Vlad Loktev: observation

Transcript context

…That was an amazing story. I feel exactly the same way. I went through a similar experience when I joined. And obviously, the human tunnel eventually didn't scale and people started doing it per team versus the entire company. We could do a whole episode on Airbnb culture and learnings from that. Interestingly with the human tunnel, it started I think with the founders, but it ended up being they had no involvement in these tunnels. It was just employees knew that this is the thing we're going to do for every new employee, and so I think it's interesting. I guess just spending a little time on culture and learnings from Airbnb about the value and power of culture, is there anything there you take away with two other companies you work with now of just how to set up a great culture, how to do this well? I would say there's no single playbook. I would say the one thing that comes to mind just being really intentional and thoughtful about it and actually dedicating energy to it. Just as much as you spend time building product, hiring people, is you got to spend just as much energy actually thinking about culture and your core values. And so core values are very, I would say, indicative of what the culture will be. So those two are very linked and once you think about core values, I remember what worked really well was you don't just write your core values in the document somewhere and then no one ever opens it. The key is, regardless of what the core values are, you want to make sure that those core values are prominent in just about every single thing that you do. So when you hire people, you hire for certain core values, and at Airbnb, we had core value interviewers up until, I mean, my entire tenure basically. Even when we had thousands of people already at the company, when we were hiring people, everybody had to pass core values interviews, so it was very ingrained in how we hired and what we looked for. Then even performance reviews and promotions, no matter how much impact you made, no matter what you did, if you were not also exemplifying core, you didn't get promoted. You didn't get to the next level, and so even in our performance conversations, those core values were very present in the day to day. And then of course they were also printed everywhere. They were just physically everywhere all the time, so I felt like every single person around me always knew what the core values work, and so that's my biggest advice. It's like, don't copy some other company's core values. Instead, just be intentional about what matters to your organization and then make sure that those core values are freaking everywhere, part of every single process. Otherwise, no one's going to care. Just to reinforce what you're saying, have been gone from Airbnb for five, six years now, and I still a 100% remember the core values. I'll go through them real quick. Be a host, be a cereal entrepreneur, which is cereal as the cereal story of Airbnb, champion the mission and-…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.