Brian Chesky is the founder and CEO of the roughly $85 billion home-sharing business Airbnb. The company has been around for nearly 20 years and has had its ups and downs, but Chesky is still adamant that he will overtake the hotel industry. And in 2025, Chesky says Airbnb will roll out the biggest updates to the business ever.
Fortune Next to Lead editor Ruth Umoh sat down with Chesky to discuss his contrarian management philosophy, why most business advice books are wrong, and why he doesn’t believe in employee autonomy.
Fortune Next to Lead editor Ruth Umoh sat down with Chesky to discuss his contrarian management philosophy, why most business advice books are wrong, and why he doesn’t believe in employee autonomy.
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00:00I don't believe in autonomy.
00:01You don't?
00:01No.
00:02Why's that?
00:03Because you want to be autonomous starting your own company.
00:04I don't believe in it.
00:05I don't think employees want autonomy.
00:07I think that is a giant misnomer.
00:09Do they want to have some element of autonomy of how they do their jobs?
00:13Yes.
00:14But I do not think that the vast majority of people
00:17are actually happier in a truly autonomous environment.
00:21Brian Chesky is the founder and CEO
00:23of the roughly $85 billion home-sharing business Airbnb.
00:28We weren't visionaries.
00:29What we were were people that had an experience no one else had.
00:32The company has been around for nearly 20 years
00:34and has had its ups and downs,
00:36but Chesky remains adamant that he will overtake the hotel industry.
00:40I really had to evolve by empowering and enabling,
00:43which is totally different than doing.
00:45You have to go from doing it yourself
00:47to enabling everyone else to be able to do great work themselves.
00:50In 2025, the self-made billionaire plans to roll out
00:53the biggest updates to the business ever.
00:55I sat down to understand how he sees the industry,
00:58how he plans to take hotel market share,
01:00and his management philosophies behind being in founder mode.
01:07You've been inadvertently linked to this spirited debate
01:10over founder mode versus manager mode.
01:12I know you didn't come up with those terms yourself,
01:15but I'm curious why or whether you think this so-called founder mode
01:19is the best way to run a company,
01:21is the best way to be a successful leader.
01:23I think it is. I think it is.
01:25I think founder mode, Paul Graham coined the term.
01:29Basically, I'll give you a little bit of background.
01:31I spoke about my journey being CEO.
01:34And when I started Airbnb, I was a founder.
01:36I ran it the way a founder would run the company.
01:38I was in the details. I knew everything going on.
01:41I was the chief product officer of the company.
01:43And then I hired a bunch of executives
01:45as we grew and went into hyper growth.
01:48And did all these things everyone told you to do,
01:49like hire great people, empower them to do their job,
01:52give them space, and the results were devastating.
01:55It's not that you shouldn't hire great people or empower them,
01:58but you have to be in the details.
01:59You have to be close with them.
02:01You have to, as a CEO, set not only the vision,
02:04but the rhythm. I review all the work now before it ships.
02:08I am the chief editor of the company.
02:10This flies in the face of everything we're taught about modern leadership,
02:13except when you go through history,
02:14many of the best companies in history,
02:16from Steve Jobs to Walt Disney to today with Jensen,
02:20Elon, or many others.
02:21They're people that are in the details.
02:23Now, a lot of people, they hear this and say,
02:25wait, isn't that like micromanaging?
02:28There is a difference.
02:29You can be in the details of people without telling them what to do,
02:33working through problems with them.
02:34And by the way, if your argument is you hire great people
02:37and you empower them to do their job,
02:38how do you know they're great if they're not in the details?
02:40Why are you not in the details, but the board is auditing you?
02:43If you're not in the details, you have leaders not in the details.
02:46So this is not about being a founder.
02:49It turns out this is more natural.
02:51This is the natural way for founders to run it.
02:53But this is not a this versus that.
02:55This is not about non-founders.
02:57This is about a mentality of belief
03:00that great leadership is presence, not absence.
03:04And most CEOs of most companies are not present.
03:08They're fairly absent.
03:09I believe the CEO should be the chief product officer of the company.
03:14Why? Because the purpose of a company is to make a product.
03:17And so why wouldn't the CEO be the expert of the product?
03:20You said that early on distancing yourself from the details was deleterious.
03:24How so? So many ways, like customer service.
03:27Joe and I have a phone number, gave customers our cell phone.
03:32We would answer the call.
03:34And then one day we're like we need to hire someone
03:36who knows more about customer service than us to do it.
03:38And then we just let them build our customer service
03:40and I could do it for every function.
03:42And what people do is they hire people and they just let them do their job.
03:46That is wrong.
03:47No leader should ever, I don't think, do that.
03:51Here's what they should do.
03:52This is a bad analogy.
03:53One time I'm a terrible golfer, but I went to get like a golf instruction.
03:58And I had a golf instructor and they taught me how to swing.
04:02And they would have to do repetition after repetition after repetition.
04:07Thank God they were there because if they weren't there,
04:09I wouldn't know how to swing.
04:10I would develop a wrong swing and they'd have to correct me.
04:13So when you hire people,
04:14the first thing is you should interview as many employees as possible.
04:17I interviewed the first probably 400 employees.
04:20The directs to my directs, I treat as a dotted line to me.
04:24I'm the co-hiring manager.
04:25And when people start, we start in the details,
04:28which one could call good management.
04:31Like apprentice-based model.
04:32Even if they know more than you about their function,
04:34they don't know more than you about the company or your standards or your pace.
04:38And they don't know how to integrate.
04:39So you have to help them.
04:40And over time, like the golf instructor,
04:42they stop watching your swing and you let go of the details.
04:45Now, if you don't do this, you end up with leaders that won't be successful.
04:50They're afraid to come to you. You go in the details later
04:53and you undermine their confidence. They sometimes hire the wrong team.
04:57If you have to replace a leader, you have to replace the team.
04:59They don't actually collaborate with other groups
05:02and you end up having 10 different teams
05:05or a hundred teams going in a hundred different directions.
05:08And maybe they use different technology stacks.
05:11They have different marketing messages going out.
05:13The whole company seizes to row in the same direction.
05:16And when this happens, there's bureaucracy.
05:19There's politics. There's a sense of a lack of accountability.
05:22Then there's complacency and people feel like they work for a big company
05:26and customers start to realize the product hasn't changed
05:29and the brand doesn't stand for anything.
05:31These are all things that come from an absence of leadership
05:35where a CEO is not being adequately involved in the details of the product or the organization.
05:39Let's use that really great golf swing analogy.
05:41At what point do you stop holding their hands and helping them swing?
05:44Because employees, they do want autonomy.
05:46So at what point do you say, okay, you're empowered enough.
05:48Go forth and flourish. Does that happen?
05:50I don't believe in autonomy. You don't? No.
05:52Why's that? Because you want to be autonomous starting your own company.
05:55I don't believe in it. I don't think employees want autonomy.
05:58I think that is a giant misnomer.
06:00Do they want to have some element of autonomy of how they do their jobs?
06:04Yes, but I do not think that the vast majority of people
06:08are actually happier in a truly autonomous environment.
06:11Let me tell you why I don't think autonomy is super helpful.
06:15There's a scenario where you're totally autonomous.
06:17You're allowed to have your own budget, hire your own team, do whatever you want,
06:21except you need legal to sign off on everything
06:25and you need the finance team to sign off on your budget.
06:28So you need to actually go through the planning process.
06:30You need to integrate with the technology.
06:32In other words, this notion of autonomy
06:35is such a fallacy in modern corporate America
06:39because companies are organizations.
06:42Organization quite literally means we organize people to work together
06:45to do something, rowing in a boat.
06:48Now, what people don't want is a lack of empowerment
06:52and they want to be able to make decisions on their own.
06:54But I don't think people, for the most part, want to be disintegrated.
06:58They want to be integrated.
07:01So I think that's really, really important.
07:02But to answer your question, because I think you're getting at it,
07:05because I challenge the notion that people want autonomy.
07:07I think they say they want autonomy.
07:09I think their actions don't say the same thing.
07:11If you look at retention, retention I find in engagement employees
07:15are often highest when they really love the people they're working with
07:19and they're collaborating and working well.
07:20Now, there are some people, like me,
07:22that probably shouldn't be in an organization.
07:23We should start companies.
07:25And I also think if you don't want to work in an organization, start a company,
07:27we could use more entrepreneurs in the world as well.
07:31But yes, you let go over time.
07:33So let's say somebody's new.
07:35I'll meet with them weekly.
07:37At some point, maybe by the 20th week,
07:40we don't need to meet every week.
07:41Now we can go every other week.
07:43But it's only after three or four in a row where,
07:45yeah, this seems like a slightly unnecessary frequency.
07:49So that would be the judgment call.
07:50And yes, eventually one day you check in less and less frequently.
07:54When did you flip this switch to founder mode?
07:56Because you said the advice early on was to, again, be very hands-off.
08:00So what was, I guess, the catalyst to flipping this switch?
08:03What were the immediate impacts?
08:04Well, that's pretty recent.
08:05So the company was doing quite well, even though you're distanced.
08:09So started the company in 2008.
08:112009, went on a rocket ship for 10 years.
08:13And so the rocket ship took off, and I was acting like a founder.
08:18And for the mid-2000s, it was great.
08:21By 2015, 2016, five, six years in,
08:25I started feeling like I didn't know what I was doing.
08:27And I think people are kind of born good founders, so to speak.
08:31I kind of probably was.
08:33No one's born a good CEO.
08:34It is such a non-intuitive job.
08:37And not only is no one born a good CEO,
08:40but many of us CEOs believe that almost all the books
08:44and information in business schools written about it are wrong.
08:46They're quite literally the opposite advice of what is appropriate.
08:51Paul Graham would call it books about manager mode, not founder mode.
08:55But again, you don't have to be a founder to do it.
08:57And so in late 2019, growth was slowing, cost was rising.
09:05I remember an employee that was an early employee just said,
09:07it's just hard to work here.
09:09I work 80 hours a week, but I'm only doing 10 hours of work.
09:12And it's like 70 hours of effort to do 10 hours of work.
09:15They described it as like working on a treadmill.
09:17We had a lot of bureaucracy.
09:19We had meetings about meetings.
09:20Anyone watching and they're in an organization
09:22where there was a meeting about how many meetings there are?
09:25It was just that kind of stuff.
09:27There was politics.
09:28There was just a lot of things creeping in,
09:30all the bad words in the big company.
09:33And then I met two people that changed my life.
09:35One was Johnny Ive, who was the head of design at Apple.
09:39We were reacquainted.
09:40And the other was Hiroki Asai, who was the creative director at Apple.
09:44And they showed me this other way of running a company that Steve Jobs did.
09:48And I couldn't believe it because Steve said
09:51he wanted to build the world's largest startup.
09:52So we had a functional organization of as few employees as possible.
09:56All the managers had to be in the details, not just Steve.
09:59They all had to be experts.
10:00Steve reviewed all the work.
10:01He did these product reviews.
10:03And they all culminated in these big launches.
10:05And the entire company rode in a single direction.
10:09By the way, I asked like Johnny Ive,
10:11did you ever feel micromanaged by Steve Jobs?
10:14He said, no, I felt the most empowered I've ever felt in my career.
10:17Nothing against the post-Steve world.
10:20I bet you Johnny felt more empowered in the Steve world than the post-Steve world,
10:23even though Steve visited the office every single day.
10:26There's this notion that power is zero-sum.
10:28Either I have the power or the employees have the power.
10:31There's a scenario where we're all powerless.
10:33It's called a lot of Fortune 500 companies.
10:36There's also a scenario where I have power and I give that power to you.
10:39It's not zero-sum.
10:41So that's what I tried to do.
10:44And I met these two people late 2019.
10:48And I had this image of like not running it like Steve Jobs,
10:51but like taking some of these principles.
10:53But we're about to go public.
10:55And I can assure you the worst thing you should do before you go public
10:58is like blow up the company and like reorganize it.
11:00So I don't know what to do.
11:02All of a sudden, it's late January.
11:04And I'm in a meeting and they're like our China business has dropped 80%
11:08because this thing called the coronavirus.
11:10And I'm like, what is the coronavirus?
11:12Well, eight weeks later, you know, everyone was talking about it
11:16and we lost 80% of our business globally in eight weeks.
11:19That's like in 18 we are going 100 miles an hour and slamming on the brakes.
11:22It was very bad.
11:24And we went from, you know, the hottest IPO probably since Uber
11:28to journalist, like respected journalist asking,
11:32is this the end of Airbnb?
11:34And I said, well, you know, Andy Grove from Intel once said,
11:39bad companies are destroyed by a crisis,
11:41good companies survive a crisis,
11:42but great companies are defined by a crisis.
11:46I said this is going to be our defining moment
11:47and I now have a blueprint.
11:49We're going to go back to not the Navy,
11:50but the Navy SEALs of startups.
11:52We're going to like be this really lean elite organization
11:55where not only am I in the details,
11:56we're all in the details.
11:58And by all being in the details,
11:59it's like one shared consciousness.
12:02It was the best thing we ever did.
12:04We made these changes and I think we've kind of in a way never looked back.
12:07The company went from losing money to one of the most profitable companies
12:11in all Silicon Valley.
12:12We make more free cash flow for every dollar earned
12:15than almost any company in Silicon Valley.
12:17We've made over 500 improvements to the product in three years alone.
12:21And most importantly, the next couple years,
12:24we're going to be launching new products and services.
12:26The Airbnb brand is a noun and a verb used all over the world.
12:29It means to get a house by the night.
12:32One day, the Airbnb brand will mean something more.
12:36I'm going to circle back on your future expansion plans.
12:39But first, I want to bifurcate the next question.
12:41When you decided to restructure the organization
12:43or really how, you know, or getting back into the details,
12:46I should say, first, how long did that take in totality
12:49and how receptive were employees?
12:51Because it's quite a shift from what they'd known,
12:53especially those who had been with you for quite some time.
12:54I have to forewarn that like when a CEO gets in the details,
12:58it's initially, people are initially pretty concerned
13:02and not super receptive.
13:04Again, why?
13:06Because it flies in the face of what everyone knows, right?
13:11Employees believe that when things are dysfunctional,
13:14it's because leadership is too involved.
13:15Not that there's an absence of leadership.
13:18They assume that employees want a lot of autonomy,
13:21not realizing that autonomy can also lead to powerlessness,
13:24that you're just left in a bureaucracy that you can't navigate
13:28and without political capital, you go nowhere.
13:30Like that's a real situation.
13:32So I would say I've been doing it for the last four years.
13:37If you want to take control of your company back,
13:38and it's usually, you know, vis-a-vis the organization,
13:41not the investors, it's a one to two year process.
13:45And I was working, you know, maybe 80 to 100 hours a week.
13:51So way more than most people want to sign up for.
13:54I think you can do it in fewer hours.
13:56But here's the amazing thing.
13:58It's like two years of a lot more work,
14:01and then you have a lot less work to do.
14:03So here's the paradox.
14:05I'm in many more details,
14:07and yet I have way more free time on my hands
14:09than the old way where I wasn't involved.
14:11Because in the old way, you still have meetings,
14:14but you have meetings for things going wrong.
14:16Because because you're not in the details,
14:18there's always someone resigning, leaving,
14:20a project has to be redone.
14:22You're brought in on like these,
14:24and then you have these very long meetings
14:26because no one knows who's the decision maker.
14:28And you have all these committees and there's a swirl.
14:30You have to sit through these really long presentations.
14:33And it's just a very inefficient way to run a company.
14:37So...
14:37Are you meet and averse?
14:39Oh, no, absolutely not.
14:40The main thing, the main way I get work done is meetings.
14:43I am averse to bad meetings.
14:44What's a bad meeting?
14:47A bad meeting is a meeting with too many people,
14:49and there's only a few participants
14:50and a lot of spectators.
14:52If everyone's not talking,
14:54most meetings should have everyone contributing and talking
14:57or the meeting should be smaller.
14:58Almost every company has too many people
15:00and they're afraid in the name of being inclusive
15:03to uninvite people,
15:04but that's not what inclusion is.
15:05That's a slippery slope.
15:07You need as few people in a meeting,
15:09not as many people.
15:10Every meeting needs a leader.
15:12The meeting needs an agenda.
15:14It needs to be prepared ahead of time.
15:16And it needs to be clear who the decision maker is.
15:19A lot of times there's no clear decision maker.
15:21There's a bunch of peers trying to agree.
15:23Peers can't agree quickly.
15:24So then you end up with this committee vibe
15:27where people just talk endlessly without making a decision.
15:30There has to be a sense of urgency and action.
15:32So I just think,
15:34I feel like there needs to be a manual,
15:36like how to run a company,
15:37and it's not business school case studies.
15:39It's got to be like,
15:40here's just a checklist of things to do.
15:43Because,
15:44like for your job or other jobs,
15:46become a doctor,
15:46you go to medical school
15:48and they tell you the things to do
15:49and you don't just have to figure it out.
15:51And I think all of us,
15:53we have to figure out our market,
15:55our product,
15:55and we should.
15:56But why is every founder independently
15:59having to figure out management theory?
16:02Why are we doing that?
16:03Any decisions,
16:04and you kind of touched on this,
16:05any decisions you're like,
16:06I don't need to weigh on in this.
16:07I'll delegate this one.
16:08I'll give you an example.
16:09We do ads.
16:11We do these like really cool TV ads.
16:13And I used to review all the ads
16:16and do multiple reviews of ads
16:17because I was trying to develop an aesthetic with the team.
16:20Then pretty soon,
16:20I only need to review the ads once
16:23and give feedback in a meeting.
16:25Now,
16:26then they started just sending to me
16:27and if I have a problem,
16:28I'll tell them.
16:29And now,
16:31a lot of the new ads I don't even look at.
16:33But when you launch this new Airbnb,
16:35I'm going to go all the way back
16:36to reviewing everything again
16:37because it's a giant step forward.
16:39Does that make sense?
16:40So there is a letting go,
16:41but it's not a permanent letting go.
16:42It's a letting go to do something transformational.
16:45Is Founder Mode just a Brian Chesky thing at Airbnb
16:48or is it embedded through every management level
16:50of the organization?
16:51You expect all of them to be in there.
16:52Every single one.
16:53Every single one.
16:54And that's where the name Founder Mode
16:56is a little bit confusing
16:58because it suggests like
16:59I'm the founder in Founder Mode
17:00and no one else is.
17:02But like,
17:02the principles of like being in the details,
17:05taking ownership,
17:06living with the product,
17:08everyone can do this.
17:09I mean, honestly,
17:09not just in business,
17:10like,
17:11government leaders should do this too.
17:13And some do,
17:13but a lot don't.
17:14You've repeatedly said you've tried to
17:17emulate how Steve Jobs ran Apple.
17:20He had a predilection for hosting about
17:22100 of the most important people at Apple
17:25and those selected were hierarchy agnostic,
17:27right?
17:28Just overall 100 top performers
17:31or the most important people.
17:32Would you ever replicate this at Airbnb?
17:34I did and I do it twice a year.
17:36You do.
17:37I don't call it top 100.
17:38Okay.
17:40Why is that?
17:41Well, I think top 100 quite literally means
17:43these are the most important 100 people in the company
17:46and what I do is I have a thing,
17:47I call it the roadmap review.
17:49So here's something crazy we do
17:51that Steve Jobs didn't do.
17:53We don't have an annual plan at Airbnb.
17:55We're one of the only companies,
17:56S&P 500 doesn't have an annual plan.
17:58We have a budget each year.
18:01Then we have a rolling two-year strategic plan.
18:04It's a two-year plan,
18:0424 months and it's updated every six months.
18:07We decouple the budget from the strategic plan.
18:11See right now everyone watching probably
18:13if they work at a big company,
18:14I guarantee you what's happening is the CFO
18:16and the CEO have told 20 teams in their company
18:20to tell us like what you're going to do next year,
18:23your strategic plan and what you need,
18:24your budget and your headcount
18:25and everyone's going to ask for the world
18:27and then you're going to say no
18:28and you're going to have this negotiation.
18:30Now you have this reconciliation
18:31and that's how most companies do planning
18:33and it's crazy.
18:34What we do is we do a budget like a week.
18:37It's like here's what we're going to spend.
18:39We have a rolling two-year plan
18:40which is a strategic roadmap.
18:42I pick the hundred,
18:4480 to 100 people in the company.
18:46I've realized twice a year is the better frequency for us
18:48because we want to have a rolling two-year plan
18:50every six months.
18:51It is not just the most senior people
18:53but it's generally the most senior people
18:55but I pick all the people.
18:57At most companies there'd be a protest
19:02if the CEO picked people
19:04because they would be considered their favorites
19:06and it would be considered unfair
19:08and not systematic
19:10and I think ultimately the CEO should have favorites.
19:14The favorites have to be unfair criteria
19:17but if you can't have favorites,
19:19if you can't say this is a high performer
19:21and this is what excellence looks like
19:24then you're going to be in big big trouble.
19:26That is just not good leadership.
19:28Now it can be fair criteria.
19:30You can have people making sure
19:31there's not unconscious bias,
19:34people keeping you honest,
19:35looking for disparate impact inside the organization.
19:38You can do a lot of surveys
19:40and you can use that to reinforce your assumptions
19:44but the notion that a CEO should not have discretion
19:47in decision-making of who should be in a room
19:50like the President of the United States would pick,
19:53we should pick too.
19:54It doesn't matter what level you're at.
19:56So we do that as well.
19:58Now I just want to say one thing.
19:59I take a lot from Steve
20:01but I'm not Steve Jobs.
20:02I'm not trying to be Steve Jobs.
20:03There's a lot of reasons why no one should try to replicate him.
20:06It's a different era, different skill set.
20:08We're a different company.
20:10So I've picked my own company
20:12but it turned out that a lot of what he did
20:15which is not that different from what Walt Disney did
20:17and other CEOs before him are good starting places
20:20and then I've adapted it.
20:23Who's your favorite at Airbnb right now?
20:25Favorite what?
20:26You said you pick favorites.
20:27Who's your number one?
20:28Oh, I have so many favorites.
20:29That's such a political answer.
20:30That's a politician's answer.
20:32I mean, I don't even know if I have a single favorite.
20:37Like I think of the company,
20:40we have 7,000 employees.
20:43I think of a company as 100 people
20:46and my job is to manage 100 people
20:48and it's their job to manage everyone else.
20:51That's the way I think about it.
20:53And so many of the people that I invite to Roadmap Review
20:56and there are dozens and dozens of it.
20:58I mean, the favorites, this is funny,
21:00my favorites are the people that I'm honestly like I'm texting.
21:03And your adorable dog.
21:04My dog on the home screen.
21:06So another thing I do is I will text a lot of employees
21:10and I'll call employees.
21:11If we want to talk, a meeting is not the best way to do it.
21:15I don't do one-on-one meetings really
21:16unless it's like somebody,
21:18I don't believe in one-on-ones
21:19and almost no great CEO in history has ever done them,
21:22very few.
21:24Like again, we can go down the list of CEOs
21:27who don't do one-on-ones.
21:28Why don't you?
21:29Almost every CEO did one-on-ones
21:31and they realized that the one-on-one model is flawed.
21:33It's a recurring one-hour,
21:35one-on-one meeting where the employee owns the agenda.
21:38And what happens is like they often don't talk about the things
21:41you want to talk about.
21:42You become like their therapist,
21:44but more, they notice they're bringing you problems,
21:47but oftentimes they're bringing you problems
21:49that you want other people in the room to hear.
21:52In other words, there's very few times an employee
21:54should come to you one-on-one with other people
21:56if they're concerned about something,
21:58if they're having a difficult time in their personal life,
22:01if they want to confide in something,
22:02they don't feel safe like telling a group,
22:05but that should be like infrequent.
22:07If that's happening frequently,
22:08that is a very ominous sign for your organization.
22:11So Jensen Huang says,
22:12I don't do one-on-ones
22:13because I want everyone to be part of the solution
22:16and get the wisdom.
22:17When you make lots of one-on-one decisions,
22:19then people feel like they don't have a decision made,
22:21they don't feel like they had a voice,
22:22they didn't have buy-in.
22:24So generally, you do group meetings.
22:26All of us choose to do group meetings.
22:28Now, there's a caveat.
22:30I do a lot of one-on-one calls and emails.
22:32I'll call someone and say,
22:34hey, what's the status of this?
22:35Like I think blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
22:37But it's not a recurring meeting with them owning the agenda.
22:40It's me when I need something,
22:42I'll call somebody.
22:43So it's I do meetings,
22:46they're recurring meetings,
22:47they're group meetings,
22:48everyone hears,
22:49there's notes taken.
22:51It's like very transparent what the topic was,
22:54what the decision made,
22:55who was in the room,
22:56who had input.
22:58So if the process was unfair in some way,
23:00I don't want to say unfair,
23:02inadequate,
23:03there's at least a record of the process that people can weigh in.
23:06And then there's really private communications,
23:08calls and texts that I'll do.
23:10And that's just partly relationship building.
23:13But that would be like a six-minute call,
23:15not a half hour or one hour one-on-one where we sit together.
23:19So most CEOs that I know started with recurring one-on-ones.
23:24And we've kind of moved away from them because of the perils of them.
23:28And these are some of the reasons.
23:30What other conventional management wisdom,
23:34leadership wisdom,
23:36have you found to be ill-advised and perhaps even damaging for leaders?
23:40Yes.
23:41Oh my God.
23:41Well,
23:42How long do we have?
23:43Yeah.
23:44So just so you know,
23:46when Paul Graham wrote Founder Mode,
23:48he never really said what it was,
23:50right?
23:50He said like,
23:51he actually even said in the beginning of the essay,
23:52like this isn't meant to describe the entire talk.
23:56So I wrote down,
23:58and I won't do it now obviously for obvious reasons of time,
24:00but I wrote down like what is Founder Mode?
24:02And it was like so far a list of 116 things.
24:06I'll give you like just a couple out of 116.
24:10Here's one that I do that almost no one else does,
24:12but I think many of the great CEOs have.
24:15I have direct reports,
24:17right?
24:17I'm a CEO,
24:18so I have a C-suite,
24:20whatever you want to call it,
24:21a CTO,
24:22a CFO,
24:22a chief business officer,
24:24a head of policy comms,
24:25a chief legal officer.
24:26So,
24:27you know,
24:27sometimes people call them executive vice presidents,
24:31SVP,
24:32senior vice presidents through your senior leadership team.
24:35And most people believe it's your job to manage that team
24:39and it's their job to manage their team.
24:41All their directs report to me too.
24:45So the directs to my directs do a report to me.
24:48I am the co-hiring manager of all of them.
24:51I have this radical view that like I'll exaggerate mildly
24:56just to make a point.
24:58If my CFO says I found a candidate,
25:02they want to work for the company and they haven't met
25:06me,
25:06then I assume they're not good enough.
25:08I want you to hire people that don't want to work for you.
25:11They only want to work for you and I.
25:13In other words,
25:13I want you to overhire.
25:15People say I'm so good,
25:16I'd only report to a CEO,
25:17but I'd report to this organization because there's
25:22going to be a special type of CEO.
25:24So it allows people to overhire a little bit.
25:27Also,
25:28you don't want your team hiring their team,
25:31not feeling like your team because ultimately they're your
25:33people because when you see whatever retires,
25:38the people under them have an expectation that they might
25:41be promoted into the job.
25:43But if you didn't hire them,
25:44you weren't part of the process,
25:46then that's a big problem.
25:47You might not promote them and you might layer them and
25:51then they'll leave the company.
25:52So I skip level a lot.
25:55A lot of companies it's considered taboo to skip level.
25:58You're not trusting me.
25:59Why are you going direct to the people?
26:01I think it's critical for CEOs to skip level.
26:04I think a CEO should have at least 30 to 50 people
26:07they're talking to very regularly below the executive team.
26:10It could be texts,
26:11it could be calls,
26:12it could be bumping in on the hallways,
26:14but you need to be in the details of the company
26:17and you got to treat the directs to your directs as
26:19your directs.
26:20I think that's very critical.
26:21So and again,
26:22I totally get if people disagree with this.
26:24Most people probably do.
26:26That's why they don't do it this way.
26:27But I do think at least is a good conversation to
26:31challenge all these conventions and say maybe there's just
26:34another way of doing it.
26:35Let's at least give it a try.
26:36And from a productivity standpoint,
26:38you found it to be beneficial.
26:40Okay,
26:41so paradoxical.
26:42Yeah.
26:43Everyone said this is going to be a bottleneck.
26:45You're reviewing everything,
26:46you're going to slow down development.
26:47It's massively sped up.
26:49Decisions don't swirl.
26:51At large companies,
26:52people wait for months and months and months for a
26:54decision to get made.
26:55Here,
26:56it just happens every week.
26:57Yeah.
26:58Sometimes every day,
26:58sometimes every hour.
27:00So decision-making has sped up.
27:02The other thing people said is the really good people
27:04don't want to work like this.
27:06They want autonomy.
27:08It turns out this is a subjective assessment,
27:11but engagements up,
27:13employee turnovers down,
27:15and the best people are more retained than they used
27:19to be.
27:20The third thing,
27:20people said the best people aren't going to want to
27:23work in this environment.
27:24It sounds like your job are too narrow.
27:27And yet we've been hiring even more senior people in
27:30this type of organization because when they hear it,
27:33that really resonates with them.
27:34They're like,
27:34wow,
27:35I feel like I don't have to spend most of my time
27:38being like a bureaucrat.
27:40I can actually do great work all day every day.
27:44And even though my role sounds narrow,
27:45it's a very strategic role and I actually can weigh
27:48on everything in the company because we're so
27:49collaborative.
27:50So a lot of the paradoxical,
27:53in a sense,
27:53it's counterintuitive.
27:56And maybe that's the biggest lesson of all,
27:58that great CEOs and leaders aren't born and a lot
28:01of leadership is counterintuitive.
28:03Talk to me about your next phase of growth,
28:07starting with your newly minted co-host network.
28:09Yeah.
28:10So Airbnb is a great way to make money by essentially
28:16putting your home on Airbnb and you can make tens
28:19of thousands of dollars a year with an asset that
28:21you're already paying for.
28:23And so we were reaching out to prospective hosts
28:25asking,
28:26hey,
28:26if you can make all this money,
28:28why aren't you hosting?
28:29And a lot of people described they were interested
28:31in hosting,
28:32but they had a perception it was too much work.
28:35People say,
28:35I don't have the time.
28:37Or let's say someone here lives in New York.
28:40They've got a summer home in Florida,
28:42but they can't actually go to Florida every week
28:44and check the guest in.
28:46And so we thought,
28:47what if we built a marketplace,
28:48a network,
28:50where we match people with homes that don't have
28:52time with hosts that have time,
28:55but they don't have homes to or they have room
28:58to operate more homes.
29:00And that is exactly what we did.
29:01We built a network of co-hosts.
29:03We call it the co-host network.
29:05It's over 10,000 hosts in 10 different countries.
29:08These are some of the best hosts in Airbnb.
29:1173% are super hosts.
29:13The average rating they manage for properties is
29:16I think 4.86.
29:18And that's compared to a third-party property manager
29:22at Listen Airbnb,
29:23which is a 4.62.
29:25So if anyone's watching and they're like,
29:28hey,
29:28I would love to make like $20,000 a year on my
29:30house by renting a month or two a year,
29:33then all you have to do is go on Airbnb.
29:36You'll see a list of co-hosts in your area.
29:39We'll match you the very best one for you.
29:41You can message with them.
29:43They take a cut of your earnings.
29:45You negotiate that with them.
29:47They can do any or all of the hosting for you.
29:49They can help you set up your listing,
29:51take photographs,
29:53manage your bookings with guests.
29:54They can check guests in.
29:56They can make sure the entire place is equipped.
29:59They can give them recommendations.
30:01They can clean the place.
30:02They can do turnover.
30:04They can do everything soup to nuts or just part of it.
30:07We think there are millions of people
30:09that would love to put their home on Airbnb
30:11if they could trust the person managing their property.
30:14And now at The Coast Network,
30:15we think they can.
30:16Yeah.
30:16How many more properties do you think would be listed,
30:20let's say,
30:21in a year's time,
30:22in two years time?
30:22What's the expectation or the prediction there?
30:25We generally don't put out targets
30:26because then I get then because and I and it's a
30:29little bit hard to predict.
30:31But I do think that The Coast Network will,
30:35you know,
30:36eventually one day,
30:37like more than two years from now,
30:38unlock millions of homes.
30:40Yeah,
30:40millions of incremental homes.
30:42I wouldn't want to put a specific timeline on it.
30:43It's just too unpredictable.
30:45But millions of new homes.
30:46Part of this The Coast Network,
30:48presumably,
30:49is also just to augment the guest experience.
30:52Could AI do any of that,
30:53creating a chatbot that answers all the questions
30:56and does all the things that a property manager would do?
30:59Yes.
31:00Well,
31:01okay.
31:01Let me preface.
31:02Sure.
31:03The AI could do some of hosting.
31:06Okay.
31:08I don't think most people want a robot checking them
31:10in, quite literally.
31:11I don't know if they want that humanoid.
31:13See,
31:13I would.
31:14I could avoid all human interaction.
31:16So if that's the vacation you want,
31:18then that would be available.
31:20Most people want,
31:23would you want to go to a restaurant with only
31:24robots serving you?
31:25I would.
31:26Okay.
31:27I think you're a niche.
31:28You're a huge niche.
31:29I think you're a huge niche.
31:30I think most people don't want that.
31:32I think most people still want human contact.
31:35We're living in one of the loneliest times in human history.
31:38We used to live in a world where you would see people
31:40face-to-face.
31:41You have real connection with one another.
31:43And now we're living in a world where more and more
31:46people are being placed by machines.
31:48And there are times where that's wonderful and that's nice.
31:52But if you remove,
31:53you know,
31:53human interaction is inefficient.
31:55It's our temptation to automate what is inefficient.
31:59And one day you could like never leave your house and
32:01never meet another person and be kept alive.
32:04And I'm going to think,
32:05you know,
32:06that is a step forward for humanity.
32:08I still think people want human connection and especially
32:11when they're traveling.
32:12But we do have like keyless entry.
32:16We do have things like more and more of our customer
32:19services being automated.
32:21We do have AI suggested like kind of replies and messaging
32:25that can help us write messages.
32:27But we do think people still want a sense of a handcrafted
32:30experience.
32:32You might want to go to a restaurant with a robot.
32:34I guarantee you that won't be the most popular restaurant
32:37in the city and that most of those Michelin restaurants
32:39are the cool restaurants people go to.
32:41If they started automating those with robots,
32:43I think they're going to probably not be in business
32:44much longer.
32:45Yeah,
32:45fair enough.
32:46You've said or hinted at the fact that Airbnb is looking
32:50to pivot away from its core product of short-term rentals
32:53and expand far beyond that.
32:54What does that look like in practice?
32:57I mean,
32:57yeah,
32:57this is a great topic.
32:58So like the Airbnb brand basically is a noun and a verb.
33:02I'm going to get Airbnb.
33:03I'm going to Airbnb my place and it means to get a house
33:06for a few nights for a week.
33:07So what if the Airbnb brand meant so much more?
33:10And I think there's a lot of types of experiences and services
33:17that we could launch.
33:20It's hard to give examples because now I'm giving away
33:23the product.
33:24That's okay.
33:25Give us the scoop.
33:26Come have me back.
33:28Next May,
33:28here's I'll tell you next May.
33:30Okay,
33:30we're going to be unveiling an entirely new Airbnb.
33:33It's by far the biggest moment the company's history
33:35since its founding and you're going to see Airbnb take
33:38the model for short-term rentals or homes for short-term
33:41stays and we're going to bring it to all these new areas
33:45and hopefully you can come to the talk.
33:47Yeah.
33:47Well,
33:48I'm sure you saw Uber is looking to buy Expedia become
33:52this super app.
33:53Is that what you're hoping for Airbnb to be a super app
33:55in the travel space or?
33:57Yeah,
33:57I think that the word super app is certainly thrown around
34:01a lot.
34:01Sure, it's a bit nebulous.
34:04It's unclear if there are any super apps in the United States.
34:06A lot of people describe WeChat as a super app.
34:09I think that the new Airbnb launching in May will feel
34:13like much more than just an app.
34:15Will it be a super app?
34:16I don't know,
34:17but it will be an app where you can get a lot more.
34:21It will be a one-stop shop.
34:25Yeah.
34:25Yeah.
34:26Yeah.
34:26Yeah.
34:26Yeah.
34:27Yeah.
34:27Yeah.
34:27Yeah.
34:28Yeah.
34:28Yeah.
34:28Yeah.
34:29Yeah.
34:29Yeah.
34:29Yeah.
34:30Yeah.
34:30Yeah.
34:30Yeah.
34:30Yeah.
34:31Yeah.
34:31Yeah.
34:31Yeah.
34:31Yeah.
34:32Yeah.
34:32Yeah.
34:32Yeah.
34:32Yeah.
34:33Yeah.
34:33Yeah.
34:33Yeah.
34:33Yeah.
34:34Yeah.
34:34Yeah.
34:34Yeah.
34:34Yeah.
34:35Yeah.
34:35Yeah.
34:35Yeah.
34:35Yeah.
34:36Yeah.
34:36Yeah.
34:36Yeah.
34:36Yeah.
34:37Yeah.
34:37Yeah.
34:37Yeah.
34:37Yeah.
34:38Yeah.
34:38Yeah.
34:38Yeah.
34:38Yeah.
34:38Yeah.
34:38Yeah.
34:39Yeah.
34:39Yeah.
34:39Yeah.