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Lecture 10 - Culture (Brian Chesky, Alfred Lin)

Lecture Transcript: http://tech.genius.com/Alfred-lin-lecture-10-company-culture-and-building-a-team-part-i-annotated Brian Chesky, Founder of Airbnb, and Alfred Lin, Former COO of Zappos and Partner at Sequoia Capital discuss how to build a great company culture. See the slides and readings at startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec10/ Discuss this lecture: https://startupclass.co/courses/how-to-start-a-startup/lectures/64039 This video is under Creative Commons license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/

Alfred LinhostBrian Cheskyguest
Oct 23, 201450mWatch on YouTube ↗

At a glance

WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT

How Airbnb and Zappos built culture to scale companies responsibly

  1. Alfred Lin defines company culture as the daily core values and actions of a team in pursuit of a mission, and argues it is a key input to long-term results and organizational speed.
  2. Lin outlines a practical method for creating credible, mission-tied values, emphasizing depth beyond generic virtues and the importance of making culture a daily habit.
  3. Brian Chesky describes Airbnb’s culture as intentionally designed early (before major hiring), treating early hires as “DNA” that will replicate across the organization.
  4. Airbnb operationalizes culture through rigorous hiring (including separate core-values interviewers), repeated storytelling, and using values to guide high-stakes strategic decisions.
  5. The lecture connects culture to brand: internal beliefs inevitably surface externally, and strong cultures produce employees who become authentic brand evangelists rather than commodity “utility” positioning.

IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING

5 ideas

Define culture operationally, not abstractly.

Lin’s framing—daily core values and real actions in pursuit of the mission—turns culture into something you can observe, reinforce, and use for decisions rather than a vague vibe.

Strong culture is a scaling mechanism for both team and business.

Culture becomes the first-principles “default” for decisions, creates trust and stability, clarifies what not to do, and helps retain the right people as the company grows.

Avoid generic values; make them specific, credible, and mission-linked.

“Integrity” and “honesty” are baseline expectations, not differentiators; the useful values are the few that uniquely describe how your company wins and why it exists.

Investing in culture slows you down now to speed you up later.

Chesky argues culture doesn’t pay off short-term and forces slower, more deliberate hiring and choices—yet it builds endurance and reduces future coordination and people-costs.

Treat early hires as compounding ‘DNA.’

Airbnb spent months hiring its first engineer because that person would implicitly define what “good” looks like for future hundreds or thousands of similar hires.

WORDS WORTH SAVING

5 quotes

Every day, [core values] and [real action] of each member of the team in pursuit of the mission.

— Alfred Lin

If the parents are dysfunctional... the child's gonna be, frankly, pretty fucked up.

— Brian Chesky

We want diversity of backgrounds... You don't want diversity of values.

— Brian Chesky

If you wanted to... build a company and sell it as quickly as possible... fuck up the culture.

— Brian Chesky

We were missionaries and they were mercenaries.

— Brian Chesky

Defining company culture (values + actions + mission)Why culture matters (alignment, trust, decision principles, retention)Creating core values (distillation, credibility, mission linkage)High-performing teams and trust (Lencioni’s dysfunctions)Hiring for culture fit and bar-raising talentAirbnb core values and origin stories (mission, scrappiness)Culture-to-brand connection and storytelling

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