Design helps shape our everyday interactions through products, furniture, objects, or experiences.
Joe Gebbia
Digital communication is completely different from in-person, face-to-face conversations. One will give you surface insights, and the other really gives you depth.
Joe Gebbia
Airbnb has proven that hospitality, generosity, and the simple act of trust between strangers can go a long way.
Joe Gebbia
What I’ve realized is that the joy of meeting and greeting people from all around the world is universal.
Joe Gebbia
I often stay in Tokyo’s Daikanyama neighbourhood. You can go for a peaceful morning run along the Meguro river, and it is particularly incredible during cherry blossom season.
Joe Gebbia
Scheduled shipping is one of many inventions that has made New York a global capital of innovation and creativity – from Willis Carrier’s invention of air conditioning in Buffalo and George Eastman’s breakthrough film technology in Rochester to the rise of hip-hop in the South Bronx and the world’s first cell phone call in Midtown Manhattan.
Joe Gebbia
We do believe in an inside-out culture. If we hold our hosts and guests to an expectation of acceptance and belonging, it has to start within our company. Otherwise, how on earth do we have the credibility to hold them accountable if we’re not doing it to ourselves?
Joe Gebbia
We didn’t invent anything new. Hospitality has been around forever.
Joe Gebbia
From natural disasters to the refugee crises, the impact we can have as individuals might seem limited. But as many of our hosts know, sharing your home for even a few nights can make a tremendous difference in someone’s life.
Joe Gebbia
How do you convince somebody to host a stranger for the weekend? That’s not a trivial thing. It’s not something I think you can throw technology at, marketing at, or sales at. We threw design at it because that’s all we knew, and in doing so, I feel like we brought a human touch to it, which is so needed.
Joe Gebbia
Design can overcome our most deeply rooted stranger-danger bias.
Joe Gebbia
Airbnb is a trusted online marketplace for people to list, discover, and book unique accommodations around the world. From a private room to a private island, we offer an entertaining and personal way for travelers to unlock local experiences and see their surroundings through the eyes of a local.
Joe Gebbia
In the post-war United States, you had this race to the suburbs. Cities shrank, the suburbs got bigger – and the notion of community changed drastically. You went from all being very close together to all being spaced apart and slightly suspicious of one another.
Joe Gebbia
Cities are a melting pot for different ideas, and diversity brings a high-energy rhythm that I don’t think we’d know was gone until it was too late.
Joe Gebbia
To be truly empathetic, we have to acknowledge that we’re all human, we’re all flawed, and that life can be difficult.
Joe Gebbia
In New York, ingenuity goes hand-in-hand with the hustle to survive.
Joe Gebbia
We’ve invented a new marketplace. There was no easy way to rent a person’s bedroom over the Internet or book a vacation rental over the Internet. There was no guidebook for us to turn to as we defined this new marketplace.
Joe Gebbia
High reputation beats high similarity.
Joe Gebbia
The sharing economy is about making use of any idle resource out there. We do love seeing other sharing-economy companies flourish.
Joe Gebbia
We believe that the best solutions come from solving your own problem. If you have a real problem, there’s likely someone else who can relate. That’s how Airbnb was born.
Joe Gebbia
As Chief Product Officer, I lead our product team to create simple, intuitive user experiences.
Joe Gebbia
We started Airbnb because, like many across the U.S. and in New York, we were struggling to pay our rent and decided to open up our living room to fellow artists coming to town for a design conference. Sharing our apartment allowed us to stay in our home and start our company.
Joe Gebbia
Of course Airbnb made mistakes the first year! Some came from our own preconceptions. When we started, we designed our interface for ourselves, Internet-savvy twentysomethings. We never considered the role of good eyesight in our interface – font size, vernacular; it all matters.
Joe Gebbia
Technology moves so quickly; you can’t get comfortable with the business you have today because technology will progress.
Joe Gebbia
What we’re doing with Airbnb feels like the nexus of everything that is right. We’re helping people be more resourceful with the space they already have, and we’re connecting people around the world.
Joe Gebbia
Staying at Airbnb listings gives me the opportunity to truly understand and experience the local culture of the countries I visit.
Joe Gebbia
We hire people who are smarter than us.
Joe Gebbia
To me, ‘design thinking’ is another way of saying empathize with the customer. It’s consideration for the person you’re designing for.
Joe Gebbia
You must have the ability to recognize good design and good user experience. These are core things at Airbnb. It doesn’t matter which department you’re in.
Joe Gebbia
After World War II, communities and the trust they fostered began to erode in the United States. We moved away from dense city centers to fenced in suburban lots separated by broad highways.
Joe Gebbia
While the Cold War had us questioning our next-door neighbors, big brands emerged to capture our trust. We became consumers.
Joe Gebbia
Sympathy relies on a common experience. If you’re clumsy, you might have sympathy for others who tend to bump into things. Empathy, on the other hand, is the ability to understand another person’s feelings even if you’ve never experienced them yourself.
Joe Gebbia
I’ll never forget my first Art Basel.
Joe Gebbia
Given Miami’s unique role in Airbnb’s roots, I’m particularly proud of how South Floridians have embraced home sharing as an opportunity to earn supplemental income and catalyze economic development in their communities.
Joe Gebbia
Ultimately, the power of the Airbnb platform is that it motivates guests to blend into communities, belong anywhere, and live like locals.
Joe Gebbia
As with any new and innovative industry, entrenched interests – particularly the hotel industry – have attempted to squash the home-sharing movement.
Joe Gebbia
By helping New Yorkers turn their greatest expense – their home – into an asset, Airbnb is a vehicle that artists, entrepreneurs, and innovators can use to earn extra money to pursue their passion.
Joe Gebbia
In art school, you learn that design is much more than the look and feel of something – it’s the whole experience.
Joe Gebbia
What if cities embraced a culture of sharing? I see a future of shared cities that bring us community and connection instead of isolation and separation.
Joe Gebbia
I’ve experienced firsthand the disconnect between furniture, their environments, and the way people work.
Joe Gebbia
There’s no reason any company should be limited by its physical environment.
Joe Gebbia
Any time there is a new idea, it can take some time for policy to catch up to it.
Joe Gebbia
We have seen things in the twentieth century like the ATM machine, the VCR, and even the car. The electric car was invented in 1920, and here we, 100 years later, it is only now becoming an actual thing. So it doesn’t surprise me that new ideas are met with a lot of questions.
Joe Gebbia
When trust works out right, it can be absolutely magical.
Joe Gebbia
We’re a community-driven brand, but at the same time, we want every host in every home to recognize that they’re all individuals, and to use Airbnb as an expression of their individuality.
Joe Gebbia
At Airbnb, we’re trying to build a culture that supports details, celebrates them, and gives our teams creative license to pursue them.
Joe Gebbia
The hotel industry is a very modern invention – it only really started to become branded in the 1950s.
Joe Gebbia
Airbnb was born out of necessarity. Our rent went up. It was born out of a problem.
Joe Gebbia
Airbnb has grown thanks to our hosts creating memorable experiences and inspiring their guests to be hosts in their hometowns.
Joe Gebbia
We expect Seoul to be one of our most important markets not only in Asia but around the world.
Joe Gebbia
Dog-fooding is using your own products so that you understand from inside out what it is you’re providing the customers. It’s another way to gain insights and to gain intelligence. You use it yourself; you eat your own dog food. Every time we do that, we discover something that we can improve.
Joe Gebbia
I think Pixar’s done an amazing job integrating art and science. They really get this idea that art and engineering work side by side.
Joe Gebbia
