If you want to create a great product, just focus on one person. Make that one person have the most amazing experience ever.

My life is longer because of the journeys I have taken.

Customers are willing to try new things, and if you can survive, you will have fewer competitors. It's like entering the eye of the storm. As long as you are strong enough to survive, you can end up in still water by yourself.

The culture is what creates the foundation for all future innovation. If you break the culture, you break the machine that creates your products.

Whatever the press is talking about, they want to keep talking about it. So instead of asking yourself, 'How can I get them to start talking about me?', figure out a way to get yourself involved in what they're already talking about.

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

Our perception of time is really driven by our perception of the unfamiliar, vivid, and new.

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.

The stuff that matters in life is no longer stuff. It's other people. It's relationships. It's experience.

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.

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.

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.

People don't use Airbnb overtly to trust people more. They use it because they want to get a better sense of the culture and to save money. A by-product was that they live in someone else's shoes.

Culture is a thousand things, a thousand times. It's living the core values when you hire; when you write an email; when you are working on a project; when you are walking in the hall.

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.

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.

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.

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.