Brian Chesky mentioned reading this book twice before starting Airbnb. He was particularly impacted by two chapters, one detailing Walt Disney's move to Los Angeles and the other about the creation of Snow White, which inspired his approach to service design at Airbnb.
This book had a big effect on me. And there's two chapters that really affected me. So this is the Neil Gaibor book. It's the definitive biography and it's pretty extensive. It's like over 600 pages,...
— Episode: Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DI...
Episode: Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Wa...
Brian Chesky mentioned reading this book twice before starting Airbnb. He was particularly impacted by two chapters, one detailing Walt Disney's move to Los Angeles and the other about the creation of Snow White, which inspired his approach to service design at Airbnb.
This book had a big effect on me. And there's two chapters that really affected me. So this is the Neil Gaibor book. It's the definitive biography and it's pretty extensive. It's like over 600 pages, you can see it. The Walt Disney's biography. Yes, the biography about the man, Walt Disney.
So this book I read right before I started Airbnb. I'm living in Los Angeles. I read this biography and I thought to myself I don't have to work for someone like Walt Disney. I can try to become something like that. Even if I don't get to that level of scale of success. That's okay. I can do something much smaller. But I can do something like this.
And then there was another chapter. Four years into Airbnb. Called Folly. Folly is the title of the chapter about Snow White. And they called it Folly because they named it Disney's Folly. And the reason they named it Disney's Folly is because he bet the entire company On this feature length animated film. And everyone thought that it was terrible.
And I had a business and I thought I was reading that chapter and that's when the light bulb went off. He basically invented the storyboard for that movie. Because the movie was so long. No one had done a feature length animated film. They had a storyboard out the scenes. And I remember thinking to myself Once I read that chapter I said What if we created a storyboard of the perfect vacation on Airbnb.