Joe Gebbia

Sympathy relies on a common experience. If you're clumsy, you might have sympathy for others who tend to bump into things. Empathy, on the other hand, is the ability to understand another person's feelings even if you've never experienced them yourself.

What we're doing with Airbnb feels like the nexus of everything that is right. We're helping people be more resourceful with the space they already have, and we're connecting people around the world.

Dog-fooding is using your own products so that you understand from inside out what it is you're providing the customers. It's another way to gain insights and to gain intelligence. You use it yourself; you eat your own dog food. Every time we do that, we discover something that we can improve.

Design is an expression of one's most deeply rooted internal values.

In art school, you learn that design is much more than the look and feel of something - it's the whole experience.

We started Airbnb because, like many across the U.S. and in New York, we were struggling to pay our rent and decided to open up our living room to fellow artists coming to town for a design conference. Sharing our apartment allowed us to stay in our home and start our company.

Digital communication is completely different from in-person, face-to-face conversations. One will give you surface insights, and the other really gives you depth.

We have seen things in the twentieth century like the ATM machine, the VCR, and even the car. The electric car was invented in 1920, and here we, 100 years later, it is only now becoming an actual thing. So it doesn't surprise me that new ideas are met with a lot of questions.