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today [Music] in this episode of the Tony Robbins podcast we're bringing you to business mastery one more time poor Tony recently Led a panel discussion with the business leaders behind some of today's fastest-growing companies for this episode you're gonna hear from one of the founders of a company that changed the travel industry forever when's the last time you booked a trip somewhere where'd you stay was it a hotel or did you opt for the alternative and rent a room maybe an entire house from a local the idea of staying in a stranger's home may have
Blown your mind a few years ago but today it's not just a standard practice it's actually the preferred accommodation for tens of millions of travelers across the world there's just one company to thank for that air B&B Airbnb started as a simple solution to a pressing problem co-founders Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky couldn't afford rent so they opened up their San Francisco apartment for guests to stay in they soon realized they might Be onto something bigger than just a way to avoid being evicted so along with her old roommate Nathan Booker Shack they started to
build it into a business that was nearly 10 years ago Airbnb has been through a lot since then it was by no means a straight path to success in fact they launched and relaunched a number of times they found themselves up to their ears in debt and they were rejected by investors over and over they were very close to flatlining on more than one Occasion so how did they persevere how did they turn a floundering idea into a global business that now operates in more than 34,000 cities and 91 countries it's now estimated to be
worth 30 billion dollars let's go to business mastery to find out so we talked beforehand Facebook live and so for about 45 minutes we shared some of the businesses that you began before and how all of you have the common element of you decided what the Outcome was right you know why you were doing it you didn't know how many vows and all of you figured out the house which is really I always tell people it's the tyranny of how that keeps people I'm doing things if you know what you want with such precision and
with enough certainty you've got strong enough reasons you find the way but let's talk about how air B&B started well you share some story start with if you would the dilemma you found your So losing a roommate how this came about oh my goodness well as you saw in our mission is to create communities so that anyone can belong anywhere so that when you travel anywhere in the world you can move from feeling like an outsider to feeling like an insider and we do that through great design through community in the guest host relationship and
and the platform the offers homes anywhere you travel in a hundred ninety one countries so where we are today started With very humble beginnings it was October of 2007 and I convinced my friend from college Brian Chesky to moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco I had this premonition that if you ever put us in the same room we could create something big together and we had proved that on campus and now is out in the real world I really wanted to find out what we could do so he moves to San Francisco we both
quit our jobs at the same time and there's all this Excitement in the air of what are we gonna come up with what could we possibly create and all of a sudden this letter comes in the mail from the landlord and I've never forget what it says it says dear Joe your rent is now 25% higher so I go to Brian and we run to our online bank accounts and suddenly we look and see that we have a math problem the rent went like this and our paychecks went like this we have literally just a
few weeks to figure out How to save our apartment so we put our thinking caps on and we came up with a bunch of harebrained ideas and one day I'm sitting in the living room and I'm looking at the website for a design conference coming to san francisco and on the web page it says all hotels sold out I'm thinking man that's a bummer you know people come in last minute I look up around the living room and I think we have all this extra space what if we just hosted people during the conference You
need a place to stay so I pull an airbed out of the closet blow it up send her note that Brian say hey Brian what do you think about this he loved it and together we say well let's think about a whole experience we could host three designers we could get go get two more air beds and actually cook breakfast for the guests pick them up from the airport give him a subway pass and see francisco maybe a map to the city and before we knew it in about you know a Week or so we
had this concept that was not a bed-and-breakfast this was an air bed and breakfast so we make this website in just a week or so we put it out there and nobody knew it existed first of all so i'll remember one night we went to bed and we emailed all of the blogs covering this big conference i'd never gotten pressed before none of us neither Bryner i had ever got any publicity the next morning we wake up and we are literally on the top of all These very well led read design blogs it felt like
like Christmas morning like an you wake up and you come down and and oh my god literally the headlines were like need a place to crash network in your jam jams at Brian and Joe's San Francisco off at the air bed-and-breakfast it literally went from this like kind of just idea to suddenly people are talking about it on these international blogs in a matter of like two weeks Wow So we had people contacting us from around the world people sent us their resumes their design portfolios one guy trapped my cellphone number left me a bunch
of voicemails so we ended up choosing three guests Cattermole and Michael they stayed with us for a couple days and something really special happened first is we got to provide hospitality to them the second is they got to feel like they belong in San Francisco because we took him around to Our favorite restaurants they met our friends and the third thing is we became economically empowered as a result we made about a thousand dollars and we saved our apartment Wow and how long without stars now so you hear something like that then people's assumption is
oh and then it just took off from there I assume that wasn't quite how it worked out it took about a month or so and then it just took off like a rocket it was quite the Opposite of if you build it they will come we built it and they didn't come it took took many many years and you know there's there's an old saying in the company that we launched five times but nobody knew it was finally the sixth time that people actually picked up on it I was different or was it the accumulation
hey you know with each time we tried to pass we ran to a dead end and we said well we're not quitting yeah let's just turn around come back and try A different approach so to give us an example what was one of the early approaches that didn't work well I mean the original concept for Airbnb was air beds for conferences we thought the whole opportunity was people need to sleep on air beds when they travel to conferences and we tried it next for South by Southwest in 2008 and we had all of two people
stay on the site it was we thought that that was that was where you go as a tech company To catapult into the atmosphere of the tech world right Twitter and Foursquare and all the other greats that started there so we thought oh this is good gives it our big chance we're gonna relaunch again and it's just gonna take off like a rocket ship it did not and so we back pedaled and said well maybe this is more about travel maybe this isn't about the event maybe it's just you want to travel anywhere at any
time so it was around this time that 2008 the summer The biggest story in the summer 2008 go back with me here for a minute the presidential election Barack Obama John McCain this was sensational and everything was gearing up for the Democratic National Convention in Denver Colorado and it was so big they had to move Obama's DNC speech from the basketball arena to Invesco Stadium to accommodate a hundred thousand people the only problem is that Denver has 20,000 hotel rooms Wow So we thought hmm maybe there's a way we can ride on the coattails of
all this publicity to solve this big problem literally the mayor of Denver was saying they're gonna open up the city parks so people could camp out they had nowhere to put people and so we thought well maybe we'll just relaunch again nobody knew about the other one anyway so we'll just do it all over again but this time we've got a big spotlight on us and maybe People actually see it yeah so we geared up and we went from 0 to 800 homes in Denver in a matter of four weeks oh and in doing so
people we started to get publicity we started with local bloggers in Denver that became a local City story they sent you know the ABC News to video our hosts and when ABC does something's NBC and all the others to do that it became a regional story and then a national story and we ended up doing a live interview with CNN firm Our living room Brian and I are sitting next to each other that you're buds in her ear over Skype with CNN ended up becoming one of the most watched videos on cnn.com that day well
so let's get to the serial we watched for the DNC and that was a magic moment because at that point we'd helped a few hundred people stay in Denver and the numbers shot to the roof we went from zero to a lot right overnight we thought this is this is our rocket ship to the moon yeah However there's not a political convention every weekend and so things came crashing back down and we entered what's known in start-up land as the trough of sorrow which is you have a product and you mark it in a market
but there's not a fit yet and so there's zero growth I also call it the Midwest of analytics perfectly flat for miles it can last for months sometimes years and it's in the trough of sorrow that I feel like the only way you can get up is just Through sheer creativity so we're deep in the trough and late one night in the kitchen Brian and I are just trying to keep each other's hopes up at this point just trying to keep your spirits high and we start joking you know recall dare bed-and-breakfast what if we
provided you know something for our host to get to our guests what if we gave them breakfast cereal and it's now October of 2008 at the height the peak of Obama mania and we thought well what If we made Obama cereal well why not that would be called Obama owes the breakfast have changed we're a nonpartisan company so we need something for McCain well maybe that's Chad McCain's he's a captain in the Navy it turned out and the tag line would be a maverick in every bite so one thing led to another and at the
time like I don't even know how we did this we ended up making boxes of cereal did you design them we did Design him the first thought was what's killing the fill material producers because how do you actually make cereal I had no idea you know we're designers and tech guys like cereal is kind of a little bit outside of our realm so I get on the phone I call Kellogg and General Mills those conversations were very short so I changed tack I said well I'll call local Bay Area cereal manufacturers they at least listen
to the pitch and point we declined so that was back to Square one okay how are we gonna get cereal well cereal is already at the grocery store maybe people just do that so we found we designed the boxes we found a printer actually a RISD graduate who decided to print the boxes at no charge given that we would pay a commission on every to the sale of every box god bless him and we decided we would just put orders up on a website called Obama is calm and every time an order came in we'd
go to The grocery store buy a box of cereal off the shelf bring it back to our department but at nerve our we pull the bag out and we put it in our own Obama OHS box and over here it is the best part you charged 40 bucks for that right we did the hollers four boxes serious we did so we sent the uh we had a hot goo each one on the top by the way I had somebody burned fingers at the end of that our kitchen was this production line of Breakfast cereal and
we all Brian and I often looked at each other like did Mark Zuckerberg ever do this but he is making like this just seems a little far afield here so we send the boxes out to all the press meeting that we could think of in an end up getting on all the morning shows and all a bunch of publications Fast Company Wall Street Journal and and CNN again call this back was like this is awesome we want to cover you guys they did this live interview and we sold Out of Obama's within a couple of
days so $40 a box and we sold 500 boxes let me took one of trips to the grocery store yes it was you should have seen the look in the cashiers face every time we just hear the shelf as three shopping carts hos going through the thing I tried to explain her it you know were this tech company we're making breakfast cereal the air bed and breakfast and she was like and eventually I just learned the line I'm like we run a Bed-and-breakfast well at this point we were so deep in that in the trench
to the trough of sorrow we had about $20,000 in credit card debt because they understand where we were in the lifecycle of the company we had that that rise for the DNC and we thought this is great time to go raise money our numbers are up let's go talk to investors we got introduced to 20 of the the Silicon Valley's best investors 10 Medus for coffee 10 replied to her email 5 minutes for coffee zero invested in the Airbnb and we faced every kind of rejection that you could imagine from really you know incredible people
who picked big big winners and I learned in that moment that rejection is an invitation rejection is an invitation to keep going and as everyone up here knows you can accept it or not right it's up to you as an entrepreneur to say like awesome thanks for the invitation I accept it I'm gonna keep going yeah so here we are we kept going to the tune of raising a round of money we might hardly call it the visa round I don't think visa knew about it and we maxed out a bunch of credit cards we
had baseball card folders instead of baseball cards we actually had credit cards in it and I don't know if I recommend that or not it was very high anxiety very stress to wake up every morning so all this to say that we made Cereal not with zero budget but with negative $20,000 budget the cereal just got back to zero which is great you know when you hear about various businesses initially especially with the changes we've had in the last 20 to 25 years of the web is you know a lot of things just sound crazy
in the beginning like you can and part of that is like whether it be shoes or glasses I need to have an experience of it right and you're asking people to have a stranger come stay in Their home that they don't know could be psychotic right or the people I'm going though could be psychotic I can see how investors might hesitate or you prove that but let's just talk about trust because what all three of you have done and what I attempt to do and I think all great entrepreneurs are really doing is smiling way
to add more value so consistently that you know it isn't just a sales pitch that these people will deliver for me consistently and it Builds that trust and that's what builds raving fans how do you build trust to connect people who don't know each other and where we as the society are constantly taught don't trust the stranger I mean all this obstacle was at the outside of our biggest obstacle was a bias that we've all been taught since we were kids yes that strangers equal danger perfect perfect description we had to overcome not likes danger
out There so I mean we had to overcome not only marketplace dynamics and all that you know points of a start-up but we also had to figure out how to overcome an age-old bias there's been ingrained in all of us and the only way you know that I can sum it up is that we because there were other companies like ours in 2008 we weren't the only the only people out there so besides that was a question what asked when first were you first online sunglasses we weren't the very First you weren't the very first
okay cool we were the only once again scale though okay got it good I'm so sorry we had a there's many many competitors many players at our same level and so it begs the question you know luck and timing aside whichever's plenty why did ours eventually take off and I look back and I think you know all things being equal what we fell back on is design that was our background right that's what we knew like how to design experience and when I Say design I want to clarify that because it's not the look and
feel of something it's the whole experience it's the whole end and experience what you get so well yeah and so we just applied the same way that you think about you know a SoulCycle experience or warby parker retail experience we thought well what's the end-to-end experience that we want for a guess and for our host and through that how do we find where trust is the lowest and inject that with Personality inject that with reputation inject that with good design yes tell us some of the ways you did that how did you personal reputation management
is a huge part of it yes give a hand for sure yeah how did you break through that barrier what were the steps that you guys took to get it where people all over the world a million people we're gonna go and stay in people's homes on New Year's well we learned very quickly that a proper reputation system was key To building trust okay right making sure that there was a system in place so that people could openly and honestly talk about their experience in such a way where as with every review that got added
to the site it made it that much more possible for somebody who was resisting the idea to be like oh there's 12 people kind of like me who had a great experience yeah I'll give this a shot so enough social proof because normally I think you Talked about the fact that people only wanted to visit with some of they liked they look at the picture or try and get something of that nature is that true can you clarify that for me well I think what's important is that when there's an exchange back and forth that
people who open up a little bit more about themselves than usual end up creating that connection right if somebody just messaged somebody and said yo yeah they didn't get much of a response back and Actually what we've learned that the data that is if they message with you know a really long rambling thing like let me tell you about the issues I have with my mother people stay at your house also reply there's that kind of like sweet spot of exchange of like hey love the art on your walls I'm coming for vacation with my
family yeah so finding that sweet spot and helping coach people as they're moving through our system to how to communicate with each other what Once you've figured out the reputation management was that enough to break down that entire concern or fear or did you have to do other things in the design I wish yeah the first four years of the company were pretty dismal a lot of people don't know that maybe they look at the company to say wow what an overnight success it was when you've been doing this for over nine years now and
the first three four years were absolutely just some of the most Difficult most painful years of my entire life trying to figure these dynamics out of how do you make it comfortable to say yes to letting a stranger in your home so I say another principle that we had that we employed through design was the principles of fun and friendly and how do we make sure that our design language our copy or even the colors the the typography every nuance in detail communicate a sense of fun and friendliness alright we couldn't Sit next to somebody
and be like well of course you can trust this we've had this many thousands of people do it you know it works for these different reasons we need to design to fill our shoes and actually communicate that on our behalf all three of you have really worked on design as a competitive I mean certainly designing the environments and SoulCycle obviously the glass is soft and is designed really a giant competitive edge in any business Or was it just your business from your perspective I'm asking you I know but tell us a little bit tell us
a little bit more about design so that someone who maybe it isn't thinking in your light can think about how can I design a greater experience for my clients how do you think about it I think design is a consideration for the end customer right at every moment not just at the website moment or or the time you open the door to to the store it's it's really like You know you take like like a water bottle here we grab this real quick so like design isn't just the water bottle design is thinking about okay
what someone's first experience when they hear the name of this brand how do I want to design that what's your experience in the store when they see you from a shelf for the first time what's your experience when they get home in that first sound that happens when I click the lid what's the first Experience right I taste with my product what the product was like going through the whole cycle what's the experience of where this goes after its life how does this make sure it fits back into an ecosystem materially and you design is
considering all of those moments along the way very much like you did for the cushions you describe to us earlier like looking at every stage you you kind of observed what they really do and then make your modifications from that if There needs to be modifications for them to come more excited about it tell us about capital of expanding the business I mean here you are you a billion dollar valuation I think Marriott has got a twenty billion dollar valuation they're around a hundred and four hundred and five years around nine years you don't have
any hotel rooms you and I were talking off wine you're saying you know we don't compare ourselves to hotels Tell us about capital and tell us about why are you not hotel what's the difference with why what is the real pull from your perspective you've alluded to it but I'll be already more explicit well I think you know we consider ourselves a part of what's called the sharing economy and there's been a lot of definitions of what that means I'll define it for you here which is to me the sharing economy is commerce with the
promise of human connection Love that if you if you called it over because there's a hand for certain Thanks I think if you called it the rental economy it would be incomplete because people share something about themselves right and we have got plenty of stories to back that up about how people go above and beyond to make sure that you feel welcome when you're in their home so for us you know the thing about our company is that it's not actually a new idea because if you go Back a couple of generations and you ask
your grandparents how they traveled when they were kids yes they wouldn't tell you hotels yes they tell you farmhouses it's bed-and-breakfast ends you know staying with people in their homes yes so we like to think that all we've done is bring you know the way that people used to travel back using technology and when it comes to financing that you know that the power of the Internet is is you know insane in that you can reach so Many people so quickly and for a travel company that's incredibly important for us to be everywhere all at
once you know if you put up a search bar you better have products on the shelf when people go and searches for a city right so for us expansion and growth very quickly was absolutely important not just for the sake of growth but to make sure we had community all over the world so when you want to travel somewhere we had options for him and part of the beauty is the Experience of someone taking you through their hometown like you described that you took them to your friends you took up the local bar they aren't
as you're AB describes right you're not going and traveling there you're going experiencing it there but there's got to be some hiccups along the way with the number of people that you're dealing with how do you deal with the crazy-ass host how do you deal with the crazy guest I mean it's got to happen how Often does it happen how do you deal with it or what if it doesn't happen as often why not what that many types of numbers I'm not sure which ones real well we've done right now over a hundred and thirty
million guests stays globally that's perfect that's incredible and the number and only hundred twenty-nine million we're really less than a fraction percent have been problematic and what do you think that is I think that there's something that Changes when you enter somebody's home you think the guests themselves they know they're in somebody's home and so we all have a different set of filters I think there's some universal principles of hospitality no matter what culture and where you are in the world there are some sometimes ancients kind of laws of hospitality going back to Greek culture
or some old Indian culture around titi de veau Baha which is the guest is God yes there's Pashtunwali in Pakistan and There's these kind of agent codes of ethics of how to treat other people in your home that I think are still a part of us today that's beautiful let's start with questions here for Joe and then we'll go for the group as a whole how about this young lady back here yes ma'am I'm making Draper from Salt Lake City Utah hello first of all this is my very first Tony Robbins experience and I am
like it's like love at first sight I'm in I'm Ready this is amazing so my question for you what the Airbnb is I'm an avid and PR listener and they just had a story about people renting each other's washing and like washing machines washers and dryers while they're not home so there's this huge market it sounds like from your experience of their babies being so successful that there's a huge market for people wanting to use your stuff while you're not using it right so even in your ad you know you Didn't ever show the the
homes or like you were trying all the people you know so I think that's amazing that the company is all about people and connecting with people so my question is you know what's next are people gonna start renting out their lawn mowers while you're not using them like you know what what do you see coming next thank you for your question I think that there is this this ideal and that that we've unlocked or been a part of Unlocking which is that there's a lot of stuff in the world that sits idle there's a lot
of idle resources that go to waste every single day and there's literally since 2008 there are thousands of company that have started leveraging principles of the sharing economy of how to bring people together around those underutilized assets or rooms or cars or lawnmowers or tools and I've had the fortune of seeing these Companies when I want to get to travel I have to share one of the most interesting ones that I saw that was culturally relevant was in Korea which is I think very far headed in regards the sharing economy the city of Seoul actually
has a department just focused on bringing the sharing economy principles into the infrastructure of how they run a city government below but there's actually a start-up in Seoul that connects people who are applying For a job with people who have nice suits in their closet because in their culture that's a really important thing is that you go in with a very nice suit but it's kind of a catch-22 if I don't have a job maybe I can't afford the suit so there's actually share an economy company that connects you around some of that's just sitting
idle in a closet so I I sure hope that there's more entrepreneurs around the world that are spotting local opportunities in cities Or countries that they can connect you know guest and host with you know things that that people really need beautiful thank you how the movie back in the red shirt all the way back there yes sir great service Airbnb is awesome we used it several times thank you it's actually was life-changing for somebody who we were allowing to rent one of our properties out and she was making some money she had cystic fibrosis
she got her lung transplant it Was really cool and then we got the letter in the mail from the city of Monterrey saying no no no no no you can do that so that's been our experience and a big problem how are you dealing with that and what's the future of the regulations it's a great question I think there's a number of companies in addition ours that have stewarded technologies or new software systems into cities or Civic settings that don't as quickly right as the internet or as The technology does so there's always going to
be ketchup as much as anyone so I think what we've learned is that when we can sit down with cities and explain what it is that we do how it benefits the constituents of that city and ultimately through some practical matters like tax revenue how it actually benefits the city they're very willing to listen and there are a lot of cities around the world who are getting it Paris and London a lot of C's about the U.s. Asia and Europe so I think there's there's still some work to do in certain parts of the world
but like the genies out of the bottle this is an idea whose time has come a hundred and thirty million people have said yes I don't think we're going back to the way that it was so what's important to us is that we work collaboratively with cities to help them understand and then figure out some of the details together great one more for Here yes ma'am right here at the block thank you thank you so much first of all I'm a big fan of all of you especially you because I'm also from San Francisco in
tech so I'm a user experience researcher and I'm sure you know exactly what updates and my background is taken science and the reason I'm here this is my pretty much my first exposure to business I've come up with a cutting-edge type of user experience type of research where I am reading the Minds measuring their brainwaves and also connecting that to that emotional states and this is something that I'm also working on my dissertation which is I'm done hopefully in a few months in the field of new information science now my question is I really look
up to you guys who sort of have this idea have this gut feeling that I also have and you quit your job and you do that and I've been struggling with this sort of decision whether do I trust this gut Feeling and actually go for it I don't need a lot of capital all I need is a kick-ass laptop everything else is in my own head and I've establish the whole research plan everything and also the data analysis of the neuroscience path and I know that there's a market for it because when I give talks
people are very responsive but a part of me is also has this insecurity thinking well I really don't know much about a business and also I'm More of an artist that we did a practice year we were with either artists or you know and I'm Adam that so how did you pick took that sort of big step to actually quit your job and and do that because I think that's who does totally a lot about I mean I I love that but I just feel insecure knowing in my gut feeling that this is an idea
and there is a market for it because also a lot we've talked a lot about user research and and all that and I'm actually going To give businesses their emotional states I'm actually going to read their minds and tell them what's going on but to really take that big leap big step I guess if you could say to speak to that that would be awesome happy nice to hear from all three of you if you're sure sure it's it's a brilliant question and it's never easy like it's never like cool let's do this now's the
time I have no insecurities about this let's just do this like I Said no one ever like of course there's all kinds of doubts and oh my god like what if what if what if at a certain point I think that it there wasn't like this kind of like one moment of like oh this is gonna happen I think it was a sequence of moments and looking back before you know quit my job I could look back and tell you all the things that I did that we're like baby steps like practicing that like doing
something risky like Getting outside my comfort zone like finding different ways to kind of stretch myself and nudge myself a little bit further so by the time it came you know to make that decision I'd sort of like tuned the muscle of like okay well I looked behind me is like well those 20 things that I did over the last year that I felt uncomfortable about or like all those insecurities that I was kind of like okay Magnum one step at a time it's kind of Like cool well that's behind me then this is just
literally the next step so I think I'm looking for opportunities every like in daily life to just do something that makes me uncomfortable whenever you get that same feeling that you're feeling right now when you're at the checkout counter or on the phone with a friend or browsing the website find a way to just kind of like like challenge it I just to add to that a little bit when we were starting Warby Parker first thing was that we were full-time students so we weren't foregoing a salary I think it would have been a very
bold and risky move if we quit our jobs to immediately go after this opportunity without some proof and in fact right we're in graduate school is a two-year MBA program but while I was working on Warby Parker between my first and second year during the summer I actually worked at McKinsey so I had a back-up plan and I actually had a Full-time offer to go to McKinsey but then Warby Parker took office I stayed with with Warby Parker so I the reason why I highlight that is I think there's this perception that successful people take
these crazy leaps of faith that and jump out of planes without parachutes and I think nothing could be further from the truth you should think about when you're about to take that leap of faith can you take a step back and break down that decision Into a bunch of smaller ones and scale down the the mountain so to speak that there's a great book called the originals that profiles a lot of entrepreneurs about how do you dearest certain ideas and again going back to our story right we have this idea sell glasses online we did
a bunch of customer research before we started investing money in it then we sort of said we're going to invest this amount what do we need to continuum that's more Money and time into this idea and I break it down into a process like that it's also like we talked about the other day about the greatest investors of the world are obsessed with asymmetrical risk/reward they're not going out and taking giant risks the 50 billionaires that I interviewed virtually maybe two of them did something of that nature 48 of them were all saying how do
I take the least amount of risk for the greatest reward Which if you listen and watch all these heads bouncing here that really is the secret because taking too many large risk no matter who you are you're gonna find yourself in a challenge even Richard Branson's dear friend of mine and and Richard is one of the most crazy human beings in the world taking giant risk with his life but not in business with his life go get in a balloon again it'll do anything right he does the other few weeks ago he's mountain biking Almost
got killed it's crazy as hell but his first question of business is how do we protect the downside always he was sharing with me that when he built virgin which he just sold Virgin America by the way it's Alaska Airlines I guess in the last week or two here but when he originally built virgin he literally took two years very much this similar thing and his biggest piece was where's my biggest risk well it's buying these freaking planes from Boeing so he Literally took two years of negotiated a deal that if in the first three
years he went out of business he could return the planes and have no limitation no cost no liability so no downside only upside and that mindset is probably the smartest mindset I found economically and businesses economics as much as is our emotion and our psyche and the people it's also the financial structure to make sense that's there too did you you know when I started working With SoulCycle I had a full-time gig over at Equinox and I was so in love with it and I was so passionate about the opportunity I was figuring out a
way to do both and I think what Neil said is really smart you've got sort of one plan and it sounds like you're so passionate and you're so clearing where the opportunity is how can you kind of work your way along both and then figuring out what those checkpoints are where you sort of you Know you go in and like I went and I said that's it I'm giving this 16 hours so I'm giving you 10 hours so now I need to be over doing this and can you work your way up to it because
the passion that I hear that you have for this and the clarity that you have around the opportunity in front of you I think it would be a complete shame to let those insecurities dominate your mind and not start to take some of those thank you so much thank you and thank You so much Tony for this this is amazing you all thank you so much three more questions they can be for anybody here we'll wrap up all right yes sir right here so I have a question with Airbnb I'm kind of dealing with a
app based platform myself where I've got two groups of people professional athletes and trainers and the end users and one of the things that we're dealing with is quality control you know being that you know Airbnb is about renting out the you Know the rooms and whatnot the design aspect is one of the most critical thing as the end user so being that you can't be at all the places how do you really monitor that that the ones that are uploading the photos and you know making sure that everything is in frame and you know
it looks great and it's appealing how you know as a CEO how do you monitor that with all the you know the photos coming in to the platform that's a great question especially when you have to do This in 191 countries in all those different cultures and cities we learned a couple of things the first was we created hospitality standards so creating the nine standards and I would call them rules so much as I would call them guidelines of how to coach people through how to set up your house how to welcome a guest how
to respond quickly all these things that you need to make a marketplace work and it provide a great experience that was a little bit more Obvious the second one was less obvious and this came through I think just looking at her site in the early days and seeing how our early hosts didn't quite know how to take a great photo let's just say that and so the places that we had weren't that desirable they wanted even stay in and so nobody was booking them surprise and we thought well gee we're design guys I've done photography
my whole life what if we just rented a camera went to our biggest Market at a time it was in New York and just took photos at no charge and so we did exactly that we went to New York rented a camera went door-to-door throughout Manhattan in Brooklyn would email the hosts in advance and say hey co-founder love to come by tomorrow and we have a professional photographer too and then you knock on the door and then be like hi I'm Joe and I'm also the photographer and probably like what's going on here We take
these photos and a couple of things happen the first is that talked about building trust with your customers never before had anyone met somebody from a website they signed up for to come take free photos at their place so they could get more bookings and a couple things happened first is that people started booking rooms because you could actually see what it was you're paying for and the second thing is through these interactions with these Early adopters it built up so much love with our early community that they started telling everybody about us when you
love something when you love a brand you tell your friends about it and your neighbors your co-workers your colleagues and we started to see our organic growth go up in New York we had no ads no online marketing no press at this time we couldn't even afford it and so there was a really valuable lesson there this idea of of find a hundred People who absolutely love you is more important than finding a million people that kind of like you right so going really deep and creating this strong connection with the early adopters in your
case with your marketplace can usually inform you about about the quality levers and checks that are specific to your platform and your community thank you couple more how about yes how about in this quarter thank you my name is penny from Pembroke Pines Florida and Tony thank you for a great event and all three of you thank you for coming and sharing your experiences so first and foremost and I think you all can answer to this is you have created a niche in your respective markets you have pioneered a new way of you know so
for you Airbnb you have created a whole new market where people are using their properties or investment properties as just to do Airbnb or rent it out and Make a new interim so how do you go from there we talked about adding value how do you take that to the next level and and how do you guys kind of within your own organizations how do you try to put yourself out of business on a day-to-day basis kind of thing to fight those forces coming across let's say a competitor or some economic change or what have
you I'd like to add to that in that same frame what's next for all three of you you guys have built Businesses that are such incredible role models what's next as well wants to go first I mean for us we've been so focused over the last years I'm just opening in as many markets as we can because we can't satisfy the demand for the product with the portfolio that we have and so for us when I'm most excited about it we're opening our first international location in Toronto in March which is really exciting and unbelievably
huge endeavor For our organization I think we flag over here and so we we are really focused right now on our core business growth our international growth because we are such a young company and we know how much demand is out there but I really challenge our team every day I say all this all the time we're a company of micro innovation more than we are macro innovation so how do we up the experience every time so that riders who have been riding with us for eight years Nine years we're still coming in two or
three times a week how are we evolving the experience for them and whether that's in the actual workout and different types of training that we're doing in the room or different elements within the studio experience we're trying to introduce two or three new things every single year so that people continue to be surprised and delighted as they're coming into the experience beautiful I you know in terms of trying To put myself out of business so to speak is that always trying to limit the number of direct reports that I have so that's something I'm constantly
looking at and how can I hire somebody with more expertise in a particular area that may complement perhaps weaknesses that I have so that's always top of mind in terms of Warby Parker as we think about growth again it's all about this holistic experience so right where direct consumer vertically integrated Brand so we can either go farther down the supply chain or up farther up the value chain to customers so something that's happened in the last week is that we've opened up our first optical lab so this is light manufacturing that we're doing about an
hour outside of New York City a thirty four thousand square foot facility we just open we're going to hire 130 people and it's where thank you it's super Exciting it's where we cut the lenses insert them into the frames and the primary motivation here is the customer experience and what I mean by that is that it's going to allow us to get product to customers in the New York metro area faster which is increasingly more important it ensures that Warby Parker hands are the last hands test and touching product if we want to put personalized
notes we'll be able to and of course it helps with gross margin but Again it's those first two other pieces that are the primary impact the other thing that we're doing as you go farther up the sort of value chain is think about how we interact with our customers and where their friction points the two biggest pain points for people buying glasses is having a valid prescription and selecting the right frame for someone's face so now we have 46 stores across the country we're going to open another 25 this year so now there's more Options
for people to go into the stores we're starting to do 3d renderings of people's faces so that way we can create optimal fit frameworks and better recommend frames for individuals we're thinking a lot about eye exams and Technology getting an eye exam today is a major pain most optometry practices the hours of operations are not convenient for people that work the cost is high what if you were able to get your prescription by doing a simple eye Test on your iPhone that's something that excites us and we think will happen in the near future I've
got two answers to your question the first is I think at a certain scale to be intentional about it so we've set up a team inside the company called Samara which I've put together to help think about what are the next seeds for Airbnb I think you know as a hospitality company living in a world of tech you constantly have to be thinking about what's next because The industry just moves so quickly there's this famous list of 10 tech companies that were the hottest companies in the 90s nine of which you've never heard of any
more because maybe they got a little bit too entrenched in the business of today without thinking about the business at samaram so for us that means expanding from the home to the entire trip so the future of Airbnb is imbuing our values of Community guest host of design from the home experience to what does the whole trip experience look like how can we help with the transportation all the way through to answering the question what do I do when I'm once I'm there so that's I think what we're doing at scale maybe something more applicable
to anybody at any scale would be talk to customers like that's what we did in the early days it's talking to our community staying connected to our hosting guests Is a such a pure source of information for us we can piece things together that we might not otherwise spot on our own but by talking and staying connected to our community they often tell us things that we never would have thought of for example we had hosts who wanted to offer experiences to guess when they traveled to certain city so if you go to like Park
City Utah a host would take you skiing on trails skiing on trails that only the hosts knew about like the Locals go on I stayed in Costa Rica one time on our site and the host took me surfing and gave me free surf lessons he's a retired professional surfer and so we sort of saw like how hosts were wanting to offer these experiences but there was no way to actually organize it they were kind of putting it in the listing of their home it's very hard so eventually we've pulled it out now and there's a
whole new service just around experiences and That really the lineage of that goes back to listening to our community if you think about it there's two businesses you've always got to be managing the business you're in and the business should be coming did you're only managing the business you're in there's no future you're gonna get eclipsed by somebody who innovates if you manage the business you want to be and you don't manage the business you're and you're gonna have a cash flow Problem and I really think all businesses have to be thinking about that constantly
be I'll grow and achieve the Tony Robbins podcast is directed and hosted by Tony Robbins and Mary Burke hey auntie org is our editorial director an occasional host the podcast is produced by Carrie song and Taylor Culbertson Jamie carvahal and Adriel dilatory are a digital editors special thanks to Diane Adcock for her creative review copyright Robins research International [Music]
