No More Hustleporn: Brian Chesky on how to deal with regulators
We pulled out the highlights from Brian Chesky's recent interview at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Transcription and light editing by Anthropic's Claude, curation by Yiren Lu :-)
Highlights
Brian Chesky: Oh, man. Yeah. There were some things that were initially out of my depth. Like they did not teach you at RISD how to work with government regulators. So I always grew up thinking, if people don't like you, you should avoid them. That seems kind of intuitive, right? Or you should fight them and disagree with them and they're your opponent. And then in 2011, I hired my first executive. Her name is Belinda Johnson. She was our chief legal officer, eventually became our COO. And she told me something that was counterintuitive to me. She said, if people don't like you, you should meet with them. And I said, really? Why would I do that? Wouldn't it go horribly wrong? And she said, no, because it's hard for people to hate you up close.
And I think that's a really important lesson. So I said, okay, well, who doesn't like me? And it turned out a lot of people. And so instead of having a tour where I went on tour to meet everyone to like me, I told our team I want to meet everyone who doesn't like me. And it turned out they kept me busy for a long time. But I would meet with these government officials and sometimes the meetings would start. A little hostile at first, but I had a rule that would always listen first and seek to understand them. And I think my dad used to say, like, 90% of life is just showing up. It's actually not true in tech. But when it comes to showing respect, 90% of life sometimes is showing someone respect and listening to them.
Full Transcript
Brian Chesky: I didn't know there would be visuals today. This is going to be oh, god, already.
Brian Chesky: Yes, my dad was not very happy about that. I remember I got home one day, and he's sitting in the dining room with that opened. If you had told me when I was in high school that I would be here talking to all of you, I just thought it kind of boggles my mind to be here right now.
James Yan: The founding story of your company, Brian, will be familiar to many in the audience, but as a quick refresher, could you walk us through the origin of Airbnb?
Brian Chesky: Yeah, I'll do the quick version. I'm from upstate New York. My parents are both social workers. I remember my mom telling me one day, I think I was like, in high school, and she said, I chose a job for the love, and I didn't really get paid any money, so you should make sure that you get a job that pays you a lot of money. One day, I was really interested in art and design, and then I asked Santa for poorly designed toys so I could redesign them, like really peculiar things like that. One day, I tell my mom, I said, I'm going to be an artist. She said, oh, my God. You chose the only job in America they'll pay less than a social worker. You're going to get paid nothing. That was probably the pretext to that yearbook quote. I said, no, mom, I promise I'm going to get a job. She said, a real job. I said, what's a real job? She said, a real job is a job that gives you health insurance so you don't have to live in my basement.
So I said, all right, I'll promise you I'll get a real job with health insurance. I get to RisD thinking I wanted to be an artist, and then I felt like, the moment I got on campus. I was born, like, 100 years too late for what I wanted to do, because I was, like, an artist. I was a painter, a drawer. Photography had replaced a lot of the need in society to do a lot of things I wanted to do. I didn't know what to do at RisD. All of a sudden, you have to pick a major. There was a department head, and he says, there's this field called industrial design. It's a design of everything from a spaceship to a toothbrush and everything in between. I thought to myself, okay, that's what I'm going to do.
So I got into industrial design. I graduate RisD. I moved to California. I wanted to come to California. I didn't really know the difference between LA and SF very much. I'd never been to California. So my friend was wanting to come to LA. So I got my friend to come to LA with me. I get a job as an industrial designer at a design firm. I'm like designing products for entrepreneurs. The firm I was at was they had really small budgets, so I would do products, like, all the different times. People bring me ideas, and we think about, what's the market strategy? How are we going to design this product, how do we manufacture it? Where do we distribute it? Because we were so small budget, I got to actually do the entire thing.
Now it's 2006. One day my boss comes to me, and he says, you're going to be on a reality TV show. And I said, what? There was a precursor to Shark Tank, this show called American Inventor. It was like a spin off of American Idol. There were these contestants, and they would get $50,000, and they have to hire a design firm. I was the firm that one of them hired. All of a sudden, before I knew it, I was designing a toilet seat for a magician. At that moment, it was a cool project, but I realized that myself. What's the difference between me and this magician? I thought to myself, the difference is they made the chance to be an entrepreneur. I didn't. I was designing other people's products.
So my life is like, I'm in a car, and the road in front of me looks exactly like the road behind me. And all of a sudden, I get a package in the mail. It's a package, and it's a seat cushion, but it looks in the shape of a human buttocks with a handle. And it's it's a product called Crip Buns. And it's from my friend from RisD. He says, I started this company. We're manufacturing this product now, by the way. The product is beautiful. Ended up getting sold in the Museum of Modern Art gift shop. So it's a really nice product. He said, Come to San Francisco.
And this was like my call to adventure. And, you know, like, there might be a few times in your life where you make a decision, and everything about your life changes after that decision. That's what happened. I pack everything in the backseat of Honda Civic. I have $1,000 in the bank. I get to San Francisco, and then Joe tells me the rent is $1,150. And I thought, wow, I should have asked that before I came up to San Francisco. But it turns out that weekend, an international conference was coming to San Francisco. All the hotels are sold out. We had this idea. We said, well, what if we just turned our house into a bed and breakfast for a design conference? Unfortunately, I didn't have any beds, but Joe had three air beds. We pulled them out of the closet, and we called it Airbed and Breakfast. At that point, my mom said, so I guess you don't have that job with health insurance anymore. I said, no, mom, I'm an entrepreneur. She said, no, you're unemployed. That's when I realized, when you're starting, it's mostly in your head.
James Yan: Wonderful. Back then, the idea of renting out your bedroom to strangers sounded completely foreign and even visible to Silicon Valley investors. In 2008, you sought to raise $150,000 for your budding enterprise.
Brian Chesky: Yeah.
James Yan: You approached more than a dozen investors, all of whom, sadly, turned you down. In fact, I have here a couple of those rejection emails that investors sent you.
Brian Chesky: These exhibits are great. It is slightly embarrassing, but would you. Be so kind as to read one of them aloud for our edification?
Brian Chesky: Yes.
James Yan: Thank you.
Brian Chesky: Do you want me to read them? Yes. Okay, so we'll read this one. Oh, I know this person. Okay. Hi, Brian. Apologize for the delayed response. We've had a chance to discuss internally and unfortunately don't think this is the right opportunity for blank. From an investment perspective, this is my favorite part. The potential market opportunity did not seem large enough for our required model. Now it's travel. About the same size as oil, but it wasn't large enough. But you can imagine, like, they didn't see travel, they saw strangers sleeping in other people's homes. I'll give you an example. The first investor Joe and I ever met was in university cafe. This cafe, an investor walks in. He goes to get a smoothie. He sits down. He never picks his head up. He's drinking a smoothie. He's like, on a straw, picking up a smoothie. We're pitching him. Halfway through the presentation, he gets up because he has to move his car. We still haven't seen him since. So that was our first pitch. We pitched Paul Graham at Y Combinator. We end up getting a y combinator. The first question Paul Graham asked me is, people are actually doing this, like staying. I said yes.
So a second question was, well, what's wrong with them? The interview kind of went downhill from there. But over the course of this journey, we were about to leave our interviews, and Joe takes out a box of cereal, and a box of cereal we design. So we'll take a quick detour. We provided housing in 2008 for the Republican and Democratic national Conventions. And you remember, that was when Barack Obama was running for president. It was like a huge movement. And that weekend we launched, and we got like 80 bookings. And I thought at this point, we've made it. We're huge. Like, a bunch of blogs covered us. I'm like, we're like the Beatles of tech right now. And then all of a sudden, the next weekend for Senator McCain, we got two bookings. And then the week after, we got no bookings. And I realized, if only there were political conventions every week we'd have a business.
So we were called Airbed and Breakfast. The airbeds weren't selling, so we said, I know what you're thinking. Why not breakfast? And so we created this Barack Obama and John McCain themed breakfast cereal. We called breakfast. The Obama O's cereal. Obama O's, like, little cheerios, the Breakfast of change. And we learned about John McCain, and he was a captain of the Navy. And I thought oh, my God. Captain. Captain McCain's. A maverick in every bite. So we made these boxes, and at this point, my mom's like, yeah, you're definitely unemployed. This is just not a good sign. And so we end up designing these boxes we called General Mills, like, hey, can you make 100,000 of these? They're like, Please don't ever call us again. If you do, we'll call security. So we ended up I'm making that up. I can't remember who it was, but some big cereal company.
So we end up getting, like, 1000 box cereal. We hand glued them ourselves. Like, I remember handling cereal boxes, these collectible breakfast cereal, thinking, I wonder if Mark Zuckerberg ever glued cereal boxes. The answer was, no, he didn't. This is not a good sign. But we ended up making, like, $30,000 of collectible breakfast cereal. So we basically said at that point, we're cereal entrepreneurs, and that was how we funded the company.
So we are, in this interview, Paul Graham, he's like, what's wrong with you? Like, these people? Why are strangers staying together? And when we leave the interview, we give him these boxes of cereal, and he said, what are these? And we said, we made these. He goes, Why'd you make these? He said, Actually, this is how we funded the company, because no other investors gave us money. And he said, well, if you can figure out how to get people to pay $40 for a $4 box of cereal, maybe, just maybe, you can figure out how to get strangers to live with each other. So that's when we entered Y Combinator in 2009 after a couple of dozen investors just thought this was not for them.
James Yan: So now that you get your cash infusion from selling breakfast cereal, you pivoted back from breakfast to beds.
Brian Chesky: Yeah. We realized the market size for housing was probably better than breakfast.
James Yan: And one of the keys to Airbnb's initial success was its emphasis on accuracy over speed to market.
Brian Chesky: Yes.
James Yan: Instead of targeting millions of potential customers at once, you focused on converting 100 people at a time. What gave you that discipline?
Brian Chesky: Okay, so it's the first day of Y Combinator. It's January 2009. By the way, I want to set the stage for you. Do you remember what was going on in January 2009? Like, economic crisis, the great recession, the economy was so bad. And y Combinator has a thing called Demo Day. So the end of three months, all these investors come. Paul Graham sends us an email before y, combinator starts. He says, the economy is so bad, we don't know if any investors will show up for Demo Day. So if you want to defer, you can defer. That's how bad it was. And so we said, no, we're going to do this.
So we get to YCombinator. It's the first day, and I get the worst piece of advice I ever got. And the best piece of advice I ever got. The worst piece of I ever got was Paul Graham. You have to move to Mountain View. We never did. I'm like, you don't need to move to Mountain View. You can be anywhere, although it's cool in Mountain View. But then I got the best pieces of advice I ever got. He goes to the whiteboard, and he draws like, it's a little hard to visualize, but he draws like, imagine if you were to take a section plan of the Washington Mall. It's just like a little stream of water. And then he does another section of what would look like a well. And he said, these are the same volumes. But he said, it's better to have 100 people that deeply love you. If this axis is number of people and this axis is love, focus on 100 people that love you rather than getting a million people that kind of like you. And I think this is a profound piece of advice. It may have been the best piece of advice I've ever gotten. And it actually runs counterintuitive to almost everything that everyone says. Everyone focuses on scale, but scale requires people to have a deep passion, because if you focus on 100 people who love you, there's two things that happen.
The first thing is, how do you know how to make something for a million people? I don't know where to start, but if I pick one person in the audience and I study you, and I take your journey and say, how do we improve this part of the journey? How do we improve that part of the journey. You can actually do something really personal. And if you design something, keep iterating till they love it, and don't stop improving until that one person loves it. And you're not allowed to get the second person till the first person loves it. And then you get the second person, and you keep iterating till they love it, and then the third person. And what ends up happening is two things. One, you design this perfect experience, which is a different part of your mind than the industrial part of your mind that has to figure out how to scale this.
And the second thing is, when people love your service, they become your marketing department. They tell other people, so the first day, Why come here? They give you this T shirt, and on the T shirt, it says, make something people want. And we thought, what if we went even further? Make something people love. And so we've now done these exercises. We had this process I named after the movie Snow White. I learned that Walt Disney in 1937, created Snow White. It was one of the first uses of the storyboard because it was like this really long feature link animated movie, and he storyboarded the experience. And I thought to myself, what if we storyboard the perfect experience of airbnb?
We actually hired Pixar storyboard artists to do this. And then what we like to do is pick one frame of the experience. So the moment of truth in airbnb is when you check in, right? You're like, Is this going to be what I think it is? And there's a really bad version of check-in. Like, the host didn't show up, and there's kind of a good version of a check-in. They showed up. But we wanted to think to ourself, what would make the experience something people love? And so we created this exercise. We thought, you know, when you go on airbnb, this also true uber like, a five star mostly means, like, nothing bad happened. And we thought, well, what if there was, like, a six star? What would that be?
When you check into airbnb and the six-star is you get to your airbnb, and there's, like, a bottle of wine waiting on a table, and there's some fruit, and they have a handwritten note to you. And I'm like, okay, that's, like, really nice. And then I thought, well, what would a seven-star experience be? A seven-star experience is they get a limo, they pick you up the airport, and there's this whole curated experience. You get to the house, and they know you like surfing, and there's a surfboard there waiting for you and all that stuff. So then I thought, what would an eight-star experience be? Like an eight-star experience. You get to the airport, there's a giant elephant, and you get on the elephant, and there's a parade in your honor, and you go to your Airbnb.
So what would a nine star experience be? The nine star experience is the Beatles check in. You land and there's 5000 teenagers cheering your name, and you get to your airbnb, you have to do a press conference in the front lawn. So what's a ten star experience? We'll keep going. A ten star experience, you show up and Elon Musk says, we're going to space. And you do get back eventually. And the point of this story is that you maybe can't make an eight, nine, or ten star experience, but most people try to design something that's just good enough. But if you can add that six or seven star, if you can design something really amazing and you use the part of your brain, the handcrafted part of your brain, to create that perfect experience, then you can reverse engineer how to industrialize this millions of times over. And what happens is people love your product and they tell everyone else about your product.
And what ended up happening in our business is Hilton was started in 1919, over 100 years ago, and we were able to have the entire growth of Hilton in ten years. And this is how you do it without we had some marketing, but not initially, not a lot.
James Yan: As you said, word of mouth marketing really helped airbnb get off the ground in major cities around the world. Yet one corollary of your newfound success is that government regulators and the powerful hotel lobby were now breathing down your neck. How did you deal with those regulators?
Brian Chesky: Oh, man. Yeah. There were some things that were initially out of my depth. Like they did not teach you at RISD how to work with government regulators. So I always grew up thinking, if people don't like you, you should avoid them. That seems kind of intuitive, right? Or you should fight them and disagree with them and they're your opponent. And then in 2011, I hired my first executive. Her name is Belinda Johnson. She was our chief legal officer, eventually became our COO. And she told me something that was counterintuitive to me. She said, if people don't like you, you should meet with them. And I said, really? Why would I do that? Wouldn't it go horribly wrong? And she said, no, because it's hard for people to hate you up close.
And I think that's a really important lesson. So I said, okay, well, who doesn't like me? And it turned out a lot of people. And so instead of having a tour where I went on tour to meet everyone to like me, I told our team I want to meet everyone who doesn't like me. And it turned out they kept me busy for a long time. But I would meet with these government officials and sometimes the meetings would start. A little hostile at first, but I had a rule that would always listen first and seek to understand them. And I think my dad used to say, like, 90% of life is just showing up. It's actually not true in tech. But when it comes to showing respect, 90% of life sometimes is showing someone respect and listening to them.
And if you just get in the mindset of listening to people, then through creativity, you can decide, you can realize a win win. And I realized I would hear from them. We tell the story. And then through that I had this image that we create this model city and we'd roll out the regulation everywhere. And I did it in one city, and I get to the next city, and we're like, yeah, but we're different. We're not Portland. We're not San Francisco. We're not Los Angeles. So then I realized we had to treat every city personally. So we actually started meeting with like hundreds of cities. We have now
Brian Chesky: Yeah, there absolutely is merit to the concerns. And let me just zoom out for a second and back up. When we started Airbnb, we couldn't afford to pay rent. In other words, Joe and I couldn't afford to pay for our housing. And in 2008, many people turned to Airbnb 2008 2009 during the financial crisis to put their homes in Airbnb. But over time I learned a lesson. When I came to Silicon Valley in 2007, the tech industry seemed inherently virtuous, as if merely working in tech made one morally superior in advancing society. Fifteen years later, we now realize that if you create something really powerful, like a tool or platform, and put it in the hands of hundreds of millions of people, there will almost always be unintended consequences that the creators didn't foresee. The faster something grows, the more quickly these unintended consequences can arise.
Airbnb wasn't designed for people to remove housing from the market. So we started working with cities and regulators to address their concerns. A lot of them wanted to know that people renting out their homes on Airbnb actually lived in those homes at least some of the time. So we came up with a registration system where hosts had to register, show proof of residence, and follow certain rules like capping the number of nights per year they could rent. We also handled hotel taxes that went to the cities. It's all about working with cities, not believing our product is inherently virtuous, acknowledging there will be unintended consequences, and trying to address them.
The heart and soul of Airbnb still lies in everyday people. Ninety percent of our hosts are individuals, and that's mainly where most of our activity is.
James Yan: For those entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs in the audience, what are some post-COVID trends in travel that have captured your attention?
Brian Chesky: Well, I want to talk about two trends. First, when the pandemic hit, people had to shelter in place. Suddenly, people realized they could work remotely from anywhere. So we started seeing Airbnbs booked for 30 days or longer. Last quarter, a fifth of our nights booked were for stays of longer than 30 days. Nearly half our business is now for stays of longer than a week. People are living long-term on Airbnb, which is fundamentally different from how people use hotels.
The second trend is that because people weren't going to cities, where many attractions were closed and it was hard to cross borders, they started going to small towns, rural areas, and national parks—from 100 cities to 100,000 places around the world.
A third, concerning trend is loneliness, especially among young people. Studies show the health effects of chronic loneliness are equivalent to smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, and lonely people live 15 years shorter lives. Two-thirds of teenagers and one-third of adults report being lonely. I think modern life is making us lonely. Social media replaced in-person social interaction. Fewer people have families or connect in person. Offices are remote, retail is online, and entertainment is streaming. While these innovations are forward steps, we need balance and meaningful in-person connections.
Travel is a great way for people to connect. I want Airbnb to facilitate reunion trips with friends in different cities and help people meet each other. We verify over 100 million people's identities, so we could use the platform to bring people together and make the world feel smaller. If I were designing this, I'd focus on how people can connect meaningfully in person.
Interviewer: Excellent. Well, thank you very much for sharing your insights with us today, Brian.
Brian Chesky: Thank you.
Interviewer: Would you like to take a few questions from the audience?
Audience Member: Thank you so much for sharing your stories, Brian. My name is Floyd. I'm a second-year MBA student here, and I would love to understand a bit more about the cofounder dynamics. I find it really interesting that in Silicon Valley, so many cofounder stories end in conflict or lawsuits. But you at Airbnb seem to be one of the companies where cofounders have stuck together through thick and thin. So I would be curious to understand what the secret to the cohesion between you, Joe, and Nate was?
Brian Chesky: That's a great question. In addition to hard work, I've been very lucky, especially in meeting my cofounders Joe and Nate. You become like the people you surround yourself with. When choosing partners, pick people you could be friends with, you'd want to spend more time with than your spouse, who are so good they almost intimidate you but also complementary.
Years ago, we each took a personality test and found our results formed an equilateral triangle—we were different yet balanced. Mutual respect, humility, and never trying to "win" an argument were key. We met every Sunday to connect, even as we got busier. Successful relationships require constant contact and effort. No single argument can be more important than the relationship.
If I had won alone, I wouldn't have gotten far. The secret was committing to the shared goal of our partnership and company over any individual interests or egos. Hard work and luck brought me here, but my cofounders made me who I am.
Audience Member: Hi. My name is Tomo. I was curious to learn about the principles you mentioned regarding COVID response. Have they changed a lot? What is your design or redesign process when thinking about principles you operate on?
Brian Chesky: So when you say principles, can you elaborate a tiny bit more?
D: Yeah. You mentioned in the COVID Response section that everything comes to the principles that you're relying on. So I was wondering what are those and how it has been formed?
A: Yeah, I think that I like to come from a sense of first principles and I think every different situation there are some universal principles for the company, but say the crisis. We wrote down a number of principles. The first principle we said is act fast. We have to be intuitive, courageous, and move very quickly. A lot of people, it's like, imagine me, you're in a car chase and you pause. What, should I turn you're dead? So we had to act fast. The second thing is we had to preserve cash. Cash was like oxygen. The third is we said let's act with all stakeholders in minds. We didn't want to be villains of the crisis. And the fourth principle I said is we want to play to win the next travel season. So even when everyone's retrenching, we were thinking about kind of going forward. And I think that principles are really important because they become like your guiding light in the sky.
And they also I remember going to the board when the crisis was going on. We had have Sunday board calls because it was almost like three months was happening every week. And I told them, I'm going to make like 1000 decisions. I can't run every decision by you. So here are the principles I'm going to use. Let's align on these principles and if I stick to those principles, we can then stick to this. And I generally think that's just one example. But every project I do, I try to identify what are some immutable foundational truths that you couldn't further distill down than those things and make sure that you communicate them to people.
D: My name is Roman Scott. I'm a sophomore studying political science. And I just wanted to ask for somebody who's aspiring to be an entrepreneur, if there was one thing you could tell yourself when you were growing up, or one piece of advice you could give yourself, what would that be?
A: One piece of advice? I would say just start making something. For example, I went to Risdi and I took all these classes. But it's funny enough, one of the things that probably prepared me more for entrepreneurship than Risdi is that Joe and I both ran, like, student organizations. So I ran like, a club hockey team. Joe ran a club, a basketball team. And Joe and I had the hardest marketing challenge in the world. How do you get art students to go to a sports game? And we had like, little budgets. But the point is, I think there's going to be a temptation for you all in this audience to seek prestige because you're at a prestigious school. I think the problem with entrepreneurship, and it summarized my mom's story, is when you're starting out, the line between being entrepreneur and being unemployed is kind of in your head. And so you have to be very careful about seeking prestige, because seeking prestige sometimes means you won't get your hands dirty.
And if you don't get your hands dirty, you don't actually learn the underlying principles. How do you make something? How do you struggle through something? How do you describe a story? How do you convince someone else? And so I think making something, it could be like a little toy. Not physically a toy, but like a thing for fun. And I think just the other thing I'd say is somebody asks, how do you start becoming an entrepreneur? I say, you start. You just start. You start. You don't think, you act. You start. Very few entrepreneurs make plans. The business plans expire the moment you do the first thing. And so instead of making plans, I would just make something and make something with the resources you have with you and your friends. Anything. That process of making something is great. And by the way, the other trick I'd say is make something for yourself. Solve your own problem.
The first weekend, Joe and I were like, wait a second, let's make a little website so we can rent our apartment and make some extra money. That did not seem like a billion dollar idea, renting three air mattresses in an apartment. And so there's a lot of investors that say we like to invest in big markets. Well, what's the market size for people sleeping on air mattresses? So the problem is that I wouldn't focus on markets. I'd focus on solving a problem for yourself or somebody in your life, it doesn't even have to be a big problem. It could be something kind of fun and just start making just start doing something.
B: Brian, before I let you go, it is a view from the top tradition to end each session with a number of rapid fire questions. May I invite you to play along?
A: Yes. Let's do it.
B: When was the last time you stayed in a hotel?
A: Um, when I had these fake glasses and fake mustache. I think I stayed one. I think it was, like, last year for, like, an event.
B: And what is the most memorable airbnb you've stayed in?
A: Well, I stayed in a treehouse in berlingame, california, by this couple, doug and linda to. It's a very quick story. This is not rapid fire, so maybe I should not tell a story. Well, anyway, I will tell a story, because now I've half started to tell a story. So this woman named mackenzie, her mother and father were doug and linda. The father builds her a treehouse in the backyard. She plays in treehouse growing up. Then she graduates high school, goes to college, and there's treehouse in the backyard. And they're like, what do we do with a treehouse? And one day, mackenzie's like, why don't you put on airbnb? The house ended up paying for the mortgage, and it was this amazing experience.
James Yan: And finally I learned that your own apartment in San Francisco is listed on Airbnb. How much do you charge per night?
Brian Chesky: And, well, it's free, but, boy, do I have some cleaning fees. No, just kidding. It's free. And when you stay with me, it's a pretty cool experience, because it's me and my co-host, Sophie Supernova, who is my 18-month-old golden retriever. I make what I call Chesky's chips. Chesky's chips are an old family recipe of chocolate chips that I got actually off of Google. Then we make dinner together, and then I take them on a tour the next day to the office, where I tell them the story of Airbnb.
I'll just end by saying this. I think on the surface, Airbnb is about space, and it's like, "Oh, stay with me." But I think below the spaces, the thing about Airbnb, when it works the best, it's really about people. It's really about connecting to one another. It's the idea that the best way to change someone's mind about someone else is to walk in their shoes. And the best way to walk in the shoes is literally to be in their home. And I think that if more people could live together, then I think, obviously, a lot of minds would be changed. And so that's kind of what we're trying to do.
James Yan: Perfect. Thank you for making the time today.
Brian Chesky: Thank you all.
James Yan: Been a great pleasure.
Brian Chesky: Thank you.