Gustaf Alströmer: evaluation

Transcript context

…It reminds me coming back to Airbnb, one of the most important moments in Airbnb history was Paul Graham telling the founders of Airbnb, "Where are your customers?" And they're like, "Oh, they're in New York" and he's like, "Why are you talking to me and not in New York right now talking to them?" And they talk about that all the time. Gustaf Alströmer Yeah, it's absolutely true. I think he wrote the article Do Things That Don't Scale as a learning.... The learning there was the Airbnb founders doing the trips to New York and learning about how to build Airbnb, which is a very counterintuitive idea, which is when you have to spend the most amount of time with your customers. I think Airbnb is sort of one of the best stories inside YC of doing this well. This also reminds me, I've been talking to a bunch of founders recently. I asked them, "How many customers have you talked to help figure out this idea?" So just the other day it was 150 financial CROs that they talked to before they actually started raising this round. Another company, actually two Airbnb guys that started, they actually ran ads I think on LinkedIn to find specific people to talk to and that specific role. And they talked to probably at least 100, maybe 200. So there's a strong correlation there.…

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