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

Episode Date: October 9, 2023

If you enjoyed hearing about the highs and lows of creating the world’s biggest brands, I recommend you listen to my conversation with Spotify founder, Daniel Ek, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_35cUaU_NA Is being an artist the secret behind running a Fortune 500 company? In this new episode Steven sits down again with the co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, Brian Chesky. Brian created ‘Airbed and Breakfast’ in 2007 with his college friend Joe Gebbia as a scheme to pay their rent. Cut to 2020, when Airbnb became a public company, with its initial public offering reaching $100 billion, one of the highest in history. Brian has been named by Forbes as one of America's Richest Entrepreneurs Under 40, and one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People. In this conversation Brian and Steven discuss topics, such as: His difficult childhood Always feeling like an outsider and different How his art teacher changed his life The way industrial design shaped his career as a CEO Always wanting to design his own world Wanting to escape his childhood His work addiction Working as a way of finding love How success is isolating What no one told him about success The need to fight to be connected with people Why success won't fix you How Obama changed his life The life changing impact of one text message His biggest regret The impact of Walt Disney upon him How creativity changes the world Airbnb initially just being a way to pay the rent How creativity beats data Why more companies need creativity and heart Why company culture is everything The importance of leaders as examples How your worst moments define you Airbnb’s fight for survival What he learned about true happiness The world’s loneliness pandemic Follow Brian: Instagram: https://bit.ly/46vt340 Twitter: https://bit.ly/3RSjGYo Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo

Quick one. Just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio. And thirdly to to Amazon Music, who when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And

thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. 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 Chesky, founder and CEO of a $100 billion company. Airbnb, one of the most successful and most disruptive companies in the world. AirBend and Breakfast was just a way to keep paying rent before we came up with the big idea. We did not think AirBend and Breakfast would be a company where 4 million people a night would use. Don't focus on the

mountaintop. 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 if you're disciplined and focused. 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 did you read that? Yeah, yeah, no, no. I get a little emotional reading that. Why? that. Bye. Brian, I'm a firm 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 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, you know, 10, I could probably draw like an adult. And by the time I was in high school, I could, you know, draw like, you know, 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 going to do this. I'm not going to be like a politician, a doctor, a lawyer, an astronaut. I'm going to be an artist or a 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 got to 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? And 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 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 graph designer, you didn't really have to know how to make anything. I 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 going to cost? Because how much is it going to cost has implications on how you design it. Well, how much is going to cost depends on who's the audience. How are you going to market it? You see, when an architect designs a building, no one 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 going to do that. I'm going to walk back through that because 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. 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 might one might describe as the numerous challenges of childhood. I think childhood is really hard for people. And I think for me, especially, 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 well 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 eighties, but it was from him in the sixties. 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. I felt like I was searching for home. And 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 before that, I was just 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 like public speaking and I would do a lot of creative writing. But I remember I always was like, I was always different. Indifferent 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. Indifferent wasn't good. I sat here with a therapist

and she said to me, there's two things at a very human level. She's, 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 two, 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 a world. You know, we're tribal animals, as you know, from 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 this through the 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. 100%.

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 it that like no one says that somebody's working all day and night, especially if they're doing something creative, if you're an accessible 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 going to feel a certain way because people are going to 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 admiration, 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 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 where it comes from, I've been able to have a much healthier relationship with it. I still love what I do, I've been able to have a much healthier relationship with it. I still love what I do, but I 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've not felt that way, I probably never will. And if I, no amount of additional status or money or anything's going

to make me feel better because this amount hasn't actually changed how I feel. It turns out that 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 to 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, that's kind of, 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, it was mostly worth it yeah 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 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 imbalance. Well, we're all like broke working at a three-bedroom 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. You started hiring people that had families, and people with families don't hang out with you on nights and weekends. And then it 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 a hundred hours a week. And you just almost feel guilty any second you're alive and you're not working. And I, again, I'm huge proponent in pouring your life into working. And I, again, I'm huge for 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. Your 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 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, like, you 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 going to fill something inside of you. Whatever is inside of you that you're missing, you need to probably fill through introspection. We might call it solitude, connection to self, or maybe, you know, like many of us growing 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 with me. If I could speak in, if you could talk into Brian's ear 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 going to do. Here's how I'm going to change your schedule

for the next 10, 15 years. I'm going to 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 with my family, especially my sister. I'm now really close to her, but there are 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 going to 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 have high school friends I now do an annual trip with, someone 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 in 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 call them first, they go, what's going on? Like, 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 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 because 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 do? 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 like, just look in the window and that's your social life, then you're going to 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 Ek 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 keep my old friends and I would be friends of people in my situation. So Daniel Ek 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 or 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 um 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 sending it but also it reminded me of why i have that sand timer on the wall 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 going to 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 like 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 narrower and a little narrower. Should I say the difference though, just with the sound 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. And that's why you should almost cover it up because we can, you know, with the sound timer, we can see how much sound we have left, but in life I could, I could live for another six minutes.

And so could you, or it could be six months or 60 years. And 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, I, I, an exercise I've done is imagining, you know, at a young age, I had 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 long enough to have routine to build towards something. And I think that one of the most important things people can do, two thoughts come to my mind. The first thought is that you probably heard the saying, people tend to overestimate what they can do in a year and under missing, what they can do in 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. I mean, I've only done Airbnb for 15 years. So 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 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, and I rolled the school bus, like 180 days a year, or more than 10 years, that's 1000s 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 going to 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 like,

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 on 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 it's just, you know, like we all, I think humans have been, many, 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 affected millions of people's lives. 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 loved that we didn't tell, or the people we could have met and didn't. There's sacrifice involved in everyone's journey, especially when it's a great journey. And you're

talking about being, I think, 25 when walt disney inspired you yeah neil gabler i've 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 Gabler book. It's the definitive biography, and it's pretty extensive. It's like over 600 pages, so you can see it. It's 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 twenties. He moves to Los Angeles. He convinces his brother, Roy Disney, who I think has like, I can't remember what ailment he has, but he has like

this horrible ailment. And they don't think he's even going to live. And Walt says, come to California, it's going to be good for you. And Roy, they were like, brought they were literally brothers. And I always thought of Joe, my co founder is like brothers, if we were like, like non blood related brothers, but you know, when you're a co founder, youod 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 terrible. The company was going out of business. And I thought, I was reading that chapter and that's when the light

ball 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 to 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. And maybe 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 a Fortune 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 dissatisfied 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 positions 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. Pablo Picasso said, it took me four years to learn to 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 the sense 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 want to 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 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 millions of people to stay in homes. Airbnb started one weekend. It was October 2007. A design conference was coming 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, sent me. And so that's, 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 22nd, 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 Airbed and Breakfast would be a company where three, four million people a night would use to sleep in. We did not think Airbed and Breakfast 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 going to be a way for three people, one weekend to stay in our apartment, sleep on some airbeds, 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 and I at the time thought of the big idea. We kept talking about the big idea. And Air Bed and Breakfast was just a way to keep solving our own problem,

paying 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 advice I ever got, and it's what you were saying. And it's counterintuitive. He said, it's better to have 100 people love you than a million people that just sort of like you. If you have 100 people that love your service,

when they love something, they'll tell everyone they know. I remember talking to somebody, she loved Airbnb. I'm like, how many people did 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. And before 10,000, you get to 1,000. And before 10,000, you get to 100. So all you have to do, and all roads lead to 100, don't focus on the mountaintop. Focus on the first step. Don't focus on a million. Focus just on 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 got to do is get to 100. Once you get to 100, now you get to 1,000.

And while you do get to 1,000, you just keep going in orders of magnitude. And the job changes. But people get paralyzed because they think you 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 a trunk of a car. Google was this research project they were going to 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 the 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 startup 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 cease 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 cease to take risk, not realizing the biggest risk is we don't change in a 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 from the latest technology? These things are all hard to measure. There's an old saying by a Nobel Prize winner named Linus Pauling. He 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 are going to be imperiled. And it's a pretty damn good guarantee that you're going to be irrelevant in the future. So I feel like there needs to be more heart in business, more creativity in 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 want to live in a world that's more

interesting, than more exciting? We need to bring the creativity that artists 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 in now. We have all the technology we need to design a better world. We believe we're going to have all the money we need. We can say we need more money, but actually we can be more efficient and more productive with the resources we have. This is going to require creativity. 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 going to 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 of this email. So Joe 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 this 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. And our business is 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 going to be different. You're going to get lost. You're going to be cold. You're going to have obstacles. Things are going to attack you. You're going to 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 want to sleep, you say, yes, we're going to rest, but we got to 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 want to 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? It 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 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 is 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 rename the, I could rebrand the company and a professional manager would probably come and say, I can't do that. But I know how we 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. 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 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' passing, because Steve was so, so special. But he clearly left a set of enduring principles behind culture. You know, I spoke to Daniel Ek, as you said, as a friend of yours. He said to me, 20 years old, didn't care about culture. 30 years old I spoke to Daniel, like, 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 ask 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. For the context of the email,

I hired a head of people and culture, like a different name for HR. Joni and I have always believed that you must design the culture you want. Otherwise, it will 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 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 while maintaining mental bureaucracy and communication layers. And to make this happen,

we're going to 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, you know, they just heard Brian say it, 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 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. You know, 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've got to like, probably I don't play golf, but 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 the thing that bonds those things together you're the smartest person i'm going to get to throw this idea of culture out 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 and i'm 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 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. Hire 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 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%. It means that we obsess over the smallest details. And then how do we implement that into the business? Well, we have a head of experimentation in this podcast, full-time. We have a full-time data scientist. You said about the vibe in the room, and I said the scent, 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 in addition, 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 as 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 want to lead. And to use this, I just want to give one very concrete example of 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 it, completely cohesive. I obsess over simplicity. I want to 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 want to 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 experimenting on the tires. And then another team's 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 turns out those two things don't fit together. And they fit together. They invent this new wheel. Now it's got to fit on a bigger car body. So now they got to go to the car body team and change the shape of the car. But that makes the car, I don't know, maybe heavier.

They need a different battery. So now they go to the battery team. The battery team says, well, 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 needed to be totally integrated. So I did some things that no one else did. I said, there's no more divisions. We're going to be run like a startup. We have a design department, a marketing department, an engineering department, a 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. And he's like, I'm going to try to do the same thing. The next thing is people tend to do measurement when 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. The reason we do it is because that's what we believe. It's like, you know, like this table, we want it to be a certain sheen. But I can't prove to you that more people want to 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 want to 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 want to 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 decision-making down, I'm pushing the company to be fragmented. By pulling decision-making in, 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 the 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 going to 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 going to 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 in that difficult, or in our case, a 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 handled, our gross sales were probably higher than Starbucks. I think at that time was

$35 billion. I think Starbucks is like 25, 30 billions. 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 a verb used all over the world to suddenly people were worrying, will we even survive? And I knew there were probably some questions. Not only could we

survive, but 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 grownup 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 an emergency board meeting. And I remember there was a quote by Andy Grove. He's 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 our 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 going to redefine every part of our company. So I learned a lesson in a crisis. You make principle decisions, not business decisions. A business decision is you make a decision predicting the best possible outcome. A principle decision is irrespective of the outcome. Maybe you have no idea how the outcome is going to play out. How do you want to be remembered? What's important to you? I wrote a bunch of principles.

Some were pretty simple, like act decisive and fast. Everyone, by the way, data-oriented people really struggle in crisis because the data is changing. 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, 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 want to 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 want to be remembered? Act decisive with all stakeholders in mind, preserve cash, win for the next travel season. People said travel may never come back. It may not come back forever. I said it will come back and we're going to win. And I think the final thing is to remember that a crisis is a terrible opportunity to waste.

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 to manage 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 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 going to 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 20 uh 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 came here. I read every article about it. And you were- Can I read the ending of it? Yeah, yeah. So I wrote this long letter when I never thought I would. And I just want to read the ending of it because I want to, I'm going to 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 the 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 in the U S 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 want to 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 want to read you what- You made a long-term decision in that moment. Yeah. It's so clear. Well, I asked how do I want to be remembered cfos wouldn't have made like not just 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 citizens solely on a financial basis yeah are usually not good finances and input i appreciate my CFO and the finance team more than I ever have before, before the pandemic. Before the pandemic, I did not have nearly as healthy relations with my CFO. I saw them as somebody trying to control me and say no to me. And once the pandemic hurt, 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 at 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 want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for sharing them with us, Brian. That was... It's hard for you to read that. Yeah. Yeah, no, no. I get a little emotional reading that. Why?

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, I knew them through the work. And I knew how much sacrifice they made. You know, the burden you have and you're a leader and you say, we should do this thing. 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 develop a deep bond.

But if you don't know them, they know you and they develop a deep bond. But if you don't know them, they know you. And they develop 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.

It clouds decision making. I would say the opposite. I say get as emotionally involved as possible to understand the consequences of 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 in 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, they're 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. 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 at Airbnb, I think after that letter, I think they came to work even harder. And something happened after that. Those that remained, 4,900 of us,

against all odds, on Zoom, in the middle of a pandemic, we rebuild the company from 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 text messages, emails I got weren't just current employees, were former employees. Some of the ones that were laid off or 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 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 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 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 going to fill you the way you think they will. The thing that's going to fill you is not what you achieve. It's going to be what you do every single day. If you do things you love and you sound so few

people you love, you're probably going to 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 before 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 24-7. And I wasn't at least professionally lonely because 24-7, 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 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 personal 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 wanna say like overly, and I won't 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 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. I exercise pretty regularly. So I'm 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 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, a wedding list. And 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've i've had i've 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 um i'm single now and um 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 um in my early 30s like you know is it hard for someone like you to meet someone i think the part that's like 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 going to 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 said my job isn't to try to find somebody.

My job is to, it's kind of like, I wonder finding a partner is similar to finding what you want to do with your life. Some people say 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 um 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 because you can save money. Maybe you can live like a local, you can have these really cool memorable vacations. But 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 service. We're not just a product. I think what I'd 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 as 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, like 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 and 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 casting 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 meeting 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 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 and

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, it's how similar 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 going to realize the shared humanity we have. And if we believe the 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 that 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 going to leave the question for oh my god so they've left this in the 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 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 alone 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, oh, I'm a little bit like, 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 I make my best decisions when I'm feeling that because that love is like the light. 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, 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, you know, 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 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. 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 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.