[nonameiguess]

I would argue that, when you get to the scale of an Airbnb, or Amazon, which is where I think the "customer-obsessive" terminology comes from, you need to move beyond focusing solely on your customers. Your business is having a social impact. The house next door to me right now has had contractors going in and out of it for the past three weeks to remove and replace the entire interior because of damage done by a short-term renter. Construction has absolutely boomed around me but nearly all of the new units are becoming short-term rentals. The neighborhood is either empty most of the time, or full of drunken idiots making a bunch of noise, getting the police called on them at 3 AM, and leaving the streets and sidewalks full of trash and broken bottles.

Airbnb may very well be making its customers happy, but when so many of those customers are 21 year-olds looking for party houses they can trash and fundamentally changing the character and safety of entire neighborhoods, is that really the most important thing? Even as the founder or executive or both of a business, you're still part of a human community and you have a duty to that community not to worsen the lives of countless bystanders in order to delight the few who happen to pay you. Make products that are valuable in general, to everybody, not products that are valuable only to your customers at everyone else's expense.