yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Lecture 10 - Culture (Brian Chesky, Alfred Lin)


3m read
·Nov 5, 2024

Processing might take a few minutes. Refresh later.

Set the stage with a few slides and some comments, but the main stage is going to be with Brian when he comes up and talks about how he built the Airbnb culture. So, you're here. I've been following the presentations, and so now you know how to get started. You've built a team. You started to sort of build your product. It's off the ground. It's growing. People love it. You figured out how to do that. You figured out how to create a very special company with Monopoly Powers. That's big, and the market that you're chasing after is slightly bigger than the paper airplane business. So, you're good, right?

So, now what? We're here to submit that actually culture is the thing that's going to be very, very important for you to be able to scale the business as well as your team. Hopefully, after this talk, you'll be able to know what culture is, why it matters, how to sort of create your core values, and think about elements that fit together for the core values and the culture that create a high-performance team. You'll also get some best practices for the culture.

So, what is culture? Um, anybody want to take a guess at how one should define this? A set of values in a team? Yeah, that's good. Did you look that up on the internet? Because you had a computer and internet connection; you just looked it up. So these are some definitions that you'll find in Webster's Dictionary. But that, we're at Stanford, this is kind of a trick question. It's a CS class. Questions are never straightforward.

The real question is, what is company culture going to be? You know, culture that we can generally talk about: society, groups, places, or things. Here, we're talking about company culture. So how do we want to define company culture? We can take the previous definition and modify it a little bit.

And so, every day, blank and blank of each member of the team, in pursuit of our company blank. Some people have filled these in with different sorts of things. The first blank could be assumptions, beliefs, values. My favorite is core values. The second blank for the b blank, people have said behaviors. My favorite answer for that is real action. How do you act in pursuit of goals? That's kind of weak. In pursuit of big and hairy audacious goals, that's a little stronger. But a better definition is in pursuit of the mission.

Now that we have that definition, what do we do with it, and why does it matter? This is a quote from Gandhi: "Your beliefs become your thoughts, your thoughts become your words, your words become your actions, your actions become your habits, your habits become your values, and your values become your destiny." If you don't have a good culture in the company, you can't pursue your destiny.

What matters is it becomes the first principles that you sort of go back to when you make decisions. It becomes a way to align people on values that matter to the company. It provides a certain level of stability to fall back on, and it provides a level of trust that people can sort of trust each other with. It also gives you a list of things that you should be able to figure out what to do and what not to do. And what the more important

More Articles

View All
David Deutsch: Knowledge Creation and The Human Race, Part 1
My goal would be not to do yet another podcast with David Deutsch; there are plenty of those. I would love to tease out some of the very counter-intuitive learnings, put them down canonically in such a way that future generations can benefit from them, an…
Charlie Munger: How Our Simple Method Effortlessly Beats The Market
If you’re a young investor and you can sort of stand back and value stocks as businesses and invest when things are very cheap no matter what anybody is saying on television or what you’re reading, and perhaps if you wish sell when people get terribly ent…
15 Traits Of A Weak Person
We all know a weak person is easily influenced by others’ ideas and opinions, but not necessarily by their own. The confidence that comes from knowing you deserve something motivates you to perform the acts and prove your worth, and you exhibit traits tha…
Prelude to the Peloponnesian War | World History | Khan Academy
In the last few videos, we talked about the Greco-Persian Wars, or we could say the Persian invasion of Greece. In the first wave, the first Persian invasion, the Athenians were able to stop them at Marathon. Then, in the second Persian invasion, led by X…
Meet Albert Woodfox of the Angola Three | The Story of Us
Albert Woodfox had four decades in solitary confinement. He was imprisoned here in Angola State Penitentiary for most of his life. But it was an incident a year after his arrival in Angola that would change the course of Albert’s life. A prison guard was …
Interpreting trigonometric graphs in context | Trigonometry | Algebra || | Khan Academy
We’re told Alexa is riding on a Ferris wheel. Her height above the ground in meters is modeled by ( h(t) ), where ( t ) is the time in seconds, and we can see that right over here. Now, what I want to focus on in this video is some features of this graph.…