Brian Chesky’s response to the Samwer Brothers cloning Airbnb: “Missionaries will outlast mercenaries”

In mid-2011, the Samwer Brothers cloned Airbnb’s website.

At the time, they were notorious for cloning companies that were working in the US and replicating it across Europe and non-English-speaking countries.

Before cloning Airbnb, they sold their Groupon clone, MyCityDeal, to Groupon itself for roughly €100 million.

Brian describes the situation Airbnb was facing:

“We had 40 employees and had raised $7M. They cloned us and raised $90M, and in 30 days they hired 400 people and wanted to sell the company. And if they couldn’t they were going to destroy us around the world. And the problem with Airbnb is if we’re not everywhere around the world, a travel site not being in Europe is like your phone not having email. It doesn’t actually work.”

At the time, a lot of people were telling Brian and the Airbnb cofounders to buy the clone because they couldn’t risk losing international. But Airbnb didn’t buy them.

Brian explains his reasoning:

“The reason we ended up not buying them is I just didn’t like the culture. I didn’t want to bring in these 400 people. I felt like we were missionaries and they were mercenaries. I didn’t think they were doing it for the beliefs. I thought they were doing it to make a lot of money very quickly. And I believed in a war missionaries would outlast and out-endure mercenaries. I also felt like the best revenge against an internet clone was just to make them run the company long term. It’s like, you had the baby, now you gotta raise it.”

In the end, that proved to be the right decision. Today, Airbnb is valued at more than $100B, and most people have never heard of Wimdu, the Samwer brothers’ clone.

Full video: Y Combinator “Lecture 10 - Culture (Brian Chesky, Alfred Lin)” (Oct 2014)