The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett: Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky

You lose 80% of your business in eight weeks.

And I knew there were questions.

Is this the end of Airbnb?

Will Airbnb exist?

Brian Chesty, founder and CEO

of a $100 billion company.

Airbnb, one of the most successful

and most disruptive companies in the world.

Arabian and Breakfast was just a way to keep paying rent

before we came up with the big idea.

We did not think Arabian and Breakfast would be a company

where 4 million people a night would use.

Don't focus on the mountain top.

Focus on the first step.

A lot of breakthrough ideas don't seem breakthrough

at the time. They seem crazy.

People tend to overestimate what they can do in a year

and underestimate what they can do in 10 years.

10 years is a profoundly long period of time

to get your discipline and focus.

And you can have a small idea, a small dream,

and you can build something vast.

Airbnb is going to IPO and then disaster strikes.

And the coronavirus emergency.

Stay at home. Stay at home.

You lose 80% of your business in eight weeks.

And I knew there were questions.

Is this the end of Airbnb?

Will Airbnb exist?

We had to make some incredibly difficult decisions.

So I write this letter to the entire company.

Here's what I said.

So how do you read that?

Yeah. Yeah, no, no.

I get a little emotional reading that.

Why?

Why?

Brian, I'm a fan believer that our external world

can change and evolve and look different.

But it tends to be the case that our internal world

is much more stubborn, which is who we are at our core.

And I also believe that who we are at our core

is often shaped by our earliest experiences

that's been supported by a lot of the psychologists

I've sat here with.

To understand you the way you think and who you are,

I think it's best to first understand that early experience

and how it's shaped the internal Brian

that remains regardless of how everything else

in your life has changed.

Well, yeah, thank you for having me on.

I came from a pretty normal nondescript background,

but in parallel to sports and all the regular things kids had,

I had this other interest.

And it was a thing that most defined me,

and that was that I was an artist.

I would be drawing and drawing and I have these pads of paper

and I go through hundreds and hundreds of pages,

almost compulsively drawing,

both trying to learn how to mimic an environment

and reproduce it in reality.

And when I was 10, I could probably draw like an adult.

And when that time I was in high school,

I could draw like probably akin to a professional artist.

I love design worlds.

I wanted to design an escape.

And at the age of 17, I decide I'm going to design school.

So I've already taken like 100 opportunities in life.

And now I'm like, okay, I'm gonna do this.

I'm not gonna be like a politician, a doctor,

a lawyer, a astronaut.

I'm gonna be an artist or designer.

Halfway through freshman year,

they tell you to declare a major.

What kind of artist and designer?

I'm like, I'm still 17.

And I gotta tell you what type of artist and designer?

This guy comes in and he pitches an apartment

called industrial design.

It just sounded cool, industrial design.

And I was like, what is industrial design?

I remember him saying something like,

industrial design is the design of everything

from a toothbrush to a spaceship

and everything in between.

To design a physical object,

you have to understand three dimensions.

You can't just design an object.

You have to understand how to make the object.

If you were a graphic designer,

you didn't really have to know how to make anything.

If you guess, you have to know how to print it.

But you had to know manufacturing.

What kind of materials is it?

Are the materials sustainable?

Where do you manufacture it?

Well, how much is it gonna cost?

Because like, how much is gonna cost

like has implications on how you design it?

Well, how much is gonna cost depends on who's the audience?

How are you gonna market it?

You see, when an architect designs a building,

no one like blames the architect

if the office building doesn't get leased out.

But in industrial design,

you can't design a product, it not sell,

and you say it was a good design.

I would have never imagined

that would have come to use to run a tech company.

It turns out industrial design

was one of the best educations to run a tech company.

But I had no idea I was gonna do that.

I'm gonna walk back through that.

Cause there's a couple of words you said across the way

that really stuck out to me.

The first word you said

when you were talking about wanting to design your own world

is I was trying to design a world that I could escape to.

Yes.

The use of the word escape is quite intentional

but quite a strong word.

What were you trying to escape?

Great question.

I think I was a very sensitive child.

I think I was a very idealistic child.

And I think I was trying to escape

what one might describe as

the numerous challenges of childhood.

I think child is really hard for people

and I think for me especially like

I was young, small, undersized.

I had trouble fitting in at school.

I remember just having a really intense environment.

And I remember when I was a kid,

I would watch like the ABC where they were like a Disney,

you know, they had this thing called

the wonderful world of Disney.

And I would see these old videos of Walt Disney

on television from the 80s

but it was from him in the 60s.

And he described these like magical worlds.

I was just so obsessed with designing a world

that was different and better than the one I was in.

I just think I had a lot of kind of anxiousness as a kid.

And I never really,

I didn't really feel like I was at home.

You know, I felt like I was searching for home.

And I, there's this great Bob Dylan quote.

He said, it took me a long time to find my way home.

And I think it did for me as well.

I feel like I never found my way home

until I was surrounded at school with other creatives.

But other before that, I was just,

it's kind of an outsider

and things were very challenging and painful.

So am I right in thinking that your desire

to design a new world was also a desire

to design a home where you might fit?

100%.

If you design the world as well,

you get to control the world and you get to...

I think I want to design a world that I could live in,

that I could fit into

because I probably didn't think I fit quite into the world

that I grew up in.

Absolutely, that's 100% the case.

You said in some of your interviews

that you are a hyperactive child.

Hyperactive, impulsive, difficulty concentrating.

I was never diagnosed with ADHD.

Maybe today, if I was growing up,

somebody may have said that, but I don't know.

But I had an intense energy.

I was always trying to do things differently.

I remember in junior, middle school,

I would try to redesign the school curriculum

or something just kind of interesting,

frankly, kind of bizarre things.

I was a bit of a performer.

I wasn't into acting or anything,

but I did a lot of public speaking

and I would do a lot of creative writing.

But I remember I always was like, I was always different

and different wasn't good growing up.

That was maybe the core thing.

I think the core thing is I was different.

I was different in almost every way

and different wasn't good.

I sat here with a therapist and she said to me,

there's two things at a very human level.

I mean, her clients are royalty and CEOs

at the top of the world and athletes and gold medalists.

She says, all my clients come to me with one of two things.

And it's usually both.

Either they don't believe they're enough

or they feel like they're different.

And those two things really haunt people in the world.

You know, we're tribal animals.

As you know, I've watched Airbnb's IPO video

and this idea of connection really coming through strongly.

We want to belong.

We want to be in our tribes.

And feeling like you're different,

I was thinking about the super lens of a tribe

means that I don't belong in the tribe.

Feeling like I'm not enough

means I'm not valuable to the tribe.

A hundred percent.

And I would think both of those identified.

I felt like my entire life,

many people have like turned to addiction

and if I turned to one was work.

And luckily my addiction was very productive.

And so no one ever called at that.

Like no one says that somebody's working all day and night,

especially if they're doing something creative.

If you're an accessory entrepreneur.

And it was mostly, I mostly was made me happy.

But the challenge is that if you are doing something,

hoping to become something, hoping you become something

and then therefore you're gonna feel a certain way

cause people are gonna treat you a certain way.

It turned out that what I wanted was love

and what I was actually retracting was adulation.

And so the problem is we try to seek conditional love.

We do something great.

We get noticed.

And then people show us love and admiration,

but it's probably not love or adoration.

It's probably adulation.

And adulation I think is like a cup

with a hole at the bottom.

And the problem is you fill up the cup

but then something leaks out the bottom.

And so it kind of comes down and down and down.

You have to keep filling it and keep filling it

and keep filling it.

And the problem is that like anything,

you can't just do when you keep doing the same acts.

You must do even bigger acts.

You have to go bigger to get the feeling you had before.

I think this is incredibly typical of people,

like I know tech entrepreneurs,

where a lot of them had challenged the authority,

didn't fit in, wanted to be loved,

and were really good at something.

And it's not to take away any of that,

but just to know where it comes from.

Now that I know what it comes from,

I've been able to have a much healthier relationship with it.

I still love what I do,

but now it's really interesting.

My motivations have gone more internal, more intrinsic.

Instead of wanting to be super successful

to feel a certain way,

part of me says, well, if I have not felt that way,

I probably never will.

And again, if I know amount of additional status or money

or anything, it's gonna make me feel good better

because this amount hasn't actually changed how I feel.

It turns out that like when you go on a rocket ship,

you initially, the success and the status

and everything makes you initially probably happier

because it's new.

There's a novelty and it's distracting.

And at some point you adapt to it.

And the moment of adaptation is the moment

you probably go back to reverting

to the way you felt before all of it.

You're not worse, but you're presumably not better.

Life is so much more than just climbing a ladder

and getting the top and realizing

you're not much higher than you ever were before.

That the world is, you had everything inside of yourself,

mostly to be happy before the journey started.

And probably what you needed most is purpose.

You have that health and relationships.

And I think that, you know, a lot of people take

the last one for granted, those relationships.

And that's kind of probably been my journey.

The cost of your addiction to work.

In hindsight, you can maybe point at the cost

and say, this was something I sacrificed

at the expense of happiness because of that addiction

to my work.

What are those things?

Let me first say that like it was mostly worth it.

And so I want to be clear about that,

that I wouldn't have done it dramatically different.

I am, let me just say, I am, it's like the journey

of Airbnb, of being able to build Airbnb

has been unbelievable.

It's been the great joy of my lifetime.

And if people could experience what I had experienced,

I would say to them, it would be the most unbelievable ride

of a lifetime.

And I wouldn't want to change a ton because it's been amazing.

But if they're about, somebody's listening

and they're about to go on this journey,

I would forewarn them about some things that no one told me.

And no one told me when I started this journey

is two things.

The first thing is how lonely it would be.

And it doesn't have to be.

But it's almost like by default.

You see, when I started Airbnb,

I started with my friends, two of my friends.

Then we hired people.

And those people, they were our employees,

but they were also kind of our friends.

And this notion that I was the boss,

there was a power and balance.

Well, we're all like broke working

at a three-page apartment.

So what does it mean that I'm CEO?

Like that's kind of just a title.

And so I felt really connected.

We weren't a family, but we were more like a family

than a business if it was one or the other.

And then as we got successful,

then it became more of a corporation.

There was a chain of command.

There were more boundaries.

Like you started hiring people that had families.

And people with families don't hang out with you

on nights and weekends.

And then it just becomes more formal.

And that's the moment that your employees

become your employees and less your friends.

And that gets more and more isolating.

And then people start looking at you

a little bit differently and it feels really good,

but you can just find yourself working more and more

to live up to the responsibility.

And you feel like you're never working enough

and you're working 60 hours a week,

then 80 hours a week and 100 hours a week.

And you just almost feel guilty any second you're alive

and you're not working.

And again, I'm huge pouring it

and pouring your life into something.

But I think that what I thought was every incremental hour

would make me more productive,

but it turns out that like we need to step away from work.

We need to be happy.

We need to have some healthy relationships

to probably make good decisions.

I don't, lonely leaders are probably not the best leaders.

And when you're lonely, you're probably less empathetic.

You're a sense of vigilance is up.

You don't necessarily see problems really clearly.

You don't have people to bounce ideas off of.

When there's a challenge, you could feel like you're alone.

You don't have as much resiliency.

And so I remember going from being incredibly happy

to feeling incredibly isolated, not having been prepared.

Now I was prepared for all the business challenges.

People told me what it's like to scale a team,

hire executives, but we weren't really well prepared

for the psychological and emotional journey

that we would go on.

That turned out to be some incredibly intense journey.

So that was the first thing.

The first thing that I didn't know,

no one forewarned me about and that I've now learned

is about the lonely journey it can be.

And I would just tell people it doesn't have to be lonely.

Keep in touch with your friends,

meet other entrepreneurs.

Like you've got to almost fight

the world as you go on this journey

is going to isolate you into a bubble

that's gonna completely detach you from reality.

And if you're not careful, you can lose a sense of yourself.

And you have to fight every single day,

like a person in the ocean without a life jacket,

just staying above water.

And that staying above water is fighting

the temptations of isolation

so that you can remain connected.

And if you're connected, you're gonna be okay.

But it's not gonna just happen.

Most people don't have to think about breathing.

You just breathe.

You have to think about staying connected.

The other thing is you can't try to be successful

to think it's gonna solve something inside of you.

Being successful other than maybe a sense of purpose.

It turns out having a purpose and serving others

and being focused in something,

that's generally good for you.

Beyond that, no amount of status and power

is gonna fill something inside of you.

Whatever is inside of you that you're missing,

you need to probably fill through introspection.

Like we might call it solitude, connection to self.

Or maybe like many of us grown up were kind of lonely.

And so we wanted to be loved.

So we decided to pursue these things

so that people would be connected to us.

But then by working, we're just lonely

or more and more isolated.

In fact, maybe the thing we had to do the entire time

was reach out and bring people in.

Maybe that was the thing we were missing.

And that was probably what happened on me.

If I could speak in,

if you could talk into Brian Zia in October, 2007,

when you were 26 years old

and you arrived in San Francisco,

and you could say, Brian, listen,

here are some practical things I'm gonna do.

Here's how I'm gonna change your schedule

for the next 10, 15 years.

I'm gonna add one extra hour of something

to your schedule every week.

What would that one hour be?

It's completely obvious to me

that I would make time for the people I love.

Who is that?

I would start my family, especially my sister.

I'm now really close to her,

but there were a bunch of the Airbnb journey.

We would go weeks without talking.

For no other reason, I was just busy.

And like, well, like, and there's this paradox

that when you go on this crazy journey like I do,

a lot of people don't reach out to you

because they're afraid to reach out to you

because they think they're bothering you,

but you're so busy that you're dealing with inbound

from the business that if no one,

like you're just reacting all the time.

So if your friends don't reach out to you,

you're not gonna reach out to them

because you're just reacting to everything.

And they're like, well, they're so busy

if they want to talk to me, they reach out to me.

You see how you end up in this like,

drift and drift and drift?

I would have stayed connected to my high school friends.

I would have, I have high school friends.

I now do an annual trip with

some of them I didn't talk to for almost 20 years.

I graduate, I didn't keep in touch with them.

It's one of the great regrets I have.

I had college friends that I lived with after RISD,

but every year as I went on my Airbnb journey,

we talked less and less and less

and I drifted more and more away.

And I could go down the list.

I actually, I had this thing I've said,

I talked about it once before,

but it was 2021.

It was like May or June

and I had developed a, at this point,

long relationship with President Obama.

He had left office and he became a bit of a mentor to me

and he mentored me on like leadership and business.

At one point he took a personal interest to me.

And I remember I was single, got out of a relationship

and I kind of felt lonely.

And I remember telling him,

I think I need to be in another relationship.

And he said, I don't think you yet need to be in a relationship.

I think what you need are friends.

And I thought to myself, but I have friends, what do you mean?

But then he explained that he had these 15 people in his life,

many of them before, mostly before he was president,

and they were totally connected.

And I realized I had all these people in my life,

but if I called them, first they go, what's going on?

What's new with you?

And I have to get them all up to speed in my life.

And if you have someone in your life

where if you were to call them or text them,

you have to get them up to speed, then you're not connected.

People you're connected to are already up to speed.

And I actually think that most of us being alone

or being lonely is an illusion.

Or maybe the illusion is that like people don't love us.

And the fact is we have all these people,

but we're not reaching out to them.

And they're also not reaching out to us.

And everyone's waiting for someone else

to take some initiative.

And it seems crazy cause we're just a text message away

from our entire life.

And yet, what do we do?

We open the phone and instead of texting people

or FaceTiming them or like seeing them,

we, what do we open social media?

So opening social media is like going to a dinner party,

except you don't go inside, you're looking in the window.

And you know, like it's great if it's a way station

to meet people, but if you're just looking in the window

and that's your social life,

then you're gonna feel really sad.

So knock on the door and walk in

and start talking to people, start hanging out.

So this is, that would be the thing I would do.

I wouldn't have been totally isolated.

I would have stayed connected to my family,

my close friends and really the only other thing I'd say

is I'm now friends with a bunch of other entrepreneurs,

including you said you had Daniel Ech on the show

and I would call him a friend

and I'd spend time with him and others.

So in other words, I would have old friends,

I would keep my old friends

and I would be friends of people in my situation.

So Daniel Ech doesn't know the Brian before Airbnb.

So maybe he doesn't know the real me, that me,

but he does know a different real me

that my childhood friends can't know.

Because my high school and college friends

can't possibly know what it's like

for me to go through what I'm going through.

And I can tell it to them and they can have compassion,

but they can't possibly know what I'm talking about,

but Daniel can.

And Daniel can know what it's like

when an executive leaves you

where everyone's kind of the walls are caving in

and you feel like you're not scaling

and you're like drowning in this.

There's all these things I can describe.

We have a shared experience.

So I think those two groups are really important.

Your roots and your friends from the past

and your friends from your present day shared experiences.

And there was a period of time

where I didn't have either of those really.

As you were saying that,

it reminded me of a phrase I had many years ago

in a book I read that said,

the things that are easy to do are also easy not to do.

And as you're talking about the,

just sending the text is so easy to do,

which is also why it's so easy not to do it.

Because we're always just one text away.

So what's the point in sending it?

But also it reminded me of why I have that sand timer

on the shelf over there because it's funny.

I think I've lived so much of my life believing

that I could do life later.

Like I could pick up the relationship

with my family later.

And then that's, it's almost like we're living

through the frame of that we're gonna live forever.

Like when you look at our decision-making,

you think, fuck, you're giving like three decades

of your prime years to building this thing.

And we're assuming that we can pick up the rest later

and it'll all be there.

And that's what I learned.

I tried to pick it up later and there was nothing there.

I think that metaphor of the hourglass

with the sand slowly dripping every day of your life

is a window and every day that window gets a little narrower

and a little narrower and a little narrower.

Should I say the difference though just with the sand timer?

Tell me.

Is you, you know it's dripping

but you can't see how much you have left.

Oh, that's a really good point.

So it's, and that's why you should almost cover it up

because we can, you know, with the sand timer,

we can see how much sand we have left,

but in life I could live for another six minutes.

And so could you, or it could be six months or 60 years.

Yes, that's a profound thought.

And you're right.

We don't really live our lives imagining

if we had a limited time left, how would we live?

I like to, an exercise I've done is imagining,

you know, at a young age, 10 years left.

Because if I had one year left,

I might be so dramatically different

that I might not do something sustainable.

I might like not work and just only spend time

and that's not sustainable.

But I think we always go about life

thinking we have many decades.

And I think that creates a sense of procrastination.

And if you say to yourself, you have this decade,

what would you want to do?

It gives you enough urgency,

but also it long enough to have routine

to build towards something.

And I think that like one of the most important things

people can do, two thoughts come to my mind.

The first thought is that you've probably heard this saying

you can, people tend to overestimate

what they can do in a year.

And I'm gonna say we think we can do it 10 years.

That 10 years is a profoundly long period of time

in some ways if you're disciplined and focused.

And you can have a small idea, a small dream, a small goal,

and you can build something vast.

And may have only done Airbnb for 15 years.

Do you think about what 10 years is?

You wouldn't have hired me as your intern 15 years ago.

The other thing about 10 years though,

is think about the amazing life experiences

you can have with other people.

And I think life is about experiences,

but the best experiences are the ones

you share with other people.

Like on Airbnb, 80% of our trips are with other travelers.

Like 80% of people travel with other people.

And I think as I think about my memories growing up,

I rolled the school bus like 180 days a year,

or more than 10 years, that's thousands of days,

and all those memories blend together.

I don't really remember those.

But I remember basically every vacation I've ever taken.

I remember the first time I went to this city,

the first time I went to that city,

and they're burned in my mind.

And I think that when I look back on my life,

I'm gonna remember all the experiences I went,

all the places I saw,

the friendships and the people I loved and who loved me,

and what I poured my heart and soul into.

And I think that that is an important way

that I've thought about my life.

And I made time for some of it,

but I think the pressure of being successful

made me so focused on trying to climb a mountain

that maybe I didn't focus enough on who I was climbing with

and who was along the way with me.

Brony Ware interviewed palliative patients on their last days

on Earth, so she interviewed people in their deathbed

and asked them what their biggest regret was.

Hypothetically, if you had six minutes left,

and I was interviewing you

to find out what your biggest regret might be,

now you had six minutes left, what might you say to me?

I think my biggest regret would be

the time I didn't spend with people I love,

maybe making sure those people knew how I felt about them.

And then I'm 42.

I've created many great things.

The one thing I haven't created that I've always wanted

was probably a family.

I just couldn't even explain exactly rationally why,

but we all think humans, many people have an urge

to create a family, maybe to feel like they've created

something and they can leave something behind.

I will have left a company behind,

but maybe I could leave more than that behind.

So those would be the things that I would regret.

But importantly, I'd also like to say,

I feel like in other ways, I've lived multiple lifetimes

and I would be filled with so much love and gratitude

for what I've been able to experience

because I never thought in my lifetime,

I would be able to experience what I've experienced

right now up to this point.

The amount of people I get to meet,

the amount of work I get to do,

I get to come to work every day to obsess

with some of the most creative people in the world.

And most people, they don't get to be surrounded

with the people they choose.

When you're a CEO, you get to pick

the people you're surrounded with.

There's something really special.

And I've gotten to select some of the most creative,

kind, compassionate, intensely driven people in the world

making some things that I'm so proud of

that have effected millions of people's lives.

So, but I tend to think we regret the things we didn't do,

not the things we did do.

And I think we tend to regret the people

we didn't spend time with,

the people we love that we didn't tell,

or the people we could have met and didn't.

I find it incredibly fascinating

that when we look at the back end of Spotify

and Apple and our audio channels,

the majority of people that watch this podcast

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I would like to make a deal with you.

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I can't tell you how much it helps

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That is the only favor I will ever ask you.

Thank you so much for your time.

Back to this episode.

This sacrifice involved in everyone's journey,

especially when it's a great journey

and you're talking about being, I think, 25 years old

when Walt Disney inspired you.

Yeah.

Neil Gaibor, I read this book twice.

Yes, I've read this book twice.

This book, okay, so this book had a big effect on me

and there's two chapters that really affected me.

So this is the Neil Gaibor book.

It's the definitive biography and it's pretty extensive.

It's like over 600 pages, you can see it.

The Walt Disney's biography.

Yes, the biography about the Man-Walt Disney

and there's two entrepreneurs

that I've always looked up to more than any others

and those are Walt Disney and Steve Jobs,

partly because they built companies

that have lived beyond them,

but more importantly, they were creative people

that were basically running tech companies.

I mean, Apple was clearly a tech company.

Disney was at the time very much like a technological marvel.

The first chapter that really affected me

was this chapter, I think it's Go-Getter.

It describes the period of time

where he moves from Kansas City to Los Angeles

and he's early 20s.

He moves to Los Angeles.

He convinces his brother Roy Disney,

Roy Disney, who I think has like,

Kimber what ailment he has,

but he has like this horrible ailment

and they don't think he's even gonna live.

And Walt says, come to California,

it's gonna be good for you.

And Roy, they were literally brothers.

And I always thought of Joe, my co-founder,

as like brothers, if we were like non-blood related brothers,

but when you're a co-founder, you're almost like brothers.

And him going to LA in the 20s, I think it was the 20s,

was like me going to San Francisco in 2007.

The gears of the world felt like they were turning there

in some really important way.

So this book I read right before I started Airbnb,

I'm living in Los Angeles.

I read this biography and I thought to myself,

I don't have to work for someone like Walt Disney.

I can try to become something like that.

Even if I don't get to that level of scale of success,

that's okay.

I can do something much smaller,

but I can do something like this.

And then there was another chapter four years

into Airbnb called Folly.

Folly.

Folly is the title of the chapter about Snow White.

And they called it Folly,

because they named it Disney's Folly.

And the reason they named it Disney's Folly

is because he bet the entire company

on this feature length animated film.

And everyone thought it was this terrible,

the company's going to out of business.

And I thought, I was reading that chapter

and that's when the light bulb went off.

He basically invented the storyboard for that movie

because the movie was so long, right?

No one had done a feature like anime film.

They had a storyboard out the scenes.

And I remember thinking to myself,

once I read that chapter, I said,

what if we created a storyboard

of the perfect vacation on Airbnb?

From the time you book to the time you check in,

and what if we literally designed the end to end journey?

You might call this service design.

And this became a guiding light

to how we design our service.

We didn't just design the screen, the apps, the emails,

we designed the experience, the end to end experience.

Kind of like when I was in industrial design school

and we were like designing a ventilator or some product

and you're trying to put yourself in the shoes of the user.

So this book became very influential for me.

I mean, the final thing I'll just say is like,

somebody once said numbers are the language of business.

And I remember thinking to myself,

no language is the language of business.

Numbers is just the only way we have to measure them.

But that you ever notice there's 500 companies

in the forge of 500.

How many of them are creative people?

I don't know how many, but like I might be one

of the only ones that went to design school.

They have boards of directors.

Let's say there's 12 or 10 people per board.

So that's like 5,000 board members.

How many of them are creative people or designers

or people from the humanities?

Not many.

How many CEOs have creative people reporting to them?

Not many.

And so we have this world now

where many people are just satisfied

with the way the world is.

We are often given two bad options.

We tend to be fighting zero sum

when we could imagine something better.

But we don't have a lot of people in business of power

that can take creative leaps of the imagination

and really understand how to design something better

that we're in right now.

And I think creativity is kind of being systematically

squashed from maybe corporate America.

You know, Pablo Picasso said,

it took me four years to learn the paint like Raphael.

But a lifetime to learn to paint like a child.

I think that childhood curiosity is something

that creative people are able to typically,

I think, hold on to.

And I think that's being a little bit lost.

And what I loved about Walt Disney,

and I also liked about Steve Jobs,

was that since they were truly creative people

that had truly creative companies,

they empowered them and they had an intuition.

They didn't just paint the company by numbers.

And that's the kind of company I've always tried to do.

I've had this dream of creating one

of the most creative places on earth,

like Disney or Apple.

We may not get there, but at least we'll have the ideal.

I wanna talk about that moment where creativity won out

over what a CFO or the numbers might say.

But taking a step back to that,

what something else you said there,

which is kind of alluded to this idea of creating for,

creating for yourself,

being the path forward to creating for others.

And I saw that, it's actually one of the big things

as an entrepreneur I've taken away from the Airbnb story

that you don't have to sit there

and think about what a million people want in a product.

You just have to solve a problem

for like you and your best friend.

And you can build an amazing business out of that.

And that's really like the genesis of Airbnb.

If you go right back to-

And that's almost every company in the world, by the way.

Almost every company in the world.

Maybe enterprise companies are not that.

People have this thing, people forget,

take any giant company in the world,

nothing large started large.

They always started small.

It started with a few people, one or a few people.

And many times they were making something

that looked like a toy.

It looked like a hobby.

I remember one of my first investors said,

Brian, don't worry about people stealing your idea

because if it's any good, everyone will dismiss it.

Everyone will dismiss it.

Everyone will dismiss it.

It turns out that a lot of breakthrough ideas

don't seem breakthrough at the time.

They seem crazy or they seem unserious

or they seem like hobbies.

They seem something small.

Airbnb, we did not design a way for a millions of people

to stay in the homes.

Airbnb started one weekend.

It was October, 2007.

A design conference come to San Francisco.

All the hotels are sold out.

And we had this idea.

We said, what if we just turned our house

into a bed and breakfast for a design conference?

We can make enough rent.

I think I actually have that email.

Oh yeah, you have the email that Joe sent me.

Yeah, yeah, you have the email that Joe sent me.

And I thought of a way to make a few bucks,

turning our place into a designer's bed and breakfast,

offering young designers who come into town,

a place to crash during the four-day weekend.

This is September 22, 2007.

We thought we were just creating a way

to create a bed and breakfast for the conference.

Unfortunately, we didn't have any beds,

but Joe had air beds.

We pulled the air beds out of the closet

and we called it airbedandbreakfast.com.

Now I can assure you,

we did not think airbedandbreakfast

would be a company where three,

four million people a night would use to sleep in.

We did not think I'd be doing podcasts

and I'd be a giant public company.

We thought it was gonna be a way for three people

one weekend to stay in our apartment,

sleep on some air beds, pay us money.

We'd have a cool weekend adventure.

We'd go about our lives.

And a funny thing is we thought it would pay the rent

while Joe Nate and I, or Joe and I at the time,

thought of the big idea.

We kept talking about the big idea.

And airbedandbreakfast was just a way

to keep solving our own problem,

paying our rent before we came up with the big idea.

But when I joined Y Combinator,

it's a very well-known startup incubator of sorts,

the founder, Paul Graham, used to have a saying

and it's the most important vice ever guy

and it's what you were saying and it's counterintuitive.

He said, it's better to have a hundred people love you

than a million people that just sort of like you.

If you have a hundred people that love your service,

they, when they love something,

they'll tell everyone they know.

I remember talking to somebody, she loved Airbnb.

I'm like, how many people do you've told Airbnb?

She goes, I probably told 10 or 20.

And their friend standing next to her go,

no, she's told like one or 200 people.

And I started realizing people who love something

become your marketing department

and they'll tell other people.

And if they tell other people,

that grows by what we call word of mouth.

So how do you get somebody to love something?

I don't know how you get a million people

to like something at the same time

when you're starting from nothing.

But I do know how you could get one or two people

to like something.

You can meet with them.

You can understand what their needs are.

And you could design something so perfectly spoke

just for them.

And you could literally think of them

as recruiting one person at a time.

If you have a business idea,

you don't need to get to a million.

Before you get to a million, you need to get to 100,000.

Before you get to 100,000, you get to 10,000.

Before 10,000, you get to 1,000.

And before 10,000, you get to 100.

So all you have to do in all roads lead to 100.

Don't focus on the mountain top.

Focus on the first step.

Don't focus on a million.

Focus just in 100.

And as you do that,

you make the problem small and manageable.

Because a million has to build systems

and you start developing complexities you can't deal with.

So all you gotta do is get to 100.

Once you get to 100, now you get to 1,000.

And while you do is when you get to 1,000s,

you just keep going in orders of magnitude

and the job changes.

But people get paralyzed

because they think they have to make something big.

And they're like, well, Apple wasn't like this

or Google wasn't like this.

Well, actually, Apple started by selling these blue boxes

in the back of like a trunk of a car.

Google was this like research project

that we're gonna sell for like low millions of dollars

and they didn't really know what they had.

These things all start as unprestigious toys

that seem hacked together.

And they're only made for you and your friends.

That's almost always how it starts.

And that question about creativity beating rationality

from like a corporate America standpoint,

the Airbnb story is riddled with moments

where you chose creativity and customer experience

over scalability and profits.

But that wins out over a long period of time in a story.

It always does, doesn't it?

I think it's in our soul to be creative.

I think most entrepreneurs are creative.

It's funny, almost every business is conceived intuitively.

Maybe sometimes people have a business plan

and they have some like statistical insights and data,

but most people in the start company, they have no data.

Like they have no customers

and even no customers, you probably have no data.

And so everything is started with intuition,

with insights and understanding.

And then the problem is,

as you get more successful, you get more data.

And as you get more data, you get more reliant on the data.

And as you get more reliant on the data,

you get more derivative, you get more iterative.

And data is good.

It's what we might call necessary, but not sufficient.

But why, if something made you successful,

would you abandon it?

If you follow your intuition, if you follow your heart,

if you had ideas, why would you seize to have them

the bigger you get?

You don't just have to found a company,

you have to continue to refound it, to rebuild it,

continue to have new ideas.

And I think the difference between Airbnb

and a lot of other large multinational corporations

is you think of a company like a body.

Most companies, it's like they're cut off at the head,

they're disconnected from their heart,

and they're kind of cut off and they're focused

on the one more analytical side of their brain.

I think what most companies need is more creativity

and maybe a little more heart and soul.

Most people at companies are loving, well-meaning people.

They just don't act that way.

You know, like the HR and legal departments

are mostly really good people,

but the departments sometimes work

where the groups overly defer to these groups,

they're very risk-averse, they round the edges off it,

they seize to take risk, not realizing the biggest risk

is we don't change and the world that we know will change.

But no one wants to be the one to make a change,

to take a risk.

The organization starts focusing on itself

rather than why it exists to serve other people.

So all these things start happening

and you start appointing more and more analytical people

and then pretty soon you wake up

and the only people on your board

are only analytical people

and they only value what can be measured

and the only things you are measuring

are measured on a short-term horizon.

So the quality of your product, the brand,

how happy people are, the vision,

whether you're moving in the right direction,

are you about to be disrupted in latest technology?

These things are all hard to measure.

There's an old sighing by a Nobel Prize winner

named Linus Pauling who says,

not everything that counts can be counted,

not everything that can be counted counts.

So we tend to have a bias

towards short-term financial measurements.

It doesn't mean they're unimportant

but if you only optimize for them,

then you're gonna be imperiled

and it's a pretty damn good guarantee

that you're gonna be irrelevant in the future.

So I feel like there needs to be more heart and business,

more creativity and business

and not for the sake of the creative people,

for the sake of the businesses,

for the sake of the world we live in,

don't we wanna live in a world that's more interesting

than more exciting?

We need to bring the creativity,

the artist and scientists come together to bring

and it's that marriage of artists and scientists

and operators all coming together

that I think can design a significantly better world

than the loan we have and now.

We have all the technology we need

to design a better world.

We believe it when I have all the money we need.

We can say we need more money

but actually we could be more efficient

and more productive with the resources we have.

This is gonna require creativity though.

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At the very beginning, I saw this email,

which I think is really important

because maybe it's the most important thing

because there are gonna be people starting companies now

that are getting a lot of emails like that.

This is from August 1st, 2008.

By the way, so let me give the context this email.

So Joanie and I were trying to raise money.

For everyone trying to raise money,

I want you to know that Airbnb

was trying to raise $150,000 at a $1.5 million,

I think, post-money valuation.

I'll give you that right now.

Exactly, and here's one of many rejection letters.

Hi, Brian, apologies for the delayed response.

We've had a chance to discuss internally

and unfortunately don't think that it's right

for fill-in-the-blank investment firm

from an investment perspective.

The potential market opportunity

did not seem large enough for a required model.

Now, I want you to just put in perspective,

Airbnb handles nearly as much money

as the entire GDP of the country of Croatia today.

One in about every $1,500 spent in the world,

about $1 spent on Airbnb.

That's a pretty large market.

In our business, it's pretty much the same idea

as the idea that we proposed that person

who said our market opportunity wasn't large enough.

So there's probably a myriad of lessons in that,

aren't there?

And I think that it's a reminder

that the world doesn't just change,

or at least it doesn't just transform

towards our dreams, ideals, and ambitions

that require certain types of people.

We might call them entrepreneurs, inventors,

all sorts of people in different domains

that believe the world could be a little different

than the one that they live in.

They have the audacity to believe that they can do it

and they have the ability to convince other people

to go on that journey with them.

But along that journey, everything's gonna be different.

You're gonna get lost, you're gonna be cold,

you're gonna have like obstacles,

things are gonna attack you, you're gonna fall down pits.

And the question is when people are cold

and they're shivering and they're not sure what to do

and you're running out of resources and rations,

can you find your way up that mountain?

Do you know why you're going?

Can you invent all these different apparatus

like there's a stream, you can't figure out,

you can build a bridge to cross the stream

with the limited resources you have.

Can you recruit people along the way?

And can you beat the drum?

And when people are tired and they say,

I wanna sleep, you say, yes, we're gonna rest,

but we gotta go, just 500 more steps.

I know it's right over the edge,

I think we can do a little bit better.

And can you push people outside their comfort zone?

Not enough to hate you, but enough to feel like a trainer,

you're like three more reps and you don't wanna do it.

And then that very moment, they're not your friend,

but at the end of the workout, you're like,

thank you for pushing me that hard.

This is that kind of person.

And can you take divergent ideas

that no one's ever seen before

and just continue to reformulate them?

Could you store these ideas in your head?

A thousand competing ideas

and just reformulate them in your mind?

That turns out this stuff is difficult,

but you can work your way up there.

Most people watching this have the skill set

to be an entrepreneur.

Not everyone has a skill set

or the desire to run a giant company.

I don't think everyone needs to do that,

but a lot of people have the skill set

to do something, to start something.

This is what you need to get up the mountain.

And the problem is, imagine we got up the mountain

and then somebody was dropped from a helicopter

having never walked up the mountain

and you tell them, okay, now you lead this group

up the next mountain.

Can you imagine how hard it'd be for that person

to drop from the sky?

Or maybe they joined a third of the way up the mountain,

but they weren't there at the very beginning?

You see, a founder brings three things

that a professional manager doesn't have.

The first thing a founder has is,

they're the biological parent.

So you can love something,

but when you're the biological parent of something,

like it came from you, it is you.

There's a deep passion in love.

The second thing a founder has

is they have the permission, right?

Like I can't tell another child what to do,

but if they were my child, I probably could.

I have the permission.

And so you have a permission.

I could rebrand the company

and a professional manager would probably come and say,

I can't do that, but I know how he named it.

I know how we branded it.

So you know what you can change.

And the third thing that a founder brings

is you built it so you know how to rebuild it.

You know the freezing temperature of a company.

You know what temperature it melts.

You know what this looked like before it was tooled,

where it came from, the alloys,

where they were sourced from.

You're not just managing it, you're building it.

And the problem is professional managers

typically don't have any of those three,

at least not in the abundance of founders.

But the problem with founders, there's two problems.

The first is most of them cannot scale

to run a giant company.

And even if they do, the last problem is

they don't live forever.

And companies, great companies,

usually want to live longer than humans do.

And so therefore you end up with the inevitable challenge

that Disney and Steve Jobs had,

which is succession planning.

And actually both of them died prematurely

and didn't maybe Steve prepared more than Walt did.

And that's the last step of the journey.

But I think there's something really special

about founders and founder-led companies.

And I think that if you want the world to change,

we need more entrepreneurs.

We need more founders.

If you want to empower more women,

you should make more women entrepreneurs.

If you want to lift up more economies around the world,

you should lift up entrepreneurs in those economies.

It's one of the greatest ways to create wealth,

to change the world,

and to just change the trajectory of society.

So powerful, Brian.

It made me think about what Steve Jobs did leave behind.

And that's maybe where the word culture comes in.

Because I would have bet against Apple surviving

and flourishing in the wake of Steve Jobs's passing,

because Steve was so, so special.

But he clearly left a set of enduring principles behind.

Culture.

You know, I spoke to Dan Yulek as you said,

as a friend of yours.

He said to me, 20 years old, didn't care about culture.

30 years old didn't know what it was.

At 40 years old, I think company culture

and team culture is the most important thing.

When you think about culture, how important is that?

What is it?

How does one go about creating it?

It's funny you asked this question,

because last week, I sent an email to the entire company

to all 6,000 people.

And my email was about culture

and why it's important and what it is.

Can I read you a portion of it?

What a privilege.

So the context of the email is I hired

a head of people and culture,

like a different name for HR.

Jonah and I have always believed

that you must design the culture you want.

Otherwise, it'll be designed for you.

And you might not like what emerges.

The people and the culture they create

at the heart of Airbnb.

Simply put, culture is what creates the foundation

for all future innovation.

In the long run, the culture is the most important thing

you will ever design because it's the engine

that designs everything else.

All good designs start with a vision.

And I want working at Airbnb to feel like

working at the world's largest startup.

I believe we can grow into one of the largest companies

in the world without feeling large.

A company that's still run like a startup.

With the best people in every discipline

collaborating at high speeds with intense focus,

all more maintaining mental bureaucracy

and communication layers.

And to make this happen,

we're gonna reimagine the HR function.

Because too many companies have lost sight

of what HR was originally designed to do,

reducing it to merely an administrative function.

Yet at its core, HR is about people and culture.

And it's one of the most strategic functions

within a company.

That's why we don't call it HR.

Because it should be about bringing out

the very best in people.

Most of all, I want us to feel like we're building

one of the most creative places on earth.

A company that brings together some of the best people

of our generation to dream up new products and services

that capture the world's imagination.

A place where years from now, people would say,

if I was alive during that time,

that's where I would have wanted to work.

I literally wrote that email last week about culture.

It's so incredible.

It's so incredible because the greatest leaders

that I've met all arrive at the same conclusion

about culture, even if it takes them 10 years

or 20 years or whatever, they arrive there.

The question though, because so many CEOs

could send that email, right?

Everyone could just, they just heard Brian say it,

so they copy and paste and send it to their team.

The question is, how do you actually create that?

It's so great.

So big, huge insight here, okay?

I used to think you talk about the culture

and you talk about how important it is.

And you write out a list of, well, what is your culture?

Well, our culture are a bunch of principles

or values we live by.

So what makes us most unique?

Let's do a session, let's write out a list of our values.

Now let's tell everyone the values.

Let's print them on the walls.

Let's have people repeat them.

Let's keep telling people culture is important.

And that stuff can help a little bit,

but it's not how you build culture.

So let me give you a few thoughts.

Your culture is the shared way you do things

and often they're based on lessons you've learned.

And the lessons you tend to remember the most

are the ones that are seared in you.

They come from trials and tribulations

from your most difficult times.

It's the way you rise the occasion

in the face of adversity.

Your culture is the behaviors of the leaders

that get mimicked all the way down every single person.

Your culture is every time you choose to hire someone,

every time you choose to fire someone,

every time you choose to promote somebody.

It's the way everyone does everything.

And the way a leader designs the culture

is not by writing out a list of values.

It's by basically leading by example every single day

and taking a survey of every single thing happening

and constantly shaping it, pruning it, like a gardener.

And you don't just allow the culture to happen.

You design the culture.

You have an idea of what you want to do

and you're just constantly getting this group together.

You know, you might have a culture of excellence

and a culture of excellence means I review all the work

and I say not good enough, not good enough, not good enough.

And eventually I could not join the meeting

but people know what I'd say.

They'd say it's not good enough.

This is our standard.

And the moment I can not be in the room

and the same action happens as if I was in the room,

that's the moment it goes from management to culture.

So it's like a golf swing.

To teach a golf swing, you gotta like probably,

I don't play golf, the instructor has to watch the person.

And at some point the person learns how to swing a golf swing

without the instructor there.

That's the difference between management and culture.

And culture is something that people learn

to develop these shared instincts.

And it's so important because it's your ultimate

intellectual property, not your technology,

not your recipes, not your exclusive contract vendor,

relationships, the way you know how to do something.

That is the most important thing a company has

because all a company is is a bunch of people,

a bunch of money and a direction that those people

are using those resources to go towards.

People resources strategy and the culture is a thing

that bonds those things together.

You're the smartest person I'm gonna get to throw

this idea of culture at.

So I wanted to throw it at you

because I've just, again, a week ago,

I started thinking about it

when I was asked the question on stage.

People, because in a post pandemic world

they're now trying to figure out if they're remote

or in office or whatever else,

trying to figure out their company culture.

And I came to the conclusion that you shouldn't,

you shouldn't try and create your company culture.

It is already there if you look closely

and try and figure it out.

And here's what I kind of concluded,

that if someone's trying to figure out

what their company culture is,

think about the problem you're trying to solve in the world.

Then from there, reverse engineer,

the behaviors you need to solve the problem.

Then from there, reverse engineers,

the philosophies and values you need

to create those behaviors.

Then from there, implement the fucking things.

Hide the people.

So through the lens of this podcast,

how do we become the best in the world at what we do?

Best podcast in the world.

The behavior we need

because we're dealing with algorithms

that changed all the time is this experimental mindset.

We need to constantly be leaning

in every time something changes.

That's the behavior we want.

So one of our values is what we call 1%.

What means that we obsess over the smallest details.

And then how do we implement that into the business?

What we had of a head of experimentation

in this podcast, full-time.

We have a full-time data scientist.

If you said about the vibe in the room,

and I said the sense that the AI thing glued under the table

recording the conversation with the trackpad.

So that's like our company culture.

It was the behaviors we needed,

the philosophies that created,

and then the systems, processes and people,

we then hide through to make sure that we achieve that.

Does that roughly,

you're the first person I've ever said that to,

that roughly makes sense.

And please interrogate it for flaws

because I need to improve my thinking.

I think it's essentially correct.

And I think the one thing I would add

is when we say behaviors,

because I agree with the word behaviors,

but I want to like round out behaviors

because for just a second.

I used to think behaviors as the things

we used to say the what and the how.

This is something I always got wrong.

There's what you did and how you did it.

And people tend to think of the what as competency,

how well you did your job.

And culture is how you went about doing it.

And like, so were you a jerk?

Were you nice?

Did you make people around you better?

And I don't think that's accurate.

That's what I used to think, there was the what and the how.

It turns out the how you do something

creates the what.

In other words, you can't break the core values

and succeed at making something,

but like trample on people along the way.

Your values, your culture is how you do something.

So for example, let me take our example.

Like one of our, we don't even really have

codified core values.

We have old codified core values,

but like our culture is at its strongest

when it's just like one shared consciousness.

So the best cultures is one shared consciousness

where everything in your head, everything you care about

is permeated throughout the people

and they can finish your sentences

and people would do in a room without you

what they would do if you were there.

And that's when you create this collective consciousness.

So my thing is the culture starts with the intersection

of what your vision is and what your personal values are

and how you wanna lead.

And to use this, I just wanna give one very concrete example

where I left this out.

I'm a perfectionist.

I am the people who work for me will watch

that actually laugh

because that's kind of like a classic understatement.

I want every part of the product to be perfect.

I want our product to be perfectly designed.

I want it to look like one person designed

to completely cohesive.

I obsess over simplicity.

I wanna make sure that it's about reducing something

to its essence.

I want there to be this sense of heart and imagination.

And the problem was the way we were running the company,

I was running it the way I thought everyone else

wanted to work.

And they wanted to work

in autonomous separate groups and divisions.

They wanted to do lots of experimentation.

And for me, I like to be creative and experimental

but I not wanna do micro-experimental optimizations

for software because what that meant,

let me use an analogy.

Let's say we're making a car.

One team is expiring me on the tires

and then another team is experimenting on the wheels

but it turns out those two things don't fit together.

And they fit together, they invent this new wheel.

Now it's gotta fit on a bigger car body.

So now they gotta go to the car body team

and change the shape of the car.

But that makes the car, I don't know, maybe heavier

and they need a different battery.

So now they go to the battery team,

the battery team says we need to manufacture a new battery.

But now they need to actually capitalize that.

So they go to the finance team

and the finance team goes we have to go to the IR

investor relations to say we need to explain,

we need more money.

It's just a metaphor.

The metaphor is that you're all in one team roaming together

and I realized that we need to be totally integrated.

So I did some things that no one else did.

I said there's no more divisions.

We're gonna be run like a startup.

We have a design department, a marketing department,

engineering department, the sales.

And this is how every little company is run

and almost no large companies in the entire world

are run this way.

People say you can't run a giant company like a startup.

But I wanted to do that and I know Steve Jobs

had done it that way.

It's like I'm gonna try to do the same thing.

The next thing is people tend to do measurement

and you get really big.

And you do small tactical micro optimizations

but then you tend to bias towards performance marketing,

towards AdWords, towards small optimizations

and you don't take big creative leaps

because big creative leaps require the entire company

to organize work together.

You don't obsess over things you can't measure

and it's hard to measure quality.

If this pixels off, if that doesn't feel quite right,

if this thing's complicated, it may be hard to measure.

So maybe that doesn't matter.

I said no, that matters.

That's our culture.

And somebody once said, but we can't measure the impact.

I said that's exactly why it's our values.

Because our culture and our values are we do something

when nobody notices and we can't even measure it

and we don't even know if it works.

But the reason we do it is because that's what we believe.

It's like this table, we want it to be a certain sheen

but I can't prove to you that more people

wanna sit in this room but I want it that way.

It matters to me.

I always joke to people the most important customer

is yourself.

You have to love it because real artists

wanna sign their name to work.

And you have to be willing to sign your name

in the bottom right quarter of that thing

to make it perfect.

So this is just a metaphor.

So it starts at you, your values.

And then the last thing is your behaviors.

Those behaviors aren't just how you act and behave.

It's your capabilities.

It's how you make something.

And maybe like your values

are we're constantly trying new things.

And that has to be rigorously detailed and documented.

And I think you wanna show by example

and I tend to skip level, work with a team

and watch them and keep meeting them.

I meet every team in the company that works on projects

that I see, I meet them either every week,

every two weeks or every four weeks.

And I have them show work.

It's like watching a golf swing.

I'm the chief editor or the orchestra conductor.

I don't push decision-making down.

I pull it in.

By pushing making decision down,

I'm pushing the company to be fragmented.

By pulling decision-making in, it's like a solar system.

The planets are coming closer to sun

and at some point we're all one collective consciousness.

We're totally integrated.

We can row in the same direction

and we all have the same values.

Every single thing you care about in your head as a leader,

your culture is as strong as everyone else caring

as much as you do about every one of those things.

They may never be a carbon copy.

Individuality is good.

But the further away from you,

usually it's like carbon copy of a carbon copy

of a carbon copy.

And so I think your job as a leader

is to flatten the organization

to make people feel as close as possible to you.

By feeling close to you,

they're gonna be close to the values

because you as a leader, you are the values.

And then disaster strikes.

And then disaster strikes.

And then, you know what?

When disaster strikes, whatever you do

in your darkest hour, that becomes your culture.

Because your culture, people think is the perks,

the yoga, the free food.

No, culture is like, when everyone said,

you were gonna fail in your darkest hour,

when you didn't know how to get out of the situation,

when you were in this incredibly difficult position,

maybe you're in a difficult negotiation,

maybe you're about to run out of money,

maybe you're in this horrible situation with a competitor.

Whatever you do, and that difficult,

or in our case, the pandemic,

and you're about to go public,

and you're working on one of the biggest IPOs ever

at that point, and then suddenly,

you lose 80% of your business in eight weeks.

That's what you lost.

80% of our business, and we had a business larger,

we were handling, our gross sales

were probably higher than Starbucks.

I think at that time, it was $35 billion.

I think Starbucks is like $25, $30 billion.

So this is gross sales through the platform,

gross revenue, gross booking value.

When a company that big loses 80% of its business

in eight weeks, it's like an 18 wheeler

going 80 miles an hour and slamming on the brakes.

Nothing really good comes out of that situation,

at least not initially.

Was that your darkest hour?

100%.

It was so dark, at least professionally.

I mean, my darkest personal hour,

I'll talk about in a second,

but my darkest professional moment was,

I remember there were news articles.

Is this the end of Airbnb?

Will Airbnb exist?

And this is eight weeks after we were preparing

for one of the highest IPOs ever,

how could we go from this noun and verb

that we used all over the world

to suddenly people were worrying,

who will we even survive?

And I knew there were probably some questions.

Not only could we survive,

but could I, could I, Brian, lead us through this?

I think no one doubted I knew how to build this.

I did, I mean, that happened.

But was I enough of an adult and a grown-up and a leader

to be able to manage through a crisis?

And that crisis occurred on March 15th.

That's when the world shut down, the Ides of March.

And I remember holding emergency board meeting.

And I remember there was a quote by Andy Grove.

He was one of the founders of Intel, I believe.

And he said, bad companies are destroyed by a crisis.

Good companies survive a crisis.

But great companies are defined by a crisis.

And I told their board

that we're gonna be that third category.

See, everyone was like, oh my God, why us?

And I was like, no, no, watch us.

And I told myself, at that moment,

this is our defining moment.

I had no evidence that this was our defining moment.

But I said, this is our defining moment.

And I said, what's about to ensue over the next six months

will be the best six months in the company's history.

We are gonna redefine every part of our company.

So I learned a lesson in a crisis.

You make principal decisions, not business decisions.

A business decision is you make a decision

predicting the best possible outcome.

A principal decision is irrespective of the outcome.

Maybe you have no idea how the outcome is gonna play out.

How do you wanna be remembered?

What's important to you?

I wrote a bunch of principles.

Some were pretty simple, like act decisive and fast.

By the way, data oriented people really struggle in crisis

because the data's changed and they don't know what to do

and they are uncomfortable making intuitive decisions.

You better do that in a crisis.

The second, as I said, act with all stakeholders in mind.

A lot of people suddenly, they don't think about everyone

and they get really cold and heartless.

I mean, that's a temptation

and you should not do that in a crisis.

Always imagine how do I wanna be remembered in history?

Maybe history won't remember you.

Maybe we're not important enough to be remembered.

But pretend like we are.

If we had to be remembered, how do we wanna be remembered?

Act decisive with all stakeholders in mind,

preserve cash, win for the next travel season.

People said travel may never come back

and may not come back forever.

I said it will come back and we're gonna win.

And I think the final thing is to remember

that a crisis is a terrible opportunity to ways.

If you tell yourself, this is my defining moment,

then that creates an optimistic mindset.

And that optimism is what everyone looks to

because in a crisis, the hardest thing to,

you know what the hardest thing

the manager in a crisis is?

This is what I learned.

It's your own psychology.

It's not the employees.

It's not the financials.

It's your own psychology.

Because if you think you're screwed,

people see it in your eyes and they say,

well, you have the most information

so we must be screwed.

But if you're optimistic and that optimism is rooted

in reality, some basic facts

that people still want us to exist.

And here's why.

Then that optimism is gonna be the conditions for creativity.

And you damn well need creativity in a crisis

because in a crisis, you often have like two bad options

and you sometimes want that third path.

And that's what creativity is.

Oftentimes in life, creativity is that third path.

That third road that doesn't exist that you pave

with all the components that weren't ahead of you.

So that's what we did.

We rallied the company together.

We got in a foxhole basically

and we rebuilt the company from the ground up.

We had to make some incredibly difficult decisions.

We had to reduce the size of our company by 25%.

History will always remember how you did that.

I hope so.

And I hope they remember it well.

I remember it.

I read it one hour ago before you came here.

I read every article about it and you were helped.

Did I read the ending of it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I wrote this long letter when I never thought I would.

And I just wanna read the ending of it.

So I'm gonna read just the close, the last three paragraphs.

So I write this letter informing the company of a layoff.

This is obviously very difficult.

And actually in a pandemic, it's pretty traumatizing

because it's uncertain.

You're isolated.

You're by yourself maybe.

And you don't know if you're laid off in a pandemic

who's hiring because economy slowed down

and we were in a recession.

So I go through this email.

I write out all the benefits.

I'm not gonna read the whole thing.

I wanna just fill the gap for you though.

Because the benefits you gave, I read it upstairs.

The benefits you gave people were unlike any other company did.

The way you looked after their mental health,

the way you offered to maintain their healthcare

and the US people lose their healthcare

if they lose their job.

I looked at it and thought, fucking hell.

We created an alumni directory where if you were laid off,

you could opt into a public directory.

We'd publish your information

and we'd point recruiters to your information.

And we ended up getting like hundreds of thousands

of recruiters and people ended up visiting those profiles

and a lot of those people got rehired.

I was even calling CEOs.

And I remember this is how I wanna be remembered.

I only remember that when I'm imperiled,

we're in our darkest hour.

I'm not just worrying about how we will survive.

I'm trying to call CEOs of other companies

to see if they can hire our people.

But I wanna read you what, oh sorry.

You made a long-term decision in that moment.

Yeah. It's so clear.

Well, I asked how do I wanna be remembered.

CFOs wouldn't have made like,

I'm not saying CFOs in general,

but finance focused data people

would never have made those decisions.

It's nothing, yeah.

And the lesson isn't that finance isn't good

or data isn't good.

It's that making,

just solely on a financial basis.

Yeah, yeah. Are Juicy not good.

Finance is an input.

I appreciate my CFO and the finance team

that are gonna be more than I ever have before,

before the pandemic.

Before the pandemic,

I did not have nearly as healthy relationship my CFO.

I saw them as somebody trying to control me

and say no to me.

And once the pandemic heard,

I said, thank God, there are constraints.

But you should never only make a decision

based on purely financial reasons.

So I end the letter and here's what I said.

As I've learned these past eight weeks,

a crisis brings you clarity

about what is truly important.

Though you've been through a whirlwind,

some things are more clear to me than ever before.

First, I'm thankful for everyone here at Airbnb.

Throughout this harrowing experience,

I've been inspired by all of you.

Even the worst of circumstances,

I've seen the very best in you.

The world needs human connection now more than ever.

And I know that Airbnb will rise to the occasion because,

and I believe this because I believe in you.

Second,

I have a deep feeling of love for all of you.

Our mission is not merely about travel.

When we started Airbnb,

our original tagline was, travel like a human.

The human part was always more important than the travel part.

What we're about is belonging

and that the center of belonging is love.

To those of you staying,

one of the most important ways

we can honor those who are leaving

is for them to know that their contributions mattered

and that they will always be a part of Airbnb's history.

I'm confident their work will live on

just like this mission will live on.

To those leaving, I am truly sorry.

Please know this is not your fault.

The world will never stop seeking the qualities and talents

that you brought to Airbnb

that helped make Airbnb.

I wanna thank you from the bottom of my heart

for sharing them with us, Brian.

That was...

It's a hard for you to read them.

Yeah, yeah, no, no.

I get a little emotional reading that.

Bye.

Because of the thing I said,

I had a deep feeling of love for all of them

and even the ones I hadn't met,

like I knew them through the work

and I knew how much sacrifice they made.

You know, the burden you have in your leader

and you say, we should do this.

And it turns out somebody actually does that thing

and that person who does that thing,

they might sacrifice personally

so that you can do that thing.

And maybe you know them and you would delve a deep bond.

But if you don't know them, they know you

and they delve up a deep bond for you.

And then in the darkest of hours,

in your dark hour, it's their dark hour

and you tell them that we can't be together anymore.

And that's difficult.

And imagine breaking up with somebody.

Now imagine breaking up with 2,500 people or 2,000 people.

It's very difficult.

And sometimes some people think

don't get emotionally involved

in cloud decision-making.

I would say the opposite.

I say get as emotionally involved as possible

so you understand the consequential decisions

and now try to make a decision

but seeing the entire picture,

the emotions, the financials, the strategy,

you're a whole person.

Bring all of it into the place.

That letter was one of the most defining

moments of my life and my career.

And something remarkable happened right after that letter.

I got hundreds of thank you letters

from people who were laid off.

It was the most unexpected,

one of the most unexpected things in my life.

And I think what they were thanking me for

wasn't just the benefits we gave.

I did say something.

I said, we have great people

and other companies be lucky to have them.

In other words, people had,

even when they got laid off, had to have dignity.

And Dignity required me to elevate them

and remind people that these people are really good.

And if I said people are really good,

other people might want to hire them.

And the last thing is that I think many people

just thanked me because they felt like

we had created a very special place

that a special place in their heart.

And many of them said,

we still want Airbnb to exist

because there's no company quite like it.

And it doesn't mean we're better than everyone else,

but it means like every person,

we're a little bit different.

There's something different about us.

And those that left that remained Airbnb,

I think after that letter,

I think they came to work even harder.

And something happened after that.

Those that remained 4900 of us

against all odds, on Zoom, in the middle of a pandemic,

we rebuild the company for the ground up.

We reorganize every part of the company.

We rebuild all the products.

We redo how we do marketing.

Then something miraculous happens.

Our business starts recovering

because people start getting in cars

and staying in Airbnbs like a tank of gas away.

And then our bankers who put our IPO on hold say,

you should dust off the S1.

And then we decide to go public.

And we go public at a valuation

that probably valued us at $48, $50 billion.

And by the time within an hour of opening,

we're $100 billion.

And a huge amount of the tax measures emails I got

weren't just current employees,

we're former employees.

Some of the ones that were laid off

were people I'd been along the journey with.

It was the most unbelievable seven or eight months

of my life.

And by the end of it, I remember saying,

I think I was 39 at that point.

I said, I'm 39 going on 59.

Because I've lived like 20 years this year.

And I think that's the moment I really grew up.

How did you feel in that moment?

Your company's worth $100 billion.

It's IPO'd.

How does it feel?

I had a lot of feelings.

Mostly great feelings and some sadness.

Sadness.

A little bit.

I'd say it was 70% pride and exaltation

and sense of accomplishment.

And I think why is, I think obvious.

I think the more insightful thing is that

it wasn't, I wasn't sad in the IPO or post.

I was mostly happy.

But I had 20, 30% sadness in a part of me.

And it emerged after the high of the IPO started going down.

And then I went about my daily life

because the IPO was December 10th and December 17th

and December 20th and January 1st and January 10th.

And you know what happened?

The thing that shocked me was my life day to day

was exactly like it was before the IPO.

It was as if nothing had happened.

The IPO and us being a public company

mostly existed in my head as a consciousness.

Yes, we were now public and yes,

we now had a quarterly earnings report,

but like I'd wake up on Monday

and nothing was really different.

And the point of the story is that

if your goal was to be public,

so you could say you're a public company CEO,

you made people all this money, you became a public.

It's kind of like saying I became a doctor.

I won this gold star.

I did this thing.

These things have merit.

They're great to accumulate,

but they're not gonna fill you the way you think they will.

The thing that's gonna fill you is not what you achieve.

It's gonna be what you do every single day.

If you do things you love

and you sound so happy with people you love,

you're probably gonna be happy

as long as you don't take those things for granted.

And if you isolate yourself doing things that are painful

or you don't love or you do,

but along the way,

you don't make time for people that you love,

then you might not be happy.

Why is this so simple?

I don't know, but that seems to be the case.

You talked about your professional low moment

being the pandemic,

your personal low moment over the last 15 years.

Was this leads into it after the IPO?

Because 2020 was 24 seven.

And it was the weirdest thing.

In 2020 people,

I would get a lot of condolence messages before the IPO,

like when we were down and out.

I would get condolences.

I'm so sorry, I feel for you,

and people felt bad for me.

But I wasn't unhappy at that point.

I was on adrenaline.

I was working 24 seven.

And I wasn't at least professionally lonely

because 24 seven, I was in constant contact.

I'm on the phone with my board members,

my executive team, my employees.

I'm on this rush.

I have a purpose.

Maybe I'm totally isolated.

Maybe I'm totally disconnected from friends,

but I'm in the field of battle.

So I'm not thinking about that.

And it's okay that I don't have time for that

because we're sheltering in place and everyone's working.

And I don't feel like there's something I'm not getting.

Like, of course.

And then we become a hundred billion dollar company.

We go public.

We're no longer in crisis.

Suddenly I have weekends free.

I have evenings free.

I can choose to fill it with work,

but I know I don't have to.

And that moment, that's when I don't have the rush,

the same level rush.

I don't have the adrenaline.

I'm at the top of a mountain.

And now I say, what do I do now?

And who do I do it with?

And that was that moment of isolation

that I had been working for a year and a half

from probably March of 2020

to like May, June, July, August

or some general period of 2021.

And I was working basically 16 hours a day,

seven days a week.

I knew it was a singular period of my life.

I don't regret a minute having done it.

I'm thankful I did not have like professional responsibilities

like a family at that point.

And I could dedicate.

I don't want to do that again if I don't have to,

but I wouldn't do anything different

about that period of my life.

But the moment that period ended,

this deep sadness came in because now I'm like,

well, I can't just keep filling it with work.

And that's when I realized that I can,

I don't want to say like overly,

and I don't want to say I designed my personal life,

but I can, what I could do is design how I spend my time.

I can be intentional.

And I can be intentional about spending time

with people that I love and people I care about.

And that's when I started reaching back out to people.

And that became the beginning of everything

that was changed how I felt personally.

How are you doing on that front, on the personal front?

I still struggle with it.

I can't say I don't struggle.

I'm doing much better.

I've made so much progress.

I feel pretty healthy.

Like I exercise pretty regularly.

So I'm like pretty healthy.

I don't really drink alcohol very often ever.

So I'm pretty healthy.

On the friend side, actually this is a funny story.

When I was turning 40,

I was going to throw a big birthday party.

And then because of COVID,

I think it was the Delta strain,

or I ended up not throwing a giant party,

having a small party.

But for the first time in my life,

I had to write who all my friends are.

Because I had to send an invite list.

And I never, it's kind of like,

if you're like going to get married,

people have to create an invite wedding list.

Maybe in your life,

you've never written who all your friends are.

Why would you?

And the crazy thing is, as I wrote a list of my friends,

I started realizing how many I hadn't kept up with.

And so then I literally went down the list

of like dozens and dozens of friends.

And now I'm pretty disciplined

about staying connected to people.

But romantic relationships.

I was in two relationships over the course of nine years.

They were very long relationships.

So I spent most of my 30s in two very long relationships.

I'm single now.

And I've dated some,

but that's probably something I need to make more time for.

And it's definitely like more complicated for me today

than it was when I was in my early 30s, like, you know.

Is it hard for someone like you to meet someone?

I think the part that's kind of interesting is like,

yes and no, I think you have a lot of,

like you encounter a lot of people

and you have a lot of access,

but at the same time, like, you know,

there's a pretty big infrastructure around me

and my life is like pretty structured and organized.

And there's not maybe as much spontaneity.

Like I'm not just gonna like bump into somebody

at the grocery store as frequently as I used to.

Like not to say that's where you meet somebody.

But you know what I'm saying?

Like there's a little less spontaneity.

It's definitely not the easiest.

It's not the easiest thing,

but I'm not sure it ever is easy.

I think there's always this happenstance that occurs.

So, you know, I kind of said like,

my job isn't to like try to find somebody.

My job is to, it's kind of like,

I think I wonder finding a partner is similar

to finding what you want to do with your life.

Some people say follow your, like follow your passion.

And I always say, but what if you know what your passion is?

I think the better thing is to follow your curiosity.

But your curiosity is something

you must actively participate in.

You must actively put yourself out there

in situations to discover what you love,

what you love and who you love.

And be open-minded.

And be open-minded knowing that you might not predict

what you want and that you might not have a type

because to have a type is to be so prescriptive

that you think you know exactly what you want.

Well, if you knew exactly what you want,

you'd probably already have it.

You said a second ago,

the vision really actually starts with the founder.

You've gone through a lot of personal changes

over the last couple of years.

And that's sort of inspired the next chapter of Airbnb,

it seems about connection and being more than just

people renting out their houses.

What is that next chapter for Airbnb?

So I think when people see Airbnb on the surface,

they see homes, most of those homes are empty.

And the reason you book them is cause you can save money.

Maybe you can live like a local.

You can have these really cool, memorable vacations,

but you know, it's a space.

And I think that the center of gravity of Airbnb,

over time, I like to shift from the spaces to the people.

I think at the end of the day, we're not just a service.

We're not just a product.

I think what I like everybody to become

is more of a community,

more of like a global travel community.

And I think in that community,

I imagine that everyone will have

this really robust profile

and with this rich identity system.

So we know who everyone is

and everyone knows who everyone else is,

which I think is the foundation of trust.

The profiles are really rich with public information

and personal information, like preferences.

And you come to Airbnb, not just to find a space,

but because Airbnb, the app, the brand, the company,

you feel like it really knows you

and understands who you are

and really what you want.

And maybe initially for travel,

but eventually you could go beyond travel.

And then our job is the app, the brand, the company,

is to be like the ultimate host.

And what a host does,

like what does a host at dinner party do?

They don't just offer you food.

They like, oh, hey, meet John, meet Sally,

like meet each other.

And so you can start to connect people

to places, homes, experiences,

service all different types of things.

And that we can use great design

in the latest technology

to really be able to match and connect people

all over the world.

And if we're successful,

then I think we can push against

this dark cloud of loneliness

that has been cast to anything,

shadows over society all over the world.

I mean, literally right before this,

I was at, the reason I'm in a dress shirt,

I took my jacket off was I was at 10 Downing Street,

but I wasn't being the prime minister.

I was meeting some of his members of his staff,

including the minister of loneliness.

They have a minister of loneliness.

The fact that the United Kingdom

needs to have a minister of loneliness,

and probably many countries do,

tells us that it's not just older people that are lonely.

In fact, some of the loneliest people

in the world are teenagers.

This is crazy.

And why is this?

It's because the mall is now Amazon,

the theater is now Netflix,

the office is now Zoom,

and it's not the fault of any of these things.

I think these are all great inventions.

I had this vision once,

like what is my purpose at a professional level?

At the most fundamental level

is to help bring people together.

That's kind of what we do at Airbnb,

the most fundamental level.

Maybe we bring you together with your friends to travel.

Maybe you bring you people from other cultures

you've never met before.

If we can bring people together,

I think we can reinforce these two core ideas

that we've had since the day we started.

The first is we believe people

are basically fundamentally good.

Like children, most children are good.

You were born creative, curious, open-minded, loving,

for the most part.

I think that we have the ability for goodness

in the outside of us.

And the other thing is I think you said this

in the beginning of our discussion.

People are basically 99.9% the same.

In fact, genetically speaking, that we know that's true.

And the thing I'm surprised by

is not how different we are as I travel the world,

is how similar I am, we are.

And that 0.1% that makes us all different,

we might call that diversity and culture and heritage,

and we use all these different words

to describe that 0.1%.

But as you spend time with those people,

you're gonna realize the shared humanity we have.

And if we believe that 99.9% of the people were the same,

then it would be really hard to hate someone else,

because how could you hate someone

that's 0.1% different than you?

That would seem kind of pointless.

And then suddenly you would find this common bond.

So that's kind of at a conceptual level,

where I'd like us to go.

I'm not saying that's who we are,

but that's saying at a conceptual level,

where I'd like us to go.

The direction of travel.

The direction of travel.

And maybe even one day beyond travel.

No pun intended.

Exactly, oh, I like that.

Brian, we have a closing tradition on this podcast,

where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest,

not knowing who they're gonna leave the question for.

Oh my God.

So they've left this in the official diary of the CEO for you.

There's a question we are often asked

that we usually gloss over or lie about on a frequent basis.

Will you answer this question and answer it honestly?

The question is,

how are you?

I would say the feeling that I have right now

is one of the feeling loved.

Because the last, you know, this journey I've been on

has been so intense.

And by the way, like I,

this isn't the first podcast I talked about this stuff.

I was on a couple others.

And after I started talking about this,

I had a lot of people in my life

who I love who reached out to me

and it's been a basis for some connections.

And what I've realized is I was never as lone

as I thought I was.

And I had so many more people in my life than I realized

and they loved me more than I ever knew.

It's kind of funny.

We often wait till after people die

to tell them how much we love them

at these like services, hoping maybe they're watching.

And sometimes there's a reminder

that we should tell them

how we feel about them while they're still alive.

And I've gotten the benefit of people telling me that.

And I've been able to tell them that I had a cold

and sometimes I have these temporary feelings

of a little bit like a little tired here and there.

But those feelings come and go.

And the feelings that stick with you

are like really basic feelings.

And I think the most important feeling

that I have is love.

And it's, and I make my best decisions

when I'm feeling that.

Because that love is like the light.

And it's like a true North Star.

And that's how I'm feeling right now.

And also, the more I think about it,

the more I let it in, the better it feels.

And the more it's true.

Brian, thank you.

Thank you very much.

You are, I mean, you are one of a kind, that's for sure.

And you're one of a kind in the most important ways.

Because those people that are different,

that think differently, that see the world differently,

that are able to go back to first principles

and design a new world

and believe in the ability for us to design a new world,

end up doing that.

And just from sitting here with you over the last two hours,

whatever it's been,

I see someone who has the potential

to do exactly that,

design a new and better world and also believes in it.

And in doing so inspires others to believe

that that's possible too.

That is a truly special thing.

I've interviewed a lot of people.

Not everybody has that, but you're born with it.

And the cost of that so clearly to me

is the feeling of being different.

Yes.

It's also probably a struggle to form connections

in other ways where other people might do it so seamlessly.

Yes.

But from a societal perspective,

the sacrifice you make in being different

is one that society will owe you for long after you're gone

and it's a worthy, worthy sacrifice.

It's a truly worthy sacrifice

because if there was ever a time, as you said,

with the loneliness saw that Theresa May appointed,

that we needed someone to be thinking

about bringing people together and designing a new world

as you tried to when you were a young boy, it is now.

So thank you.

Well, thank you so much for having me here.

It's been an incredible conversation.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.