These are the positives I took from this post:

- Grit and formidability. "They did nothing half-way, and we could sense this even in the interview." If one doesn't feel so strongly about the problem they're trying to solve, it is going to be hard to sustain the energy needed for the effort required.

- The founding team is key. "We didn’t even like the idea that much. Nor did users, at that stage; they had no growth." Despite the "startups = growth" truism, it is refreshing to see that one of YC's biggest exits had no such trait even after a year of work (when they decided to fund them in W09) apart from the fact that the founding team was relentless.

- Momentum is everything. "No one ever worked harder during YC than the Airbnbs did. If you suggested an idea to them in office hours, the next time you talked to them they’d not only have implemented it, but also implemented two new ideas they had in the process." This may sound easy but it is so hard to do in practice (speaking from experience) because of the discipline and focus it requires to keep moving the needle a bit more every day.

- Don't let rejections break you [0]. "One investor they met in a cafe walked out in the middle of meeting with them." Again, it so very easy to let rejections get to you despite trying your hardest to not be bothered by them. You start to question all kinds of things which isn't a healthy thing to do but it is kind of inevitable because the disillusionment hits so hard.

- Live in the future. Care enough to make it happen. "When they first tried renting out airbeds on their floor during a design convention, all they were hoping for was to make enough money to pay their rent that month. But something surprising happened: they enjoyed having those first three guests staying with them. And the guests enjoyed it too... That experience was why the Airbnbs didn’t give up. They knew they’d discovered something. They’d seen a glimpse of the future, and they couldn’t let it go." The Airbnbs weren't the first to realise this [1] but they cared enough about making this work at a scale never done before [2].

- Know your metrics of goodness and identify how to hit them [3]. "They knew that once people tried staying in what is now called 'an airbnb,' they would also realize that this was the future. But only if they tried it, and they weren’t. That was the problem during Y Combinator: to get growth started. The way to get growth started in something like Airbnb is to focus on the hottest subset of the market. If you can get growth started there, it will spread to the rest. When I asked the Airbnbs where there was most demand, they knew from searches: New York City. So they focused on New York." If I take the liberty to draw parallels with Amazon's founding [4], Jeff Bezos (who incidentally is an early Airbnb investor himself) chose Seattle for a reason (taxes and tech talent). He chose Books for a reason (warehouse-ability, shippability). He chose to be online-only for a reason (low costs and reach). Again, easy in retrospect, but requires non trivial amount of insights and delibration when starting up. And it is all too easy to overthink this and get lost in a quagmire. Drinking the kool-aid, as it were.

Survivorship Bias or not, I think Paul would be the first to point out that every startup is different.

[0] https://medium.com/@bchesky/7-rejections-7d894cbaa084

[1] VRBO, HomeAway, CouchSurfing...

[2] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/airbnb-didnt-create-brand-new...

[3] https://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=24807

[4] https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/rWRbTnE1PEM