Brian Chesky

A number of years ago, I noticed that as we got bigger, we started losing a little bit of that startup intensity, that startup energy.

And I asked myself, how can we get that energy back?

And we basically took a very small team.

We named the team Project Hawaii.

The name doesn't really matter.

But basically, I took a very small team of people and we said, we're going to focus on a very, very small service area.

And we decided to focus on conversion rate, the guest journey.

And I basically tried to work with a team as if we were at Rouse Street.

Rouse Street was the apartment that Jonay and I started.

And I said, we're going to act like a startup.

And the team just grinded really, really hard.

We weren't working like a big company.

We were a very small team, grinding really hard, focusing on obsessing over the customer experience, really looking at the data.

And we really got a lot of points on the board.

And then we really started taking these pods and we really started working with the teams, trying to coach them how we worked in the early days.

And I just think the pace increased, the intensity increased.

We really tried to bring in world-class people onto the team.

They got very, very focused.

We tried to get all the management and bureaucracy out of their way.

And it's been a couple years.