Starting today, I'm living on Airbnb – Brian, Airbnb CEO | Hacker News Reader

Starting today, I'm living on Airbnb – Brian, Airbnb CEO

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7 pointsdsr125 comments

I get quite a dystopian feeling from the new future this thread envisions. "Decentralization of living". My mind goes large companies like AirBnB buying up apartments en mass and individuals jumping from one temporary apartment to the next; never calling anywhere "home".

I mean that was close to what WeWork was doing.. There was also that real estate start up that lost half a billion in an up market.

So yeah I would say you are right on the money.

Isn't this already common for young people in cities? I used to change apartments every year on average.

Not really. I'm picturing short term, furnished apartments that you swap every week or two (like an AirBnb). This lifestyle is already popular among the younger generation; low stress, no ties, freedom to travel and explore. It's great until you want to settle down and have security but at the point where big companies own everything that won't be possible.

It's sort of in line with this "Great Reset" conspiracy: "You will own nothing and you will be happy".

Oh my…so brilliant!!! You are going to experience what users do?! Wow, who would have thought that’s a good idea! This guy must be the founder of a multi billion dollar company, right?

Anyway, you shouldn’t need to announce this and get all that PR or whatever. You should just be doing this all the time. Why? Because that is how you build products that solve problems / build things people really need.

I come from Stanford, and I know all these finance people, and I do all this data analysis and you investors should all give me money because I can converse intelligently. Blah blah.

Build fucking good products by living as a user of your product. No hubris here, but I signed up the first couple thousand of my users by busting my ass on the streets asking everyone to check out my product. From observing them I learned their needs and how to build something solid. We blow everything that competes out of the water and are experiencing growth that would make the incumbents cry, especially because we are going to eat their lunch in the next few years. Dumped $1.6M of my own money into the company to do it, no investors. Moved to a foreign country multiple times to work with outsourced dev teams so I could afford it. Sleeper on floors, built awesome relationships. And best of all, my product ameliorates society so out KPIs are how much are we helping people. Got the most inspired team that’s like family. Yada yada. Wouldn’t trade this life for anything and I have zero tech background and am a single founder. Yeeeeee

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