As the company became more prominent, so did Chesky’s sources. Soon came meetings with Facebook’s (FB) Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s (AMZN) Jeff Bezos, and eBay (EBAY) CEO John Donahoe. He went to Bob Iger and Marc Benioff to ask how they push their executive teams to do more. From Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg he picked up tips about efficiency in scaling internationally.

Jeff Bezos has taught us that you can be customer-obsessed, not competitor-obsessed, and by the way, one way to win is just to be longer term the other person if you're trying to win in a year - I'm trying to win a ten year so we'll probably be right but who really wins. So I think you know I admire many people but maybe I just call out that.