Did anyone else in your batch succeed?

Yep, obviously not to the same degree :)

wow! what do you think made them standout so much?

I can only speak for myself, and it was a feeling of “oh this is a great idea”

Thats pretty fascinating. I think PG made it pretty clear that none of the VCs thought airbnb's idea had any potential at first, I guess somehow they managed to turn it around, at least within the YC cohort

Yeah I remember Chris Sacca at one of our Tuesday dinners saying something like “sorry guys, don’t do this, someone is going to get murdered”

Which - to be fair - might have scuppered the company if it had happened early on by chance.

Ps Chris was my favorite speaker - he’s the only one who made sure to tell everyone to chill out, take care of your health, sleep, etc.

Sacca's response is interesting because it highlights something very cool about the gig economy: the commoditization of trust.

People are actually far more benevolent than people think. The number of actual murderers and other miscreants is such a small number as to be negligible for the purposes of renting out your home, your car, getting food delivered to you, etc.

You could also argue that this was solved "along the way" and also not really clear back then. I am an AirBnB host myself and were also wondering about this recently and there are several factors today which contribute positively: Provided as a (technical) solution by AirBnB (Recommendations, IDs, etc.) but also how the internet/web evolved as a hole - A place that somehow manages that strangers meaningfully/safely interact with each other. This was never clear and also an uncertainty for Wikipedia (earlier) and now for AirBnB in a different and new way: Inviting strangers to your house.

Part of this is because these companies associate individuals with their real world identities or credit card numbers. Uber does criminal and driving background checks.

My first interpretation was that the hotel chains would have them murdered mafia style!

Well thats one way of interpreting his comment Lol

And to be fair, Chris was right[0].

In total the parent comment exemplifies how Chris values and honors life over profit. That’s a tough internal struggle in this industry and is probably why he dipped out a few years ago.

[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/airbnb-ban...