YouSaid · the spoken record

Joe Gebbia

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218
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2018-03-08
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2018-03-08
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1
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  1. “And that did all right, except it was so laborious. I'd be down in the garage, like zip tying things together and had to design all these cards and then get the stickers. And then it just, it took way too long versus on how much we made. And so around this time, I also have a day job. My day job was I got a fellowship from a book publisher called Chronicle Books.”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “We didn't make any money on it. We bootstrapped the whole thing and never took investment on it. And the one thing that we did innovate on that actually did make money for us is. We call it the green box, and the green box was basically like a physical magazine that we shipped out on a quarterly basis that allowed people to build an actual materials library for themselves. So we'd ship actual samples with these beautifully designed placards that gave you all the information about it with a special integrated hook. So you can imagine a whole wall of materials that you'd have in your design studio or your design team, in-house, or consultancy, whatever the thing was, or even at design school for your materials library.”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “WebSee pointed out revenue was a cool. Eyeballs were cool. Traffic was great, but revenue didn't matter. And so unfortunately, we subscribe to that as well with EcoCollect, and our service was free.”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Well, Ecolect launched at a time, and this might be hard to understand now, but if you go back ten plus years around 2007, Web 2.0 is happening on the internet. Revenue is not cool.”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “And I still pack it up and ship it out. And, you know, Life's changed quite a bit since then, but it's a great reminder for me of like. Early days Just hustling, of trying to get stuff done, of the enthusiasm and the exuberance of bringing an idea to life. It was a rush.”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “You're very welcome So Kripun's sort of is slowing down, but it's funny every so often I still get an order. I still go down to the garage.”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “And we'd find manufacturers around the world and we'd plug them into the system. And it was basically like a really high-end search engine and community for people who cared about this topic. So we slowed down critically that the thing is that the product remained. I had figured out manufacturing abroad. The Cripon's website was up. It was getting press at this point from around the world. It's getting blogged about. I have shipping orders out of my garage. At this point, I moved to San Francisco. My garage became headquarters. And it got into some of the big catalogs in the US. One of them is called Silicon. Hundreds of thousands of homes. And I had these orders flowing in. I'm like, my garage, I had to employ some friends to come help pack up crip ones, these orders of hundreds at a time. It was insane. Great learning experience”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Was a growing consciousness around we want to feel good about the things that we're making. And so I realized I'm not a material scientist. Maybe I'm not going to invent a foam. However, I know how to make a website. So what if I started a site that would allow any designer to connect with the sources of sustainable materials, whether it's bioplastics or reclaim glass or organic cotton? And so a classmate and I partnered up together a buddy named Matt. We created this website. Help solve our own problem of having access to sustainable materials. Know the site started and it was this combination of ecology and intellect, so we called it ecollect. And it was basically Google for sustainable materials.”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “But I couldn't find anybody that made a foam that was appropriate for the product. So I decided to go forward with the product. And that sparked this other idea, which was, okay, I've learned two things from this. A, the foam doesn't exist. And B, there wasn't even a good source to try to find the foam in the first place, right? Like Amazon was starting to really emerge at this time, and it was so easy to find a book on Amazon or like content. I was like, why isn't there a site where you can find sustainable materials? I talked to some of my classmates that we had graduated at this point and became very clear that whether you're in architecture or fashion design or package design or industrial design,”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “With crip buns, I actually delayed the launch of that for six months because I was trying to find a foam that was environmentally considered. And I called everybody. I was talking to people in the Midwest making foam out of soybeans at one point. I found a woman in England who started to make plastic out of bubble gum that you'd scrape off the sidewalk.”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “Cradle to cradle. Yeah. Bill McDonough's book, which also came out around this time, was hugely influential. Natural capitalism kind of came around in this time. There's starting to be this other way of thinking about how we consume things in the planet. And certainly you feel a responsibility as a designer because you're pretty close to the origins of those things. Sometimes you don't decide the strategy of, hey, we need to make this product, but you're definitely in it in the field of view of being able to decide what kind of materials to use. What's the whole life cycle of a product? And so...”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Driving through these canyons of trash. Like you have your faces pressed up against the bus window and you can't even see to the top. Of the landfill for the state. And you get out to the top and you get out of the vans and you're looking back over this just landscape of garbage. And for me, it hit me like a ton of bricks. I'm like, wow, like I do not want to spend my life making things that contribute to making a landfill better. That is not interesting to me. It was like a really impactful moment where I just started to feel a slight sense of guilt that I was now studying a discipline that was about making more stuff. And so it really kicked off this. Enthusiasm or consciousness around how do you make stuff that's environmentally considered?”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Creative pursuit of painting, which was more about expression of ideas through that medium, into the expression of ideas through industrial design, which was cool to me because you could make something objects and it could be replicated thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of times. You could actually touch millions of people with your designs, just like the EAMS And so this is my motivation to switch industrial design. You could use design to improve people's lives and it could be done at scale. Could touch a lot of people all at once. And so RISD in the Industrial Design Department did something brilliant. Our first year in the program, they put us all in the school vans. And they drove us out to the Rhode Island State landfill. And here we are”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “Goes back to RIS I switch from being in painting to being in industrial design, largely in part because I learned about Charles and Ray Eames, two designers from the mid-20th century. That were a couple raised the wife, Charles is the husband, and they produced design that it's legendary. It's still referenced today. It's in the MoMA, in the permanent collection. It's iconic. And they dedicated their lives to producing the best design to the most people for the least price. And they were really celebrated for democratizing good design and making it accessible. I had also had the chair project with Gareth Jones and fell in love with making things and realized that I wanted to switch from this more”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Until he tried it out. And he like actually got up and he sat down before us. He goes, oh yeah, this is pretty good. And then they said, okay, thanks. And like I walked down, it's like this like blitz of like five minutes of just pitch mode and it was like getting peppered with all these questions and all these lights on you and these cameras I did not get on the show, but it was just one of these crazy moments of these unexpected things that this product, these experiences that this product brought me.”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “And so I'm like, okay, so I got my product, proud entrepreneur here. I walk down the hallway. It's this dark, the lights are off, this dark hallway. All you can see is like these two illuminated doors at the end. And I open the doors. And there, this huge conference table is Billy Mays and one other co-star. And then there's like all these cameras and all these lights pointed at you. He goes, hey, I'm Billy Mays. Come on in. And I sit down in the chair, and suddenly I'm on this pitch session. It was like Shark Tank before Shark Tank. Right. Like I'm having to pitch him on why my product's so great. And it wasn't going so well.”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “And there was this. Reality show at one point for inventors and people that made products for some reason I was inspired to submit crip runs. And so I flew to LA one weekend, and I'm in this lobby for the casting with all these other inventors and everybody really weird stuff, like a lot of stuff for cats. They all like pet cats running around them and like, it's like a lot of pet stuff. And there's me in one of my best shirts holding my Kurt Buns really proud. And the producer comes over and they mic me up. And they're like, okay, we want you to walk down that hallway and go through those double doors. And that's all they said.”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “So I applied at one point. And many, many more. Yeah. Hey, I'm Billy Mays. Welcome. We're going to show you this right now.”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “I was able to pay for my trip basically by the sell these crib ones. It was just a great lesson in having to figure out how to translate your story beyond just English speakers in my case. That was a role in an experience. So, man, that project took me all over the place. I got to meet the guy who invented the foam finger. This guy, Gerald Foss, who's here in Texas, to see if he wanted to do manufacturing at one point. And you go into his lobby and he's got like the original foam finger from the 1970s in the glass case, right? Totally random. I got to meet the late Billy Mays.”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “A sale, and I was like, Oh my god, okay, this is gonna work. And then I had another guy who actually happened to be a RISD grad who was there just visiting, who spoke Japanese. He's like, if you want to help translate, I'm happy to do this for you. So bless his heart. He was amazing. He actually would like draw people over to my little folding table with my stacks of crip buns everywhere. And he would tell the story in Japanese. I'll never forget the last day. It was like towards the end of the day everything started kind of closing down and we sold the last pair of cryptons. And there's this picture of him and I sitting there at this empty table being like, oh my God, I can't believe we did it.”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “So, thankfully The young designer next to me was Japanese, and we struck up a friendship. We're going to be together for the next couple days. And I'm like, I have a problem here. I need to translate these things. She's like, well, I can help you translate if you want to make any written material. So I designed this poster overnight, this giant poster that is all in Japanese with pictures of crip buns. I had a picture of a stadium seat with an arrow pointing to it and stadium seat seating in Japanese and then had somebody kneeling in a garden, I had somebody meditating on it. And she was so kind to translate for me. I ran to Kinko's that night, got it printed in downtown Tokyo. And the next day I had this beautiful poster that did all the explanation and had demo chair printed out in Japanese on the demo chair. One by one, somebody actually”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “Imagine I've got my big backpacker's backpack. I've got these two giant cardboard boxes of 20 crit buns each that are like heavy and awkward. I'm trying to navigate the narrow subway system of Tokyo. And I get to my setup at the design fair and I've got this little tiny folding table to my left and right and all around me are other designers as part of design boom. I'm so excited As people come walking up on day one, I start talking to them to try to tell them the story. And nobody speaks English And by the end of day one, I've sold a total of zero crit buns. And I'm thinking to myself, oh my God, this is not good. I'm definitely not going home with 40 cushions. I need to change my strategy here because this is not going to work. The story is not translating. The power of the story that works so well has no impact here whatsoever.”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “And I realized the power of story in that moment that design is more than just a product, it's more than just digital experience. That cushion is 50% foam and 50% story. It was a really valuable lesson. And so I used, like, I learned from that every time that I went to these different events. So here we are in Japan. We're in Tokyo. And it's really exciting. My first time to Japan, I'm thrilled. My senses are just overwhelmed with everything about Tokyo. And I'm at this five-day design event for Design Week. This is back in like 2008, 2007. And so I go out there with 40 cushions, which are these two giant boxes. They take up a lot of volume, right? And I'm like, I take those things on the plane and then I take them through the Tokyo subway system.”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “So that was stage four. Stage five, I never could have predicted. And this was really the magic of learning what it's not only about a product, but it's about a story as well. I would literally watch people buy my product. They'd stand up They turned the next person in line who'd say, What the hell is that? And the person who just bought it would literally tell them verbatim the story about the back of the package. They would sell the product for me. I would just sit back and watch this happen. And I'm like, this is amazing.”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “I won so many uses for the thing just by asking people that question. And the minute that people could. Connect it to something that's important in their life, there's a very high percentage that they bought it. And in 1999, it wasn't. A huge commitment”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “And what's amazing is that people told me all kinds of different uses that I never even imagined for the cushion. There's actually 35 different uses for it. People use it for camping trips. People take it to baseball games. Soccer moms love it for their kids. Pregnant women love it because it takes pressure off your tailbone when you sit down because it's got a dip in the middle. People with sciatica love it because, again, the dip in the middle takes pressure off your tailbone.”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “Does it deliver what it says it's going to do? Does it make any hard surface more comfortable? So I always have a demo chair nearby for people to try it out. And so people sit down on it. And as they're sitting on it, I had a chair next to them. And we lean over to them and I figured out the question to ask. I asked somebody, how do you see this fitting into your life?”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “They kind of get a smile on their face and they flip it over. The interstage three, which is the story phase. So on the back of the package, I tell the story in a couple of lines, how the product was concepted, how it was created, who made it. And so you see them reading the story. And then they smile and they make the connection of why the thing is the way it is. They're stage four. Step number four is tried and true. I've seen this everywhere. They immediately start going like this with a cushion in their hand. They're looking around because they want to try it out.”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “After hundreds of interactions with people face to face, I designed my stand with the cushions and the big signs that crit buns, supporting creativity where others can't. And I actually have seen it so many times at this point. I was able to break the sales process down into five steps. There were five stages to the Cripon's sales process. The first stage is what I call the what the hell is that stage where people are walking by and they do this double take and they look at it and they're like, what is that? But the shape and the color is interesting enough to draw them in. And so then they get to stage two, which is called the touch and feel phase. They grab the product off the stand. They squeeze it. They realize it's soft.”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “They have the entire space. You get a small fee to pay, but nothing like the actual cost. And so they subsidized it to make it possible. And so I got involved in that. And it took me all over the place. I traveled to Sydney, Australia, where I sold the cushion. I traveled to New York and I traveled to Tokyo for Design Week one year. This was fascinating because I got to experience what it was like to sell the cushion in person directly to consumers. It's one thing to sell to a store manager than it is to sell to actual customers. The other thing was RISDI has these events where the alumni can come together and sell their creations with the ceramics or furniture products. And so at this point, I had figured out.”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “Well, no, I mean, this is for any kind of gift fair or any kind of event where there's other designers selling their things. I got connected with this website called designboom.com. One of the biggest design blogs in the world. And they had this thing called the GiftMart. And they basically would invite designers from around the world to come sell their things at these big design week events where it would be really hard to afford access to it as an independent young designer. They would kind of create that opportunity for you.”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “Was just wanting to experience that feeling like what I imagined might feel like if I were to ever accomplish something that was so such a stretch goal for me. I don't know. I just developed a relationship with the buyer at the time. And I think that just evolved into an order eventually. At that point, wow, what was next?”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “And I walked in, and there it was on the shelf of the moment. I took a picture, and I just thought, like, wow, like, this seemed, if you, if you, if I had told myself three years earlier that I would have made a product that would be on the shelf of the MOMA store, I would have said, you're crazy. Like, that's impossible.”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “And they're like, all right, let's just easier to let this go. Maybe. Who knows? I never asked them. But the product that ended up selling out of their store.”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “New York City Huge. I mean, there's legends there. Like, you can get EME stuff, you can get George Nelson stuff, you can get the greats of the greats, right? Along with modern things, of course. And so I set my goal. I'm like, I'm going to figure out how to get crit buns into the moment store. And after two years of just not giving up, I finally got my first order from MOMA. I will never forget that phone call.”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “One of the One of the finding moments was I set a goal for myself. I said, what's the store shelf that would be the pinnacle for me? Like, what would I just be the most proud of? And one of the most heralded shelves for any designer to get on is a shelf at the design store at the Museum of Modern Art.”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “I go home to Atlanta for the holidays. I tell that stories in Atlanta. I mean, everywhere I went, I was always carrying a cushion with me. I talked to anybody about it. It was like everybody I talked to, I was just practicing the sales pitch. And just to get comfortable with it. So that product and that concept just Know, it was never meant to be anything huge. It was just meant to be grad school, in essence, to help teach me the whole stack of product development because I was doing everything out of my apartment from the distribution, the packaging, the fulfillment, the website, the press. Like everything was run from my desktop computer next to my bed in my bedroom. And so I got in a very small scale, I got the full ecosystem of what it means to run something. Obviously at a very small manageable scale, which is perfect And so”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “Four cushions on the shelf of a store. I'm like, hallelujah, somehow it happened. Now I have even more confidence to walk into a store, meet with a buyer, and ask the question, you know, what's the process to get a new product into your store? And that gets down with them and talk about the product, how original it was. So I make trips to Boston and talk to stores there. I'd go down to New York, I talk to Pratt, I talk to School of Visual Arts, I talk to Parsons, I talk to more stores in Providence.”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “In a good sense. Like you're pushing the boulder downhill. Right. Right. Before I was trying to climb uphill against all these obstacles. Now it's just like coasting downhill”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “I gave them to her, and I went back later that night after they closed. It's like, it's dark on Thayer Street. I go to the front of the store and I press my face up against this cold glass. And I can kind of see my breath in the glass. And there's a dim light on in the back of the boutique. They're closed. And I'm scanning the store and I'm squinting, and there it is. I can see kripons on the shelf of the store. I'm like, fuck yes. I did it. Everything after that point was downhill. Like, it was like, I knew how to walk into a store. I knew how to talk to a downhill.”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  41. “It is. That's a crazy street to be on for Halloween. So I go into the store. I give them the. And the woman goes, I'd love the bike some cushions from you. And I'm like, oh my God. And she goes, I'd love to buy four. And I'm like thinking inside, hell yeah. She could have bought one and I would have been Abby. So she starts to go with the thing, well, here's you can ship them to, and here's the address. And I go, Oh, no, no, no, I'll go pack them up at my house and bring them back to you today. She's like, really? I'm like, yeah. So I ran them. I packed up my cushion. I was so excited.”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  42. “I like it. I like it. So I'm telling myself, okay, SWIFT, who cares? I just got to move on. And so I did. I'm like, all right, I'm just going to find another story. Some people are going to love it. Some people aren't. It doesn't matter. I just got to keep going. I can't get hung up and one person saying no. I need to go keep going until I can find somebody that says yes. So I went to the next door, they said no. Went to the third store. They also said no. I went to the fourth store, which was this little tiny gift boutique store on Thayer Street in Providence.”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  43. “You kind of walk. And I'm thinking to myself. That sucked. Like, how the hell am I going to sell these cushions if that's the reaction I'm going to get? And it was in that moment where I remembered this sales equation that I had heard at this entrepreneur weekend at Brown University that I snuck into one time. And the guy talking gave this equation for whenever you introduce a new idea into the world. It was an equation for receiving rejection and how to move past rejection. And the equation was SW squared plus WC equals MO.”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  44. “So I put together a sales sheet. And I put on my best shirt and my best shoes. Like just the best kind of professional look that I could have. And the first story I walked into was the Brown University Bookstore. And I asked for the store manager. And we sit down in this little conference room and I start to go through my spiel. And I put the sales sheet in front of her and a sample, a cushion. And I'm going through the whole thing and I'm like, you know, given all my enthusiasm and about 30 or so seconds in, she looks at me and she goes, no thanks and gets up and leaves the room. And I'm just sitting there, this tiny little fluorescent lit conference room by myself with my cushion on my sales sheet and no sale. Like actually a pretty horrible rejection. So I walk back to my apartment very slow walk, kind of like a Charlie Brown.”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  45. “And two things happen. The first is that. Were now 400 students running around campus with crip buns actually using them in the studios. I could go talk to them, I could take photos of them, I could actually start to build stories and narratives around how they use the product. And the second thing that happens is I'll never forget in my apartment in Providence, in the basement of like this really old kind of early 1900s apartment. I had about 10 boxes of hundreds of Kripons filled up this entire room and I'm sitting there staring at them and thinking oh boy nobody's coming to my basement to buy these things I have to go out into the world and I'll figure out how to sell these how do I sell these things”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  46. “So that summer I started to develop the brand, I followed the patent, which has a design patent on. It followed the trademark and everything. And I went back to the school that summer and I said, you know, that was so fun for the graduating class. What if we did this for the incoming class as a welcome to RISDI gift? And they love the idea and they placed their first order. And so on top of that order, I tacked on my own inventory. So I did this production run of, I think, a thousand cushions.”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  47. “Rizzy and just design school in general does such an exceptional job of helping you come up with a creative process to think of really original creative ideas. They usually hit a wall, though, which is that you stop it at the prototype and then you move on to the next project. And for me, it built up this incredible desire to figure out how do you get to the shelf of a store? Like, how does your idea transition from that one-off prototype all the way to the shelf of a store? And so I thought, well, I want to decode this black box. I have to figure this out. So I made a decision that I was going to use crip buns to help figure out how you get a product from an idea in your head to a sketchbook, the shelf of a store. So the day after graduation, I started my first company to make and sell crit buns. And the beauty of it is that I didn't get paid for the graduation project, but they gave me the metal mold afterward, which is a few thousand dollars. So with the biggest expense out of the way, I was off.”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  48. “Is the impossible? Of how do you make 600 crip runs, 300 red, 300 blue with a silk screen on Such a short amount of time, when everybody's telling you no Everybody just stared at me and was like, this is never going to happen. I was exhausted by the time that happened. However, it was so fun to see my classmates running around with crip buns. Everybody had a pair and it was really fulfilling and it was worth all the effort and all the energy. And I finished my two thesis successfully on time and I got to graduate and everything. And while a lot of my classmates went off to great jobs at NASA doing industrial design and summit some of the big design firms like Ideo and others, I made a decision. I said, you know”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  49. “And he goes, All right, here's the address to send it to. So I literally called the school back might as well have been five o'clock. I'm like, we got it. Here's where to send the purchase order. Two weeks later, the day before graduation, 600 crip bon showed up on campus with a silk screen on top that said RISD class of 2005”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  50. “It's like they make And the things at foot and water made out of foam. And the guy told me, he said, well, I remembered something. He goes, you know, we can't make the mold in time, but if you find somebody else, we can produce the cushion. And the other thing is it had to have a silk screen on the top that said RISD 2005 on it. And so I call back this guy, Christoph, at like 4.50 p.m. on a Friday. He should have been gone. I don't know how I caught him still in the office. And I go, Christoph, it's Joe at RISD. I found somebody to make the mold. He'll have it to you by Monday. Can we wake at work? And he goes, you really want this, don't you? Yes, whatever you can do.”

    2018-03-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #301: Joe Gebbia – Co-Founder of Airbnb · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT