Culture with Brian Chesky and Alfred Lin (How to Start a Startup 2014: Lecture 10)

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, you've been following the presentations and now you know how to get started. You built the 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, one-of-a-kind 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? So 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 create your core values, and think about elements that sort of fit together for core values and the culture that creates a high-performance team. You'll get some best practices for the culture.

So what is culture? Does anybody want to take a guess at how one should define this? Dizzle values? Yeah, that's good! Could you look that up? Because you had a computer and internet connection, you could just look it up.

These are some definitions that you'll find in Webster's dictionary, but that's— we're at Stanford, this is kind of a trick question. It's the CS class; questions are never straightforward. The real question is what company culture is going to be. You know, culture that we can generally talk about society, about groups, about places, and things. Here we're talking about company culture. So how do we define company culture?

We can take the previous definition and modify it a little bit. Everything—this is a hint of how we may want to define company culture—is about the actions and beliefs of each member of the team in pursuit of our company mission. Some people have sort of defined these with different points. The first blank could be assumptions, beliefs, or values. My favorite is core values.

The second blank could be behaviors. My favorite sort of answer for that is real action. How do you