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 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