Brian Chesky Quotes

Starting a company is like throwing yourself off the cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down.

In a startup, both the problem and solution are unknown.

If you want to build a startup that has a good chance of succeeding, don't listen to me. Listen to Paul Graham and others who are applying tons of data to the idea of startup success. That will maximize your chance of being successful.

Like many of my fellow entrepreneurs, I didn't create Hearsay Social with my co-founder Steve Garrity because it would be fun and easy, but because we're at our best when faced with enormous challenges.

There are a lot of people building small ideas now. There's an idealization of being an entrepreneur, but the most important thing is to have a really great idea.

In 1990, Paul Smith and I decided that conducting polymers as materials had developed to a level of maturity that commercial products were possible. With this as a goal, we founded UNLAX Corporation.

I'd get kicked out of buildings all day long, people would rip up my business card in my face. It's a humbling business to be in. But I knew I could sell and I knew I wanted to sell something I had created. I cut the feet out of those pantyhose and I knew I was on to something. This was it.

As an entrepreneur you keep trying things, and I try everything. I try business ideas, on our website we test everything, iterate, iterate, iterate.

If every effect of any new products or methods were required to be known before they could be produced and marketed, they would not be true innovations - and thus not represent new knowledge of what people would like, if offered.

I do think a lot of people are trying to do important things still, and I think it is really a great thing that entrepreneurship is getting easier. When I started, it was just much harder to begin a company.

It's shocking we don't see more engineers and entrepreneurs interested in enterprise.

There's an idealization of being an entrepreneur, but the most important thing is to have a really great idea.

Technology ventures can succeed with very little investment, unlike many other industries. A lot of the big Internet players like Google or Yahoo were started by a couple of guys with computers. Microsoft was started in Bill Gates' garage.

I want to create an environment where I can create technology, get it into the hands of someone to market it, and move on to other technologies so I can keep innovating. I want to be a serial entrepreneur: Incubate an idea, get it to a good state, and make that an enabler to get to the next state. It's every researcher's fantasy.

The thing about startups is you can make it, and if it's wrong you can remake it, and you can build a team that you want to have, a product that you want to have. You're utterly focused on your users or your customers and their needs, and trying to figure out how to meet those needs.

The biggest problem is startups in search of a problem. Chase what you're passionate about; you'll probably already have knowledge in the space.

For decades, technology entrepreneurship has been revered, and people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk were heroes.

If you go to business school, and you put a product out there in the world, and it's working, the logic is to keep putting the same product out there. And I think that really bumps up against the creative process - and moviemaking, generally. And I think that our company really pushes against that.

If I had been out in the industry instead of being a college kid who had an idea for another T-shirt, I would have been too scared to do anything.

Even though Traf-O-Data wasn't a roaring success, it was seminal in preparing us to make Microsoft's first product a couple of years later.

All the biggest companies are based on a founder who had a need, hacked it together, and said, 'Hey, other people might want this.'

Almost anything worth doing involves some measure of risk - from learning to ride a bike, moving to a new city, and certainly, starting your own business. The point is that no one has ever started a business or created a new product with a guarantee of success.

We believe that the best solutions come from solving your own problem. If you have a real problem, there's likely someone else who can relate. That's how Airbnb was born.

I think, when I see entrepreneurs, they tend to talk about the market and the industry - which is obviously very important, but the most important thing is you're product. What are you selling? And does it really have product-market fit?

At Venture for, we've worked with hundreds of aspiring young entrepreneurs who want to build businesses and change things for the better.