The '11-Star Experience' Mindset
To understand Joe Gebbia's hiring philosophy, you have to understand his obsession with the user experience—pushed to its logical, and often illogical, extreme. He famously developed a thought experiment called the “11-Star Experience.” A 5-star experience is arriving
at your Airbnb and finding it as described. A 6-star experience is arriving to find a bottle of wine. By the time you get to 11 stars, the Beatles are greeting you at the airport, and they’ve already written a song about your trip. While absurd, this exercise wasn't about literal execution; it was about expanding the team’s imagination about what was possible. This mindset dictated who they could hire. Gebbia and his co-founders weren't looking for people to just fill a role; they were looking for employees who could help them conceptualize, and then build, an 11-star experience. This required a rare blend of creativity, empathy, and a willingness to ignore conventional limits.
Hiring for Culture, Not Just Resumes
When it came time to hire their first engineer, the founders had a list of technical requirements, but the real test was something else entirely. Gebbia has often recounted how they spent more time assessing cultural fit than coding prowess. They were building a company that was an extension of their own lives, operating out of their apartment. The stakes felt personal. They needed someone who not only shared their vision but who they would genuinely want to spend all their time with. This led to an intensive, month-long interview process for that first hire, Nick Grandy. He met with them for dinners, went to events with them, and truly integrated into their lives before an offer was made. They were designing their culture with the same intentionality they brought to their product. This established a critical precedent: at Airbnb, who you are is just as important as what you can do. The early team understood that culture wasn’t a poster on the wall; it was the sum of the people in the room.
The Storytellers and Community Builders
Perhaps the most defining aspect of Gebbia’s early hiring strategy was his focus on skills far outside the typical tech startup playbook. In the early 2000s, most tech companies were hiring engineers and marketers. Gebbia, a designer by training, understood that Airbnb wasn't just a technology platform; it was a platform built on trust between strangers. The problem wasn't code; it was connection. So, they hired people who could build it. They brought on photographers to go door-to-door in New York City, taking professional photos of listings to make them more appealing and trustworthy. They hired writers and storytellers to craft the narrative of the company and its community. They sought out people with backgrounds in hospitality and urban planning. This was a radical departure from the Silicon Valley norm. While competitors were optimizing algorithms, Airbnb was optimizing for human experience, a direct result of Gebbia prioritizing design-thinking and empathy in the people he brought on board.
From Foundational Hires to Company DNA
These early decisions didn't just get the company off the ground; they became permanently encoded in its DNA. The obsession with the user journey, born from the '11-Star' mindset, is still a core tenet of Airbnb's product development. The painstaking focus on cultural fit ensured that as the company grew exponentially, it maintained a cohesive sense of mission and identity. The interview process, even for thousands of employees, long retained elements designed to screen for the company’s core values. Most importantly, the initial choice to hire for empathy and storytelling over pure technical skill is why Airbnb succeeded where so many other home-sharing sites failed. They built a brand centered on “Belonging Anywhere,” a concept that could only come from a team that was designed, from day one, to think about people first and technology second. Gebbia’s approach shows that the first few names on the payroll aren't just employees; they are co-authors of the company's entire story.
