Disruptive Leadership and Changing People's Minds with Nate Blecharczyk and Samaira Mehta

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Commission-free trading is the norm, but true value is more than a price tag. It's a team of traders to answer any question, a personalized education, and thinkorswim's charting capabilities. Value is becoming smarter with every trade. TD Ameritrade, where smart investors get smarter.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:16)
Which is harder to change? Someone's world or someone's mind?

**SPEAKER_3** (0:22)
The idea of hosting a stranger in your home is probably not intuitive to most people.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:28)
I never really set out to create any form of disruption. I really just set out to solve a problem.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:34)
Failure is simply a learning opportunity, right?

**SPEAKER_6** (0:40)
World Reimagined with Gautam Mukunda, a leadership podcast for a changing world, an original podcast from NASDAQ.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:48)
Women bring so many new perspectives, new points of view to the table. The creativity, the compassion, the collaboration.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:08)
What could this be someday? An empty house has so much potential. Should the couch go here, or over there? Do we want to put the big comfy armchair into that nice sunny corner? Or put the plant right in the window instead and see how big it can get? And well, I don't know what to make of all these weird tiny cabinets, but I'm sure there's something we can do with them.
Of course, every new place has rooms with fairly specific uses. You probably shouldn't put a mattress in your kitchen, say, or a dining room table in the master bath. But for the most part, when it's a blank slate like this, a home could be anything. Even the beginning of a revolutionary business.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:57)
First of all, this was an empty bedroom. It didn't even have a bed. But we set up an air bed, and instead of calling it a bed and breakfast, we called it air bed and breakfast.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:07)
Nate Blecharczyk is the co-founder and chief strategy officer of Airbnb. And when he and his roommates turned co-founders, Brian Chesky and Joe Ghebbia started up in 2007, they weren't trying to change the hospitality industry as we know it. They just wanted to make a few bucks back on their rent over a busy weekend in San Francisco. But they were also paying close attention to what happened next.

**SPEAKER_3** (2:31)
And we put up a simple blog post advertising very affordable accommodation for the weekend. And we actually got inquiries, and three different individuals ended up staying there. One was a 35-year-old woman from Boston. Another was a father of four from Utah. And there was a man from India. And I guess we were expecting guys like ourselves, you know, guys in their 20s. And so we were immediately kind of struck by the fact that this was a diverse group, individuals with very different backgrounds than ourselves needing a place to stay. Once they stayed, we all hung out together. Joe and Brian introduced the guests to their friends, their networks. And so it ended up being not just a way to pay the rent or a way for them to save money and have a place to stay, but it really became this kind of social experience where friendships were formed. And so that was how it all got started. But from there, we thought, well, you know, this was such a win-win. Maybe there are other people in other situations where the same arrangement might work. And we recognized, though, to do that, we would have to overcome that stigma of how do you trust a stranger. And so that was really then when we focused in on solving that specific problem. But we kind of stumbled into it, not because we had done a business analysis, but because we were solving our own problem.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:48)
Nate and his co-founders had discovered a new way of thinking about unused space in their apartment. But in order to capitalize on it, they had to change the way people thought about strangers. In much the same way that this space could either be an office, a gym, or a spare bedroom you rent out for a little bit of extra cash, the world is full of people who could either trash your home if given half the chance, or become your new best friend.
Changing the way people see each other was one of the first challenges Nate faced as a leader. It's not an easy one, especially when the person you want others to see differently is yourself.

**SPEAKER_4** (4:30)
I think this was one of the most eye-opening stages in my journey because I always thought I was perhaps too young to create change, but I never saw it in action until this time.

**SPEAKER_2** (4:46)