Brian Chesky

“As children, we have vivid imaginations. We stay up late waiting for Santa Claus, dream of becoming president, and have ideas that defy physics. Then something happens. As we grow older, we start editing our imagination.”

“I think we go through our lives limiting our potential, and when times are tough, it's easy to convince ourselves that something isn't possible, but if you start there, then you limit yourself and the possibilities of what you can create.”

“CEOs are often chief product officers. But for me to say I'm a chief product officer when my product is a community, I really should be thinking of myself as head of this community.”

“The people with the passports, the people who travel more, tend to be the most understanding. And it's ironic that the people who travel the least have the strongest opinions about the people they've never met.”

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

“When you start a company, it's more an art than a science because it's totally unknown. Instead of solving high-profile problems, try to solve something that's deeply personal to you. Ideally, if you're an ordinary person and you've just solved your problem, you might have solved the problem for millions of people.”

“In June 2010, I moved out of my apartment and I have been mostly homeless ever since, off and on. I just live in Airbnb apartments and I check in every week in different homes in San Francisco.”

“Repetition doesn't create memories. New experiences do.”

“Unless you have fixed costs, you don't need any capital to create a prototype. Ideally, your co-founders, with sweat equity, can create the product themselves.”

“Airbnb is different from most brands. We're a community of individuals, and yet there's a consistency holding us together through the values we share. We have a common belief in belonging, but everyone's expression of it will naturally always be a little different.”

“Never assume you can't do something. Push yourself to redefine the boundaries.”

“I think I've always been pretty shameless about seeking out people much smarter and much more experienced than me from the very beginning.”

“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.”

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

“Our culture is the foundation for our company.”

“The American dream, what we were taught was, grow up, own a car, own a house. I think that dream's completely changing. We were taught to keep up with the Joneses. Now we're sharing with the Joneses.”

“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.”

“Think of the imagination as a giant stone from which we carve out new ideas. As we chip away, our new ideas become more polished and refined. But if you start by editing your imagination, you start with a tiny stone.”