Do a deep reflection on what exactly went wrong and write it down. Please don't do that lazy analysis where you just blame government, the economy, the markets, fundraising etc. It might have been a contributing factor and you should reflect that but please do that uncomfortably deep and introspective work of figuring out where *YOU* the founder went wrong.

Spend your time on something meaningful. Not on parties, and not on taking it easy. That’s not good enough. […] When you’re young, you think: Let’s party, do drugs, drink, waste it all, right? But as you get older, you look at what you’ve accomplished. And when you get old, you’ve run out of time. You have to ask yourself: Why am I here? Can I contribute anything to humanity, to society, my work?

so I sometimes think, why should I talk young women into being a scientist if they then end up being sort of disliked or not accepted by their contemporaries and so it’s a tricky business actually.

My advice to everyone is: “Become a journalist.” ... if you have a chance to be a newspaper reporter for three or four years — before you do whatever you want to do — do it, because you will know so much.

We need to have mentors. I think I've always been pretty shameless about seeking out people much smarter and much more experienced than me from the very beginning. Michael Seibel and other people. And the more successful I got, the more leaders I started seeking out, whether it was investors, or Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook, or I got the opportunity to spend time with Warren Buffett and he became a close mentor of mine.

When we started Airbnb, no one wanted to invest. I felt like a failure so many days. It was small, it wasn't growing... A sane person probably would have quit. But we kept going through obscurity, through rejection. We couldn't raise money — but over time, it started growing.