AirBnB, Peter Thiel and Culture

Taylor Pearson writing about how company culture and how It Can Be Worth $150 Million:

After AirBnB closed out their Series C raising $200 million in a round led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, the AirBnB team invited Thiel to the office.

They took him into a conference room and had pulled up various metrics on the screen to show him how the company was doing.

Midway through the conversation, AirBnB CEO Brian Chesky asked Thiel what was the single most important piece of advice he had for us?

You’d think maybe it would be something about gross margins or network effects that you’d hear about in an MBA program. It wasn’t.

He replied, “Don’t fuck up the culture.”

This wasn’t what you might expect from someone who just wrote a $150M check. When asked to elaborate on this. He said one of the main reasons he invested in AirBnB was their culture.