Summary Brian Cheskyâs new playbook (Youtube) youtu.be
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Speaker 0 Way too many founders apologize for how they wanna run the company. They find some midpoint between how they wanna run a company and how the people they lead wanna run the company. That's a good way to make everyone miserable. Because what everyone really wants is clarity. And what everyone really wants is to be able to row in the same direction really quickly.
Speaker 0 And so I basically got involved in every single detail. And I basically told leaders that leaders are in the details. And there's this negative term called micromanagement. I think there's a difference between micromanagement, which is like telling people exactly what to do, and being in the details. Being the details is what every responsible company's board does to the CEO.
Speaker 0 It doesn't mean the board is telling them what to do. But if you don't know the details, how do you know people are doing a good job? People think that great leaders' job is to, like, hire people and and just empower them to do a good job. Well, how do you know they're doing a good job if you know the details? And so I made sure I was in the details, and we really drove the product.
Speaker 1 Today, my guest is Brian Chesky. Brian is the c l and cofounder of Airbnb, which he started in his apartment with his co founders Jo Nate, and has turned into an $80,000,000,000 global business with travelers and homes in 220 countries. I was very lucky to get to work with Brian for many years. And my sense is, if you ask people who they consider the most inspiring tech or business leaders today, Brian would be right near the top of that list. In our conversation, Brian shares an in-depth explanation of what's happening with product management at Airbnb, which caused quite a stir in the product world when he talked about this previously.
Speaker 1 We also get deep into Brian's new approach of how he runs Airbnb, including shifting away from traditional growth channels, like paid growth, and instead betting that if they just build the best possible product and tell people about it, growth will happen. Also, how the product team now operates, including having just 1 single road map across the entire company, and Brian staying very close to every design and every feature. We also get a bit into his personal life, including how he finds balance and avoids burnout, how he continues to learn himself so that he can stay ahead of the business and its growth, this is a very special episode for me and I'm thrilled to bring you Brian Chesky after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Sidebar. Are you looking to land your next big career move or start your own thing?
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Speaker 1 The old way of doing product management is over. Rediscover what's possible Brian, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 0 Well, thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 Did you ever think when I left Airbnb, 1, that I would have a podcast, and 2, that you'd be on my podcast?
Speaker 0 I had no idea you would become a podcast host and that you would have such a successful podcast. But, yeah, congrats on everything. It was awesome.
Speaker 1 I appreciate it. Congrats to you too, Brian. Things seem to be going great. Excited that you're here. I wanna start with the elephant in the room for a lot of listeners of this podcast.
Speaker 1 What is going on with product management at Airbnb? You made some comments at Figma config, and a lot of people got this impression that you eliminated product management Airbnb. And I've heard from a lot of product execs having boardroom conversations as a result of that. And they were trying to decide, should we remove product management from the company? Should we significantly cut product management?
Speaker 1 So I'm just curious to hear from you. What is the latest on your thinking on product management, and what's happening with product management at Airbnb?
Speaker 0 I spoke at Figma, you know, like, 4 or 5 months ago. I spoke to a room of designers. I then, got off stage. I saw people somebody tweet that said something to the nature of that I said I got rid of the product management function. All the designers cheering.
Speaker 0 So I wanna I wanna, you know, I wanna talk about 2 things. What I actually meant, because I didn't actually get rid of the people, And, also, why did the people in the room cheer? Because that's also, like, a 1 thing we should ask ourselves. I hope everyone listening to this podcast should understand where did that place come from? That 5,000 desires in a row cheered because I thought I eliminated the existence of a function.
Speaker 0 Because if I said I omitted the engineering function, no 1 would have cheered. It was specifically that function. So I wanna talk about what that might mean. It wasn't the people. It's the way they're working together.
Speaker 0 So we don't have any longer the traditional product management function as it existed with you and yours here. But we didn't get rid of people helping drive the product. What we did is we combine what 1 might call the inbound product development responsibilities of product manager with the outbound or marketing responsibilities of product marketing. That's the first thing we did. The second thing we did is we off boarded much of the program management functions that product managers may do to actual program managers.
Speaker 0 A A lot of people with the product management title are actually program managers. So we actually started off boarding some responsibilities to program manager. The last thing we did is we made the group smaller and more senior. So we don't really have a lot of junior product marketers. So the most senior people are called product marketers, but everyone has to understand how to talk about the product.
Speaker 0 So the basic idea is this. You can't build a product unless you know how to talk about the product. You can't be an expert in making the product unless you're also an expert in the market of it. And a lot of companies, what they do is they ship a product. It doesn't work, and they say we tried that.
Speaker 0 It didn't work. And if you say you tried it, it didn't work. My question is, was it a bad product, a bad strategy, or bad execution? Maybe it was a really well made product, but you had no distribution plan. You had no way to talk about the product.
Speaker 0 If you build a great product and no 1 knows about it, did you even build a product? So that is essentially what we do. We have a much smaller function. The people are much more senior. They have much more responsibility.
Speaker 0 The other thing, though, is that they do not control or drive designing or engineering. We are a fairly purely functional model. They manage by influence. They do not have control. Now you might ask, like, how does that work in a company where people can only manage by influence?
Speaker 0 Here's the amazing thing. We built and designed a company where you can manage by influence and no 1 has to like you. You don't actually have to have to win people over. Oh, and the last thing I wanna say is why does 5,000 designers cheer when the people thought I removed the product management function? Because I wanna say, I I don't know I don't know if I can speak on behalf of all the designers, but having talked to a lot of designers, I think designers in the valley are very, very frustrated with the product development process.
Speaker 0 Not to say the product managers, but they're extremely, frustrated. And I think a lot of designers feel like they're compromising. Many designers I know, heads of design, well known heads of design, I told them they're not designers. They're design administrators. They're running a design service organization because Silicon Valley often treats design as a service organization.
Speaker 0 You know? Like, design is catching things before it go out the door. It's not actually typically part of the development process. And I think this is not just bad for design. I think it's bad for product managers and engineers because we all wanna build the best products.
Speaker 0 And 1 day you wake up and a variety of phenomena might have happened. And if people are watching this from a large company, here might be some of the characteristics. The first thing you notice is that these different groups might be running on slightly different technical stacks. That's the first problem, and they may actually be require accumulating technical debt. The next problem you'll see is that there's a lot of dependencies.
Speaker 0 So 5 teams are going some different directions, but they all need a payment platform. And so that once it happens is that the teams that everyone's dependent on get this backup like a deli and people are going around the block. And then they are basically, like, at some point, they just kinda give up. So then the teams that are dependent on other people say, give me the resources, and I'll build this group myself. So instead of 5 teams going to marketing to get a campaign or to leverage some service, they start building their own marketing departments, their own groups.
Speaker 0 So now they're really becoming separate divisions, and this is where division comes from. Now once you have a division, your division is as successful as you are a priority. So now you have to advocate for your division, so there's a lot of advocacy. If you have dependencies, you've gotta persuade people by building relationships. And so the people that are like that build the best relationships are the ones that get the most resources, and that creates what we call politics.
Speaker 0 And so now politics have brewed in the company. And suddenly, people gets more subdivided, more subdivided, subdivided, and that creates another problem, which we call bureaucracy. And that bureaucracy means it's hard to know who's doing what. You can't like, people are going in different directions, and that creates a lack of accountability. When there's lack of accountability, then there's a sense that what I do doesn't matter, and that creates complacency.
Speaker 0 And then suddenly, a fast growing company becomes a big slow moving bureaucracy. This is a general arc that winds up happening. And then you end up having a situation where a company's done, like, 10 marketing efforts, but no customers heard anything. They have 1,000 of engineers. They shipped all these products, but a customer can't tell you a single thing you did.
Speaker 0 And, you know, marketing and engineering, like, don't talk to each other. It's not even they hate each other. They're, like, in different universes. I've always said that the health of an organization, 1 simple heuristic is how close there's engineering and marketing. And marketing is a lot of companies are like the waiters.
Speaker 0 Engineers are like the chefs, and the chefs yell at the waiters as they go in the kitchen. In fact, the waiters are the ones talking to the customers all day, and they also know how to sell things. So you really want them being joined at the hip, and you want engineers to be thinking about maybe how to talk about the products that they're building. So this is the problem that we had. And I also the the other thing we were doing is, as you know, Lenny, we're spending a lot of money in performance marketing.
Speaker 0 I don't think performance marketing is a bad thing. I think of marketing as a laser. I see my cofounder who obviously know well, Joe, used to have this metaphor of lasers, flash bulbs, and chandeliers. If you wanna light up a room, performance marking's a laser. It can light up a corner of a room.
Speaker 0 You don't wanna use a bunch of lasers to light up an entire room. You should use a chandelier, And that's what brand marketing is. But if you do need to laser in and balance supply and demand, then performance marketing is really good. It literally lasers in. Performance marketing though doesn't create very good accumulating advantages because it's not an investment.
Speaker 0 Now if you wanna build it permanently like Booking dotcom, if you have a really higher of a IROI, now you can have a performance marketing arbitrage business. But assuming you don't wanna arbitrage business, you actually need to be investing. And so we think of marketing as education that we're educating people on the unique benefits. So a lot of companies don't do product marketing. They do brand marketing, which are ads about the app, or they do performance marketing, but they're never really educating people about new things they're making in shipping.
Speaker 0 And because no one's marketing new things or shipping, there's no purpose to ship new things because you ship new things and people don't know them or use them or they're not educated. And so you try these big new things. People don't adopt them immediately, so then you get more and more incremental. Now what we do is we do we have a rolling to your road map. We don't even really do a annual plan.
Speaker 0 I mean, we as you remember, Lanny, when you were at Airbnb, we would have, like, 3 month planning cycles. Now planning cycle is just a budgeting cycle, and it's like most people only spend a week or 2 on it. Some don't spend any time on it. And we have a rolling 2 year product plan, the strategy product strategy roadmap that gets updated every 6 months with releases. We release products, every May and every November or October.
Speaker 0 Obviously, we did 1 today we can talk about. The entire company works together. They row in the same direction. And the product management also does the product marketing. So they're figuring out how people are gonna learn about it.
Speaker 0 They're doing the demos. They're understanding the story, the videos. They're, you know, figuring out all the customer touch points, making sure everyone understands it. Our product marketing works with communications. We, like, work months ahead of time on all the different assets.
Speaker 0 And when we're working on a launch, 1 of the first things we'll do is start figuring out what the story is. And the story will often dictate the product because, ultimately, you have to tell the story to people. But a story also is a really helpful way to develop a cohesive product. Right? We wanted a company where a 1,000 people could work, but it looked like 10 people did it.
Speaker 0 And so sorry. That was a bit of a brain dump, but that is a little bit of a universal theory for how we develop products now. And I could go into a lot more detail, but I probably will stop there.
Speaker 1 That was amazing. You touched on all of the things I wanna talk about. So I'm gonna Oh,
Speaker 0 geez. So I can go deeper and deeper because the rabbit
Speaker 1 hole Exactly. Exactly. So I'm gonna pull on a couple threads. The first is this idea of a single road map you talked about. And what this reminds me of is I I was talking to another very prominent CEO of a public company, and he pointed out that there's this cycle that he sees a lot of founders go through where they initially run the show.
Speaker 1 They're in charge. They tell people what to build. And then over time, they're encouraged to delegate and to empower, and it leads to a bunch of optimization work and small thinking maybe, and you talked about bureaucracy and politics. And then, eventually, you realize, I need to take the reins again and drive the ship and kind of take back control of what's happening. And it feels like you went on that journey.
Speaker 0 That's exactly how it went, and that's how it goes almost at every company I've heard of. By the way, I think that, like, many years ago, I remember, I think, reading a blog post by Ben Horowitz saying that a lot of people tell product led founders or engineering led founders to step away and delegate their product to other people. But suddenly, they delegated away the thing they're best at, the thing that is hardest for them to replace. So we don't have a chief product officer title, but if we had 1, it would be me. You know, they they I wouldn't have a chief product officer.
Speaker 0 I think the CEO should be basically the chief product officer of a product or tech company. And the CEO is not the chief product officer, then I don't know if they're a product or tech led company. Maybe maybe that's okay if they're an ops company or if they're a marketing company or if they're, like, not a tech company at all. But, ultimately, I think this founder CEO should be that person. So when we were starting Airbnb, it was probably the 3 of us.
Speaker 0 You know? As you know, like, I think Airbnb was a unique situation where it was 3 of us. I don't think any of us was that dominant. I probably played the closest thing to the role of the the people listening, like, the closest thing to the role of the product manager. But, again, I did marketing.
Speaker 0 I did design. I did, like, ops. I did, like, kind of a little bit of everything. So I was basically everything but engineering. And then as we grew, I started getting more and more hands off the product.
Speaker 0 And I always remember, Lenny, when you enter this, there was this paradox where the less involved I was in a project I mean, there was there to be clear, there were times I inserted myself and dysfunction occurred. That is absolutely true. And that was just a learning experience for me. But there's this other scenario where the less involved was in the project, the more spin there was, the less clear the goals, the less advocacy the team had, the less resources, the fewer resources they had. And then therefore, the slower they moved.
Speaker 0 And the slower they moved, the more they assumed it was because I was too involved. Right? Because people assume that that our natural equilibrium is to move fast. So if we're being slow, it's because of an overinvolvement in leadership. And therefore, I would get less involved.
Speaker 0 I would give teams more control. I would give them teams more empowerment. And the more I kept giving people what they asked for, initially, they may have been happy, but the outcome of it was always it seemed weirdly like they got less of what they wanted. They wanted to move faster, delegating down. So I think that things were getting worse and slower and slower and slower.
Speaker 0 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019. And by 2019, we're spending $1,000,000,000 on AdWords. We weren't really, like, investing in the brand. We were doing a huge amount of AB testing. I think AB testing is important in times.
Speaker 0 But, like, let me actually, let me let me let me let me clarify AB testing. We don't test blue versus green. We have a control and a treatment, like I think we did when you were a year. So we have a design. We might do a hold back occasionally to see how the thing is working.
Speaker 0 But if we do an AB test, there has to be a hypothesis. If we don't have a hypothesis and a is better than b, then we're stuck with b. And that's, like, a really, really big problem, but never you can never change it. And then imagine 10 teams doing AB testing and, like, imagine if you e designed software the way you designed a house or design house the way you've done software. And we AB test a sofa.
Speaker 0 And we said, like, well, how does this sofa work? And, oh, seems like with this sofa that we've a b tested, people spend more time in the living room. So, therefore, like, people are gonna like this room better. But, actually, the sofa has a relationship to the end stands, which have relationship to lamps, which have a relationship to the carpet or the rug, which have relationship to the television, which have relationship to the house and everything else. So you have to think about the whole cohesive system.
Speaker 0 And I started realizing that I remember working with ask I asked 1 person on your team, somebody you know well, and I asked him. I said, why is there I feel like I open our app and the product hasn't changed in, like, 4 years. I remember saying this, like, 2018, 2019. And he this person described that, you know, well, as just the way we're doing things. The initial way we're doing things to move fast had made us move slow.
Speaker 0 So we end up doing is it was now late 2019. I don't know what to do. I'm like, the product is slow. The app seems not changed. Costs are rising.
Speaker 0 I keep adding more people. There seems to be more, like, politics. By politics, I mean, advocating for, like, individual interest rather than the whole of the company. More bureaucracy, meaning, like, meetings about meetings about meetings and a lot of dependencies. People are describing working 80 hours and getting 20 hours of productive work done, which is, like, just like a crazy ratio a week.
Speaker 0 And I didn't really quite know what to do. And then right before the pandemic, I meet 2 people that really affected how I thought about things. The first is Hiroki Asai. Hiroki now works at Airbnb. He's 1 of my executives and actually product design product marketing design and marketing report into him.
Speaker 0 And he was a creative director for Apple. So he worked for Steve Jobs, was, like, basically dotted line to Steve for many, many years, came from graphic design, eventually ran all of marketing communications. Then Apple Marketing Communications, they actually, like, they actually designed the app. They made the app. They designed, like, all the marketing touch points for the store.
Speaker 0 Right? So it wasn't just ads. It was, like, every brand touch point, they were responsible. So everything flowed through marketing. And so marketing became the governing factor that made everything really organized.
Speaker 0 I met another person or got reacquainted a person named Jony Ive. And Jony Ive was the head of industrial design and chief design officer at Apple. And they described this way of running a company that was totally different than the way that I was running it. It. It was basically the way that Steve Jobs ran Apple from about 1998 till he died in 2011.
Speaker 0 Apple somewhat runs it this way today, but they are semi like, its services is turning into division, and they are just so big that I think it's, you know, not a 1 to 1 anymore, but they are still technically run this way. And I had this image of not being divisional because we were running, like, we had 10 divisions. We had a flights division and, you know, we had a homes division, which is divided to pro host and core host and luxe, and we had business travel, and we had, like, you know, a magazine, and we had experiences, and we had dot org, and we had China. So we had, like, these 10 different divisions all going in different different directions. And I created this culture where everyone would be a business manager and or a, you know, business leader, general manager, which made them wanna create many general managers.
Speaker 0 Right? And so the company kept getting subdivided, subdivided, subdivided, and that made a very, very difficult return. And this was all about me delegating responsibility. The problem is if you're running a divisional company, you're a product led founder, you're kinda what are you doing? Like, strategy, capital allocation?
Speaker 0 My job went from proactive to very reactive. I was reacting to a lot of things. I was in a lot of meetings, try to adjudicate different issues between groups. So then the pandemic occurs, and I have this image on my mind. It's like I have this dream that I could run a company much more like a startup.
Speaker 0 I remember going on a walk with Joe and Nate and Balinas. It was October 2019, and I told them I had this dream that I left the company 10 years ago, and you they just asked me to come back. And I said I was horrified at what I found. And they said, well, what did you find? I said, I found a company that, on the 1 hand, had amazing culture and people with a great mission, with a brand people really loved, but the we lost our design roots.
Speaker 0 Yeah. We weren't investing in the long term. We were obsessing over hitting metrics. We didn't actually have any cohesive understanding of what we were doing. It was really hard to get work done.
Speaker 0 A lot of the great people were leaving and cost was rising and growth was slowing. And that was exactly kind of what was happening. And then the pandemic occurred and we lost 80% of our business in 8 weeks. And then suddenly, we're like, oh my god. Like, I remember having a basically, staring into the abyss.
Speaker 0 And luckily, I've never had a near death experience, but the way it's been described to me is it's like your fly flashes before you your eyes and you have clarity. And that's what happened to our business. We had a near death business experience, and our business flashed before our eyes. And so suddenly, I basically got into action, and I said, I'm gonna run it this other way where I'm gonna get back and evolve in the details. And by the way, Lenny, here's the funny thing.
Speaker 0 Before the crisis, a lot of people felt like I was too involved in different areas. Once the crisis happened, guess what happened? People are like, what do we do? We need you more involved.
Speaker 1 And
Speaker 0 so I got more involved. And when I got involved, I made the following changes. The first thing I did is I took, like I said everything we're doing has to be written down and put into Google Google like a Google Sheet. It turns out people couldn't even write down everything they were doing. I remember 1 person told me, you you think we're doing too many things for me to ever be able to document.
Speaker 0 I'm like, what? But, anyways, we eventually got a room to write everything down. And I said, okay. We can do about 20% of these things. And so if everyone says, oh, I'm I might ever be simple.
Speaker 0 I'm only doing 3 things. Yes. But you're 1 of, like, a 1000 people. So, actually, we're doing 3,000 things. So to set a 1 team doing 3 things, 3 teams should do 1 thing.
Speaker 0 So we totally cut down the number of projects. We removed layers of management. I wanted to be as few layers as possible from leaders of team. We went to a functional model. We went back to a startup.
Speaker 0 So we said, we're not gonna have divisional leaders. We're gonna have design, engineering, product, and which turned to product marketing and marketing and communications and sales and operations, all the functions of startup. I said, we're gonna have fewer employees. We're gonna have fewer more senior people. There's a great saying that the best way to slow a project down is add more people to it.
Speaker 0 And so we felt like very few employees. We have fewer than 7,000 employees today. So relative comparison, I think Uber has 30,000. And this is not to say they're big. It's just to say that's how small we are.
Speaker 0 And we've really benefited from having not a lot of employees. So we had we made sure that every executive was an expert in their functional domain. So you know how there's a lot of engineering managers that aren't that technical or maybe not a lot, but they're they exist. Or there's designers, but there's design leaders who who lead the people. A design leader's job should be managing the design first, the people second.
Speaker 0 That's what Johnny did, or, like, they're they're interchangeable. I I could never imagine Johnny out at Apple just being a manager of people. He was looking and designing the work with the team. How do you manage the people without managing their work? How do you give them development if you're not in the details with them on the work?
Speaker 0 So the same thing is true that people had to be experts. Everyone had to be an expert. I stopped pushing decision making down. I pulled it in. I created 1 shared consciousness.
Speaker 0 I said the top 30, 40 people in company are gonna have 1 continuous conversation. Metrics are gonna be subordinate to the calendar. So we're gonna have a road map. It's gonna be a 2 year road map. We'll update the road map literally every month.
Speaker 0 People may wonder, well, like, what if the world changes? Yeah. It changes every day. So the road map's something where the next month doesn't change, but 2 years out, it changes. It's a rolling road map.
Speaker 0 And by the way, if Ukraine, like, gets invaded and you wanna, like, provide housing for refugees, you can still pivot people and adapt very quickly. We house a 112,000 refugees. So you still keep a reserve of resources to be able to pivot and do things because there's always unexpected events. I created this new function called product marketing. We basically describe what that is.
Speaker 0 I made the group much smaller. I took a lot of product managers. I reassigned them as program managers. I had many of them trained an actual program manager because their roles got much bigger. Program management Airbnb is a high status job.
Speaker 0 A lot of companies, it's like a coordination job. At Nerd Me, we said because we're gonna do launches, it's high status. We said we're gonna do 2 launches a year, and you can't ship something unless it's on the road map. So every single thing in the company, with the exception of some infrastructure projects, have to be on the roadmap. And then I'm going to review all the work.
Speaker 0 And so we create the CEO review schedule where I said, I'm getting back in the fall from the project and I'm going to design. I'm going to review all the product and all the marketing. So every project I would do review every year every week, every 2 weeks, every 4 weeks, every 8 weeks, or every 12 weeks, there'd be a cadence. And then I had a head program manager that would score all the projects, either they're green, yellow, or red, being they're on track or not on track to ship. Whether we thought there were work, we don't know until after we ship it, but I use the reviews of the work every single week.
Speaker 0 And the reason there's not a lot of bureaucracy and the reason you don't need any influence at Airbnb is I'd review the work. And if something wasn't happening, then I would, like, stop the meeting and say, why isn't this happening? And, like, we would all get together. And so you couldn't have a situation where, like, a team wouldn't collaborate. And so it would be like I could then feel the work of an of a individual engineer.
Speaker 0 Because imagine it's like we're a car company, and I I see the car prototype every week. And I noticed there's a there's a there's a something about the tire is off. Now I I can identify the individual person who was blocked. So every week, I would see I would try to see the equivalent of at least a semi assembly of the entire new product we were working on, which allowed me to identify with teams the different bottlenecks happening in the company. And the reviews were the thing that allowed us to dictate the pace.
Speaker 0 And so because we had annual we all these reviews, I didn't need to mandate people going back to an office. I didn't really care where they worked because I could track how well they were working because of the review cycle. I it's so these were these were, like, some of the changes that we made. We also started really building out much more of a marketing communications and creative function. We built our own in house creative agency.
Speaker 0 So we use production partners, but we don't use Wieden and Kendi or Shieter in those anymore. We actually build our own in house agency, so to speak, which is a creative group. The creative group does a lot of the the the not just the ads, but the creative on the product. So we got really, really functional. We got rid of a function called UX writing, and we combined it with marketing writing.
Speaker 0 We said, wait. Aren't the best writers, Like, why don't we just have the best writers do everything? Why is UX writing a separate function? Because, actually, the emails, the app, the ads should all be 1 voice. Now there may be people that come from a different background, like there are people that come from UX, but they all roll up to 1 function of writing.
Speaker 0 And writing should not go to design. Writing should go to a function called writing. Unless you want your head of writing to report to design, then that doesn't make sense. So we we we really make made a lot of those changes. Just if round up the question that you asked, I think that, like, way too many founders apologize for how they wanna run the company.
Speaker 0 I don't know why they do, but I think they apologize for how they run run the company. They basically find some midpoint between how they wanna run a company and how the people they lead wanna run the company. If you're a founder, what I would tell you is the problem with finding a negotiation between how you wanna run the company, the people you want, is that's a good way to make everyone miserable. Because what everyone really wants is clarity and what everyone really wants is to be able to row in the same direction really quickly. And also, if you try to appease employees, they may not even be there for the whole time.
Speaker 0 So we have entire projects, the company, where somebody advocated to do it. It was a big commitment, and then they left. And now we're still doing the project they advocated for. So it really has to be something that everyone wants to sign up for, not just the person who's there because they might not always be there. And so, you know, I basically got involved in every single detail, and I basically told leaders that leaders are in the details.
Speaker 0 And there's this negative term called micromanagement. And I think I think there's a difference between micromanagement, which is like telling people exactly what to do, and being in the details. Being the details is what every responsible company's board does to the CEO. It doesn't mean the board is telling them what to do. But if you don't know the details, how do you know people are doing a good job?
Speaker 0 People think that great leaders job is to, like, hire people and and just empower them to do a good job. Well, how do you know they're doing a good job if you know the details? And so I made sure I was in the details, and we really drove the product.
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Speaker 1 That's get eppo.com/lenny. You guys found such a unique way of working. I've never heard of a company working in these ways in so many contrarian ways. I think it's gonna be a really interesting case study as things progress. Essentially, what you've done is shut down traditional growth channels or at least limited them, paid growth and maybe SEO, maybe referrals, at least for a while.
Speaker 1 And you kind of shift it to, let's just make an awesome product and tell people about it. And our bet is that what's gonna grow. Do you feel like this can work for most other products, or is there less, like, a consumer specific opportunity? What advice would you give to founders that are thinking about, man, we should try something like this?
Speaker 0 I think that this methodology can work for everyone, but I don't think you have to be as ideological 100. I still think growth channels matter. To be clear, we still spend money on performance marketing. We still do measure conversion and we will do some experiments. Think of conversion and growth optimization as like running a football down a field.
Speaker 0 And think of these big, like, leaps as passive. You should probably be doing 80% passes, 20% running the ball down the field. And a lot of companies, they do 80% running down the ball down the field versus and 20% passes. So I think that this methodology will work for everyone. I mean, here are the things I believe.
Speaker 0 I'll give you a checklist. Number 1, I think that the CEO, unless they're not a product person, should think of themselves as the chief product officer and they should be involved in the product. Number 2, if you're not functional, I would at least think about everyone being really close together. So here's no way of saying it like every product manager should be interconnected and know what everyone else is doing. They shouldn't be independently siloed unless they're really all running like separate companies or separate orgs and they have no dependencies.
Speaker 0 I think that every leader should be an expert in what they're leading. There should be no people managers in the entire company. And when I say people managers, meaning your only responsibility is people, not the work or not the domain, because you can't manage people the void of their work. You know, imagine like a fire chief. They don't know anything about, like, putting out fires.
Speaker 0 Like, that's crazy. Like, you have to know the subject matter. People should aim to have as few people as possible on their team. I'm not saying eliminate people. I mean, grow slowly and do not be reckless.
Speaker 0 5 teams should do 1 thing. Rather than 1 team, do 5 things. So that's just a metaphor, but people should work together. I think that people should consider doing launches. You can, by the way, ship every hour of every day, but then package it and tell a story if you aren't gonna hold the product back.
Speaker 0 I think that team should use data, but they should also use research and intuition. There's a designer called Charles Eames that said you can't delegate understanding. If you're gonna do AB experiments or measure data, you have to understand what it means. I think that you have to have an intuition. Intuition comes not from arbitrariness, It comes from understanding.
Speaker 0 I would make sure that you have engineering and design, ideally report to the founder product led person. I would not have design under product unless you have an extremely good reason the product person kind of is a designer. I would try to think about product management, expanding the responsibility and including distribution to understand the customer and teaching people how to tell a story. I would try to make sure that the product managers are a combination of art and science. I do not think you want purely technical product managers doing things if they're going to work with nontechnical functions.
Speaker 0 Right? If they're only work technical functions, that's fine. But they don't work in nontechnical functions. I think that's a problem. I should make sure that marketing and engineering are interconnected.
Speaker 0 I would make sure that you have a few layers between the CEO and other people. If you're a CEO, every direct to your direct should be a implicit dotted line to you. So I treat every direct to my direct as if they're a direct report, a dotted line. I don't try to conflict with the direction of my team, but I always wanna know what another layer below me is doing. I think you should think of each release as a chapter of a story or like an episode of TV series.
Speaker 0 And you should think of your company in a 5 or 10 year story. You may not know where you are in 10 years, but you're telling this ongoing story. And most of all, I would say that everyone should row in the same direction. If there's only 1 thing I said in this interview today, which I'm not sure what it would be, but I think a good candidate is try to get everyone to row together in the same direction. Otherwise, why the hell are you all in the same company?
Speaker 1 Speaking of rowing in the same direction, you had a huge launch today. I know you wanted to talk about it, your winter release, and it kind of is the culmination of a lot of the things you're talking about. I'd love to hear just some of the stuff you're launching.
Speaker 0 Let me just back up, Selene. So Yeah. You know this problem really, like well, 1 of the best things of Airbnb is that we're this marketplace where guest and host come together, and we have all this unique inventory and people, you know, list on Airbnb. And every home is 1 of a kind, and we have 7,000,000 homes, and there's all the surprise and all this delight. The problem is that every home is 1 of a kind, and you often don't know what you're gonna get.
Speaker 0 And so a lot of guests have described checking into Airbnb as a moment of truth, where when you open the door that, you know, the home you find out if the home is exactly the home that you booked. And this turns out to be a big problem for people wanting to book at Airbnb. And when we survey guests or people who don't use Airbnb, the number 1 re the hotels are not as special. They're not as unique. But the advantage they have is you know what you're gonna get.
Speaker 0 You know exactly you're gonna get. And so what we found is that reliability is Airbnb's Achilles' heel, or at least it has been. That, you know, with hotels, you know you're gonna get an Airbnb you don't always know you're gonna get. And so we asked ourselves, what if we could combine the uniqueness of Airbnb with the reliability that you've come to spec in a hotel? And that's what we've done with guest favorites.
Speaker 0 Guest favorites are, you know, homes that guests in our community love the most. We took 370,000,000 reviews on Airbnb, plus millions of customer service tickets, plus all the host cancelation data, and we use all the signal to create the top 2,000,000 homes that this collection of 2,000,000 homes that we call guest favorites because the gallons of the guests rate the highest, we think combine the uniqueness of Airbnb with the reliability you come to expect no tell. And I can't imagine there's a lot of use cases where you wouldn't want to book a guest favorite. We think that's also part of this broader system of readings and reviews. You see, as you know, Airbnb is built on a system of trust, and we invented this new way for people to trust 1 another, you know, at least at scale, you know, through through through living together, certainly.
Speaker 0 And we felt like the rating review system could use a little bit of an upgrade. So we obviously made some upgrades to ratings and reviews. And the final thing, and this brings up another point I might bring up, is we've completely overhauled the host tab. So, you know, 1 of the most important things when you get to an Airbnb is the listing is accurate. But the problem is that a lot of host listings don't have all the details up to up to date.
Speaker 0 So they might not, like, describe perfectly their listing. They might not have filled up their amenities. They might not have a photo tour. And the reason why as we're doing research is because they found it was hard to manage their listing. And it was hard to manage your listing because it was designed as this hodgepodge thing by different teams over many years.
Speaker 0 Oh, here's the other thing, Lenny. When you're at Airbnb, we had guest team and a host team.
Speaker 1 Mhmm.
Speaker 0 We don't have a guest team and host team. We have a design team. We have a marketing team. We have an engineering team. The reason we don't break the app into guest and host anymore is because reviews affect guest and host.
Speaker 0 It turns out that almost everything involves connecting the guest and host. And you have separate teams that tend to have separate roadmaps that go in separate directions and become incompatible. So we have product marketers that are responsible for guest and host things, but there's the the designers are and the engineers are fairly fungible and they can move from project to project. And then we keep some people, especially the product marketing people, on a domain area, but we really wanna make sure that we have designers and engineers covering a much larger surface. And so so that's what we did.
Speaker 0 We have this incredible new tab called the listing tab that we designed. It's quite possibly 1 of the nicest things we ever designed. If you go to my Twitter account, you'll see a little sizzle reel from some of the design we've done. By the way, the design is a whole new aesthetic. I'd like to, like, make the announcement that I think flat design is over or ending.
Speaker 0 You know, I think if you remember the 2000 was dominated by skeuomorphism. The 2000 tens have been dominated with the launch of iOS 7 by flat design. I think we're gonna move back into a world with color, texture, dimensionality, more haptic feedback, but I don't think it's gonna be skeuomorphism where it pretends to be like a wood drain to reference like a dashboard or leather, but I think it's gonna have a sense of dimension. I think the reason why is we're spending more and more time on screens, and we want the screens to replicate some of what we see in the natural environment, light, texture. I think it's more intuitive.
Speaker 0 It's more playful. I think AI allows the development of more sophisticated interfaces. People in AI are gravitating to image generating art that has got more dimension to it. And so I think that we've we've really started to push this more three-dimensional, colorful aesthetic that I think I think it's gonna be where a lot of interface design is going. And we built this AI powered photo tour where we create our own AI computer visioning language that we trained on a 100,000,000 photos, and it can basically scan all your photos and organize them by room.
Speaker 0 So that's what we did today. Maybe just to round it up, what I would say is that none of this would have been possible in the old way of working. You know, we could have theoretically launched a lot of these features, but, you know, really getting them to work together has been key. And guest favorites has required the guest. Yeah.
Speaker 0 People, you know, you have to work with guests. You have to work a host. You have to essentially, you know, you know, you have to you have to, like, figure out how to communicate to the market. So it's a much more integrated approach.
Speaker 1 The designs you talked about, they are incredibly cute. You tweeted a little video of a lot of them, like, the couch with little textures on it, and, it is really cool. Also, the listing tab. I think people that aren't hosts don't understand how important the listing experience is to a host. That's like I think how many hosts are there?
Speaker 1 7,000,000 something like
Speaker 0 There's there's there's 7,000,000 listings. Yeah. Over 7,000,000 listings.
Speaker 1 Yeah. And so that's, like, the home base. That's, like, the small business platform for millions of people. And so I I worked on the host sites. I have a special place in my heart for host features, and I feel like travelers don't really appreciate the value of that part of the product.
Speaker 0 Well, yeah. You you did some amazing work there. Yeah. I think that, like, the big lesson, Lenny, the other thing we learned is to create a great guest experience, you need great host. And to have great host, you need great tools.
Speaker 0 And so if you wanna create a great experience for guests, it often starts with building great tools for host to enable them to buy the great experience for guests. And so that was 1 of the theories behind listing tab is we're gonna build great tools for host. They're gonna love it. And we also felt like if we put care in design of our app, the hosts are gonna see that and that they're gonna actually put care into hosting even more than they already do. And they they do put a lot of
Speaker 1 care in now. Speaking of great products, a defining characteristic of Brian Chesky in my mind is how big you make people think, how you push people to think bigger. Memories I have of you is in meetings, we present our goal, and you're always saying, how do we 10 x this? What would it take to 10 x this idea? And somehow, we often hit these crazy goals after you 10 x them or sometimes just double them.
Speaker 1 What have you learned about just the power of setting really ambitious goals, but also finding the balance with not demoralizing people if they don't hit these really ambitious goals.
Speaker 0 As you know, there was a there was a saying inside of Airbnb, it was add a 0 Add a 0 at the end, which is to make to imagine something you order manage bigger.
Speaker 1 Mhmm.
Speaker 0 The exercise isn't necessarily to say, if people say they wanna hit a goal, I say, okay, I added a 0. You have to hit that goal. It's more the exercise of what would it take to be 10 x bigger or do something 10 times better. Because what you find is when you push people, they will sometimes think about the problem differently. And 1 of the best ways to get unstuck from a problem is to imagine a 10 x scale or 10 x better or 10 x faster, where you can't do the current process to do it.
Speaker 0 You have to think differently about the problem. And to think differently about the problem means you have to deeply understand the problem. And if you really understand the problem, you have to break it into its components. And we might call this, like, first principle thinking. What are the foundational elements that comprise this problem, and how can we reconstruct them?
Speaker 0 So the first thing is, I think, by adding a 0, at least conceptually for teams, it helps them understand a problem. The second is I think 1 of the most important things for a founder or leader to do is set the pace of the team. I think the pace of the team is 1 of the most important things you can do, and that pace is sometimes governed not by how hard people work, but how decisive they are. If you want to improve the speed of a company, then make faster decisions. And that fast decisions come from a bias of action.
Speaker 0 If we're in a meeting, we don't just say, like, okay. Like, let's circle back on this next week. No. We'll have it done by next week. Let's stay in this meeting till it's done.
Speaker 0 What are you doing? Have a bias for action. Who's responsible? Okay. What are you doing?
Speaker 0 Okay. Let's check-in an hour. I'll call you in the morning. Okay. How we do this?
Speaker 0 And so you end up getting 3 months of work done over that period of time. But the last thing I'll say about adding a 0, Lenny, is I remember there was a story about a great, basketball coach named John Wooden. He was 1 of the, winningest basketball coaches, I think, in college basketball history, perhaps the greatest. And someone asked him once, I'm gonna paraphrase what he said, like, what is your secret to success? And he said that, you know, I just asked my players to do their very best.
Speaker 0 And I remember thinking to myself, that doesn't sound like the secret to success, asking people to do their best. But there was an implicit thing that he didn't say, which is that he saw potential people that they never saw in themselves. And so the role of a leader is to see potential in people that they may not even see themselves. And when I tell somebody it's not good enough, either I'm saying you're not good enough or I believe that you have more potential than you're showing me. So in other words, you can push a team and they could feel demoralized because they can feel like what they're doing is not good enough if they have a fixed mindset.
Speaker 0 Or you create a growth mindset organization where the more I'm involved, the more I say you can do better. It's because the more I believe in you, and I know that you have more in you. And the way to know if a team could do better is if their life depended on that, could they do it? And Andy Grove used to say that there's competency and motivation. And motivation is if they're like and they're not literally dependent on it, but, like, if it was a crisis or if it was like a defining moment in their lives.
Speaker 0 I think the job of a leader is not to make it life and death. That's too far. But to be able to motivate a team, to see potential in them that they don't see in themselves and to really push them, to set a tempo, to break something down to 1st principle thinking. And if you do that, then I think that's gonna be the opposite of these slow moving, kinda soul crushing bureaucracies.
Speaker 1 I've definitely been through that where you set a crazy goal, and then we ended up hitting it. And so I've seen that myself. Mhmm. With some of the things you've talked about of, say, do it now. We're not gonna wait, another week to circle back, and this stuff you talked about of taking on the CPO role, not having a CPO, and, also, all these launches.
Speaker 1 It sounds like a lot of work and a lot of hours. What have you learned about avoiding burnout and creating balance and also just helping people on your team avoid burnout and creating balance?
Speaker 0 First of all, I wanna give you a a a a very surprising learning. I weirdly now the more I get involved this is so weird. The more in the details I am, the more time I have on my hands. That's a paradox. And I wanna explain that paradox.
Speaker 0 It doesn't make any sense. But when I explain this process to people that I would be in the details, we'd have 1 shared consciousness. I would review everything. We would do endless edits of even the press release. It would seem like I would be working 80, 100 hours a week and that people would be disempowered and that no 1 would wanna do anything.
Speaker 0 And anything. And I got just the opposite. Here's what I found. If you decide to be in the details and get very, very hands on like I did, it might be a lot more work for about 1 to 2 years. And so for 1 to 2 years, it was way more work than the old way.
Speaker 0 But once we turned the corner, suddenly, everyone started rowing the same direction. Suddenly, I didn't have to be in meetings anymore, and people would do what I wanted to do if I wasn't there. And by the way, that's what the culture is. They say the culture is what happens when you're not in the room, and the brand is what people say when you're not in the room. And so that became our culture that suddenly there was fewer conflicts in the company.
Speaker 0 There was less turnover. People were rowing in the same direction that I wasn't reacting. Before, I would get 10 surprises, 9 were bad. Now I get 10 surprises, 9 are good. And you don't really have to do anything about good surprises, only bad surprises.
Speaker 0 That I used to have to intervene in projects I wasn't involved in because they were going off into the wrong direction. And by the time I got involved, I was associated with dysfunction, but I only got involved because it was dysfunctional. It wasn't actually going well. And then it was 3 times his work to fix something because we weren't involved in the very early 8 stages. So I I was much more involved.
Speaker 0 I had a lot less time on my hands initially, and now I actually, weirdly, have a lot more time on my hands. But to answer your question on burnout, I think, is another very good question. I do not think I'm the poster child, at least historically, of work life balance. I'm 42 years old. I live with the golden retriever.
Speaker 0 I don't yet have a family. And if you asked me when I was in college how I thought my life would be right now, I probably would've thought the inverse. That I have a family and I'd 1 day run a company. And I did things in a slightly different order. But 1 of the things I've learned is that there's this temptation to work more and more and more hours.
Speaker 0 And sometimes you need to still let's say an artist, you have to step away from the painting And you actually start getting more derivatives slower and slower. And so I basically have tried to break it a practice to step away from the work. And so here's some of the things I do. Every other weekend, I, like, don't really work at all. And then, you know, every other weekend, I work pretty intensely.
Speaker 0 If I had a family, it would probably be more like a day day of the weekend. I'd work into more intensely. So, you know, I would you wouldn't be a parent every the weekend, but I'm not. So it's a little different. I usually make sure I exercise and I never miss a workout.
Speaker 0 So I usually, like, wake up. I'll do, like, 20 minutes of morning cardio on a Peloton. I'll go to the gym 3 or 4 times a week and do weights. I'll I'll basically do cardio just about every day. I make sure that I eat really healthy.
Speaker 0 I have, like, a kinda classic, like, bodybuilding diet of 5 to 6 meals a day. So I think I try to make sure I do that. I try to make sure I get a fairly good amount of sleep. And then I the other 2 things I try to do is, like, have really healthy relationships. I think 1 of the most important things that will govern, like, how happy you're in your life is your relationships.
Speaker 0 I think the 2 govern I think the 3 things, your health, your relationships, and your work. Those are probably the 3 most important things. So as long as you're healthy and you have meaningful work, the last is relationships. And there was this Harvard study. It's the longest study on human happiness.
Speaker 0 I think it's 85 years old. And the question was, what's the secret of happiness? And, of course, they weren't expecting to have a single answer, but they got 1. And the answer was the secret to happiness, if there is 1, is healthy relationships. And I had found Lenny that over the time of being an entrepreneur, I had gotten totally isolated, that it was almost as if I didn't have friends.
Speaker 0 I had friends, but I didn't keep in touch with them. And every time I reached out to a friend, I had to get them up to speed on my life. And if you have to get people up to speed, you're not really keeping as much in touch with them. And so I started making a practice a couple years ago to make sure that I have a group of friends that I'm constant in touch with, including old friends. So I have a group of high school friends.
Speaker 0 We have a group chat. We take 1 to 2 trips together which are together every year. I have a group of college friends. We have a group chat. We take probably a couple trips together a year.
Speaker 0 By the way, doing Airbnbs are great. We all get in the house together, and it's like you your opportunity to have a shared experience. And if you don't travel your old friends, you have only old stories to talk about, and then you kinda say the same old stories over and over. So you wanna be able to have new shared experiences. When I stay here in New York City, I'm in New York right now.
Speaker 0 That's why you don't see my typical background. I stay in my sister's apartment. So she's got a 2 bedroom and I stay in her house because I like to see her. And I just make sure I spend a lot of time with friends. And, of course, we travel.
Speaker 0 I mean, traveling is what I kinda do with a lot of my friends, and then I like to draw and read. So I try to make sure it's health, work, and relationships, and I try to make sure I have a balance of each. And you might call family relationships. You know, I'm just I'm single, but, you know, that would be another version of it.
Speaker 1 I heard you say along the same lines on a different podcast about how when you're really busy, you didn't have time to reach out to anyone. And they never thought they could reach out to you because they thought you were so busy.
Speaker 0 In the old world, I was reacting. So everyone thought I was busy. So the people I really cared about, a lot of them said, well, he's busy, so he'll reach out to me when he's not busy. But here's the problem. I was so busy that all I was doing all day was responding to people.
Speaker 0 And so if people I cared about didn't reach out to me, I was just I was dealing with incoming. I could barely deal the incoming. Now that was a mistake, but I was reacting. And so, by the way, here's another lesson for founders. A lot of founders spend their time based on reacting.
Speaker 0 So people will email them, and they'll wake up and they'll respond to emails. And suddenly, their email sets the agenda. People ask for meetings. And suddenly the meetings they take are based on the people who email them versus, like, here's my strategy. And then over the next year, what are the relations I need to have and the meetings I need to take to be able to execute this strategy?
Speaker 0 If my life were to end in a year or in 10 years or some time horizon that's shorter than I expected, who are the people I would have wanted to make sure I spent time with? And if you imagine that your life is finite, because it is, and you imagine you're not gonna be here as long as you thought you would be, because it's possible, it would completely change how you prioritize your time. And then suddenly you would start to say no to things and you'd say yes to other things. I now try to say no to what I call fake work, which is things that feel like work, but they don't actually move the ball down the field. And I really try to say yes to work that's very meaningful and people that are very meaningful to me.
Speaker 0 So, yeah, it's a really, really good insight. And by the way, that metaphor, Lenny, is true of companies too. You can sometimes be like, you don't wanna only spend your time reacting or or spending your time with the employees reaching out to you. I mean, you do wanna do some of it, but then you're rewarding, you know, only 1 type of behavior. And the introverts or the people that aren't reaching out to you aren't gonna get any attention.
Speaker 1 Just 1 more question, and then I have a quick fun question at the end. I know you have to run. If I were to ask people who are the most inspiring leaders in tech and in business in general, I think you'd be right near the top of that list. You've been through a lot of ups and downs. You've learned a lot of lessons on the along the way.
Speaker 1 What have you found has been most helpful to helping you continue to grow and keep up with the business, the way the business is growing the scale, and just to take on this leadership role? Is it, like, coaching? Is it reading? Is it other mentors? Something along those lines.
Speaker 0 You asked really good questions. And by the way, thank you. I, so I'll I'll share a few thoughts. I was I was with Sam Altman probably a few weeks ago at dinner, and I told him, yeah, I still feel like I have a lot to prove. I haven't made it yet.
Speaker 0 And he was, like, really surprised. He's like, what are you talking about? And I didn't even realize that he thought that was an absurd notion, but I said, no, I haven't made it yet. That's not to say I'm not grateful or I feel like I need to get somewhere so that therefore I'll feel, like, worthy. But I have this still this kind of beginner's mindset that the bigger I get, the more a beginner I tend to feel.
Speaker 0 It's like a weird feeling. I think, like, when you when I first took off, I think I thought I like, maybe, like, I knew everything or I knew more than I certainly did. But then you get past some peak. Where you go into this trough where you realize, oh my god. The moment you get to some frontier of knowledge, you start to become a beginner again, and everything is new.
Speaker 0 And so I think the first thing I try to do is to be a beginner. You know, Pablo Picasso had a saying. He said, it took me 4 years to learn to paint like Rafael, but a lifetime to learn to paint like a child. And so I've tried to always see the the world through the eyes of a child. And I think 1 of the key characteristics of a child is curiosity, to see everything with fresh eyes, to not have too many judgments.
Speaker 0 Like, when I was trying to figure how to run a company, I studied the history of division organizations, and I studied Steve Jobs, but also studied, like, what Bill Gates did. And I studied, like, Alfred Sloan at General Motors, that MIT, MIT Sloan is named after. And actually, the founding of divisional companies, which I believe was DuPont, they were making powder for gunpowder. The war ends. What do you do with powder?
Speaker 0 Turns out powder can be used for paint, but the way you sell gunpowder and paint are different sales channels. So they created what we now know as the divisional structure. So I try to, like, understand the sources of things. I try to learn. I try to be shameless about reaching out to help.
Speaker 0 I think that a lot of people are afraid to reach out to help because they think other people are busy. The biggest honor most people get in their lives or 1 of the biggest honor is when other people ask them for help. Because we all just wanna feel useful. So don't feel ashamed to reach out to something for help. It actually like, it gives a lot of them great honor.
Speaker 0 And I think you don't need to reach out to people 10 years ahead of you. They can just be people a year ahead of you. In fact, an entrepreneur getting started, I might be less youthful then than somebody 2 years ahead of them that knows, like, the latest distribution channels that I, like, kind of have forgotten. So I think that that is the key. It's learning.
Speaker 0 It's growing. It's curiosity. It's constantly having that hunger and that fire to always wanna be better, to to feel like I haven't made it yet. Because the reason I say I haven't made it yet is because if I've made it, then I'm done. Mhmm.
Speaker 0 And I wanna feel like an artist. You know, Bob Dylan used to say an artist has to be in a constant place of becoming. And so long as they don't become something, then they're gonna be okay. And so you you have to always be evolving, learning, growing, And the canvas keeps getting bigger. The mountain top keeps getting higher.
Speaker 0 And I feel like I'm just getting started, and I hope that, you know, the panel I don't know how long you intend to do the podcast, but I tend to do this for a long time. And if you do or or whatever, we'll definitely wanna have talks. And I hope years from now, Lenny, I hope 70% of what I said, I still believe. But if a 100% of what I say, I still believe, then I probably haven't learned very much. And so even if if 90% say, I I don't believe anymore than I'm, like, you know, kind of delusional and wrong.
Speaker 0 But if but but I sincerely hope that I retract it or change or modify a few things I said today in a few years because that will mean that I've gained more wisdom. And so how do I do that by being curious?
Speaker 1 That is beautiful. It reminds me you mentioned Sam Altman. I'm there's a tweet that he put out a couple weeks ago that I'll read real quick. Many people have reached out to offer help and advice. Over the past year, no 1 has gotten close to Brian Chesky in terms of delivering.
Speaker 1 He will take a midnight call at any time, put an hours of work on any topic, answer difficult questions correctly with clarity, make any intro, etcetera. How's that feel to have seen that?
Speaker 0 It was I I had no idea Jacob was gonna do that. And I just wanna say, like, I think Sam is obviously, like, a once in a generation founder. I think what he's done with OpenAI is extraordinary. And when he launched Chat GPT, I had known him for a really long period of time, and I kinda knew a sense of the journey he was about to go on. And I think that he was very deep into the technical part and the part of OpenAI.
Speaker 0 But it turned out there was a product, a design, a marketing, a leadership, a sales. So there were all these other functional responsibilities. And so being able to just play a small part in, you know, giving some advice when necessary, and he would take what he wanted and to skirt discard others. But I think, Lenny, maybe this goes to another thing, which is all I tried to do with Sam is what other people did for me. When I started before Y Combinator is a person named Michael Seibel.
Speaker 0 He's in Y Combinator. And he used to meet with me and give me advice. And he wasn't an official adviser. He wasn't an investor. I didn't hire him or anything like that.
Speaker 0 He wasn't my board. And I asked him, I said, how do I repay you? And he said, well, I want you to pass this on to other founders. And I would meet with a lot of people in the valley. And there was just this, like, incredible culture of generosity that that we all were gonna win, you know, if the ecosystem was healthy and the ecosystem be healthy if we all helped 1 another And you kinda pay it forward.
Speaker 0 And so, you know, I, you know, I think that it's just 1 continuation of the valley of people helping 1 another, learning from 1 another. And I also feel like I learned by teaching as well.
Speaker 1 Final question. When someone joins Airbnb, there's a very long standing tradition of sharing a fun fact about yourself or might be the longest standing tradition. It's always tough on the spot, but I'm curious, Brian, if there's a fun fact that you wanna share about yourself that maybe people don't already know.
Speaker 0 Yeah. So a fun fact about me is that I actually spent most of my life as an artist. You know, when I was 5 years old, I remember my parents, like, take me to the Norman Rockwell Museum, and I would sit in front of, you know, his beautiful illustrations. They're really paintings, I should say. I shouldn't even call them illustrations.
Speaker 0 And I would try to reproduce them, And I got obsessive with art. I remember when I was maybe in elementary school, I asked Santa for poorly designed Christmas toys so I could redesign them. When I got so the older, 1 of my friends, I went to his house. I'm gonna say I was, like, 8 or 9 years old. And his dad was basically, like, redoing his deck, but his dad decided to design it himself.
Speaker 0 I think maybe he's an architect. So we had this giant dining room table and he had, like, this vellum paper and he had a t square and a drawing triangle and a protractor, and I the just they're cool. They're really cool looking tools, and they were basically floor plans and architectural drawings. So I got into architectural and landscape design when I was, like, 8 or 9, and that led to my interest in architecture. I went to RPI as a freshman of of high school to do, like, a pre college program.
Speaker 0 Then I got into, like, more and more drawing and figure drawing. Then I got to a film and animation. Then I got involved in in environmental design. I realized that if you buy stock in a company, you could get these cool glossy annual reports. This is kinda when the Internet was kind of, like, nascent and people still mail annual reports.
Speaker 0 And so I got my dad to buy a few shares of some Disney stock. And I got these renderings and the end report of theme parks. And I started, like, drawing, like, and designing, like, theme parks and communities. And I was at this private school for, actually, for hockey because I had this parallel life where I was playing ice hockey, and I I thought I was gonna blow up play college hockey. My dad was really into it.
Speaker 0 I was really into it. And I had a art teacher in high school at this military school. That's another fun fact. I basically went to a military high school.
Speaker 1 Wow. Did not know that.
Speaker 0 And at this military sports academy kind of oriented high school, I had the same art teacher from 8th grade to 11th grade. And that's not a good thing, by the way. I don't see it as a good thing because I I was not diversifying my skills. And so I leave this high school because I wanted to pursue different interest than hockey, And I transferred to my public high school late my junior year. And imagine, like, transferring to a new public high school late junior year.
Speaker 0 And I meet my art teacher who changes my life. Her name is miss Williams, and she sees my artwork. And by the way, my mom was nervous about me becoming an artist. She used to tell me I chose a job for the love, and I paid them. I got paid no money.
Speaker 0 She used to choose a job that pays you a lot of money. And I said to my mom, 1 day I'm gonna be an artist. She said, oh my god. You choose the only job where you're gonna pay less than the social worker. So I think my parents, you know, they were supportive of me going to art, but they were very nervous.
Speaker 0 And then miss Williams told my mom, she said, don't worry. He's gonna be a famous artist 1 day. I wasn't intended to become a famous artist, but what that did is I think it gave everyone the confidence for me to pursue art. I ended up being 1 of the a winner. There were multiple winners of a national art competition, and I had my artwork displayed in the Rotunda Gallery.
Speaker 0 That then led to me getting a scholarship at the Rhode Island School of Design, where I end up going to RISD. It's like, you know, it's kinda like it's kinda like MIT for design or whatever. It's like a it's a it's prestigious art design school. But I got to RISD, and I realized I was born a 100 years too late for what I wanted to do, which is, you know, draw and paint. And I felt like at that point, photography and now AI generated art, but certainly even back then, photography was replacing a lot of the skills that I that I need that that I had.
Speaker 0 And that's when I was in my fresh year of college. I learned about a funk field called industrial design. They in they said industrial design is the design of everything from a toothbrush to a spaceship and everything in between. And really, Lenny, maybe just around that story because that was a fun fact, but I'm kinda just and this is the prefounding story that I never tell. I don't think I could have ever done what I did if I wasn't an industrial designer.
Speaker 0 I think industrial designer is different than a graphic designer because an industrial designer, you have to actually under you know, you have to work with engineering in your in your training. You have to like, I I worked with mechanical engineers, electric engineers. You have to understand manufacturing. Industrial design is very accountable to sales. If you design a building, an architect, and you design an office building, an office building doesn't get leased, the architect's usually not on the hook for it.
Speaker 0 But if you're industrial designer design, a product doesn't sell, you're, like, kind of on the hook for it. At least people assume you didn't design a good product. So you have to understand marketing and strategy. And so that became this gateway. But I didn't really wanna make items and objects my whole life.
Speaker 0 But at RISD, the biggest value I got in addition to learning industrial design was I met my co founder, Joe Gebbia. And the day of graduation, Joe looks to me, says, Brian, I think we're gonna start a company together 1 day. And I had no idea what he was referring to. So I moved to Los Angeles where I work as an industrial designer for 2 years, when 1 day I got a package in the mail that changed my life. I opened this package, and it's a seat cushion with a handle on it.
Speaker 0 And it's a letter from Joe, my my friend from RISD. He said, I started a company in everyone in San Francisco. I live in San Francisco, and all these people are starting companies. You should come here. And this is in 2007.
Speaker 0 YouTube had just come out. I had, like, seen all these Steve Jobs keynotes finally on YouTube. I didn't know who he was. I'd never heard his voice before before YouTube. And, you know, Apple had this renaissance and Google was on fire and Facebook was taking off, and it felt like the gears of the world that were turning were in San Francisco.
Speaker 0 And so 1 day, I go into work and I quit my job. My boss is dumbfounded, and I pack everything in the old, old, backseat of old Honda Civic. I get to San Francisco, and Joe tells me the rent is $1,150. I don't have enough money to pay our rent. This design conference come to San Francisco.
Speaker 0 All the hotels are sold out. We said, what if we turned our house into a bed and breakfast for design conference? I don't have any beds, but Joanne threw her beds. We called it air bed and breakfast. So my fun fact was I was an artist and designer before Airbnb, really an artist, at least how I thought about it.
Speaker 0 And I think that's maybe 1 of the things that makes Airbnb different because there's not a lot of designers or artists running Fortune 500 or S and P 500 companies. And I think that intuition, imagination, design, curiosity, I think we need more of that. By the way, I think the people listening, I think everyone on this what listen, you have these qualities. But I think that a lot of companies, it's like we're a body and the companies are cut off at the head. They're disembodied from the heart, and they're often really biased towards 1 side of their head.
Speaker 0 And I think that some of the greatest scientists played musical instruments like Einstein. I mean, I think that, like, being a whole well rounded way of thinking about the world is good. So, anyways, that's my final thought.
Speaker 1 I love that fun fact because it almost explains everything you've been talking about, which is rethinking the way companies can run, doing things super differently. So I really appreciate you sharing that. I also love that it transitioned to the creation story of Airbnb, which happens a lot at Airbnb. People hear that story over and over because it's, so interesting and so important. Brian and I have to run.
Speaker 1 Thank you so much for being here and being generous with your time. Thank you, Lenny.
Speaker 0 And congratulations everything you're doing.
Speaker 1 Thanks, Brian. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast.
Speaker 1 You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.