The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World by Brad Stone

“Chesky was moving slowly, but at the same time, he was frustrated that his imagined success wasn’t arriving quickly enough. “Every day I was working on it and thinking, Why isn’t it happening faster?” he told me.4 “When you’re starting a company it never goes at the pace you want or the pace you expect. You imagine everything to be linear, ‘I’m going to do this, then this is going to happen and this is going to happen.’ You’re imagining steps and they’re progressive. You start, you build it, and you think everyone’s going to care. But no one cares, not even your friends.”

Travis’s Law

Our product is so superior to the status quo that if we give people the opportunity to see it or try it, in any place in the world where government has to be at least somewhat responsive to the people, they will demand it and defend its right to exist.

“When there’s a cool new business on the internet, that’s great,” he said. “But when the internet moves into your neighborhood, into your apartment building, and you don’t know anything about it, suddenly people assume the worst and they have a lot of fears.

“So there’s a couple of things you need to do. The first thing you need to do is grow really, really fast. You either want to be below the radar or big enough that you are an institution. The worst is being somewhere in between. All your opposition knows about you but you are not a big enough community that people will listen to you yet.

“You have to get to what I guess I’d call escape velocity. If a rocket takes off, there’s a bumpy ride before you get to orbit, and then there’s a little bit more stillness.