Skift Take
Before Airbnb, the vacation rental industry looked like the offspring of Craigslist and Geocities. Part of its genius is that it realized users feel much better about renting a stranger's place when everything looks very nice.
Airbnb Inc. Chief Executive Officer Brian Chesky said that for technology companies, design is as important as engineering, pointing to the example of former Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs.
“When we went to the valley, design was viewed as a huge liability,” he said at the Bloomberg Businessweek Design 2013 conference in San Francisco. “It was not good that we were designers. What they were really saying is the heart of a company is its product, and the heart of a product is technology. And technology is created by engineers.”
