haven't made just how you do it. This is masters of scale. I'm Reed Hoffman. Co founder of LinkedIn.

Partner Greylock. And your host. On this episode All make the case that the only way an organization can truly scale is the first two things that don't scale at all.

I'll try to prove that theory through stories from some of the smartest entrepreneurs I know. Over the last twenty years, I've worked on or invested in many companies that scale to a hundred million users or more. But here's the thing. You don't start with a hundred million users. You start with a few.

So stop thinking big. And start thinking small. Hand serve your customers, win them over. One by one. Now, this may sound like odd advice if you're an entrepreneur with global ambitions. Mark Zuckerberg didn't personally invite 1.8 billion people to Facebook.

He built a great product. And the users just poured in. Right? Not exactly. On this show.

I'll dispel that myth. By talking to founders who fought to win their users. I'm starting with Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb. because he epitomizes the idea of handcrafting the user experience before you start to scale. It's a principle he first absorbed in design school. I was doing medical design once.

I designed a children's ventilator. I had to sit in the shoes of the child. And so I had to like Imagine being a child. get in like the operating table and like you have to put yourself in the shoes of the patient or the person using your product. And if you're only doing A B tests, like you're never designing with empathy.

But a funny thing happened to Brian when he moved to Silicon Valley. He sort of forgot about designing with empathy for a single user. It's a common mistake amongst entrepreneurs with global ambitions. They have to promise investors the world. Tens of millions of customers, billions in revenue. It's intoxicating. Just listen to Brian go. This is a travel industry that is something like 7% of global GDP.

Somewhere between five. In seven trillion dollars, ten times the market size of Google's market size. And Brian might have stayed in the stratosphere, if not for a fateful meeting with Paul Graham. co-founder of Y Combinator. Y Combinator is a startup incubator, which cultivates and invests in early stage companies.

Brian was admitted to White Combinator in two thousand and nine. And his first meeting with Paul was confounding. Paul tends to stump people with deceptively simple questions. Where's your business? And I go, What do you mean? Like where's your traction? I go, Well, we don't have a lot of traction. He goes, Well, people must be using it.

I said There's a few people in New York using it. And he's said something I'll never forget. He said, So your users are in New York and you're still in Mountain View I said, Yeah. He said, What are you still doing here? And I go, What do you mean?

Said go to your users. Get to know them. Get your customers one by one. And I said But that won't scale.

For hugely millions of customers. We can't meet every customer. And he said that's exactly why you should do it now. Because this is the only time you'll ever be small enough that you can meet all your customers, get to know them, and make something directly for them. Brian and his co founders followed his advice to the letter. We literally commuted to New York from Mountain View. So we would be in Wycom Air for uh was it two night dinners? And then Wednesday

Joe and I would go to New York. We literally would knock on the doors of all of our hosts and have their addresses. We say knock knock hello, hey, this is Brian Joe, we're founders, we just want to meet you. It's a little creepy just to knock on the door unannounced. We need excuses to think in their home. So they came up with an offer that the host couldn't refuse. We'd send a professional photographer to your home and photograph your home. Of course, we didn't have any money and we couldn't employ photographers. So Joe and I we'd show up their door and they're like wow, this company's pretty small. These home visits became Airbnb's secret weapon.

It's how they learned what people loved. It's really hard to get even ten people to love anything. But it's not hard if you spend a ton of time with them. So if I want to make something amazing, I just spend time with you. And I'm like Well, what if I did this? What if I did this? What if I did this? From those questions, a handcrafted experience is born.

We'd find out, hey, I don't feel comfortable with a guest. I don't know who they are. Well, what if we add profiles? Great. Well what do you want your profile? Well, I want a photo, great, what else? I want to know where they work, where they went to school. Okay. So you add that stuff. And then you literally start designing touch point by touch point. The creation of the peer review system. Customer support. All these things came from us literally We didn't just meet our users, we live with them. And I used to joke that when you bought an iPhone, Steve Jobs didn't come sleep on your couch, but I did. Yes. Was there a particular experience that was really stuck in your mind? I remember we met with a couple hosts and

It's winter. It's snowing outside. And we're like in snow boots. And we walk up to the apartment and we went there to photograph the home. And we're like, hey, I'll upload your photos to the website. Um, do you have any other feedback? And he comes back with a book, with a binder. And he's got like

Dozens of pages in notes. And He ends up creating like a product roadmap for us. Like we should have this, this, this, this this, and we're like, Oh my God. This is our roadmap.

Because he's the customer. I think that always stuck in our mind as the roadmap often exists in the minds of the users you're designing things for. It is typical to get very detailed feedback from some of your early users. And if you're not getting some people who say This is super important to me. I love this.

I really need this to work well. It usually off track. Passionate feedback. Is a clue that your product really matters to someone. And one passionate user can turn into many.

If you listen to them carefully. It's essential to get this kind of feedback early. While you're still defining the product. It's like setting a foundation as an architect. You wouldn't build a skyscraper before you've built a solid foundation.

User feedback ensures you won't build a dozen floors on an unstable swamp. Brian has a simple method for extracting detailed feedback from users. He doesn't ask about the product he already built. He asked about the product of the dreams. We'd ask these questions like what could we do to surprise you? Like, what could we do?

Not to make this better, but to make you tell everyone about it. And that answer is different. If I say what could I do to make this better, they'll say something small. If I were to say Reed, what would it take for me to design something that you would literally tell every single person you've ever encountered? So you start to ask these questions. And it really helps you think through this problem. It's essential to seek out and listen to user feedback. But the caveat is you have to figure out which users to listen to.

You're gonna have different kinds of users giving you feedback. And some of it will take you in the wrong direction. So you need to exercise judgment in discerning. Will this particular user and particular feedback lead me to the mass market?

Or is it an edge case? For example, at LinkedIn we had one group of users who invent a name for themselves. They call themselves lions. Which is LinkedIn open networkers. Because their theory of the world was that everyone wants to directly connect to everyone else in the world because that's the way they wanted it.

But they're actually not the majority case. Алатапи уз аксессии в сам селебрит статус. Do not want that. And if we followed their feedback, LinkedIn would not be where it is today. We had to steer away from a bunch of passionate users who told us very explicitly that we were fools for not following their advice.

If you want to build something that's truly viral, you have to create a total like mind experience That you tell everyone about. And so we basically took one part of our product and we extrapolated, what would a five star experience be and then we went crazy. So a one, two, or three star experience is you get to Airbnb and no one's there.

So you knock on the door. They don't open. That's a one star. You know, or maybe it's a three star if they don't know but you have to wait twenty minutes. And if they never show up and you're pissed and you need to get your money back, that's one star, you're never using those again.

So f a five star experience is you knock on the door, they open the door, they let you in. Great. That's not a big deal. You're not gonna tell every friend about it. You might say, I used Airbnb, it worked. So we thought what would a six star experience be? A six star experience.

Knocking the door. The host opens. Hey. I'm Reed, welcome to my house. You're the hosts in this case. And You would show them around and on the table.

Would be a welcome gift. It would be a bottle of wine, maybe some candy you'd open the fridge, there's water, you go to the bathroom, this toiletry. And the whole thing is great. That's a six star experience. And you'd say, Wow, I love this more than a hotel. I'm definitely gonna use Airbnb again. It worked better than I expected.

What's a seven star experience? Knock on the door. Reed Hoffman opened. Get in. Welcome.

Here's my full kitchen. I know you like surfing. There's a surfboard waiting for you. I've booked lessons for you. It's gonna be an amazing experience. And by the way, here's my car. You can use my car and Um, you know, I also want to surprise you but I got you this is best restaurant in the city of uh San Francisco. I got you a table there.

You're like Whoa Like this is way beyond. Adding stars clearly excites Brian. It took some time to run through this mental exercise. We'll skip ahead to the ten star experience. So what a ten star check can be. A Chen Star check-in would be the Beatles check-in in nineteen sixty four. I get off the plane. А не бі файтай ску кід черні майним.

with cars welcoming me to the country. I get to the front yard of your house and there'd be a press conference for me. And I would be just a mind f experience. So what would eleven star experience be? I would show up the airport. And you'd be there with Elon Musk and you're saying you're going to space.

The point of the process is that maybe nine, ten, eleven are not feasible, but if you go through the crazy exercise of keep going, There's some sweet spot between They showed up and they opened the door and I went to space. That's a sweet. And

You have to almost design the extreme to come backwards. Suddenly doesn't just like having like knowing my preferences and having a surfboard in the house seem like not crazy and reasonable. It's actually kind of crazy logistically. But This is the kind of stuff that creates great experience. But how far do you go toward the eleven star experience? to create the Nirvana product, all successful entrepreneurs at some point.

Have to come back down to Earth. There's really two stages of a startup's product. The first design a perfect experience and then you scale that experience. And that's it. But which part of the perfect experience do you scale? So the most ambitious entrepreneurs

Let's call them the Elons, after my friend Elon Musk. probably get there through raw energy because they're convinced they need to solve a problem. А не ускалав фін із ван степ. That they have to push through on the way. The Elon say I'm going to Mars.

But first I've gotta solve this problem right in front of me. First I need to get that rocket launched. And I need to have a business model for that first rocket, and that looks like satellites. Okay, I'm gonna try satellite launches, and how do I get my first rocket? I need to create a scalable rocket platform.

But unless I get the first rocket up, it doesn't matter. And you kinda work back to that. Then you've got folks like Brian who say, I realize that to get this awesome experience, I have to ratchet back to something that still seems like magic, but is totally doable. And then I need to design the elements. That get me into the totally doable thing.

So how does Brian decide on the doable thing? He settled on a service with the appropriate level of magic and started building it. And here's the next thing to notice. They didn't launch perfectly scaled services. They built everything by hand. We had a saying that you would do everything by hand to what's painful.

So Joe and I we'd photograph home toils painful, then we got a photographers. But we'd manage them with spreadsheet, tools painful, then we got an intern. I don't think I knew How anything would grow to the level that it did. She's the intern who managed those spreadsheets. She still works at Airbnb. Very manually. I would email the photographer and the host and connect them and the photographer would then Send me the photos.

Um I would go through each one, giving feedback if they needed to be retouched. And then I would manually upload them to the host website they're listing one by one. It would take hours to upload. Multitasking was the name of the game. And then we would automate the tools to make her more efficient. And we kind of looked at this

And we said, Okay, what is the easiest thing that we can Automate. Any little thing that changed was you know, quite a shift in what I had been doing. But for the better. And I remember

one day Brian would come to me at the end of every day. How many did we get? How many photos were shot? And it was like, oh gosh, I have to go through and count all of these. And then eventually a system does everything. We build a system where now a host comes, they press a button, it alerts our system, which goes to a dispatch of photographers, but it's all managed through technology. They get the job, they market through an app that we build, and then payment happens. The whole thing is automated now. Note how they gradually worked out a solution. They didn't guess at what users wanted, they reacted to what users asked for, and then they met the demand through a piecemeal process.

And here we come. The true art. Of doing things that don't scale. It's not just a crude way of succeeding on a shoe string budget. It also gives your team the inspiration and urgency to build the features that users really want.

I've seen this handcrafting story play out over and over again with entrepreneurs. Take my friend Patricer. He's the founding CO Stripe an online payments company. Today, thousands of businesses use Stripe to process payments from their online customers. But in the early days, they were a scrappy startup.

And Patrick paid close attention to his users. Very close attention. uh where we would just help customers with Well whatever issue they they wanted to ask about. And we were very distressed after a while to notice that occasionally people would come into the chat room while we were sleeping.

And ask a question, you know, they wouldn't get any response. And so we wrote a bot that would just page one of us. If somebody asked a question, they didn't get a response after more than thirty seconds or something, and someone would kind of grogggily, bleary eyed wake up and like help the bad and then go back to sleep. So in addition to being CEO, Patrick had become Stripe's bleary eyed customer service rep. Frustrated users would page him at all hours. It sure did not feel dhamorous. Actually it reminds me I don't know if you know Paul English who founded Kayak. Kayak is an online travel service that finds the lowest available rates across different websites. Paul, um for a number of years in kayak had his cell phone number as the customer service number.

Now it's common for entrepreneurs to swap stories like this. And I think it's worth dwelling on these early days of handcrafted work because most entrepreneurs tend to have a funny reaction to these experiences. They may laugh about it later, they may call the work unglamorous. They may celebrate the day they could hire a helping hand or automate these chores out of existence. But thoughtful founders will never say what a complete waste of time. They'll often look back on this period as one of most creative phases of their careers. Nancy Lublin, for instance, scrappily launched an international nonprofit.

From her New York City apartment. Her organization dressed for success. started as a clothing drive for women who needed to walk into a job interview looking sharp and feeling confident. Nancy stockpiled sweaters on her bed and jewelry in refrigerator. And soon she was inviting volunteers into her apartment for informal training sessions.

So people start hearing about dress for success and would contact me, just random people would contact me and say, I want to start this in St. Louis. I want to start this in Hartford and I would say great. You wanna come stay with me? People literally f strangers would fly from St. Louis and stay on my futon, my college futon, in my tiny, like law school apartment in New York, and I'd be like, How can I help? And I would send them postcards like saying, like, don't give up, I know it's really hard. You got this. And I just Killed them with kindness. Today, Dress for Success has affiliates in one hundred and forty five cities worldwide.

But let's be clear. The transition from the handcrafted phase to the massive scale phase is a challenging one. And I want to dispel any illusions that you can switch from one to the other with ease. In fact, it requires two opposing mindsets. You have to fulze with a single user. At the same time you have to worry about everyone. I like the way that Brian describes the difference. The designing of experience is a different part of your brain than the scaling experience. It's a different skill set. The scaling experience is a highly analytical, operations oriented, technology oriented problem. The designing of the experience is a more intuition based, human, empathetic, end to end experience.

One parallel might be writing and editing. So the handcrafted phase tends to be more like writing. It's a more inventive and creative process. Where's the scaling phase? Tends to be more analytical.

It's more like being an editor. At that point you tend to do more pruning. You realize Well this whole thing is magical, but if we focus on this twenty percent We get eighty percent of the magic. So you prune.

You compact, you distill. And you architect. So can now run at a rocket ship rate. You're transitioning the product or service over to a scale organization that can now run it. The organization needs a simple plan with very few errors and very little improvisation.

Now you might think the first step design the ideal user experience drops away as soon as your product goes viral. Then comes the glamorous work of expanding in new countries and thinking about your strategy in the years ahead. Handcraft work is essentially a kind of boost rocket. That helps you get in orbit. But it's not the kind of rocket for the whole trajectory.

It gets you out of the gravity well and after that Get ready to slingshot around the world. You became an international company. Then Middle two thousand eleven.

We raise money, we're like this billion dollar valuation company, and then in summer two thousand eleven A woman's home got trashed, and then we had to go the next step, which was we are just this little covenant apartment, but as far as the world's concerned, we have a giant office building, we better be grown-ups. So we had to build 247 support, had to have more secure payment instruments, we had to add a trusted safety team, we had to verify people's identity. We realized we had to get our money transmission licenses. So then there's this whole like administrative bureaucracy that gets added. Then Two thousand twelve.

We get to the point. We are we have like fifty hundred employees, we have no executive team. There's no management, there's no like company meetings, there's no communication, so no one knows anything. I don't know anything. Like like literally nothing. I don't I don't even know how we ran the company. And so I instituted some basic things, like I have to have an executive team, and then the lawsuits come in. And you have to really sort it out. And unfortunately, we're not regular at the federal level, regularly at the city level. And every city is different. And they're like, I see what you did in Paris.

But here in New York. We're different. And so you'd go city by city. You've got to hire those people to really triage and deal with all these issues. It's like a video game.

You slay a dragon, you think you've completed the board game. And then you're the next level and all of a sudden the dragons get really big. But when you're slaying dragons, it's hard to hold on to the handcrafted mindset. Still, I would argue that the sharpest founders have Never fully abandon the mindset.

No matter how big their company gets. And so the organization will start having antibodies Against new handcrafted things. It's a response that protects organizational efficiency. It says look.

This new thing? We can't get it to scale. It won't operationalize. It won't fit within our process. The reason that scaled companies have a hard time with this handcrafted process is all in the list of objections about why this won't work, why this shouldn't be integrated as part of the company.

And so what you need to do as a founder is be extremely choiceful about which handcrafted innovation you choose and how you protect it organizationally. You need to protect it. Because the natural reaction of the scale organization will be to kill it. He wanted to reinvent the industry again, and he knew he had more to learn about the travel experience in order to do it. So he turned to Hollywood for help. I often find that to reinvent an industry, you do not take inspiration directly from that industry, that you need to look at orthogonal industries.

And for us the orthogon industry to travel was cinema. And the best trips you've ever seen are the trips that characters in movies have. And that we would provide that analogy in real life. And I actually literally hired a storyboard artist from Pixar. And we had him storyboard the perfect airbnb experience.

When we did that We realized there was like this two hour movie. And only twenty minutes were in the home. There was all this like leading up to the home, getting the airport Going around, going to dinner, hanging out with friends out and about. It was like most of the trip was not in the home.

But we realize that point we need to be in the end to end business of travel. So the same way That we did things that don't scale. We call them magical trips. Notice how quickly Brian turns his attention to a single traveler.

In an instant he switches from global concerns back to his artisanal roots. And that's because he's building something radically new here. You want to scale the perfect trip. But what is the perfect trip? What are the essential ingredients that make a vacation truly memorable?

It's a question that Brian can't even begin to answer until he delivers that experience to at least one person. You're about to get a master class in handcrafting. And so we put up these flyers. Anonymously saying seeking a traveller. Well photograph your trip to San Francisco.

If you let us follow you. This guy Mercardo replied he was from London. Here we go. And we sent a photographer around him while he was just traveling to San Francisco. What we learned was this trip was awful. Like he'd show up. He go to Alcatraz by himself, put on the headset, then you go to Bubblegum Shrimp. He'd stay in like uh like budget hotel. He'd go to hotel bar by himself, like sitting like with a bunch of dudes at the bar. He doesn't talk to anyone'cause he's introverted. We call him back.

You say Ricardo. We want to create the perfect trip to San Francisco for you. You fly him back. And we had the team storyboard the perfect experience for Airbnb. We had a driver.

pick'em up the airport, then we took him to the perfect Airbnb through all these services. He went on these dinner parties. We got on the best seats at restaurant. We took him on this midnight mystery bike tour, like sixty riders go on it. And nobody but the leader knows it'll end up.

And it's just like there was this crazy magical world. I see him at the end of the trip. I say, How was your trip? He says was amazing. And then I walk away.

Yells at me. Brian, one more thing. And he starts like crying. And he breaks down and says, Thank you, this is the best trip I've ever had. I was like, Oh my God, I guess it kinda kinda worked, like it really moved him.

Because I don't think anyone ever tried to like design end to end experience for somebody like they're in a movie. Before and we did it. That became a blueprint and we said We are confident on a un scalable basis.

That we know how to create a trip. That deeply moves somebody. It's better than anything they've ever experienced. question is can we develop a technology scale to do it a hundred million times. Notice here how quickly Brian switches back to the analytic mindset. He can extrapolate from a single journey to a list of essential ingredients.

Here is a systematic breakdown of the perfect trip. When you first go to city, you need a welcome event within the first twenty-four, forty-eight hours where you're around people. The day when you land you need to get alchemated to the neighborhood. that by day two or three, you need to have a challenge out of your comfort zone. If you do not leave your comfort zone, you do not remember the trip.

And if you can belong out of your comfort zone. And something new happens to you. then there's gonna be a moment of transformation. where the person you were in a small way dies. And a new, better version of yourself is reborn.

Now this is the narrative of every movie you've ever seen. A main character starts in the ordinary world. They leave their ordinary world. They cross the threshold to a new magical world. Where all these obstacles happen.

And they overcome something. And they call it the hero's journey. And we apply this. To trips. Build a small team.

And we spent the last couple years figuring out how to scale this. And this has led to what we have today, which we call Airbnb trips. In November of twenty sixteen, Brian unveiled five hundred chip packages in twelve cities. And now he's fully in the scaling mindset, figuring out how to expand the service to new destinations. But as Brian will tell you, he misses the handcrafted work.

Here's a surprising message for entrepreneurs who have only a handful of users to serve. I kind of tell a lot of entrepreneurs who don't have traction, I miss those times. I mean yes, it's exciting to have traction to have a super s like company that's like huge scale. But the biggest leaps you ever get is when you're small. And another way of saying it is your product changes less the bigger you get.

Because there's bigger more customers, more blowback, more systems, more legacy. The most innovative leaps you'll ever make. Often. Especially if you're a network.

are gonna be when you're really, really small. You can change the product entirely in a week. Try doing that at LinkedIn or Airbnb today. That'd be a huge disaster. So I think Taking advantage of that sub scale. Designing the perfect experience, asking yourself what you could do is amazing. And if you have a teeny startup

I have good news for you. Now is the moment you can take the most daring leaps of your career. Dream big. And act small. Pay passionate attention to your users.

Handcraft the core service for them. Create a magical experience. And then figure out. What part of that magical handcrafted thing can scale.

I'm Reed Hoffman. Thank you for listening. Masters of Scale is a Wait What original. Our executive producers are June Cohen and Darren Trift. Our producers are Dan Kedney.

Jenny Cotaldo and Ben Manila. Special thanks. To Jessica Johnson, say it's a pieva. Lisa Shriber. Chris Yay.

David Sanford. J Punjabi. Stefani Kent. And Rafina Am. Original music.

Is by the Holiday Brothers. Mixing and Mastering by Brian Pugh. Visit masters of scale dot com to find a transcript. for this episode. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share

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