What people demand is what the policies serve.

When we go city by city, country by country, the majority of our hosts, our owners, are simply renting out their spare bedroom.

There's this misconception globally that the platform is about property groups and big property owners renting out entire buildings full-time.

How do you convince somebody to host a stranger for the weekend? That's not a trivial thing. It's not something I think you can throw technology at, marketing at, or sales at. We threw design at it because that's all we knew, and in doing so, I feel like we brought a human touch to it, which is so needed.

Airbnb is about travel.

In the future, we will see living experiences curated around a shared lifestyle.

The question that I can't shake - it's this question that keeps coming up for me - is What does the shared home of the future look like? People are sharing homes at a rate that no one ever predicted, but residences and homes weren't designed for it. They were designed around ideas of privacy and separation.

In general, we believe in regulation - just as long as it is fair and balanced.

We've invented a new marketplace. There was no easy way to rent a person's bedroom over the Internet or book a vacation rental over the Internet. There was no guidebook for us to turn to as we defined this new marketplace.

We encourage employees to ship new features on day one, which immediately encourages them to come up with something creative and different.

Of course Airbnb made mistakes the first year! Some came from our own preconceptions. When we started, we designed our interface for ourselves, Internet-savvy twentysomethings. We never considered the role of good eyesight in our interface - font size, vernacular; it all matters.

The fear of mistakes is the fast track to irrelevance.

Cities are a melting pot for different ideas, and diversity brings a high-energy rhythm that I don't think we'd know was gone until it was too late.

When it comes to technology and the home, I really don't want to see any of it.

Every apartment I've ever lived in has had a space to make, create, and get stuff done within eyesight of my bed.

For me, one of my personal inspirations was designers in the mid-20th century named Charles and Ray Eames.

I have the privilege of working with our in-house design studio, called Samara, and our humanitarian team, called Human. Samara is thinking about the future of Airbnb, and Human is working on ways to leverage our platform outside the cause of day-to-day business.

I think Pixar's done an amazing job integrating art and science. They really get this idea that art and engineering work side by side.

To me, 'design thinking' is another way of saying empathize with the customer. It's consideration for the person you're designing for.

Staying at Airbnb listings gives me the opportunity to truly understand and experience the local culture of the countries I visit.

We expect Seoul to be one of our most important markets not only in Asia but around the world.

Airbnb was born out of necessarity. Our rent went up. It was born out of a problem.

Design can overcome our most deeply rooted stranger-danger bias.

We didn't invent anything new. Hospitality has been around forever.