Vlad Loktev: belief

Transcript context

…Then just to make sure people get this point you made about this core value hiring team, which is really unique, I don't know if anyone else does this, is there's people trained to interview in core values and they were a specific volunteer team. That part of the interview process, one of these people came in and they interviewed for core values, which was meant to represent what the founders were looking for initially. I mean, it was also very telling how, I remember, it was an honor internally to be selected to be a core values interviewer in the first place. Most people, large companies are like, "I don't want to do any more interviewing. Oh my God, I'm in interviews all the time. " Here, people were like, it was a sense of this emotional proud moment when you were basically given the keys and somebody said, "Hey, we actually think you would be fantastic at helping us think about how to make sure every single new hire embodies these core values." I think that was so powerful. Amazing. So again, we could spend an entire hour on the culture of Airbnb and all the things we've learned there. It's actually a good segue to the last area. The last part I want to talk to you about, which I think a lot of people are probably wondering about as we have been chatting, which is about Airbnb's current ways of working. So, we had Brian Chesky and the podcast, most popular episode of the podcast turns out, and he shared his approach to product, which a lot of people are like, "huh, that's unique and different and I don't necessarily want to work that way." Other people are like, "This is amazing. This is exactly how I want to operate, and so I'm going to make my company work this way." The way he described Airbnb is it kind of moved from bottom-up, experimentation driven to very top-down, "We're going to have one roadmap. I'm going to be involved in everything." Product managers and our product marketing managers and all these things that I think people are like, "Wow, that's really new and interesting." You actually worked through a lot of that. You went through that transition. I think technically you're a product marketing manager when you left Airbnb?…

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