Airbnb's 3 cofounders underwent a personality test to determine their compatibility

Brian Chesky, Nathan Blecharczyk, and Joe Gebbia underwent a personality test to determine their compatibility.

Transcript

00:00I got really lucky at Airbnb with Brian Chesky, our CEO, and Nate Bocharczyk, who runs Strategy

00:07for Us.

00:08We did a personality assessment at one point in the history of Airbnb, and they plotted

00:13our results on these concentric circles.

00:15And we had a dot here, a dot here, and a dot here.

00:18And the facilitator was like, oh my god, I've never seen this before.

00:21You guys are an equilateral triangle.

00:24I think that's one of the many reasons why the company is what it is today, is that

00:30we often joke that we had three legs of a stool, and if you took one of the legs away,

00:36one would have stayed up.

00:38So I think having complimentary co-founders is absolutely critical.

00:43Find the person that compliments you.

00:44What are you not so great at?

00:45What are your weaknesses?

00:47Go find the person who has those strengths.

00:49How does Mike compliment you at Samara?

00:52Mike is amazing.

00:53Mike McNamara.

00:54He's the CEO of Flex, which is one of the largest contract manufacturers on the planet.

00:57It's a $25 billion company, 200,000 employees in 13 plus countries.

01:02And he brings a level of expertise around building things, supply chains, manufacturing,

01:09sales process.

01:11And between him and I, he handles that domain, and I get to handle the things that I'm good

01:15at, which is brand building, user experience, design, architecture.

01:19And I think what you've seen so far through Samara is a direct result of that duality

01:24between the two of us working really well together.