Nate Blecharczyk, Co-founder of Airbnb, on Selling Breakfast Cereal and Other Growth Hacks

**Nate Blecharczyk** (0:00)
Advice is not a silver bullet. It's that exchange of ideas that gets you thinking.
The classic advice we got from Paul Graham was, do things that don't scale, go out and meet your users. And we're like, we're an internet company, why do we meet our users?
Our best executive hires and employees too, are folks who come into it with a learning mindset. They don't want to come in with their own agenda and go in their own direction, they really want to get on the same page with you and are willing to listen.

**Glenn Solomon** (0:26)
From GGV, this is Founder Real Talk, where we get real about the challenges that founders and startup executives face and how they've grown from tough experiences. I'm your host, Glenn Solomon, managing partner at GGV Capital.
On today's episode, we have Nate Blecharczyk, the co-founder of Airbnb, and we recorded this podcast at Airbnb's headquarters. I'm joined by my good friend, Crystal Huang, as guest host.
So we're super excited to have Nathan Blecharczyk here with us today for our first ever live audience podcast at Founder Real Talk. Nate's one of the three co-founders of Airbnb. As an early internet pioneer, Nate financed much of his way through Harvard, where he graduated with a degree in computer science via entrepreneurial and programming roles. He coded up the initial Airbnb site, and one of his two co-founders, Brian Chesky, in his own words about the early days of Airbnb said, Joe and I would have crazy dreams and visions. Nate would find a way to make the wildly impractical possible. Nate served Airbnb in many capacities, including CTO, and these days as Chief Strategy Officer and Chairman of China. We'll discuss this varied set of roles with Nate, and please join me in welcoming Nate to Founder Real Talk. Thanks, Nate.
So first question for you, you know, you, Brian and Joe have been together now for quite some time, but going back to the early days when Airbnb was just getting off the ground, how did you guys mess your skill sets? What did you do well? What did those guys do well? And how did you figure out who was going to be responsible for what?

**Nate Blecharczyk** (2:12)
Well, actually, this was one of the premises for working together in the first place was the team, because we were living together as roommates in San Francisco before starting the company.
And during that time, we each had different jobs and we had side projects, things that we worked on after work and on the weekends.
And so we immediately noticed each other's work ethic. We also noticed that we had complementary skills and we were helping each other out. Joe and Brian are designers. I'm an engineer. They were helping me to create marketing material, design my sites. I was helping them to build theirs. And so part of the idea of doing Airbnb was not even so much about Airbnb, but it was the team.
Once we got going and the company got running, it kind of all fell into place fairly organically. I would say by being the only engineer, actually my early title and my email footer was All Things Technical Guy. So of course the engineering, but anything having to do with data, analytics, some of the basic finances in the early, early days. And that's all I really had bandwidth to do.
Joe was doing a lot of the visual design, user feedback, customer service. Brian was doing a lot of the external stuff, interviews, fundraising. And I think just looking at our personalities, that has also kind of dictated who does what. I mean, Brian, if there's one word to describe him, it's bold. He's the guy out there convincing you to go 10x harder, and I think that's what you kind of need in the CEO and the leader. Joe is the perfectionist. He has tremendous empathy for users and wanting to get it right regardless of how long it takes. And of course, I'm the engineer.

**Glenn Solomon** (3:47)
So you guys were friendly before starting the company together. Do you think that's a positive or a negative for a group of founders to know each other in a context outside of work like that?

**Nate Blecharczyk** (3:57)
I think it's very good. I would say that starting a company together is like a professional marriage, and you want to go into that eyes open.
And so having some context and experience with one another beforehand is really great. I'd also say that during the first year, by the end of the first year, things were not going well.
And had it been easy to walk away from each other, we probably would have, but we were definitely in it together. We were friends, and we realized that if any one of us left, the other two would be kind of sunk, and nobody wanted to do that to their pals. And so I think we stuck through it longer than we otherwise would have. And I think it helped us a lot.