标题: Airbnb CEO [打印本页] 作者: choi 时间: 7-6-2015 18:45 标题: Airbnb CEO Leigh Gallagher, The Education of Brian Chesky. Coming up with the idea for AIRBNB was the easy part. The transition from broke art-school graduate to multibillion-dollar company CEO? That was more complicated. Here’s how the sharer-in-chief hacked leadership. Fortune, July 1, 2015. http://fortune.com/brian-chesky-airbnb/
Quote:
“Hatched in 2008 on a whim, Airbnb is now a massive platform * * * [with] a valuation of $24 billion, a figure that exceeds the $21 billion market value of hotel giant Marriott, which runs more than 4,000 hotels. Among so-called unicorns, tech startups with valuations of more than $1 billion, Airbnb trails only Uber (reportedly close to closing a new round of funding at a value of $50 billion) and Chinese phone-maker Xiaomi ($46 billion). Airbnb will reportedly bring in around $900 million in revenue this year.
“this article—the first in-depth profile of Chesky himself, rather than the company
Note:
(a) "We’re [reporter and Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky are] sitting in the President’s Room at Airbnb’s airy, ultra-chic headquarters in the SoMa neighborhood of San Francisco. Other meeting spaces in the historic building, which the company moved to in 2013, are designed to replicate an Airbnb rental in Fiji or the war room from the movie Dr Strangelove."
(i) South of Market, San Francisco https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_of_Market,_San_Francisco
(or SoMa; south of Market Street)
(ii) Dr. Strangelove https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Strangelove
(section 2 Cast and characters: Peter Sellers as * * * Dr Strangelove, the wheelchair-bound nuclear war expert and former Nazi; section 3 Production, section 3.2 Sets and filming: paragraph 2 and a photo whose caption is "The War Room with the Big Board")
(b) “It’s a high-level, strategic way of thinking about management, something that sounds more out of the playbook of Jim Collins or Peter Drucker than a 33-year-old first-time CEO [Chesky].”
(i) James C. Collins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_C._Collins
("James C 'Jim' Collins, III (born 1958) is an American business consultant")
(ii) Peter Drucker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Drucker
(1909 – 2005; was an Austrian-born American management consultant)
(c) Robert McNamara: “There’s no learning curve for people who are in war or in startups.”
learning curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_curve
(The familiar expression "a steep learning curve" is intended to mean that the activity is difficult to learn, although a learning curve with a steep start actually represents rapid progress)
In the first graphic, “a subject” means a person (can be an animal, though)--anyway, a subject in a study or experiment.
(d) “Chesky, who in 2008 had never heard of an angel investor or read TechCrunch, knows this [sudden change of fortune for the better] better than anyone. ‘It’s not natural for someone like myself to be at art school, to then be unemployed, and then five or six years later have this [CEO of a big company],’ he says. ‘Nothing really prepares you for that’ .”
TechCrunch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TechCrunch
(Owner AOL (which acquired TechCrunch in 2010); Launched 2005)
(e) "By now, the story of Airbnb’s origin is lore in Silicon Valley and beyond: In October 2007, [just moving to San Francisco] Chesky and Joe Gebbia, two unemployed RISD graduates, were broke and staring at their rent due date. So they came up with the idea to pull some of Gebbia’s air mattresses out of the closet and sell sleeping space in their apartment to attendees of a sold-out design trade show. They called it the Air Bed and Breakfast. (The ‘continental breakfast’ consisted of untoasted Pop-Tarts.) Three people bunked with them that weekend, and the idea got some attention on design blogs. A few months later their engineer friend Nathan Blecharczyk joined Chesky and Gebbia as the third co-founder, and in August 2008 the site debuted as Airbedandbreakfast.com, an online platform for people to rent out space in their homes."