Lisa Dubost

So now it's time for the first lightning talk of tonight and I'm super excited to have her join us tonight. Her story will give you a different picture of what it means to be an employee in a high growth startup. The story will also tell you a little about what it means to work with culture and intuition in a data driven startup world. Lisa de Bost has been employee number three at Airbnb and will share her story now. Please welcome Lisa on stage. I guess that's me a long time ago. Hi guys, thank you so much for being here. I guess I'll start with a little bit of background on where I'm from and how I landed here in Copenhagen today. I was born and raised in Paris with a Danish mother and I actually started my career in one of the most corporate environments, Samsung. Samsung in Paris was not a big company. Not as fun as Airbnb for sure. After two and a half years of a lot of process, a lot of hierarchy and a lot of slow decision making, I realized that this whole corporate bullshit was not for me. And I decided that I was going to spend some time either in my three interests at the time when I was 25, which was either food, design or travel. Moved to Copenhagen, design studio there and then met one of the founders of Airbnb and I'll tell you a little bit about that story later. Last but not least, the reason why I came back to Copenhagen is because after working for seven years in travel with Airbnb, I realized that my husband's dream was to open a restaurant. And since food was one of the three items on my bucket list, we moved here and he's just opened a California inspired restaurant here in Novo. So, completely different shift in my career and who knows where the next years will take me. Probably in some social entrepreneurship. But most importantly, people often ask like, what do you really love? And I'm going to tell you what I hate. There's not a lot of things that I hate. There's three things I hate in this life and this world. It's probably cheese, even though I'm French, I know it's weird. Two is hypocrisy. I should ask, I should ask Trump actually to that list. And third is public speaking. So, thank you guys for making me go forward. First, really appreciate it. In fact, when the organizers asked me to contribute here to be part of this town hall, my first reaction was, uh-uh. I'm not doing this. However, I did hear the word contribute to the startup community. And that was it. Aren't we all here to somehow contribute? Contribute to a relationship. Contribute to a community. Contribute to a mission. Even to our future. Or the future of our kids. I remember having a conversation with Brian Chesky not so long ago about personal aspirations. And I reminded him how not everyone, and not everyone on this earth is born with a desire to lead, to create, to build, or to be a founder. And their name next to Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or Steve Jobs. Some people simply and genuinely want to support and contribute to a mission they have. Some people simply and genuinely want to support and contribute to a mission they believe in. Some, um, so I'd just like to invite you all today as young companies, entrepreneurs, founders, to think about this as you're hiring people. As you're building your teams. And also potentially about when you're thinking of your future and what's next for you. Success and most importantly happiness can come from a place of just one thing. And that is of just wanting to contribute. So this was my early days contribution to Airbnb. First month in 2010 we're all crashing in the founder's apartments in Soma. And at the time I was really focusing on getting the company global. And focusing on Paris. Since that's where I was born. But I'm not going to tell you about the whole story of Airbnb. We'd be there forever. And plus I'm sure you guys know a lot about it already. Instead I'd like to focus on some topics. That have been very relevant. And where I've learned a lot over the past seven years. And by the way this is the team exactly seven years ago on our way to our first Christmas dinner. And I think you can tell by the face of the founders their true personalities. Because this is exactly who they really are. Especially Brian and Joe here. So today I'm going to focus in the little time that we have together on leadership presence. On intuition. And following your intuition. And we'll talk of course about culture. Because that's something that often comes with the story of Airbnb. So one of the many projects that I took on in my seven years at Airbnb was to build a leadership training. As you know when you grow really fast as a company. Individual contributors become managers overnight. You basically are gifted with a team of six or seven people you've never managed before. And yet because you were the first hire doing data. You become the head of analytics. And you've never managed before. But this is how it goes when you're growing really fast. In fact even our founders did not have a lot of management experience in the past. So we build. I paired up with a really amazing leadership coach from the Bay Area. And we created what we call a leadership learning lab. Which was a two day program where everybody who was managing people were invited. Both the junior managers and the senior managers and the founders. We had a lot of modules around. The three levels of listening. Around feedback as well as feed forward. Around designing alliances. One that I really liked was actually called the three center check in. And this is something that I would like to share with you today. One of the key skills of leadership today is developing self awareness. We know what's going on for us. And then we know what's going on for everyone else. It is so important to learn to be. To be present. So we can be present for others. For our teams. For our managers. For our board. For our customers. So I'm going to share a way with you to develop this self awareness. Because leadership presence is not magic. It's something that it's like a muscle that you can build. And I don't know if you've ever met a leader that has so much going on. Is so incredibly busy. Yet they're in the room. And everybody's attention is focusing on them. And when you have a one on one with them. They're actually truly listening to you. And this is a muscle that we as leaders should all build. So since we're all a lot north of our nose. In our heads. There's so much going on. It's like our body at the end of the day is a vehicle for millions of thoughts. And a lot of things happening in our minds. I think it would be really interesting to actually try to like detach a little bit from the head center. Because our brain is actually not the only place we receive information. We have three centers of intelligence. One of them being the head. Where the thinking is happening. The heart. And the body. And actually for the body we think about that spot which is four fingers underneath the belly button. Which is also in martial arts. They're called the dan tian. And this is often where the gut feelings come from. When you have a gut feeling. When you have some kind of instinct. So I know this is going to be a little bit strange. But I've done this with 2,000 people. So I'm sure I can do it with you. And I'm just going to ask you to participate fully. And I promise that there will be something. You'll get something out of it. So. First I'm going to ask you to drop everything that you might have in your hands. Phone. Drinks. Computers. Notebooks. Put everything on the floor. And I'm going to sit with you. And we're all going to sit comfortably with a pretty tall spine. Or like not crouching too much. And both feet on the floor. And then. Once we found that comfortable seating and position. We are going to just allow our body to feel like we're going to feel the density. We're going to feel like the weight of our body on the chair. And the weight of our feet on the floor. And then we're going to close our eyes. We'll start by taking. A deep breath. Letting the chest and the belly feel on an inhale. And let it all go on the exhale. On natural rhythm. No effort. No trying. Now I invite you to turn your attention to your head center. Bring your attention to notice what you're aware of in the content of your mind. Perhaps there are thoughts. Memories. Plans. Concerns. Hopes. No need to judge. No need to alter any aspect of what you're seeing. Just allow it to be there. Now turn your attention to your heart center. Notice what you feel here. You might ask yourself. What is my mood right now? What is my emotional tone? What feelings are present? Excitement. Boredom. Frustration. Disappointment. Delight. Contentment. Now turn your attention to your body. Take a moment to allow your attention to scan your whole body on the inside. Notice how your shoulders are. Allow them to descend. Relaxing your arms. Your toes so. Fill your buttocks on the chair. Let your attention travel down. Your legs. Your thighs. Your calves. Your ankles. To feeling the soles of your feet on the floor. Now bring your attention back to the legs. To that. And up to that spot. Just below the navel. It will help to put your hand there if you wish. Just resting gently on your belly. What are you aware of? Constricted. Contracted. Maybe a sense of aliveness. Dullness. Heat. Coolness. Pulsing. Let everything be there. Let the body express itself to you. And when you're ready. Just open your eyes slowly and come back into. Mind the silent我要. What is happening. So what is different. Nathan thee ваши Müd, Compared to before you started the exercise. Do you notice anything for yourself. Do you notice anything about the energy in the room. easier or harder to access than another. Most of us find it very easy to access our head and then struggle to access the other centers. I'd like for you to think about how you might use this. You might be using it just to ground yourself during the day, just to be more present. A lot of Airbnb leaders actually have an abbreviated version of this where you just check, okay, what's going on here, what's going on here, what's going on in my body, before stepping into a board meeting, an important conversation, an interview, or even a pitch to Brian. We need to train ourselves to be aware of the centers so we can fully be aware of the whole amount of information that is around. The information is limited if we're only staying in our head. And that way we have the capacity to respond in the most adept way. What this exercise helped me realize is that a lot of important decisions actually are not made just with our head center, but made with either our heart or our mind. We're gifted with instinct, intuition, gut feelings, whatever you call it, and yet we forget. To tap into it, just because we're trying to think rationally. We're trying to remember this advice that was given to us or something that we've learned from the past. And we forget. I always remember I met this amazing coach in San Francisco, this amazing woman who's on the executive director of a board of Kiva and who was actually nominated by Obama to be the global citizenship ambassador together with Brian. And when I asked her, what is one thing in your career that you would do differently? She said, I wish I had started listening to my intuition earlier in my career. Because we don't, we're never reminded to listen to our gut. When I met Joe Gebbia randomly at a trade show in Chicago on a design train show, I had no idea who he was. Airbnb was not on the picture yet. And yet I showed up, went straight over to him and I say, hey, my name is Lisa. I work from eight to five with this company, but I have a lot of energy and I speak five languages. So if you ever need help developing European businesses or something, just let me know. And he looked at me like, okay, sure. To this day, I do not know why I did this. There is no rational involved. It just felt right. This guy seemed like he was cool and he has something very interesting going on. He was very charismatic. So this is why I, this is how it all started. So when Joe and Brian started Airbnb, same thing. The idea does not really make sense. It's rationally. Most investors. In the early days were like, are you crazy? Like, did you think this through? This is never going to happen. And yet they had the gut feeling that had this intuition that this is how people would travel in the future. So they kept going. So my point here is that intuition not only can lead to making important and great decisions, it can also fuel growth because we, as a disruptive company, if you're doing something innovative, there's no playbook. Right? So you use a lot of your intuition to like try things, do things and make the company grow. So I'm going to move over to culture because we don't have a lot of time and culture is something that was also like, it's totally related in the sense that in order for us to define our mission and our core value, we had to all get out of our heads a little bit and also use our heart and center. And you'll see some of our values are really related to the heart and the body. So what is company culture really quickly? This is a definition that I really like from Alfred Lin, who was, you know, CEO of Zappos for three years, also early investor at Airbnb through Sequoia and advisor every day, a and B of each member of the team in pursuit of our company. And then you can fill in the blanks. And this definition feels very complete to me. Everybody, every day, core values and actions of each member of the team in pursuit. Of our company mission. But way before our fill in, Gandhi came up with this. Your beliefs become your thoughts. Your thoughts become your words. Your words become your actions. Your actions become your habits. Your habits become your values and your values become your destiny. I think that's a really good place to start. He already had his finger on, on culture back in the day. Um, how we did we build culture at Airbnb? I will recommend you since I'm not going to read you the whole post and we're short on time. But I really recommend you to go and check out Brian's medium post called don't fuck up the culture. And it has some very interesting insights on how we were literally and everything that we did, uh, focusing on, on culture. But this is how it really happened. Actually in the very early days of Airbnb, that's looks very silly and stupid when I look back at it now, but we had no money. You had no budget. We're just a bunch of like kids trying to figure something out, working till like 11 or 12 and then we'll go on the rooftop. And like do some silly like rock, paper, scissors games. We had no budget. So we found ways to do competitions and then there would be a $50 Airbnb voucher at the end of the day if you want the competition. So there are ways to actually create some fun if you have a little bit of imagination. Air guitar. I didn't even know it was a thing, but apparently there's even an air guitar for dummies. We had air guitars competitions on our roof as well. Um, silly little things that led to just a bunch of individual roles really caring about each other. And just wanting to be host to each other. And this is how we built our mission and our core values and our core values. Um, so this is like another interesting quote from Brian about having clear mission first the mission and then the core values. These are core values and we're really short on time, but I do want to share with you a few things that are really helped us in the process of hiring. When you define your mission, then come your core values. When you have your core values, you want to implement them. In. Everything that you do. It's in the performance reviews. It's in the leadership training. Most importantly, if you want to scale the culture, which is the question that everybody asks, how do you scale culture? You hire people who are in line with your vision and line with your mission and your values. So for all of those, um, uh, core values, we had specific questions and we have a group of people at Airbnb who are actually interviewing for core values and they give you a good feel of, and they give, ask you questions like. Be a host would be, what is the last time you did something meaningful for someone in the work environment? You did something that you did not have to do or, um, be a serial entrepreneur. What did you start? Or if time was not an issue, what would you start now or simplify? What is something complicated that really deserves to be simpler and why? But my favorite question of all is the question that Joe gave you. He asked me when we first met and that I've been using in most of my core values interview to like hundreds and hundreds of candidates at Airbnb on a scale of one to a hundred. How lucky are you and why? Oops. Um, so as a company grows, it's easy to this side of the core values and for sure, Airbnb success is definitely, uh, and it's definitely the result of a lot of. Time and energy spent on constantly walking and living the core values. So now with over 3000 employees, of course, there's more process, there's more structure within the company, but now if you compare a 3000 people company like Airbnb and a random bank or insurance company, the difference will be the culture. So I think I'm completely out of time. There's so many things I could talk about, but thanks for listening guys. And thanks for being present. Thanks everyone. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.