Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Brian Chesky
[00:00:00] S1: The biggest gift anyone's given me is believe in me. And I think the biggest gift you can give somebody, or one of the biggest gifts is believe in you. A couple of examples. When I was 16 years old, I transferred to a public high school. I was really into art, I was a pretty good artist. I didn't know how good I was. And I had a teacher named Miss Williams. She believed in me, and I remember telling her telling my parents, he's going to be a famous artist. I never became a famous artist, but it gave me confidence that I was actually good at something, because I wasn't that good at hockey. I wish I was, and I wish I could make my dad proud of ice hockey. I just didn't get very far. And suddenly that belief set me on a path. In that moment I said, I'm going to go to art school. And that moment I realized, I can decide to be happy the rest of my life. I came to Silicon Valley. I met Michael Seibel and the guys at Justin.tv, and they believed in me. They were early YC people. Paul Graham made an exception to let me in early at Y Combinator. He believed in me. I wasn't an engineer, and he almost never funded non-engineers. He thought the idea was not a good idea, actually. He said, people are actually doing this? I go, yes. He goes, what's wrong with them? But he believed in me. My investors – I can go down the list of investors, they believed in me. Joe and Nate – I had no business being a CEO. Joe somehow believed in me. I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the generosity of people believing in me and in helping me. But I think the greatest gift I can give back is believing in others and help them, and not pull the ladder up behind me, but to really show them. I had the great privilege to eventually join the Giving Pledge. You have to write a letter. I remember my letter was, if you could ask my high school teachers who would join the Giving Pledge, they wouldn't have guessed me. The basic idea in my life philosophy is we all have unknown potential. I think we have these stories in our own head about what we're capable of. To go back to John Wooden, somebody once asked him – what's the secret to success? And he said, I only ask my players to do their very best. The person goes, oh wow, that seems weird. That sounds like what a parent says to the kid who loses all the time. He goes, here's the catch.
· Brian Chesky, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
I saw potential in people they didn't see in themselves. And that's my management philosophy. When I tell somebody it's not good enough, I'm not saying you're not good enough. I'm saying I see potential in you that you don't see in yourself. That is the most motivating thing you can do. To say, I believe in you and I believe you can do even more. And people will climb a mountain for that type of thing. And maybe the way to finally end this whole conversation, is the most important person ever that you can believe in is yourself. And I think a lot of us that are entrepreneurs, we're driven by insecurity. We're driven by some hole. Not all of us, but a lot of us. Something in our childhood, something – a lot of us were not the coolest kids or whatever. And there's something in us we wanted to prove. And then you get really successful and you still have imposter syndrome. And a lot of the path to happiness and salvation is just the path of like learning to believe in yourself. For me, I only believed in myself long after other people believed in me. And now my gift is to try to give it to others. [00:00:00] S0: Beautiful place to close. Thanks man. [00:00:00] S1: Thank you very much.