GigaOM » Joe Gebbia

What Airbnb learned from Jiro Dreams of Sushi

Katie Fehrenbacher — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 21:00:37 +0000

Airbnb cofounder and Chief Product Officer Joe Gebbia is one of a new crop of designer founders who have successfully morphed their design careers into building and running breakout startups. And these new designers have been looking to some very non-traditional creators for inspiration. Gebbia told a group of designers at an event, which was a collaboration between AIGA and Parisoma, in San Francisco on Wednesday night that the movie Jiro Dreams of Sushi represents what they fundamentally believe at Airbnb.

In case you haven’t seen the documentary, which came out in 2011, Jiro is an octogenarian sushi master who has perfected the art of making sushi at his Michelin three-star restaurant in the Ginza subway in Tokyo. He’s spent decades perfecting simple tasks like selecting, cutting, and preparing the best fish. “Jiro embodies craftsmanship and detail,” said Gebbia, explaining:

One of the responsibilities of designers is to seek out and find the details. If we don’t who else will?

Gebbia, who graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design, says he took his entire product team to Jiro Dreams of Sushi. “At Airbnb we’re trying to build a culture that supports details, celebrates them, and gives our teams creative license to pursue them,” said Gebbia. I’m not interested in the debate about what comes first engineering or design, said Gebbia, “the important thing is designing the farm,” or the environment for these things to thrive.

For example, Gebbia cited a small detail that Airbnb built into its host messaging system. When a host is replying to a guest, the email can be repopulated with a message that the host sent to a former guest, but with the name changed for the current guest. The idea is that a host will commonly be emailing the same things to multiple guests, and the auto population can save them significant time. One host was so happy with the time-saver that they sent a gushing email to the team.

Airbnb might be a $2.5 billion-plus valued company now, but of course it wasn’t always so. Gebbia — who says his first entrepreneurial venture was selling drawings of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to classmates in grade school — remembers the times of rejection quite clearly. Around 2008 we were “staring in the face of rejection,” after attempting to raise funding from venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. “We got 20 email intros to investors, 10 emailed us back, 5 took coffee meetings with us, and zero invested in us,” recalls Gebbia.

Some of the best advice Gebbia says he got in 2009 from Paul Graham, the head of Y Combinator, who accepted the Airbnb founders into his accelerator. Graham gave the company permission to solve problems that wouldn’t scale, said Gebbia, explaining that Graham told his team to “go out and meet your customers.”

The early team started staying in the Airbnb rooms in New York and realized the hosts needed much better photography to show off their housing assets. After spending a weekend renting a camera, photographing host accommodations and publishing them on the site, bookings started growing immediately. The team returned to the Bay Area and reported their findings back to Graham. Graham’s immediate response was: “what are you doing here? Get back to New York.”

Sushi master Jiro is just one newer influence on the design of Airbnb. Gebbia, who studied industrial design at RISD, says his early influences also include Charles and Ray Eames, the furniture and product designer team who are widely cited as helping democratize design. In terms of company culture, the early Airbnb team visited Zappos a few years ago to learn about how to create and maintain a fun company.

Gebbia spoke at our soldout RoadMap 2012 event, which focused on design in the age of connectivity. RoadMap 2013 will take place this coming November and tickets will go on sale shortly. To be the first to know when tickets will go on sale, sign up here.

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Startups are great, but we can learn a lot from “end-ups,” too

John Maeda, Guest Contributor — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 18:30:07 +0000

At last week’s DLD Conference in Munich, I had the opportunity to sit onstage with the co-founder and CPO of Airbnb, Joe Gebbia. We started by discussing the unique creative culture at Rhode Island School of Design, where Joe went to college, and where I currently serve as president. Joe shared some of his secrets of being a successful designer-founder, and then turned the tables and asked me what it’s like to run a 136-year-old institution like RISD.

As often happens these days, the Twitter summary of my answer was perhaps more articulate than my answer itself:

@johnmaeda: “Today end-ups — old companies and institutions — want to be become more like start-ups. Yet they are classic and important.” via @AnnePascual

@johnmaeda: “Start-ups want to end up successful. Both want to be great.” via @Sloane

I sit on the board of a couple of start-ups (like Sonos and Quirky), but I spend my days running RISD – what I call an “end-up” in contrast with a start-up. I also used to be at the academic equivalent of a start-up, the MIT Media Lab, which was founded in the 1980s (30 years is young in academic terms). Now, the term end-up may sound pejorative, but in fact I mean the opposite: If you think about it, the end goal for most start-ups is to eventually become an end-up, which is to say successful and long lasting.

At the same time, you increasingly hear that large corporations and institutions now wish to act more like start-ups, in order to innovate and become more agile. My friend Jocelyn Glei, editor-in-chief of 99U, remarked recently how “start-up culture” is so much more coveted and in the zeitgeist than it was 10 years ago; prior presidents simply didn’t talk about start-ups like Obama does.

(As an interesting side note, this analogy works for countries as well. European nations like France are the great end-ups of civilization. The U.S. was a start-up that is now coping with becoming an end-up. And China is an end-up that feels like a start-up again.)

Here are some of the crucial differences between start-ups and end-ups:

Start-ups	End-ups
Want to be something	Already are something
Agile	Stable
Culture is forming	Culture has formed
Have little	Have lots
Have little to lose	Have lots to lose
Try something for the first time	Tried everything and know what works
Unproven	Proven
Do what needs to get done	Clear roles and responsibilities
Flat structure with empowerment	Hierarchical structure with rules
May come and go	Stand the test of time
Heterarchy	Hierarchy

Start-ups have little, but also little to lose

By definition, customers aren’t drawn to start-ups because of a trusted legacy or brand. So they must prove their worth to each and every new customer and get their name out without a well-resourced marketing machine behind them.

End-ups with strong brands that draw customers in, however, can become hesitant to act for fear of tarnishing or altering that brand. Start-ups have no choice but to act, and act fully – it’s the only way they’ll survive.

Change comes naturally to a start-up

A start-up is like a baby growing up: It needs to change and grow to become itself. Start-ups often dream of having the strong internal cultures, passed-down stories, and shared history that you commonly find in end-ups and that guide their decisions.

But change is awkward to an end-up, much like it can be for a grown adult trying to reimagine him/herself. It’s often necessary for end-ups, but it’s never easy.

End-ups have resources; start-ups have commitment

At end-ups, employees have well-defined roles and responsibilities. In the best case, that ensures that things are done efficiently. In the worst case, though, it can inhibit people from taking on new responsibilities with agility. At a start-up, it’s all-hands-on-deck to make sure things get out the door, even if it’s sometimes unclear whose hands are doing what and chaos ensues.

And it’s important to note that it’s the stories and legends of the great end-ups that inspire most great start-ups – think of HP, Apple, IBM. Rather than assume that all end-ups are decaying dinosaurs, we must acknowledge that each is the envy of the other in some respects.

End-ups have learned to manage scale, and have accumulated wisdom over time; start-ups have the benefit of the agile beginner’s mind. The challenge for both is to seek greatness by learning from each other.

John Maeda is a graphic designer and artist, and is president of Rhode Island School of Design. Follow him on Twitter @johnmaeda.

Photo courtesy of Anettphoto/Shutterstock.com.

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Born to help make the rent, Airbnb grew from good design

Eliza Kern — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 23:04:53 +0000

Airbnb might be one of the hottest startups in Silicon Valley, but it didn’t start with such glamorous roots. In fact, it started with an air mattress.

“Airbnb was born out of necessarity. Our rent went up. It was born out of a problem,” said Joe Gebbia, the company’s co-founder and chief product officer at GigaOM’s RoadMap conference in San Francisco Monday. “By inflating the air bed, it began that design process.”

Gebbia said that about five years ago, he and his co-founders were looking to make some extra money, and by hosting a few visitors in San Francisco, they were able to make some extra money and forge a social bond with their visitors. And then it occurred to them that the product could work for other people too.

Now, Airbnb has raised about $120 million in financing after a round last summer, when it was valued at about $1.3 billion. Gebbia says the site, which allows users to post rooms for rent and book visitors, sees more than 1,000 new listings every day. It’s booked more than 10 million nights so far.

“We started with airbeds,” he said. “And people have listed private rooms, and then… boats and treehouses and castles and villas.”

When someone listed their island in Fiji on the site for relatively decent prices, that’s when Gebbia realized Airbnb had reached a new level of business.

“I just remember sitting back in my chair, and saying, ‘this totally redefines the experience,’” he said.

Airbnb was one of the noted successes of Paul Graham’s Y Combinator incubator, and he said Graham was instrumental in pushing them in their early days to really consider who their customers were. The team was located in Mountain View at the time, but most of their customers were in New York, so they got on a flight and headed to New York, where they started talking to the people listing their homes on the site.

“Our conversations with them illuminated everything that was wrong with the product,” he said, saying it took off afterwards.

Gebbia said in the 1990s, the real consumer challenge for the internet was bringing customers online, but that’s changing now, and Airbnb is at the forefront of this change.

“Airbnb is about the nexus of the online and offline to create the perfect customer experience,” he said.

Check out the rest of our RoadMap 2012 live coverage here, and a video recording of the session follows below:

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Announcing Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia to speak at RoadMap

Om Malik, Katie Fehrenbacher — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 16:02:19 +0000

Our list of awesome speakers for our RoadMap conference keeps growing! We’re excited to announce that Airbnb co-founder and Chief Product Officer Joe Gebbia will join our lineup for a conversation with GigaOM Senior Writer Mathew Ingram on how Airbnb has been using design as a competitive advantage, and what’s behind the trend of the designer founder.

Gebbia, a Rhode Island School of Design grad, leads an integrated team of designers, engineers, and researchers at Airbnb who create the user experiences you see on the site. This summer Airbnb completely redesigned its site focusing on beautiful images and “wish lists.”

Our RoadMap conference is a day-long event that focuses on design in the age of connectedness and we’ll dive into topics like how to create user interfaces and user experiences in a connected environment. The idea is that with the explosion of big data and always-on wireless connections, simple design is the key to creating meaningful and valuable connected experiences.

Speakers include:

Perry Chen, CEO, Kickstarter
David Karp, Founder and CEO, Tumblr
Ben Silbermann, Co-Founder and CEO, Pinterest
Kevin Systrom, Co-Founder and CEO, Instagram
Evan Williams, CEO, The Obvious Corporation
John Maeda, President, Rhode Island School of Design
Yves Béhar, CEO, fuseproject, CCO Jawbone
Stefan Olander, VP, Digital Sport, Nike
Tony Fadell, Founder and CEO, Nest
Dave Gilboa, Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Warby Parker Eyewear
George Blankenship, VP, Worldwide Sales and Ownership Experience, Tesla Motors
Alex Ljung, Founder and CEO, SoundCloud
Katia Beauchamp, Co-Founder, Birchbox
Paul Mascarenas, CTO and VP, Ford Motor Company Research and Innovation
Oren Jacob, CEO, ToyTalk
Jennifer Pahlka, Founder and Executive Director, Code for America
Bobby Podesta, Head of Creative, ToyTalk
Scott Wilson, Founder, MINIMAL

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This week in European events

Bobbie Johnson — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 09:30:35 +0000

The big noise this week is The Next Web conference in Amsterdam. It’s the conference that spawned a blogging empire, you know. But there’s plenty of other stuff going on across the continent, whether you want to know about HTML5 in Barcelona or feel like putting yourself forward for IGNITE Berlin, which is taking place next month.

Got any events coming up? Leave details in the comments or email them to bobbie@gigaom.com

The Next Web, Amsterdam, April 26-27
Speakers include YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley, Airbnb’s Joe Gebbia, and controversial gamification expert Gabe Zichermann.

Deutsche Gamestage, Berlin, April 24-28
This five day event focused on the games industry incorporates a developer conference and awards ceremony that make it the German equivalent of GDC.

Data Science Global Hackathon, worldwide, April 28-29
Timed to coincide with Big Data Week, this series of global hackathons is organized by Data Science London, takes place at local events in places like Helsinki, and offers hackers a chance to compete against other teams around the planet: participants will be presented with a serious data set and asked to do something exciting with it. More here.

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AirBnB gets $112M in new investment

Om Malik — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 05:01:27 +0000

AirBnB, a San Francisco–based person-to-person room-, apartment- and house-rental startup, has raised $112 million in Series B funding from a group of investors including Russian Internet investor DST Global, General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz. Though three years old, the company has raised about $120 million. AirBnB Andreessen Horowitz partner Jeff Jordan, who until recently was the chief executive officer of OpenTable, led the investment on behalf of Andreessen Horowitz.

Frankly, today’s new announcement is just an affirmation of what has been reported in the past, ad nauseam. Sarah Lacy of TechCrunch had first reported of the likely investment on May 30, 2011, and speculated that the company was valued at close to a billion dollars. We have heard similar valuation metrics as well. As we previously reported, the company is on track to take in $25 million of net revenues during the current year and is also said to be doing flow-through revenues of around half a billion. The company itself says that two million nights have been booked using the system. The company is experiencing rapid growth in overseas markets. The New York Times reports that the company is racking up about 10,000 guests a night.

AirBnB is an amazing story of enterprenurial grit. More importantly the company is at the leading edge of what I have described as a new peer-to-peer (or person-to-person) economy. This p2p economy is an area of much interest to me. Here is a video interview with AirBnB CEO Brian Chesky, who shared his story with me a few months ago. In addition, Colleen Taylor interviewed his co-founder, Joe Gebbia, and I have embedded that interview as well.

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VIDEO: How Web-Based Sharing Is Driving A Green Economy

Katie Fehrenbacher — Wed, 18 May 2011 22:59:36 +0000

While I’ve noticed a bit of a slump in cleantech these days, one of the bright spots has been using the web and cell phones to share resources, from rooms, to cars to “stuff.” Car sharing company Zipcar soared in its Nasdaq debut last month, and Airbnb has booked over 1 million nights of shared space since its founding.

You’re probably wondering: are these companies really green? Well, digital technologies have a unique ability to segment goods into service increments — by day, hour, even minute — and can lead to the use of resources far more efficiently. For example car sharing services lead to removing a significant amount of cars from the roads. At Green:Net, Airbnb’s co-founder Joe Gebbia and RelayRides CEO Shelby Clark, chat with Collaborative Consumption Lab’s Lauren Anderson.

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