How Brian Chesky Is Redesigning Airbnb for the AI Era

No one is born a good CEO. I think people are basically born good founders, or said differently, it's innate. You don't have to learn how to be a good founder. The job of CEO is completely counterintuitive, and almost all of your intuition about what to do is wrong. We founders were taught to learn by doing, and that's great for a founder. It's not good as a CEO. You do not want to learn on the job how to be a CEO.

And so I learned the hard way, and it was really about not apologizing about how you want to run a company, being in the details. Before we hit go here, we were talking about industrial design, which you studied at RISD. And I have this weird affinity for the history of this topic just because Raymond Loewy, one of the famous industrial designers, helped me a lot in my career indirectly. I'd love to hear you just riff on the influence that guys like him had in your early studies and why you studied that in the first place. Such an interesting background.

I went to, I was an artist growing up, but I didn't know what to do with my life. And I went to the Rhode Island School of Design, and at RISD, when you're a freshman, you have to pick a major. I'm 17 years old and I'm like, "Okay, in three months I have to decide what I'm going to do the rest of my life." And there were 18 majors. And I remember the department head for industrial design came. I never even heard of the term industrial design. I don't know what it was. And they said, "Industrial design, design of everything from a toothbrush to a spaceship and everything in between." I immediately said, "That's what I want to do with my life," 'cause I was thinking of maybe being an architect or something like that.

And so I started learning about industrial design, and I learned about Charles and Ray Eames. Raymond Loewy. Raymond Loewy, probably the most important industrial designer of the 20th century. Designed so many incredible products. His first designer, Air Force One. He designed like, you know, a lot of like consumer products, very beautiful consumer products. He had a profound impact, I think, on society. And as I was studying the history of industrial design, it was so incredible, 'cause industrial design field is a deeply technical field. The thing about architecture is fairly technical, but the, it's a more known boundary. Like, there's buildings, and there's commercial, there's residential, there's retail, there's only so much variation. It's a multi-thousand-year-old like field. Industrial design for the most part really started with Josiah Wedgwood. It was like, it's really the mass industrial products. So, industrial design is really new from the industrial revolution. And it used to be analog things. The first industrial design was chairs and tabletop dishes and bowls. But as technology grows, suddenly industrial design becomes cars and airplanes. And now you have microwaves and refrigerators. And then eventually it becomes like medical equipment. And then, you know, with computers, the most famous industrial design probably in the world is the iPhone. And the vastness of industrial design is unbelievable. The intimate relationship you have with a product is incredible.

I remember in, I grew up in the 1980s. I love video games. I like, I played with a Game Boy, a Game Gear, Super Nintendo. These devices, or remember Nike in the 80s and 90s. Those sneakers that were the Reebok Pumps. These products captured kids' imaginations, and they had a very intimate relationship with you. They really had a sense of personality. And, and computers in particular were something I was really, really interested in. And then, of course, you get to the golden age of Apple, starting probably in 1998 with the iMac and, and Jony Ive, who was like my hero. So I went to RISD, and when I was at RISD, Apple was the golden age of industrial design. They really educated the public about design. Once they're educated, they couldn't unsee great products. And that really, like, captured my imagination. And what I loved about industrial design was, A, it was very technical. You work with mechanical engineers, you work with electrical engineers. B, here's the thing about industrial design. It's almost different than any other design. This is also true of fashion design. A design is only successful if it sells. So if we design an office building, like architects can win awards for their office building, and it can never get leased. You, you can design a house, but no one looks at, well, what was the retail value of the house? So it, the awards are detached from the commercial success. If you design a product and no one buys it, it's considered a failure. And so because the commercial success matters, you have to think about marketing, manufacturing, distribution, solving problems. It's not just about winning awards. It's about being viable to a customer.

The other thing is, it's very much a problem-solving field. It's got so many different boundaries, and it's very much about empathy, about user journeys. You know, more than I think any other design field, I think industrial design always seemed like it was the kind of field where you put yourself in the shoes of the user, and you design these user journeys. And I think they really teach industrial design through user journeys. I don't think they teach graphic design that way, at least they didn't at the time. It's a very specific type of field. And I think that really prepared me for designing. I just, to give you one example, one of the projects I designed when I graduated RISD was a child's ventilator. And so instead of just thinking about like a child's breathing machine, instead of just thinking about the design of the ventilator, one of the projects I had to do was imagine being the child in a hospital. And so I had to imagine being a child. It's hard to do, but you're six years old. Imagine you're being six and you're scared. You're looking up at a breathing machine. And imagine the parents. The parents go in, and the parents are like, "Is my child going to be okay?" If this breathing machine seems like ominous and like it's keeping you alive, the parents are going to freak out. Like, what's wrong with my child?

The other thing is, I learned that one of the interesting things that happened was the nurse technicians, they had no problem that these things were complicated. But the hospital wanted a breathing machine that was so simple that everyone can learn how to use it. Except the nurse technicians had pride that only they knew how to use it. So you had to like weigh the stakeholders. How do you design something from the vantage point of a child? Consider the, the how would it imbue to the parents? How can it be universally useful for everyone without threatening people's jobs? You see, there's so many dimensions, and that just, I think, really prepared me for this field. And I think it's there's a reason why I became a CEO because there's no product managers in industrial design. Like, you are the PM. There's industrial designers, and there's engineers, and there's program managers. So, industrial designer is the product manager. So a design product is one function.

Do you think the world's going to go that way now? You were obviously famous for helping usher in this founder mode idea. It seems like there's now, that was kind of pre-Opus 4.6 or whatever. There's like another layer to that now. I'm curious what we would call it. But it seems like for the first time again, someone even like you running a very large company with lots of people, can disintermediate lots of the steps between idea and outcome. And this design stuff, maybe even more applicable than ever. What is the new mode like? Like, how would you describe, because everyone's trying to figure out how do I run a company in this era? So how would you describe the new capabilities and the mode through the lens of of this?

I mean, basically, yeah, like founder mode was something that Paul Graham coined, but based on experience I had. And the experience I basically had was like, I felt like I was a, just to back up, I think people are basically born good founders, or said differently, it's innate. You don't have to learn how to be a good founder. No one is born a good CEO. And the job of CEO is completely counterintuitive, and almost all of your intuition about what to do is wrong. Like, you listen to somebody, and you're like, they tell you something, you want to agree with them, and then you got to be careful, know if you agree with them without getting the other side. You know, like, there's a lot of things that are counterintuitive about being a CEO. And so the problem is, we founders never were really prepared to be great CEOs. And I think we founders were taught to learn by doing. And that's great for a founder. It's not good as a CEO. You do not want to learn on the job how to be a CEO. In other words, trial and error is bad for CEO. You know why trial and error is really bad? Because you hire somebody, they build an empire, they leave, and now you got to unwind their empire. And it takes like four years. So, you've wasted years. So, actually learning how to be CEO is something you should learn. And so, I learned the hard way. And I basically learned that what happened was founders were overdelegating their companies to these professional managers. I'm not disparaging them, but they were detaching themselves, and they were being managed rather than managing the company. And it was really about not apologizing about how you want to run a company, being in the details. That was founder mode.

Was there a moment that that like clicked for you that you had to change the mode?

Yes. The pandemic. Two things happened. Actually, speaking of Jony Ive, Apple, um, and another person named Heroki. Here. So, I spent the 2010s riding a rocket ship. Airbnb, Uber, a few of us. We went on these crazy rocket ships that like, you know, Open AI, Anthropic are doing now. It was awesome. It was amazing. But by the end of the last decade, around 2019, I remember waking up one day, and it was like completely unrecognizable the company I was running. I mean, I had like 7,000 employees. I didn't know what anyone was doing. I felt like I was in a car without a steering wheel. And I just could not turn the company. I was like, "Turn left." And the company would go right. And, and actually, not only did I feel like I was not in control, I don't think anyone felt like they were in control. It was just a free-for-all. And it was just thousands and thousands of decisions being made for me. Uh, me overly deferring, not listening to my intuition. And I got to this point where I remember having this dream where I, and I told my co-founders, I had a dream in late 2019 where I felt like I'd left the company for 10 years and I'd come back, and I was like, somebody had been running the company for 10 years, and they like kind of turned it into this like giant political bureaucracy, and I didn't even recognize the company. And then I realized, oh my god, it was me the whole time. And so it was my fault. Like, I had actually enabled all this to happen. And then I started talking to people, and they all had the same experience. And all these founders felt like we were all made to feel crazy because, you know, um, we had this instinct. The pandemic was what it was. So around the same time as the pandemic, I hired a guy named Heroki Asai. He was from Apple. And he told me about how Steve Jobs ran Apple. And Steve Jobs, when he came back to Apple in 1997, in July of 1997, there were nine days from bankruptcy. And he basically just like went into founder mode. What you call founder mode. He got into the details of every little detail. And I wanted to do that, but initially the company braced against it. It was, it was almost like this, um, it repelled against it. And then the pandemic happened, and we lost 80% of our business in 8 weeks. We were in total crisis mode at that moment. I went from peace time to wartime. And then I just totally took control of the entire company, and I just never let go. Basically, what I did is I reviewed every single thing for two, three years. I worked like 100 hours a week, reviewed every little detail of the company. My vision wasn't to do this forever. My vision wasn't to micromanage forever. My vision was, before I empower people, I need to know what's going on. This notion that great leadership is hiring great people and trusting them to know what to do. Well, how do you know they're great if you're not auditing what they're doing? And you actually want to start hands-on under control and give ground grudgingly. Everyone does the opposite. They let go. They hire someone. They go in the wrong direction. And by the way, that's bad for the leader. You're not training them. So to bring it back to your question, that's founder mode. We need AI founder mode.

AI founder mode is going to be even more intense than founder mode. I'm not yet ready to tell you what that is. I'm in the middle of it.

What are the principles that you're thinking about as you go into it? Like, even if you don't have it ironed out yet?

I think AI founder mode, you're even in significantly more details because you have almost everything on demand, right? Like the mechanism of founder mode was I had a lot of meetings because that was the only way I get information. So I probably did 35 hours of meetings, which is very similar to the way Steve ran Apple. Um, you know, so I wouldn't do one-on-ones. I'd only do group meetings. I'd do a recurring thing where I review every single thing in the company, either on a weekly basis, bi-monthly, or quarterly, live, in-person group meeting, and I'd have a full chain of command. So I used to tell people, like, you know, a lot of companies, you have to like get your boss to approve it, and your boss's boss to approve it, and your boss's boss's boss to approve it. I'd have the full chain of command in the room, and anyone can give their opinion. I would make all the final decisions. I would not speak first. I'd usually speak last, and I'd usually agree with the team, but 10% of the time I'd disagree, but I'd ratify every decision. It was a very clear chain of command. But this is a meeting-based culture. I think in AI, I think we're going to move away from meeting-based to asynchronous, and we're fairly remote. And so I think that will benefit us. I think you're going to have a lot fewer layers of management. You know, I think there was an old famous saying, the Catholic Church has been going on for 2,000 years, only have four layers of management. Why do every other company have like seven, eight, nine layers of management? I know there's this like general idea like, as a thought experiment, what if I could theoretically manage all 7,000 people flat? I don't think that's a good idea. I think that's an extreme, but I do think going to a few layers of management would make a lot of sense. We're in the, I'm in the middle of trying to think about how to redesign the company. I think every single person in this company's job will change. What I'm amazingly doing now is trying to get people to adopt AI tools, and I want to see how everyone's job changes in the world of AI tooling, and then I want to basically embark on like a fundamental redesign. I don't think people managers will have any value in the future. When I mean people managers, people that only manage people. I think everyone's going to have to be a hybrid people manager or manager IC.

Meaning they have to have contact with reality in some sense, like a thing a customer end up seeing or?

Yes, an engineer, they have to be technical. In other words, they have to be, um, every engineer needs to code. Even the managers need to code. And whatever the version of that is for your field, you need to code. So, if you're a lawyer, you're just not managing people. You have to actually read the case law and you have to get involved. And that makes sense, right? Like, you can't just be like these managers where you're kind of people's therapists, and you're just doing meetings, you're doing one-on-ones. Like, I, I do not think people who have lots of recurring one-on-ones are not going to survive because what they're doing is like that. "Oh, you come with me with whatever your problem is. I'm here to help you." Like a mentor or professor. That kind of leadership style is not going to work. You need to have context. And I think, I think a lot of people will survive this age of AI. The two types of people that will not survive the age of AI are two types of people. Pure people managers who like think it's all about just leadership. No, it's about content and leadership. And by the way, like, you, like, I, I hear about design leaders that, like the heads of design, they don't actually manage the design. Jony Ive manages design. He designs and he leads people. A design leader who only manages the people? That's crazy to me. The way Frank Lloyd managed his design team is through the work. I say you manage people through the work. You don't manage the people, you manage the work. Otherwise, what are you doing? I mean, yeah, like maybe a couple times a year you should have like a check-in and go out to dinner with a direct report, have a heart-to-heart, ask them about their family, like build relationships. You should do that. You should have relationships. That's not a day-to-day thing. You're not their therapist. You're managing people through the work. So the two types of people will not make the shift to AI are pure people managers and people that are rigid and don't want to change and evolve. As long as you're like, got a growth mindset, I think the tools are going to be very easy. There's an economic incentive for the tools to be so easy everyone can figure them out. So I don't think the AI tools are going to be complicated. Right now, there's a lot of command line. I think ClaudeBot and Co-work are not the most intuitive to an average person, but I think economic incentives will be for this to become incredibly intuitive. And I think maybe one last thought is AI is really an enterprise thing right now. If you take out ChatGPT and like people screwing around, like image generation, it's pretty much just an enterprise phenomenon. I'm on the board of Y Combinator. 175 companies last batch, 159 were enterprise. There are no consumer companies. Because there's new consumer companies, the incentive to make the interfaces really simple is not there, because it's their job to figure out the interface. The next wave of AI is going to be consumer AI. Consumer AI is going to be the big prize. Can you think of a consumer AI company? You know, maybe OpenAI, but most their energy is now going to Codex. Google, yeah, with Gemini, but most of it's still going to search. They don't want to cannibalize their business. So, I think that's where it's all going to go. And I'm trying to start thinking about AI as a consumer play and how do we make tools so simple that everyone here can figure out how to use them.

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It's, it's surprising that so few have tackled consumer. So many of the biggest companies in history are consumer companies. You built one of the great consumer companies of the last generation of companies. What advice would you give to people that do want to build consumer businesses using this technology? Like, if the next batch of YC startups were to invert because of your advice, what would you tell them? How would you guide them?

Yeah, this is really interesting. Here are the, here are the three or four reasons I think it's happening. Number one, I think a lot of people when ChatGPT came out were afraid. They're afraid ChatGPT was going to kill their business. And I think a lot of investors didn't want to invest in something where they thought ChatGPT was going to kill it. Number two, the business model is tricky. ChatGPT, there is no yet consumer business model for, um, AI that I've seen. Um, for example, ChatGPT, there's three ways it can monetize. Subscriptions. Unfortunately, they're probably going to hit a local maximum percentage of users subscribing because Claude and Gemini are giving away for free. Ads, again, they're hitting a local maximum because Claude Gemini are not going to do ads. And then e-commerce, they shut down the third-party apps. And the inference costs are expensive enough that, you know, it's just they're burning a lot of money. And so, I think the first thing is you need to have a business model around consumer AI. You can't just be in a business of information because people are not trained to pay for information. They're not trained to do that. So that's the first problem. The second problem is distribution is mature. Now, again, top three apps in App Store are AI. So it does prove you have something revolutionary. You'll find your way to the top. The third thing is, while I think Silicon Valley, we like to, we like to describe ourselves as rebels, I think, and maybe it's a little bit like the always-on nature of Twitter. I think it's very trend-based and vibe-based. I think there's a sense that like everyone, there's a little bit of like everyone kind of does what everyone kind of does. That makes sense. I think the trend is enterprise. The other thing is with Y Combinator, and this is, this is, I'm on the board of Y Combinator, so I have a good, like, like we tell, um, entrepreneurs, get a YC, other YC startups to be your first users. It's a really great distribution strategy, right? Like the way we got our first users is you do things that don't scale. Now, what happened was that has taken the logical extension that everyone just keeps making enterprise companies. Maybe finally, the reason people aren't doing consumer companies, they're just harder. They're more hits-driven. The prize is bigger, but the risk is higher. It's more all or nothing. You can pick a narrow vertical, build a good medium to large-sized business. It's pretty straightforward. You can get other YC companies to adopt it, and you can grow into larger and larger enterprise. You can pick a sliver, vertically integrate with AI. It's very straightforward. It is much more history-driven business. You have to be good at a lot more things. You generally have to be better at design, marketing, culture, press. Like, it's not purely, you know, technology and sales, which is what I'd say enterprise is like. You make a product, it can be a technology-based product. Often times in enterprise, the person using the product is not the person buying the product. And so sales becomes really important, but you can start sales really small with smart companies. It's really hard to figure out how do you start small consumer? Like, who do you start with on the street? So I think these are the reasons why my prediction is that we're living in the age of enterprise AI, and I think in the next 12 to 24 months, you're going to see the beginning of a consumer AI renaissance.

I mean, almost every app on my home screen has not changed fundamentally since AI, including Airbnb. And?

I think that's going to change in two years.

On your most recent earnings call, you referenced this thing, Project Hawaii, I think it was called, which is like the on-the-ground direct application of the soon-to-be-defined founder AI mode, or whatever. Maybe just describe what that is and how you, as an incumbent consumer company, are trying to make yourself into one of these AI companies and sort of like what's possible with a project like this.

This is such a great story. So, you know, I had this conundrum. We had like 7,000 people, or I, we were down to 5,000, and I needed to, I wanted to like basically take the magic of the founding of the company, the early stages. We were in this little apartment working together, and I wanted to work with like this team of 10 people, and I wanted to like have that team work on one problem. We said, let's put a team together to focus on improving the guest experience, improving conversion rate. Conversion rate is basically search to book. The conversion rate of people typing in a location and dates and booking. And there's a funnel, and you can basically measure the funnel, and you can do A/B test. But more than A/B testing, I wanted to do something where the north star was, let's make the experience better and increase conversion. We're going to start with a better user experience. And so we put together a team of like, I think it was like 10 or 12 people, designers, engineers, a couple product people, data scientists. This is mostly just a pure software team, and we treated it like a little startup, and we said, we're going to just focus, and we're going to do a system of crawl, walk, run, then fly. Crawl, fix the bugs, fix the problems of conversion. Once you build a little bit more, um, confidence, walk, start to do, start to develop features, like really start to reframe the journey. Then run, rethink the entire flow, big features. Fly, like completely re-yourself, and everything is going to be measured. The team's results were phenomenal. They ended up delivering the equivalent of, I think, in year one, $200 million in internal revenue for the company. The following year was like $400 or $500 million. Now, you know, we're at a run rate of like over 600 basis points. 600 basis points of $134 billion dollars. You get the sense of how much of a lever that is. It was just one team. I mean, it maybe it grew into dozens and dozens of people, maybe 50 or 60 people. But it was this really lean team. We took that team. We said, what if we apply to the next problem? Pricing. Same people. Another team, totally different team, same model. Then another model, then another model. So it was really, and I really tried to work with a team. And initially, I would meet with them every week, and then it became every other week, and then every month. And, you know, my general philosophy is start really hands-on and let go over time. It's like, I'm not a golfer, but like, I took a couple golf lessons. Like a golf instructor. The, here's an analogy for management. If you learn golf, you, you want to learn with a golf instructor before you build any habits, because if you learn on your own, you're going to like, have a weird swing, and then when you get a golf instructor, they got to change your muscle memory. So the golf instructor's got to watch you swing like thousands of times. Eventually, they don't need to see it. You let go over time. What most founders do is the opposite. They develop, they bring these people in, they let them figure it out, and then they intervene later, but they already have the wrong muscle memory. So I decided, I'm going to be totally hands-on. I'm going to do everything with a team, teach them everything I know, and let go. Then do it the next team. And then I had teams learn from other teams. Then when we launched services, experiences, we basically found this, this other way of innovating.

So here's a riddle, or it was a riddle to me. Airbnb, we had this core business that was really successful. It did nearly a hundred billion dollars a year in gross sales. For every thousand dollars spent in the world, $1 was spent on an Airbnb. Except we had the problem of, we're like a one-hit wonder. And for 18 years, I couldn't get a second hit out. And I kept wondering like, why am I, why is this not working? And the answer is like, too obvious. It was staring us in the face. But we kept having the burden of trying to scale these businesses at a global scale from the beginning. When we started Airbnb, we started in one city, New York City. We had 100 users. I was in YC. Paul Graham goes, "Where are your users?" I'm like, "They're in YC." I'm like, "They're in New York." We have like, not many, but they're in New York. He goes, "You're in Mountain View. Users in New York. What are you doing here? Go to Mountain View." We went door-to-door meeting the users. The basic philosophy is make the problem as small as possible. Get to product-market fit, then scale. So, we launched services, experiences last year, and it didn't work right away. And I'm like, "Oh shit." We launched services, experiences in a hundred cities. And I went back and I thought to myself, "Wait a second. Airbnb launched in New York, Uber launched in San Francisco, DoorDash launched like Palo Alto. Let's make the problem small and just perfect a city." And so we started doing this with new businesses. We basically go to any new business, we're going to do one to 10 to many. We'll pilot in one market. Any idea, if we get the market to work, we'll go to 10. You get to 10, it works, we'll industrialize. It took us 16 years to get to our second and third business. We started getting those two working. Now we have like 10 to 20 pilots. Eventually, we'll have 70, 50 to 70 new verticals. So these are the, this is like the Hawaii system. It's basically taking this giant company, making it a really small elite team. So the Navy, it's like the Navy SEALs. I work with the teams really, really leanly. Make the problem as small as possible. I think that's a key thing. Make the problem as small as possible. Dominate a niche. Peter Thiel used to say this. He was one of our first investors. He said, "It's better to have a monopoly of a tiny market than a small share of a big market."

Is the reason for both of these things, the idea that it works in Toronto, but not at 100 scale, 100-city scale? And the reason a 10-person team can outperform a 100-person team?

Is this the shared reason, some sort of like better contact with reality? And like somehow reality starts getting distorted as you get bigger or something?

The general principle, this comes back to the most important piece of advice I ever got. The first day at Y Combinator, Paul Graham said, "It's better to have 100 people love you than a million people sort of like you." And that came from Paul Buchheit. Paul Buchheit was a partner at Y Combinator. He created Gmail. And I think that this old famous story was he created Gmail, and it took him two years, and they said, "You can't ship until 100 people inside of Google loved it." And actually, it took like two years to get 100 people to actually like the product. But once 100 people like something, 100 million people like it. It's like the sample size is enough. And so the problem is, you try to make something a million people like, you can't talk to a million people. And so you end up like with this shallow swimming pool. It's like you're trying to heat up an ocean. And the ocean just, it takes too long to heat up, and you can't tell. Instead of heating up an ocean, heat up a bathtub. And like, just make the problem as small as possible, and you're close to the customer. In fact, if you only are focused on one city, or even a subset of a city, you can talk to every person. You can put all these resources on a tiny problem. And I guarantee you, take a ton of resources, you put on a tiny problem, the smaller the problem, the more you'll change the numbers, the trajectory. And that will teach you lessons. And there's, you do things that don't scale, then you scale. And the scaling is industrialization. But product-market fit is a distinct problem from industrialization. So you want to basically make the problem as small as possible. Understand the user. Put yourself in their shoes. Blow their mind. Do things you've never thought before. Do them by hand. Make them unscalable. Don't worry how much it costs. Just prove the model. In other words, it's like R&D.

This is a lot like industrial design.

This is what we call prototyping. Before you manufacture something, you prototype, and you make prototype after prototype after prototype. And until you make something that you love for yourself, or someone loves. So yes, the smaller the problem, the more there's fewer abstraction layers. You're actually on the ground. You're talking to people, and that's how you prove it. Hawaii to these pilots, it's all the same thing. By the way, same thing with AI. You're removing abstraction layers, and you're going, you're making the problem as small as possible. You're going directly to the source. I think that's a principle that all these things have in common.

It's like we're playing this game of telephone.

Yes.

If we don't do it that way.

Yes. Yes. And you just lose information each time communication.

And this is why founders don't like running large companies, because they end up in a game of telephone. They say something, and then it goes down like five layers, and then it goes back up five layers, and then these like meetings, and the meetings become like system reviews. And literally, like the lowest point for me when I was, when I was having meetings about meetings.

It was like very meta.

You've gotten into this new mode. It's called founder mode. It's now called CEO mode. Do you think you're now a good CEO?

I think I am. I think I was naturally good founder, although I would say I also got really lucky, um, because I had two great co-founders, and damn did I luck out on that. I think I was a very good early-stage CEO, and I think the moment I had to have like an executive team, I really struggled to make the shift from a founder to CEO. I really struggled. And I think in the 2010s, I do not think I was a great CEO, and I think we paid the price for my learning curve. And I think the pandemic was a rude awakening for me. I think I was conflict-averse. By the way, somebody once said, "A pitcher never takes himself off the mound." As a manager, you got to go take them off the mound. I was always helping people, I didn't want to hurt people's feelings. I wanted them to take them off the mound. It would. And the longer you leave a pitcher on the mound, the more home runs they give up, like the more upsetting they're get. And they're still going to be angry at you no matter when you take them off the mound. So, I don't think I was naturally a good CEO. And I remember during the, the up to the pandemic, at one point, I wonder, I wonder if I'm just not meant to be a CEO. Maybe I'm not meant to do it. And then the pandemic happened. We had a near-death experience, and I said, well, there's no, I don't like, I'm screw the rumination. Like, like, it's do or die. And I feel like I learned how to do the job. And there's really a few phases of CEO. Have an idea, get to product-market fit. Product-market fit to hypergrowth. Hypergrowth scale to become a real company. Real company as in profitable, public, like, and then the last phase, and I did all that. You know, we have like 40% free cash flow margin. We're very profitable. We do a hundred billion dollars in sales, customer sales. The last phase of a CEO's reinvent the company, product extension. And the reason our stock has been flat is because we only do one thing, and we have kind of, you know, we've started to saturate a little bit of the core idea. So we've had to reinvent ourselves, we had to do product extension. So I still got to prove myself. And then there's another proof point, can I navigate this transformation of AI? By the way, I think founder mode is going to be the only way to operate in the age of AI. If you're a giant professional CEO, I think you can operate in a founder mode, but if you're like, you know, risk-averse, you want to be incremental, those types of people are not going to, survive the age of AI. So, I think there was an old Albert Einstein quote. He said, "The best way to keep your, uh, balance on a bicycle is to keep moving." You're going to have to keep moving. So, I think that like founders are going to be really well primed, or like really well set up for this age of AI because we kind of have to redesign our whole company from scratch again.

Was there anything else that Heroki, isn't Heroki is that taught you? Because Steve was perhaps the literal ultimate example of everything you just said, focused on the details in the weeds forever, reinvention of the company.

Yeah. Heroki. So, just, just, I would love to say, and before I say, just to say who Heroki is, everyone knows Jony Ive. Um, Heroki is a bit of an unsung hero. I always heard about him. He was like this legendary mythical figure that like was elusive. There's like almost no photos of him online. There's like no videos of him. He was never out in front, but he was Steve Jobs' creative director. Um, it was a function under marketing. He did the ads. He did like the graphic design. He was really responsible for, you know, when he was like that black type with the gray font, and like the product in front of white. Like that was really his aesthetic. He taught me two principles of Apple that I brought. One was simplicity. When you start a company, because you have no money and you're so constrained, you're naturally simple. Lack of abundance creates natural constraints, and so simplicity is thrust upon you, and that is good for you. And then once you raise a bunch of money and hire a bunch of people, you go in a lot of directions, then you lose your sense of focus. How many startups can we think of today who have struggled from lack of focus? Probably name a few. So you start to lose your muscle for simplicity. Heroki taught me simplicity, and he taught me that simplicity is not removing things. Simplicity is distilling something so fundamentally that you understand its essence. I know Steve used to say, "Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that reveals itself through subsequent layers." In other words, isn't that beautiful saying? In other words, great design is about distilling something to its essence. It's kind of what Elon does with SpaceX, where he talks about first principles. And first principles is kind of like a physics term, but is also a design term. It's about understanding, if I'm going to reinvent this product, I have to understand the properties of glass. I have to understand like, you know, I have to understand everything about it to distill it to its essence. So I got obsessed with simplicity. Simplicity of our products, simplicity of our organization, simplicity of everything. The other one was a sense of craft and details. How you do anything is how you do everything. And I said, "Everything must be perfect." It comes from, um, there's a book that a lot of people in Silicon Valley recommend, "The Score Takes Care of Itself." Bill Walsh, the coach of the San Francisco 49ers, John Wooden, winningest coach in college basketball history, UCLA, same principle. First day at UCLA. So John Wooden won 10 NCAA championships over 12 years. First day, first hour with his team, he spends an hour teaching you how to put your socks on. One hour, and he said, "Put your socks on this way."

Mr. Miyagi.

Yeah. One hour teaching you how to put your socks on. It's a metaphor. Everything was that rigorous. Bill Walsh said, "The way you tuck your jersey into your pants was one of 10,000 details that depend on when you whether you won or not." Basically, don't focus on winning. Focus on getting all the inputs perfect. And you get everything perfect, then you will win, and you don't work, focus on the scorecard. And so we kind of, we do focus on growth, but we kind of stopped focusing on growth. We started focusing on making everything perfect. And if everything is perfect, and you don't grow, then you focus on the wrong inputs. But if you have the right inputs and you make them perfect, then you'll grow really fast. And so that's really what I learned from him. And I just, he really taught me, I think, founder mode. 'Cause I never met Steve. So I only knew through Heroki. And I said, "Well, I love this. I'm an artist. I'm a designer. I get to have more control of the product. I get to make everything perfect."

The initial attempt at founder mode created giant revolts. Everyone hated it because everyone thought I was micromanaging them, taking their. And I learned something fundamental. Initially, everyone hated it, and by the end, everyone loved it. Now, the people who hated it left. So, maybe there's like selection bias. The people who liked it stayed. But even the people that thought they wanted autonomy and independence and empowerment, what they didn't realize was control and power is not zero-sum. It's not like if I have all the power, you don't. There's a scenario where we're all powerless. And there's also a scenario where if I have power, I can therefore give you power. It's not zero-sum. This is the problem people don't understand. If I have more power and control, I can give you more power and control, and I can hand it off to you. It's about the idea that the car has a steering wheel. You turn it left, and it actually goes left. That's the basic idea. I do think it's all about the company rowing in one direction. That's it.

The thing that you've said historically that had the largest impact on me was this notion of the 11-star experience, the exercise of going from not a five-star but a six-star and actually forcing yourself to write it. And I have this idea in mind because of this idea of simplicity and distillation, and it's a beautiful thing, right? It's, I guess it's ultimately empathetic with the customer. But why is that idea in practice so powerful? Like, what happens as you go down or up the star count to 11 stars? Like, why is that such a valuable exercise?

Let me do like a one-minute on what it is. So basically, when you book an Airbnb, most people leave a five-star. And if you leave a four-star, it's a bad experience. Five-star, everything went as planned. So it's called review compression. Similar to Uber, you always leave a five-star. And if you leave anything other than a five-star, something really went wrong. So, but what if the driver was really amazing? You can only leave a five-star.

So I started imagining what if we could give a six-star? And I did this exercise from six to like 10 or 11 stars.

So, a five-star, let's say take one moment checking into Airbnb. A five-star check-in is you get there and the host greets you, or there's a door code and it works. In other words, nothing went wrong. You give a five-star. Anything went wrong, you give a four-star or less. But that's that's like that's review compression. Like, what if you went above and beyond?

So, what would a six-star look like? A six-star would look like you basically get to the Airbnb and there's like your favorite wine on the table, and there's like fruit, and there's snacks there, and there's a handwritten card. Okay, that's better than just letting me in the house.

So, what's a seven-star experience? A seven-star experience, there's like a limousine or something waiting for me at the airport. They know I like surfing. There's a surfboard waiting for me, and they're like showing me around the city. There's all this stuff.

So, what's an eight-star experience? An eight-star experience, I get to the airport, there's an elephant. I go on the elephant. I go on a parade in my honor. I'm like, "Wow, I feel really special."

What's a nine-star experience? I call it the Beatles check-in. I get off the plane and like 1964 Beatles, there's 5,000 teenage girls screaming my name with cards making me feel like I'm a pop star. I get to the front lawn of the Airbnb and there's a press conference in my name. So, it's a 10-star experience.

10-star experience. Elon Musk greets me and takes me to space. Right.

What you, and the reason you do this, and it's it's an exercise. It's an exercise in the absurd. There is you keep pushing to go so absurd to 10 stars that suddenly six or seven stars doesn't seem crazy at all. And the way to get to product-market fit is to just create a six or seven-star experience. But you can't create a six or seven-star experience without going beyond.

In other words, go beyond the edge of reality and work backwards. And so it's kind of a fun exercise. You you, what would the craziest possible way to blow someone's mind, one person's mind, one customer, and maybe try that? And maybe you can't scale that because that's like an eight-star experience, but you can probably scale a six-star. And that difference between the five and six-star is probably the difference between you and a competitor.

And if you can find a way to industrialize it and scale it, you might have product-market fit and something special.

One of the things that I think about when you, when you give some absurd examples at the high end of the range, is this feeling that I've experienced with AI that my imagination had almost atrophied.

Yes.

That by using these tools, I realized how hard it was. Like, "Oh, I can make anything." And I sit down, I'm like, "I have no idea what to make." And that as I started making little things, like all of a sudden my imagination got rebooted, and it feels like this exercise is like an imagination exercise.

It is like.

One of the sayings is like, "Great writing is great thinking." But I find that like, I don't know about you, some people like have ideas and they think of the ideas and they write them down. Sometimes I figure out the ideas through the act of writing.

The act of writing is the act of coming up with ideas. The act of designing is the act of coming up with ideas. It's really hard to just sit in a room and abstractly think of ideas. You need to like do something. And so I think what was happening was we had didn't have enough tools to express ourselves. I think a lot of the tools were very passive tools. I think increasingly we were spending more and more time on a sit-back experience like social media. I think AI shifts our attention from consumption to creation.

Because, I mean, social media, a lot of us spend our time on, and the only type of creation is like giving your opinion or posting. Like, but you're mostly consuming. What I love about AI is it's not about opinions. Suddenly all of us have a paintbrush and a canvas to make stuff. And I think that AI is going to lead to a renaissance in creativity. I was an artist growing up. I was a pretty good artist. So I had the ability to express ideas. You ever, here's an analogy. You ever meet a person like, there's probably, you could probably think of musicians like Prince. You name a musician that probably in words couldn't express themselves like, you know, but then through music, there's like this dimension you never knew. An artist, they're they're like, they seem really reserved, but their art is like really emotional. So many of us have this creativity inside of us, but we don't have the craftsmanship or tools to express it. And suddenly, what AI is going to do is going to give us the ability to express it. We're going to realize there are a lot more creative people than we thought. Cuz we typically think of creative people as people that know how to express their creativity.

It turns out, what if everyone can express it? Pablo Picasso once said, "All children are born artists. Their problems remain artists as one grows up." Every child's creative. If every child's creative, that means every adult could be creative. I think that every human on this planet is creative.

You ask the average person, "Are you creative?" About one in two says they're not. That's my experience.

That's not true.

It's just that they haven't exercised the muscle.

And I think that the magic of AI is what's in our head can manifest. But also, as you said, we can develop new ideas in our head because it's a relationship. We maybe have a small idea, we try something, it gives us another idea, and you go on this journey. A lot of people call founders visionaries. We're more expeditionaries. We're on these expeditions. We only call it visions later.

We're really just one foot in front of the other. Can you talk about the difference between the act of creation in pursuit of, um, achievement, you said people-pleasing earlier, achievement, um, notches on the belt, versus just for the raw, pure joy of it, which seems to be more the way the mode you're in now?

I think when I started Airbnb, I don't think we're totally trying to be successful. I mean, literally, I won't go through the whole founding story, but basically, I inflated three air mattresses, and Airbnb stands for Air Bed and Breakfast. And I like to joke that if I was trying to make money, I would have come up with a better idea than Air Bed and Breakfast. I truly did it for the love and the fun. And somewhere along the way, I got really successful. And that almost became a curse because success became a scorecard. And then I want to get even more successful. And I, it stopped being intrinsic and it started being a version of status and people-pleasing. You see, it took me a little while to realize what I was doing. What I really wanted was love. I learned growing up as a child, the way to get love is to be special. And the way to be special is to do special things. And if I do special things, I get praised and I feel loved. And I think that translated into, if I'm if I'm really successful, I will get adulation. And if I get adulation, I'll feel that feeling that I'm always seeking. And, but I didn't do this consciously. I'm not like saying this. It took me many years to realize this is what I was doing. The problem with adulation, by the way, adulation is kind of like seeking status. So many people seek status, but the problem is that's not where great products and great companies come from. See, adulation is like a cup with a hole at the bottom. And you keep filling it in thinking it's love, except it just keeps coming out the bottom. And at some point, you have to confront, who am I doing this for? Am I doing it for other people? For them to briefly love me and commend me to then move on. And by the way, that's a drug, and it's a drug that like you need, it's like it's like real drugs. You need a greater hit to get the high, and eventually it stops working, and eventually you reach a peak, and it gets really meaningless and empty. And that happened to me. And at some point around the pandemic, we go public, we have a hundred billion dollar valuation. It's like one of the best days of my life. And the next day I wake up, as if it was, we were on Zoom because of the pandemic. And I wake up, I like put on sweatpants, I go on a Zoom meeting. It was like it never happened. And it became like the saddest day of my life, cuz I realized, okay, what now? What do I do now? I got all this adulation, and my life, I, I don't feel any different.

And that made me like re-evaluate like what I'm doing this for. I had to like just come to terms with like, I want to like do things for pure intrinsic reasons. And so I had to basically just detach myself from people's approval, from status, from worrying about like how hot Airbnb is or how successful I am, which I never gave a about when we started. But like, you know, you start getting accolades and you want more of them. And you got to like let go of that cuz it's a losing game. And I just really started focusing on like just being heads down. Do the work like you used to do. Like when you were a kid, there was light. Just make stuff. Make it for yourself. That great book, Rick Rubin, he says, "An artist is an artist when they make it for themselves and they don't try to make something successful." And I stopped trying to be successful and I just went back to the basics and I realized like, a person who doesn't know you will never love you. That's okay. The people love you and the people that know you, and the most important person that's to love you is yourself. And just like, and we should love is the thing you're doing. So this became like a whole thing. It became about like just doing it because you love it, putting your heart and soul in it. It's like the score takes care of itself. It goes back to that. Don't try to be successful. Try to do something wonderful that you love for yourself. And maybe you'll be successful, maybe you don't, but don't focus on who you want to be. Focus on what you want to do. That was what Vice President Obama once told me. He said, "If I focus on who I want to be, I focus on being president of the United States, and I wasn't, my life would have been a failure. But if I focus on what I wanted to do, I want to help people, I want to be a community organizer, then I don't need to be president." And so I think so many entrepreneurs focus on what they want to be. "I want to be a giant tech founder. I want to run a billion-dollar company. I want to do this. I want to do that." Instead of focus on what do I want to make.

And then suddenly, there's no way to fail if you're making what you love.

It's an incredible set of ideas. I'm curious what most fell away in your life in this recent period as a result of this shift in mindset? Like, what do you do less of that you used to do a lot of when you stopped chasing adulation?

Mostly ruminating.

You ruminate less.

Yeah. Just like worrying about like worrying about people's opinions of me. There's something mildly narcissistic about like worrying about everyone's opinions as if they're all thinking about you.

No one is.

Like, like the reality is like, even people watching this, like I'm going to be self-conscious, except for a moment, they're going to think about me, but then they're going to be mostly thinking about themselves. And that's okay. And all of us are thinking, everyone's thinking about us, and they're thinking about themselves or the people in their life. They're not thinking about some guy on a podcast, except for like maybe an hour, and then it's over, and then like they, they're thinking about the people in their life. So letting go of like what people think about you. Um, cuz that's a prison. Cuz then suddenly you're making things for approval.

And then you lose your courage. That's the main thing. It's just like the, like mental energy. But I really like try to do things that are meaningful.

And meaningful things are really two buckets. It's making and spending time with people you care about. That's just those are two things.

Anything else is like kind of an obligation where I'll do it once in a while.

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And then you've got this this opposite end of the spectrum, which is one of my favorite investors, early-stage investor, said he tells every founder that they should think about the company as a platform or a vehicle for their own personal growth. Yeah.

And that their ability to grow will set the ceiling for the company. This is sort of like opposite ideas, and and we've been talking a lot more about leadership in this like second bucket. I'm curious how you think about like whether or not you care that if eventually a ham sandwich ran Airbnb, like the business model would be so perfected that it wouldn't matter in the Warren Buffett sense, and just like in general, as you, how you think about if that's true, that your ceiling is the company's ceiling as its leader.

I think they're both true. Let me try to square those at one example. I agree with both sentiments. Here's an example. Walt Disney. So people watching, I want them to try to name a Paramount Pictures film.

Hard.

I want you to name a Warner Brothers film. Maybe you'll think of like Batman. I want you to name a Universal Pictures film. I want you to name something from the MGM library. Pretty hard, right?

But I bet you can name a lot of Disney films and probably Pixar during their golden age. There's a big difference in those two. One is that Disney was very founder-led, and that Disney was all about a personal expression of one man. And the irony is the longer a company is run by founders in a founder mode, the more I think it can let go and anyone can run it. I think Disney, not to take away from the CEO of Disney, um, the new guy, Josh, is really great. I've met him. He's great. And I think they've had a lot of good CEOs. But I generally think like they're the CEO Disney has the bases loaded, right? You've got this incredible theme park that like people are going to visit no matter how well it's run. They've got this incredible IP. It's not that it's an easy job, but like Walt left so much. And I remember I was speaking to the former CFO at Disney once, this was like 10 years ago, and he said, "Disney hasn't really done anything new since Walt died." Walt died in 1966. Since 1966, we still make feature anime films, TV, and Magic Kingdoms. And of course, yeah, they do new things, but fundamentally that's the same playbook. And so I do think that that's an example where the founder reinventing the company and their expression created such a reservoir of IP, of momentum, that 50, he died 50 years ago. 50 years later, Walt Disney's spirit seems very, very omnipresent. Whereas Louis B. Mayer, I don't know if most people can tell you which, uh, studio he was, you know. Um, I think it was MGM, and I'm not even, I think it was MGM, and I couldn't even tell you the other two people. You see what I'm saying? There's a, there's

Huge difference.

Huge difference.

So I generally think this is a paradox. I think you know, yeah, the the ham sandwich, you know, have a business so good it can run it because sooner or later they will. The best businesses are ones that founders run and they reinvent and they create so much equity and such a great moat that then when they hand it off, they will endure and grow after them. I think Apple's very similar. They've had not had to invent new products for the most part. They're still running the iPhone. I mean, what a gift Steve left them that, you know, they were a few hundred billion dollar company when he died. They're like a multi-trillion dollar company now. Um, I think the one caveat is I think tech companies are different. Warren Buffett generally didn't invest in tech companies. We didn't invest with the exception of Apple. So I think, you know, you know, like Coca-Cola was a big investment of his, or like See's Candies, you know, these are things that don't get disrupted. I think technology is a cinema for change. If we're in the change industry, you kind of need to be more in founder mode more time. But I think that's how I square it, that the company is a, it's the upper bound of the founder's potential, and then the longer you're in founder mode, the more it will endure. I remember one founder told me, "I want this company to last 100 years, so therefore I can't be in all the details and so therefore I need to empower people." And I remember saying, "If you want something to be around for 100 years, you want to control it as long as possible and keep it in founder mode as long as possible, like Disney." That's my theory. That's I think that's counterintuitive. And I think people say, "Oh, but like the company's going to get very um dependent on you." Well, yeah, but the alternative is you're going to have so institutionalized this magic that it can endure after you.

Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid, was very famous for using Ansel Adams as his like ultimate tester of his equipment. And so he cared about the most important, maybe best photographer of all time, and what he thought of his device comes to mind when you talk about Disney, because there's something about, I have this visual of of Walt just like continuing to drill down to some sort of bedrock or something, and that like that's the mission that you're on as a founder, is like bedrock.

Yeah, I love that.

What, what is that for you from this point forward? Like, as you keep drilling, what is the nature like, what do you think you're still after? Where is there still room for your ceiling to raise so that the businesses can?

A few things come to mind. You know, when people think of Airbnb, if you're close your eyes and say, "I want you to think of a picture of Airbnb," you probably think of a house.

Um, we're a noun and a verb like Kleenex, which is amazing and not amazing. It's amazing in that like we're kind of the category leader. It's also tough because when you're Kleenex, you want to sell shampoo. They're like, "Wait a second. I'm not putting Kleenex on my head." Right?

So, there's it's a, it's a double-edged sword brand. So the bedrock for me is how do I change the atomic unit of Airbnb from a home to a person?

I do not want Airbnb to be about homes. I want it to be about people, and I want the people to be the atomic unit. And on Airbnb, you can get a home, you get an experience, you can get a service, eventually a flight, eventually this, that. I want to imagine a, a like a person in the center with a ring with like 50 things around. These are the things you can get. And so that is the thing, the bedrock of Airbnb is going to be identity, profile, the person's preferences. I want to develop the most authenticated identity on the internet. Proof of personhood is going to be really, really important in an age of AI, artificial. I want to develop the most robust profile on the internet. I mean, it used to be Facebook. They've kind of abandoned that strategy. I want to build one of the richest preference libraries of you as a person.

Uh, because that would be useful to have. I want to build a social graph, but in the real world, and I want to eventually have a membership program where you get all these different benefits. So the bedrock is the person.

And then I want to basically figure out how we can launch like Amazon, Amazon from books to like 100 things. I don't want us to just have homes. I want us to have a hundred things. So we need to develop this industrialized machine of understanding what are the like, you know, atomic units or the primitives that are consistent across all these different businesses. And then the last one is AI. You know, we have a bit of the innovator's dilemma. You know, plus or minus hundred billion dollars goes through our app. I have all these visions to like totally change it, but you're a public company, you know, and you're like giving guidance, and the difference between like missing and hitting earnings is you really, but not just being a public company, people's livelihood depends on Airbnb. If we mess with something, somebody could go from like making a living to not making a living. So you got to be very careful. And yet that is not an environment for mass innovation when you're being really careful. So I'm also exploring little sandboxes, you know, maybe, you know, like almost like a separate app, like what, what is a radically, like radically different Airbnb? It's like, "What's after Airbnb?" Airbnb. What's that? What's the next? And so, so I'm starting to think about. So, those are the three things I'm thinking about. Number one, how do we take the atomic unit from a home to a person? Number two, how do we basically industrialize what Airbnb offers to do like 50 things, not three things? And then, how do we like disrupt ourselves before someone else does with AI without screwing over our investors and our hosts who depend on us? Maybe the last thing I'm thinking just as a CEO is I think I've reached a certain level of mastery. I've reached a mastery of like product-market fit, hypergrowth, profitability. I'm beginning level four. Level four is reinvent yourself, product extension. I think there's something potentially even beyond that in the age of AI, which is like one of my strengths is all my experience, and that's also my weakness now. Like I'm 44. I'm not old, but I'm not young. I'm not AI-native in the same way a 22-year-old is. Is that doesn't, doesn't even, here's a bad example. When I started, me, I was 25, 26, and we were competing against Expedia, and we were on like, they were on like Outlook, and we used Google Docs, and we were like, we had an iPhone. It all seems anachronistic now, but back then, that was innovative, and we were on the coolest new tools, and we just moved faster. Pablo Picasso, another quote, he said, "The older you get, the stronger the wing gets, and it's always in your face. You got to stay light on your feet. You got to stay young. You got to keep reinventing yourself. You got to have curiosity." And so I don't want to become like this old-school person in the groove. I got to reinvent myself.

One of the things that as I've been building stuff myself, really for the first time, like I'm, I'm not an engineer. I used to build stuff, but I'd tell people and it would come, the feedback loop was like painfully slow and lossy. Now it's like 5 to 15 minutes and pretty high fidelity, and soon it'll be 5 seconds and perfect fidelity. And so there's this like, uh, I always love Brett Victor's idea of wanting to be as close to the output, the input and the output being as linked as possible. And we're getting to that stage.

The, the, the anxiety I have having this experience is that it feels like just nothing will last. And as I think about, I love business. I love business as a, uh, an art form. I guess that historically there's been these ways to have enduring moats. People would always call them. You have 200 million people that you know a lot about already. You've got hundreds of millions of reviews, lots of information on places, like you have these embedded things that you can't, I can't just get that from you. But it just seems as I build this stuff, like, oh, the, the, it's going to be really hard to have something enduring and lasting. Yeah. Now, do you share that anxiety? How does that make you feel that the, as the frictions fall, it also feels like the, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is like disappearing into the distance or something?

Take a fashion brand like Hermès, I think the most valuable fashion single fashion brand in the world. And like the Birkin bag and the Kelly bag, it's like they have a new product every like decade or something. Like these are like multi-decade old things, and they appreciate and they resale. And then you've got like Zara fast fashion. And I feel like we all want to make these things that endure, but we're living in like, like the, the hyper fast fashion of software. If you look at software from 10 years ago, no matter how great it was at the time, it looks really old and dated. You look at hardware from 10 years ago, it looks pretty decent. You look at interior design, it looks pretty good. You look at build or better. You look at buildings, and after a certain period of time, they've got this patina and they're wonderful. You go to Paris, and old endures.

So environments and physical worlds have got huge endurance. Hardware and physical things have medium endurance. Software is extremely ephemeral. Opinions are like that, but some ideas permeate. And so this is something that I'm, that I'm, I'm wrestling with myself because I want to make things that endure. And I don't know how I've reconciled it except to say this. I kind of realized I obsess over our app, Airbnb's app. It's designed, its interface. And yet, no matter how great it is 10 years from now, I'm going to look at it and think it looks like crap.

Cuz I look at the interface from 10 years ago and think it looks like crap. No matter how good it was. Data, software never looks good. So then you got to ask, like, what endures? I do think there are things that endure. Airbnb, the community endures. I started realizing the software won't endure, but the, and the network effect will decently endure, but the ideas of Airbnb, its principles, its mission, the organization, the company, the brand, the identity, the logo, the voice, the community, what it stands for, those things will endure. Most importantly, the community. I realized at some point, I told the company, "We're not building an app. We're not building a service. We're building a community." And that's cuz because that's the only thing that will last. I don't think there will be apps in the future. I think there'll be agents.

So, like, if we're attached to apps, I don't think there will be apps. So, we better like let go of that.

So many of the themes that we've talked about is this um steady progress and learning through time applied in service of others. What did bodybuilding when you were young teach you about steady progress over time?

Weirdly, bodybuilding taught me so much that I could apply to Silicon Valley. It taught me two important principles. So, I just, by way of background, my dad, my dad was really into ice hockey, wanting me to be an ice hockey player. Unfortunately, I was very skinny. I hit puberty really late. And I went to a sports academy for hockey.

And when I was 13, I thought I could be a really good hockey player, but by the time I was 14, you know, I didn't hit puberty till I was like 15 or 16. And that's a death sentence in hockey because suddenly I went from like first or second line to third or fourth line. And I went from a, a division thinking I'd be a division one athlete to division three athlete. I'm like, "Okay, it's not really going to work out for me." And so I started weightlifting. I was like 135 lbs. And I told my friends, "I'm going to be like one of the most, I, I want to be one of the top guys in the country by the time I'm 19." And they thought I was like out of my mind. I ended up by 19 competing at the national level. And the first lesson I learned from bodybuilding was, if you can change your body, you can change your life. That it was actually the most fundamental thing to change. Like everyone wants to change things around them, but what if you change you first physically? And I, I even think like, I would, if you could start somewhere, a lot of people say like, change your thoughts. I would change your body first.

Like change your physical biology, but if you're like unhappy, like I would, I would get healthy, like before I go to therapy. Like, like that's first biology. I think that fixes a lot, and then you can do other things. But really start with your physical biology. If you can change your body, you can change your life. It was the ultimate expression of empowerment. Okay, now I changed my body. What else can I change?

It's a metaphor for eventually you can design the world around you. I can change your body. I can change my environment. Eventually I can change the world. It's like you just go inside out. But the other thing it taught me, which might be even more helpful, is that you can't get in shape in one day. And if you go to the gym and work out for like 20 hours, you're not going to get in better shape. In fact, you're going to overtrain. And the way you get stronger is an adaptation from progressive overload that you basically, you know, you stress the body. The body doesn't get stronger during exercise. It actually breaks the muscles down, and it's an adaptive response like an immune system. It gets stronger, and you just keep doing it. The basic idea is that you can't get in shape in one day, and it's about 1% better every single day. And if you compound 1% a day, then you can actually have massive gains. And so it's really about discipline. And it's also very analytical. Bodybuilding is this wonderful thing where it's judged. It's, it's a subjective sport that you judge visually, but you measure it scientifically. You weigh your food. You have to put yourself in the right caloric deficit. You have to write down your training. You have to write down your weights. It's like taught me to be very analytical, metrics-driven, and that it's really about discipline, consistency. And I think that's important because I think a lot of founders just give up too early. It's about discipline. And it's about like, you know, if you train for a month, you take a month off, you're starting over.

And that's the key. You never quit. You just keep going.

One of the nice things about it is the visual feedback. Like you just judge visually. You can literally see it. You can look in the mirror. Other people can look at you and say, "You've been working out."

Probably some of the skills that you would want to apply the same progressive overload thing to as a leader are very invisible. How do you figure out the objective function? Like, how do you apply that same thing to something else that other people can't see?

Well, that's interesting. I stop trying to focus on like how good of a company everybody is, and I take it to like the project. So I'll give you one example of a project I focus on. One is I want to build the best team possible. So I basically like twice a year, we do this like giant thing we call roadmap review, and there's the top 100 people in the room, and I see the quality of the people in the room. And we did one the last two days, and then one of my most important jobs, the most important job I do at Airbnb, is hiring. That's a whole separate topic.

And the visual feedback is every twice a year, I get the top 100 people in the room, and I can see the quality of the people in the conversation. So in other words, there's many metrics that you use, and I obsess over. Maybe it's the app, and I just look at the design of the app. Maybe it's like how well the company operates, and I look at decision-making. So I, it's always about breaking the problem down to something that's observable and measurable.

Um, by the way, just on this, because this is a really important point. Basically, as a leader, you can choose if you want to spend time hiring or managing. One or the other.

The better the people, the less they need to be managed. The more time you spend on recruiting, the less time you have to spend on management. It's one to one. I remember when I was starting Airbnb, um, Sam Altman, who obviously everyone knows now is OpenAI. He was like, a kind of wonderkind when I, because I was like, one of the first Sequoia-funded companies before me were two people that had ever been funded by Sequoia from Y Combinator. Drew Houston from Dropbox. But the first one was Sam Altman, this company called Loopt. It was like a kind of like a way to see your friends on a phone before the iPhone. And I remember him telling me, I was like 27 or 28, Sequoia just funded us $600,000 at a $3 million post-money valuation, highest valuation Y Combinator. Now the average valuation is 30 million. And he said, "You're going to spend 50% of your time on hiring." I never did, by the way. It was my death blow, not spending more time on hiring. The less time I spent on hiring, the more time I spent managing. And I started learning my number one job was hiring. Every day I wake up and I, the first person I call is my recruiter. I actually think if you could have, I think people should think about their first employee being a recruiter, not an engineer, because like they are the like the most important person because they are the ones that like get you every other person.

I mean, a company is as good as its people, and the difference between like the good companies, the great companies are the people. And I think AI kind of makes that clear now that like what's all about the people. But I obsess.

I obsess over recruiting. I spend hours a day, and I don't recruit executives. I recruit two, three layers deep.

What are you doing? Are you beyond talking to them?

I try to map out all the best people in the valley. And the basic way, okay, here's how you hire good people. Do not do searches. Do not do searches. Generally, what you want to do is build pipelines. So, here's the mistake people make when they hire. They do, "I need to hire a blank." So, they do a search. They hire a search firm. And the search firm scans, they give you like 50 profiles, and then you like, you like call it down to 10 people. You contact 10. Five are interested. Of the five they're interested, you interview them. A couple drop out. Now you have three candidates, and you pick the best one you hire. And that's how almost everyone. And then you do references. You ask them for references. They give you a few references, and of course they're positive, and then you kind of hire them, and then you let them do their thing, and a year later you realize like, they're good or bad. And if they're bad, uh oh, they've already hired their own team. That is the wrong way to do it. So the best way to do is pipeline recruiting. You're constantly recruiting. You're constantly meeting people. So this is what you do. You basically are constantly meeting people. So let's say I need to hire really good engineers. I don't do searches. I just informationally meet the best engineers in the world. Every meeting, the job is to get the next meeting, meet someone else. So if I were to meet you and I say, "Hey, who's the best people you know? Can you introduce me to two or three people?" So what you're doing is you're constantly meeting people in advance of searches, and you're just building your pipeline. You just need to know lots of talent, and all of it's referral-based. The two ways to find out if people are good. I mean, one way is you're just good at assessing talent. But the two best ways is start with the results, work backwards to people. So, a lot of people say like, "Oh, like I want like a really good marketer. I'm going to go to Nike. They do really good marketing." No, no, don't do that. Find an ad you like, and they figure out who made that ad. Start with results. Work back with people. Don't start with the resume. The other thing to do is just keep asking people to build your rolodex. And so I'm constantly building a rolodex, and the moment I find somebody that's really good, I ask them who all the best people they know are. And I basically build these little mafias, like there's this, this comp, every company's got like a little mafia of talent.

So like Uber's got like an ops mafia, you know, and like Apple's got like a design mafia, and then like, you know, you build these little ecosystems, and they tell you who the other good people are, and you're constantly finding more people, more people. And what I do is I am the co-hiring manager for the top 200 people in the company. This is very radical. A lot of CEOs think it's their job to hire their executive, and their executive team hires their team. I think that is fatal. I mean, theoretically, yes. Theoretically, you should live in a world where you have such good people, they can all hire their own people. Most entrepreneurs, if they have 10 executives, would be lucky if two or three are able to do that without any support or help. You, in other words, you always want to be like marrying up, hiring people for the future. And so I'm const, I sometimes used to say like, my executives should hire people so good they would never work for them without my help. In other words, it should be like we're reaching. If you can hire them without my help, we're not reaching far enough. You want to like hire the very best person you can. So I'm constantly meeting people, constantly interviewing. The first and last call I make every day is the recruiting team.

Still.

Still, I probably spend two, three hours a day on it.

And every day, every year I spend more time, my time on recruiting the less. By the way, in the 2000s, I didn't. I thought it was all about like having a good idea, having a recruiting machine, managing people. The great thing is I don't manage this much anymore.

The more time you spend recruiting, less time spent on management, because the really good people just are self-managing.

This is amazing. And if you have to manage people, then maybe you should think about, you know, like upgrading the talent.

You said before that founders are born, you think, and CEOs can be more shaped.

For the most part. And maybe the caveat to that is just like, maybe founders aren't born, but we were like spent our whole life tinkering and building and, you know, what I mean? But you can't simulate being a CEO.

I was going to, I was going to ask like, whether or not you think they're activated in some way? Like maybe there's the raw material, but then some event happens. Um, uh, Sean from Palantir would call this the like, uh, the Bruce Banner, you know, gamma rays thing or something.

What have you learned about activating talent? I think the way to activate somebody is to give them a problem or opportunity and see if they can do it.

And I think the people that have a high level of like agency are going to do it. I don't know how to teach motivation. I don't know if it can be taught, by the way. I don't know if you can teach. I think you can motivate people, but I don't think you can make a person who's not motivated motivated. So, but I think all entrepreneurs have the trait of their self-motivated. And so it's really about giving them a challenge, and then it's up to them to step in and and activate.

Having plugged the leaky bucket of motivation of adulation, what, what's your motivation now as you attack this next chapter?

Most of my heroes are artists. I'll pick like, I'll pick four people. Um, two I've mentioned repeatedly. Leonardo da Vinci, Vincent Van Gogh, Walt Disney, Steve Jobs. There's many things they had in common, but what is something they all had in common? The last day of their life, or the last week of their life, they were working.

Leonardo da Vinci carried the Mona Lisa with him until he died. And he definitely didn't paint the Mona Lisa for adulation because he never like showed it to anyone. Vincent Van Gogh sold one painting in his life. He died obscure artist in the cornfield. Unclear what happened. Maybe killed, like unclear what happened, but did it because he loved it. Walt Disney, last day of his life, he was laying in a hospital bed, his brother Roy, Roy was like rubbing his cold feet, dying of lung cancer, looking at the ceiling tiles, which were a grid, imagining Disney World. Steve Jobs, Hiroki said the last couple weeks of his life, he like showed him like marketing, like he was still like looking at products. Now, some people can look at that and interpretation as, "Oh, that's sad. They weren't spending time with family." By the way, Vincent Van Gogh and Da Vinci didn't have families. My understanding is Steve and Walt spent time with their family at the end of their life. But I don't see that as a sad story. They're working in the end because I think they did what they loved. And Mozart, you know, the great artist in history, did what they love. My motivation is the motivation of an artist. I remember asking, you know, I just want my motivation is to create something great. That is my motivation. I would like to be successful. I want our shareholders to get a return. I would like employees to feel they're at a great company. I would love to make a huge impact in the world. But mostly, I just want to make something.

I feel like I'm a designer more than I am a CEO. And I might be afforded one of the greatest, biggest canvases of any designer in human history. Cuz usually designers are just not given this many resources. It's almost like a glitch in a system. I like figured it was almost like accidental. I like some error beds allowed me to crack this glitch and get all these resources I wasn't supposed to get.

But I'm not letting go. And so my motivation is

that of an artist. I just want to make incredible things.

It's a beautiful almost closing thought given the tools now at our disposal that everyone can do that if they want. And I think everyone's an artist. All children are born artists. The problems remain one as you grow up. AI is the opportunity for all of us to become artists and scientists and creators. We don't have to be consumers anymore.

We can be creators. What a shift. True creators. And we hear the word creator, you think social media performer. That's one way to create. You can perform. The problem is I think creator has been performance. Now creator can be create. Make everyone can make now. It's amazing.

Maybe I'll just share one other thought. God, this seems like the most exciting time to be alive like in human history. I mean, I'm kind of biased, but you know, this is the greatest invention probably in human history. AI, it is the ultimate creative expression. It is the ultimate platform shift of platform shifts of platform shifts.

I the most recent why I come to dinner, I looked at all the entrepreneurs in the audience and I said, I'm kind of jealous because here I am on stage pretending like I'm the successful guy talking to you, the young kids. And 2 3 years ago, I used to say I would never do it all over again cuz I'm afraid I would never have this level of success again. Part of me wishes I can be 26 and get rid of all success and see what's possible again. And then I realized it's age to number. I I can still act like I'm 26. I'm still young. I still got more in me. I'm just getting started. We're all just getting started. This is the most exciting time to be alive. And my god, like we can design anything now. It's unbelievable.

The last question I ask everyone's the same. What is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you? Oh, it's such a good question. The kindest thing, the biggest gift anyone's given me is believe in me. And I think the biggest gift you can give somebody or one of the biggest gifts is believe in you.

A couple examples. When I was 16 years old, um I transferred to a public high school. I was really into art. I was a pretty good artist. I didn't know how good I was. And I had a teacher named Miss Williams and she believed in me and she I remember telling her telling my parents he's going to be a famous artist. I'd never became famous artist but it gave me confidence that I was actually good at something because I wasn't that good at hockey and I I wish I was and I wish I could make my dad proud of ice hockey. I just didn't get very far. And suddenly that belief set me on a path and that that moment I said I'm going to go to art school. And that moment I realized I can decide to be happy the rest of my life. When you're a child, you do things cuz you're forced to. And like 20% of your life you get to do whatever you want and 80% of your life you go to school and you do things and you're forced to do them. And I said I can be happy the rest of my life.

I came to Silicon Valley. I met Michael Cable and the guys at Justin TV and they believed in me. They were early YC people. Paul Graham made an exception to let me an early Y come. He believed in me I was an engineer and he almost never funded non-engineers. He thought the idea was not a good idea actually. He said people are actually doing this. I go yes. He goes what's wrong with them? But he believed in me. My investors I can go down the list of investors. They believed in me. Joe and Nate believed in me. I was a I had no business being a CEO. Joe somehow believed in me. I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the generosity of people believing in me and in helping me. And I think the greatest gift I can give back in believing in others and help them and not pull the ladder up behind me but to like really show them. You know, I had the great privilege to eventually like join the giving pledge and you have to write a letter. I remember my letter was if you could ask my high school teachers who would join the giving pledge, they wouldn't have guessed me.

The basic idea in my life philosophy is we all have unknown potential. And I think we have these stories in our own head about what we're capable of. And to go back to John Wooden, somebody once asked him, I think like what's the secret to success? And he said, "I only ask my players to do their very best." And they, the person goes, "Oh, wow. That seems weird. That sounds like what like a parent says of the kid who like loses all the time." Goes, "Here's a catch. I saw potential in people they didn't see in themselves. And that's my management philosophy. When I tell somebody it's not good enough, I'm not saying you're not good enough. I'm saying I see potential and you don't see in yourself. That is the most motivating thing you can do to say I believe in you and I believe you can do even more." And people will they will they will they will climb a mountain for that type of thing.

And maybe the way to finally end this whole conversation is the most important person ever that you can believe in is yourself. And I think a lot of us that are entrepreneurs were driven by insecurity. We're driven by some hole. Not all of us, but a lot of us. Something in our childhood, something. A lot of us were not the coolest kids or whatever. And there's something in us we wanted to prove. And and then you get really successful and you still have imposttor syndrome. And and a lot of a lot of like the path to happiness and salvation is just the path of like learning to believe in yourself. And you know, for me, I only believed myself long after other people believed in me. And now my gift is to try to give it to others.

Beautiful place to close. Brian, thanks for Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks, man.

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