When Brian Chesky was pitching venture capitalists to invest in Airbnb, one of the people he consulted was the entrepreneur and investor Sam Altman, … - Reid Hoffman

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When Brian Chesky was pitching venture capitalists to invest in Airbnb, one of the people he consulted was the entrepreneur and investor Sam Altman, who later became the president of the Y Combinator start-up accelerator. Altman saw Chesky’s pitch deck and told him it was perfect, except that he needed to change the market-size slide from a modest $ 30 million to $ 30 billion. “Investors want B’s, baby,” Altman told Chesky. Of course, Altman wasn’t telling Chesky to lie; rather, he argued that if the Airbnb team truly believed in their own assumptions, $ 30 million was a gross underestimate, and they should use a number that was true to their convictions. As it turns out, Airbnb’s market was indeed closer to $ 30 billion.

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Alternative Names: Reid Garrett Hoffman Reid G. Hoffman
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As he was doing his home visits, Brian developed a clever method for extracting valuable feedback. Instead of just asking what people thought about the product as it existed now, he’d ask what they thought about the product he might build. “If I ask, ‘What can I do to make this better?’ they’ll say something small,” Brian explains. So instead, he’d ask bigger, bolder questions, like “What can we do to surprise you?” or “What would it take for me to design something that you would literally tell every single person you’ve ever encountered?” In doing so, he invited users to join him in imagining a bigger, bolder version of Airbnb.

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