Airbnb shipped first. Does that mean "build fast" actually works?

[music and bell] — In the case of Airbnb, as far as I know the story, Airbnb started as an idea to be an alternative to like accommodation, especially when there is like conference or something big as an event in a particular location. And so, the founders of Airbnb actually went ahead and pitched their idea to investors. Hey, listen, uh we will introduce a platform that will enable people to lend their sofas uh to strangers and let them sleep in their house. As you can imagine, they were laughed out of the room like in less than 30 seconds and uh yeah, it's strange. But what they did, they actually created an experiment where they said, "You know what? We're offering our sofas. " And the data showed that people actually wanted to do it. So, to your question, particularly about Airbnb, I think that they perfectly followed uh the advice to research the market and to uh do something small that can test uh the idea. Uh and they did it in the cheapest possible way, which is different than building an MVP uh in the sense of meaning minimal viable product. From that aspect, I think uh the Airbnb guys were like uh just testing their most uh the highest risk hypothesis. And when they got back with this data that showed that it works, then nobody cared that this sounded strange because there was proof that it worked. If you think about uh how they started, like Airbnb, the guys actually observed very specific pattern. When there are so many people in town, it's impossible to find a hotel that is cheap because as you know when the there is an event everything goes high in terms of price and you should like potentially stay 100 miles away to be at that event. So they observed a very specific failure of existing solutions. In the context of Dropbox it was the same. And uh what they saw is that it's very hard for people to actually keep a set of files between different machines, right? I mean I have my laptop, I have my computer, uh probably at some point my phone, but in order to share them the only solution was either to be part of one in the same uh private network or virtual private network or email them or a bunch of other workarounds. And based on that observation, they didn't create a software. They created a video demonstrating uh how they imagined Dropbox to work. It was a prototype or a mock-up that just showed the process and they were very successful with that because at the second they shared it on YouTube it became as I know viral and this is how they tested their idea.