Simon explained that a company’s purpose is to advance its vision, and since a vision is a mountaintop you never quite get to, you should have an infinite time horizon. Being an infinite company is an idea that my friend, author Simon Sinek, has been discussing with me. I know that a lot of companies are thinking about being long-term oriented, but an alternative way of thinking about it is being infinite. We want Airbnb to be a 21st-century company with two defining characteristics: We want to design a company to meet the unique needs of the 21st-century. You could say that these are 20th-century companies living in a 21st-century world. Companies face pressures based on legacies from the 20th-century, and the convention is to focus on increasingly short-term financial interests, often at the expense of a company’s vision, long-term value, and its impact on society. Technology has changed a lot in my lifetime, but how companies run has not. Companies have a responsibility to improve society, and the problems Airbnb can have a role in solving are so vast that we need to operate on a longer time horizon. It’s clear that our responsibility isn’t just to our employees, our shareholders, or even to our community - it’s also to the next generation. People are increasingly living in digital bubbles, trust in institutions is at a record low, and companies realize they have a greater responsibility to society. We can still be radical, and it couldn’t come at a more perfect time in the world. We are now big enough where anything is possible, but not so big that change would be nearly insurmountable. So I asked myself, if Joe, Nate and I were gone tomorrow, what would we want the world to know about Airbnb’s intentions?Īirbnb is still young, and the cement hasn’t hardened. A close advisor told me that now was the time to “institutionalize your intentions so that even as you grow, you can minimize what conflicts with your vision.” It made me realize that we should write down what we want to institutionalize before it’s too late. I was thinking about the next ten years of Airbnb when I received a phone call I’ll never forget. People said our idea would never work - “Strangers will never trust one another!” A decade later, people have checked into an Airbnb nearly 300 million times. Joe and I couldn’t pay rent, so we created the first AirBed & Breakfast and invited three people we’d never met to stay in our home. I am absurdly lucky even to be writing this email.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |