Lecture 10 - Culture (Brian Chesky, Alfred Lin)

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 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 is culture? Why does it matter? How do you create your core values and think about elements that sort of fit together for the core values and the culture that create a high-performance team? Get some best practices for the culture.

So, what is culture? Um, anybody have 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? You just looked it up? So, these are some definitions that you'll find in Webster's Dictionary. But we're at Stanford, so that’s 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.

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 sort 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 to that is real action.

How do you act in pursuit of goals? That's kind of weak—in pursuit of big, hairy, audacious goals. That's a little stronger, but a better definition is in pursuit of the mission. So now that