Build something 100 people love, not something 1 million people kind of like.

Culture is simply a shared way of doing something with passion.

I'm not saying the whole world will work this way, but with Airbnb, people are sleeping in other people's homes and other people's beds. So there's a level of trust necessary to participate that's different from an eBay or Facebook.

What I've been surprised by is not how different people are, but how similar they are. There are certain types of Airbnb people, and they are in every city in the world - it's just that in some cultures, there is more of a generational divide.

People went to Dell for the computers, but they go to Apple for everything… That’s the difference between a transactional company and a transformational one.

I had to learn to get comfortable in a role of ambiguity where I had to seek out advisers and learn quickly.

The office is the laboratory and meeting your users is like going into the field. You can't just stay in the lab. And it's not just asking users what they want, it's about seeing what they're doing.