Vlad Loktev: preference

Transcript context

…Awesome. So along those lines, embrace chaos, let things be chaotic sometimes because some of the best things come out of that, and as you shared, Brian sometimes just introduces a little chaos to get people out of their safe world a little bit. This idea of a shit bucket. If things are just like, "I hate this thing and it's not going well, I'm just going to throw it in the shit bucket for now and that's just how it's going to be and I'm going to move on so I could focus on impact and important things." Amazing. What else do we have here? So many little notes here. Be prepared, says your organizing front teams. Be prepared to lose friends that you had at the company as you rise and as you have to do things that maybe they're not aligned with or happy about that are helping their career. All org charts suck, nothing's going to be amazing. Don't over focus on the org chart. Focus on the people and the culture. Oh yeah, the mission above all else. Just like if things are not going well, it might be people aren't aligned with the mission of the company. Is there anything else off the top of [inaudible 01:06:34]? It's so interesting when I think back to my 10 years, things that I actually remember the most are these moments with other people and not some project or some product launch that's going super well or us doing really well with metrics. The things that really made I think Airbnb special, and now that I think back to those 10 years of my experience that I deeply just resonate with are those little moments. And one example, and this is why culture is just so important because these things don't just happen organically. You have to be thoughtful about building culture, and then I think you create a place where these little things can happen. So for me, I don't know if you remember your experience when you first joined the company, my most memorable experience at Airbnb is the human tunnel. And it was just this thing where I remember it was my first day and I was standing behind this giant wall and there was silence in, I think, it was a cafeteria. I was like this huge huge room and then somebody like this engineer runs up to me and says, "Hey, go around to the other side of the wall," and I turn and suddenly the room just explodes in cheering and clapping and everyone yelling my name. And everyone is basically doing a human tunnel with their hands. Literally every single person at the company at HQ, including the founders. And then I run through under everyone's cheering and I jump into this beanbag while everyone's chanting my name. That was my first day, and here I am, I don't know, 12 years later, 13 years later. I still remember that as one of the most amazing moments of the entire journey and I immediately felt accepted. And I wanted to contribute to the team, and a lot of the reasons why... There were many moments like that throughout my 10 years and it was a result of how we hired people for certain core values and were very intentional about just helping people integrate into this crazy company that was growing superfast. 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?…

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