Airbnb CEO Has Tips for Handling Rejection

Like pitches, most startups go ignored.

Here’s a very interesting post shared yesterday on Medium by Brian Chesky, now quite well-known as co-founder and CEO of Airbnb.

Chesky simply cut and pasted the rejection emails he received from various VC firms in the summer/fall of 2008, before his company had completely overturned the existing travel market.

Some snippets:

  • “…while this sounds interesting it is not something we would do here…not our focus…”
  • “The potential market opportunity did not seem large enough…”
  • “…it’s not in one of our prime 5 target markets…”
  • “…for some reason, we’ve not been able to get excited about travel related businesses.”
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