The conclusion from putting the two together is "when you get hard nos from smart people, if you're still compelled by your mission, keep going and work on either changing your story or telling it better".
If that's the case, the backstory to Airbnb indicates to me that around this time they had still not adequately figured out how to tell their story in such a way where it seemed like a big deal. At the time I believe, it was about:
- People having strangers stay on air beds in your homes, while you were there, and then serving them breakfast in the morning
- It was ONLY targeted at conferences where people would become so desperate for space that they'd stay anywhere (that's how the company got started - big design conference in SF. Here you can see they were focusing on the DNC and RNC).
This is a really implausible idea for one, a really small market (constrained by hosts but also conferences that fit the criteria) for two, etc.
What the story became when they broke through was about turning the excess living inventory hundreds of millions of people have into a place for people to stay. This has benefits for both sides it turns out and is widely applicable and massively scalable.
Those are really, really different stories. Like, startling different. But if you can't not only tell the second one but also show some evidence that it could be so, your stuck with the shitty first story. When they started seeing the behavior during YC that pointed them to the second story, they focused the company on it which caused it to grow, investors better understood the potential, and slowly over time it became trivially easy for them to raise money.
