The Jordan Harbinger Show - 566: Brian Chesky | Lessons Airbnb Learned to Survive the Pandemic

Episode Date: September 28, 2021

Brian Chesky (@bchesky) is co-founder and CEO of the peer-to-peer lodging service Airbnb, named as one of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2015. What We Discuss with Brian Chesky: How Airbnb not only survived the pandemic after losing 80 percent of its business during the first eight weeks, but is now thriving like never before. Why a company that still conducts itself like a startup is better poised to withstand and grow from business crises than the behemoths who have everything to lose. What was going through Brian's head when he got the news on live television that Airbnb shares were trading at twice their IPO price. How does a company leader become successful without losing their mind along the way? What Brian sees for the future of travel, and how it's changed as a direct result of the pandemic. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/566 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy med yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

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Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you do. get your podcasts. Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. And we realize, what if we sold collectible breakfast cereal? Probably after midnight, we're fairly desperate, tens of thousand dollars in credit card debt. Desperation creates creativity. And there was a lot of Barack Obama theme memorabilia. We're going to get on this trend. We call up General Mills and we say, we've got this incredible idea for John McCain, Barack Obama themed cereal. And like all of a sudden, I heard a dial tone. Like, it's not working. My co-founder, Joe, finds an alumni my college who's got a small print shop. He doesn't even make cereal boxes,

but he does like oversized prints. We end up selling over $30,000 of cereal boxes, and that's actually how we fund the company. We actually fund the company selling collectible breakfast cereal. At that point, we said we're basically serial entrepreneurs. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills are the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game, astronauts, entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional legendary Hollywood director, undercover agent, or money laundering expert. And each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how

the world works and become a better critical thinker. If you're new to the show, welcome. If you want to tell your friends about it, I always appreciate that. We've got our episode starter packs. These are collections of top episodes organized by popular topics. It'll help new listeners get a taste of everything that we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start to get started or to help somebody else get started. And once again, sharing the show is how we grow, so I always do appreciate it. Today on the show, Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, one of times 100 most influential people as well. Met him years ago at a dinner, and I thought Airbnb was a fun but silly idea. Who's going to want to eat somebody else's Cheerios, right? Well, apparently like two million

people every single day. That's who. Recently, they had a night with three. 4 million guests in one night on the app. Most of them go smoothly. Pretty impressive, right? He started the company essentially because he couldn't afford to pay rent, and now he can afford to pay rent in the Palace of Versailles if he wants to. Today, we'll discuss making tough decisions as a leader, making principal decisions as a leader and what to do in a crisis,

and a whole lot more. This was a really fun and insightful peak behind the curtain of a multi-billion-dollar company. I've really, really enjoyed it, and I think you will as well. By the way, if you're wondering how I managed to book all these amazing personalities for the show, it's always because of my network. I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. And by the way, most of the guests on the show already subscribe to the course. Come join us.

You'll be in smart company where you belong. Now, here's Brian Chesky. And I used to wonder, like, why do guys get haircuts every two weeks? What a waste of money. It's so silly. And then every time I do it, I'm like, I look 10, legit 10 pounds. lighter. Like, this is worth, it's worth it if you have the means and also thousands of people are looking at you on camera and they're like, dude, are you fat? They look tired. Your eyes are sunken.

Like, get some sleep, bro. Which I assume that's got to happen to you too, just because you're anytime you're in the media, they're like, ooh, it's like being the CEO of a company with as many eyeballs on it as Airbnb, it reminds me a little bit of like, you know when Kim Jong-un makes an appearance or something in North Korea? They're like, oh, look at that. He might have doubt. It's like, yes, that's actually a really funny point. I do have employees, like, reading into things. Like, oh, he looks like really tanned. I wonder if he's been traveling and getting rest or he looks really tired.

And so what does this mean? That's really funny. Right, like, oh, he must have been staying up all night thinking about how many people he's going to fire. I bet it's me. It's totally me. I've decided that it's me. I'm going to go around the whole office and tell everyone we're getting fired. Like, that's...

It's actually pretty funny how there's an old saying, the absence of information is filled with dirt. And so that people can like really fill in pieces of information and allow their imaginations to go wild. So it's always something you got to be careful about. And I never really realized that as a leader, you know, you can say really subtle things. And suddenly those subtle things can be interpreted to mean something like more than you ever meant it to be. Yeah, I can only imagine the level at which that happens with somebody who has a public company especially. Because of course, like all of these, I used to work on Wall Street and a lot of these sort of trader guys would say, see how we said that. see that, he's using this language, that language, it sounds like he's been in meetings with the advisors. And you only call meetings with the advisors when this is happening and when that's happening.

We saw that so-and-so was in New York, so he's an advisor. I bet there's an emergency. And it's just like they're reading actual, just, well, non-literal tea leaves. And, but it's not a thing. It's not real. I was told, not that I would have a beard, but I said, you can never have a beard because investors don't trust beards. They think you're hiding something behind the beard. I thought that was the best one I've ever heard of. But it's kind of like this idea, like, you always, you want to show as a CEO that you're having a little bit of fun, but not too much fun. Because you've showed too much fun, you're not focused, but you're not having any fun, then they're worried you're going to burn yourself out. I like that. Like, it's all like, you know, like any subtle

one degree each way is a possible extrapolation to something like really far. So like, what's the amount of beard that you can have where they're not where, like it's obviously not Jack Dorsey level of fun, but it's like somewhere before that. What's the level of beard you're allowed to have? There's no guidelines for this. I don't think there's a, if you actually look at public company's CEOs, there are very few people of facial hair, and I don't think there's any mustache that I'm aware of. And then you'll have some, like, trailblazers and, like, Jack's a trailblazer,

and he, like, redefines the facial hair category for the public company CEO. So I think that's, you know, that's a real boundary breaker. You could grow a mustache, and it would make the news. It would make the... Actually, it would be. Yeah.

Actually, that is a really funny thought. I never thought about that, and I also look terrible in a mustache, but if I did, that would, like, make news. And I don't know if it would help people, though. Beyond having people having to look at it, I think it might... affect the business in a negative way.

Yeah, that's a good point. It would be like stock price drops two points after Chesky's spotted with weird mustache. Exactly. I think that would actually, it would drop more than that, unfortunately, with my mustache doesn't look good. You invented a word that is a verb and a noun and part of our culture. So it's in TV, it's in movies, you hear it on the radio. Like, you're going to hear Airbnb in a Marvel movie or a Batman movie or something.

How does it feel when you're sitting there? You're just watching something. They didn't clear it with you. They maybe cleared it with somebody in comms or whatever. But they're talking about something you created and they're using it like a verb. Like Bruce Wayne's going to Airbnb the Batcave or something like that.

Like it's crazy. Well, I mean, the name Airbnb was purchased on GoDaddy for $7.99. So I just remember, you know, the name Airbnb, Joe and I, my co-factor and I, in Nate, we would have never named a company Airbnb be a word and the acronym combined together. The name was actually airbed and breakfast. If you can imagine, that's even perhaps a more obscure name. But, you know, the story is that like, I didn't intend to

start a tech company. I was living in Los Angeles. And my friend Joe, who I went to design school with at the Rhode Island School Design has moved 14 years ago in 2007 to San Francisco. And he comes to me and he says, Brian, come to San Francisco. Let's start a company. So one day I had this moment in my life where the metaphor is as if like the road in front of me looks exactly like the road behind me in my life. And I realize like if I don't make a change in my life, then the road I'm going to travel looks exactly like the road I have travel. This is the rest of my life. And I had this moment like, I need to make a change. I don't want to work for a company. I want to be entrepreneur. So one day, I pack everything in the backseat of old Honda Civic and I drive up to San Francisco.

I get to San Francisco and Joe tells me the rent is $1,150. So I don't have enough money to pay a rent. It turns out that weekend, though, at International Design Conference was coming to San Francisco, and all the hotels in San Francisco were sold out. And so that's when we had this idea. We said, well, what if we just turned our house into a bed and breakfast for design conference? Unfortunately, I didn't have any beds, but Joe had three air beds. So we pulled the air beds out of the closet. We inflated the airbeds, and we called it Airbedinandbreakfast.com.

And I remember when we came up with this idea, I remember telling my mom, like, I'm now an entrepreneur. and she said, no, actually, you're unemployed. And I'm like, no, no, no, I swear to God I'm an entrepreneur. And that's when I realized when you're starting a company, the difference between being an entrepreneur and employed is kind of a state of mind. And people thought this idea was crazy. I remember the first person I told the idea about one of them. I said, I told the idea.

And they said, Brian, I said, yes, they said, I hope that's not the only idea you're working on. People said, this idea will never work. Strangers will never stay with other strangers. But three people did that one weekend. To answer your question, I can never imagine that we've, were going to create a company that basically had a name that became a noun and a verb in pop culture. And the name of Airbnb originally was called AirBand and Breakfast. And I remember when our first investor, Paul Graham, said, you can't call your name your company

Airbed and Breakfast because most people don't want to sleep on airbeds and not all your hosts provide breakfast. It's really misleading. That's what it started. And so we said, well, we're just going to shorten the name. And so initially, I went on GoDaddy. This is when I guess people see was GoDaddy. I don't know, certainly did it in 2007, 2008.

And I was just like trying to, I was in my co-fant. We were just trying to find like shorter names of AirBand and Breakfast that were abstract names. And originally I bought AirB and B, A-N-D-B. And I'm like, okay, Airbnb. And then I showed somebody said, oh, you work for Airband. And I thought Airband, like that doesn't really work because of A&D. So we had to then shorten it, take out the A and the D. And it was AirB and B.

It turned out, though, it's kind of hard for some people to pronounce B and B. So when we first started Airbnb, I would say I started a company called Airbnb, Airs in the Air You Breathe, B as in Boy, N's and Nancy, Bismboy.com. I basically said that like a thousand times. So it's pretty funny to imagine a name. And then suddenly it's like in a Calvin Harris song. It's in Big Daddy too. That was probably a highlight for me. Mel Gibson held it up and Will Ferrell cheered.

It's been on like dozens of shows, movies, songs. It's pretty wild. It's also maybe even weirder is when you're like at a restaurant, you hear somebody like say it. It's almost like if you were to over hear somebody saying your name, you know, you would like pierce the air. So it's pretty unusual. Yeah, that must be,

You gotta kind of wonder like, are they talking about me or are they talking about their plans for vacation? And then it's like, well, I don't want to get in the middle of that. Because if they were like, you're never going to believe what happened at this Airbnb. You're like, I'm just here to get my salad. Yeah, I don't want to deal with this. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I heard you describe it in another interview as the worst idea that worked, which I thought was really funny. Because it's like, that's sort of admitting like, we didn't think the whole thing through in the beginning and we had the name weird.

but that sort of goes to show you that if the mission and the values are in alignment and it's something that people want, you can be, quote unquote, wrong about a lot of other things, right? You know, I thought one day this will be huge. Thousands of people will use this. That just sums everything out. And so thousands of people. One day, a couple thousand people will use this product. And by the way, like a couple thousand was probably as many people as I'd met my entire life at

that point. So that was a lot of people. So, yeah, like, when you start a company, you have to certainly believe in it. But I think that the very best people make something for themselves. And I thought, like, this is something I wanted for myself. I wanted to be able to make extra money, meet cool people, and share the space I had. It was very intuitive to me. And I thought, if I'm traveling, I don't want to be like a sequester in a hotel district.

And I can't really even afford a hotel. I want to basically have the experience like I was visiting a friend in another city. And I can just pay them a little bit of money to subsidize their rent. And that was a really simple idea. But I never really thought this would be something that, like, hundreds of millions of people would use. It just, because I think it's hard to imagine behavior changing. So I like sometimes say that, like, it's easier for us to imagine living exactly like we are now on Mars

than living differently on this planet, although the second is more likely to happen. But it's really hard, I think, for people's mental model to imagine a behavioral or a social change in society. But if you go back to first principles, It wasn't a crazy idea. All you had to believe is that people were willing to trust each other. And we were doing it all the time on the internet. We were connecting with people on the internet. We were buying selling things on the internet.

If you look at like generations ago when I told my grandfather about this idea, he said, of course. And I said, what do you mean of course? He said, this is kind of like the way I used to travel when I was a kid. He kind of meant that he used to stay in like boarding houses. And so everything was a lot less commercial. And if you really think about it, before there were brands, what were there? there were only people and people connecting with one another.

So I think that a lot of times ideas that seem bad, they seem bad. If you bring them back down to their first principles, you start to realize the only thing you have to believe about this idea is that people are willing to trust each other enough to stay in their homes. And, you know, of course, this never happened before the internet because there was no mechanism for people to be able to foster or, you know, arbitrate that trust. But now, of course, there can be. So I think that suddenly that way of thinking means that almost everything around us could change.

We can literally live in a world of our own design because we now have technology we never had before. And so that means that almost every convention could be rethought. I totally got behind the idea early. And I know probably a lot of people say that. But I used to be on this website called couch surfing, which still exists, but I don't use it anymore. Because it's like for young kids to go, oh, I'm passing through this random town in Poland. who wants to get a beer, like, whose garage floor can I sleep on? And I was really early in this site, and I used to have people over from all over, and people

would call me in emergencies and be like, I'm from Brazil and my other person canceled, or my hotel is closed, or they kicked me out for whatever reason. And I'd have guys, like, sleeping on chairs. And it was the time of my life. So as soon as I thought, all right, so this is the commercial version of that. It's a brilliant idea. And a lot of people thought, I don't want a stranger in my house. And I was like, this is the most fun you can have on this side.

of the law having strangers come over to your house that are vetted, right, that are like not just, because it's not stranger, stranger, like you do a good job of making sure it's a real person and things like that. I'm sure that was a process. People kind of assume it's, like, when I told my mom about it, she's like, I don't know about that. And I'm like, mom, it's not like crazy people from off the street who have no place to stay. It's like instead of a hotel. And as soon, it's one of those things as soon as people try it, they're like, this is much better than hotel. The person who's hosting us told us all the secrets of the neighborhood. And I feel like I'm staying in this quaint little town as opposed to like taking the 50th floor elevator down from

the Marriott in the corporate district. Yeah, if you think about it, it is a great point. I had, by the way, never heard of couch surfing until after we started Airbnb. And suddenly I realized actually there were hundreds of thousands of people doing essentially this kind of free exchange. The problem of couch surfing was because there was no money involved, it was a lot of noise to signal. There were some other kind of problems as well. So it was a fairly inefficient marketplace. and there wasn't enough incentive for people to host because they weren't actually getting paid, so they would deny a lot of requests. And it became a very inefficient process without a lot of quality.

But of course, it was a brilliant kind of movement that I thought was started. But of course, like, if you really step back, people love homes. That's why they live in them. If people truly loved hotels, they redesigned their homes to look like hotels. But of course, they don't. So number one, people love homes. Number two, most people, when they're hosting an Airbnb, aren't looking to make a profit like a hotel. their home they already paid to live in.

So often, many of them are looking to subsidize their rent. So what that actually means is they have fewer costs. And so you can actually get a really good value, get a lot of space. The third thing to think about is most people don't go to a city or go somewhere to feel like an outsider. You go to feel like an insider. But the problem is a lot of hotels are in a hotel districts with only other outsiders, tourists. And so what a lot of people I think would like to do is to feel like they're in a neighborhood, a neighborhood where they can have a whole home themselves.

But the final thing, I think the thing that's most important is the idea that, like, you can actually have a connection to the community go-to and the people that live there. And I think our mantra became like basically, you know, our original tagline when we started Airbnb was travel like a human. I think that kind of summed it all up, you know, the idea that much of modern travel, modern tourism was kind of stripping away the humanity out of like, no matter how successful you become in life, you're reminded how much you're mere mortal when you fly and when you try to travel. And we wanted to like make it feel much more, much more meaningful. I know you grew up

two parents, social workers. They dedicated their lives to helping people, right? So that has to have guided the vision of Airbnb at least a little bit, right? Totally. Yeah. My mom and dad were social workers. And my mom, I remember growing up, told me, I chose a job for the love and I made no money. So you should choose a job that pays you a lot of money. And my first career choice was to be an artist. And my mom said, you've only managed. She said, I didn't know there was a career. that would pay you less than the social worker, but it turns out there is, and they're called artists, and that you're going to live in my basement for the rest of your life, and I promised I wouldn't. And she said, okay, well, if you become an artist, then you have to promise me that

you one day get a job, and that that job's a real job, and it has health insurance. And so I promised her that. And I ended up going to a design school called the Rhode Island School Design. And I graduated from Rhode Island School Design, and I did end up for at least a couple years getting a real job with health insurance before I then quit to become an entrepreneur, or as my mom said, unemployed, until it really worked. But yeah, I do think that a life of service is something that I think my parents dedicate themselves to. And, you know, my dad was always about like rooting for the underdog and every sports team. And so that was a little bit about, I think, how we grew up. I also think Airbnb's a little different than most tech companies because I'm a designer,

not an engineer by training. And so Airbnb is, I think, rooted a little more in the humanities. I think for a technology company, we try to be like a really, a deeply humanistic tech company. And I think that that's something that people are yearning for from large technology platforms today to not feel like a number as part of an algorithm, but to, you know, really feel a little more like the internet company actually knows you, cares about you. And that's what we're striving to. It's, of course, really hard when you're dealing 100 millions of people, though. And, you know, she's still working.

She must love her job because if anyone could retire their mom and find her a nice place to live is probably the co-founder of Airbnb. Either she loves her job or says something not so great about me. I would like to think it's the first thing. I've offered to help her. But no, she loves working. She's like 69 going on 29. Wow.

You guys, you moved her in with you for a while, right, during the pandemic, so she wouldn't be lonely? To be clear, she moved in with me. Right. To say, I moved her in, would presume a nuance. She moved in. And I was like, okay, hey, mom. So actually, what ended up happening was, I think it was like mid-year-old.

March. You know, the pandemic, I think was declared a pandemic, March 12, you know, the week of March 15th or so. And so it was declared a pandemic. My mom was in the process of getting a job in San Francisco and relocating. And of course, she would have her own apartment. She gets on the airplane. All of a sudden, midway through her flight, she gets an email that her job is now remote in flight, right? Like everything is now work from home. She lands. She's working in her apartment. Suddenly, I am now running a company in sweatpants. in front of an eye map. So I used to go to an office, like most normal people, there's a pandemic, everyone's working from home. And now I'm trying to manage a crisis in a house and actually the same chairman now. We were beginning of last year, we thought we were like on top of the world.

We were about to go public. All of a sudden, we lose 80% of our business in eight weeks. In a company like our size that loses 80% of its business at eight weeks, it's like driving in 18, we are going 80 miles an hour and then slamming on the brakes. Like really nothing good happens. And so I was basically in this like,

feeling like was a freefall. People were predicting, is this the end of Airbnb? Can Brian Chesky C of Airbnb? These were headlines. And so I was just working like 16, 18 hours a day. And my mom came over for like a weekend to kind of hang out and left a few months later.

But I appreciated it because, you know, she was there to support me. And she brought a golden retriever over who was with me by my side now. And we were one big family and I was 39 years old, back living with my mom. But this time with a job of health insurance. But right. I hope that you reminded her of her speech saying that you weren't allowed to move back in with her when you graduated and leveraged the irony a little bit. A little bit of irony. I'm like, wait a second. It was pretty funny though. I'm like, wait a second. I'm about to turn 40. I'm single and living with my mom in a house. So, you know, it's not what you think. That's you on every dating app. All my mom's fears. Except for one other giant nuance, I run this company, I'm actually pretty dangerously close to what she was afraid of. Yeah. Yeah. Like if it weren't for a few million. shares or a few hundred thousand shares,

you would be getting an earful, yeah, man. Yeah, exactly, exactly. That one thing really saved me. I think it's interesting that you didn't think early on that you could be an entrepreneur because the only entrepreneurs you knew were pizza shop owners. And I had the exact same thought when I was younger, right? Like the only business owners I knew growing up in Michigan

were dentists and guys that owned like a diner. That was it, barbershop. I had, I knew Bob from Bob's Pizza. I had another friend who made, bronze baby shoes. So if you want to get your baby shoes bronzed, that was kind of the other big entrepreneur in my street. And then the third entrepreneur did essentially if you needed to have your company printed on a T-shirt or a hat. And so those are the three things I thought. And those just those companies, you know, obviously didn't capture my imagination. I think there's a lesson here.

The lesson is it's hard to sometimes aspire to something you've never been exposed to, you know. And growing up as a kid, like, what were the things that you wanted to grow up to be a professional athlete. An astronaut in the 80s would have been very popular. If you were incredibly ambitious, you would want to be like Pres in United States. But being an entrepreneur really wasn't a seemingly available option because it wasn't something in upstate New York in the 1980s that people talked about. And there weren't really a lot of entrepreneurs before that kind of computer and internet revolution. It wasn't like there weren't that many. But I think that technology and internet has basically made like starting an app, like probably in like the 70s starting a band,

like everyone does it now. It really wasn't that way. in the 80s. There really wasn't a really easy way to start a really big company. Yeah, that's a good point. It wasn't really, you knew dry cleaners, you knew people own Chinese restaurants, you knew people owned, like, very small businesses, but there was no, there was no blueprint for anything like what you're doing. I mean, there's still kind of isn't. I guess there is a little bit if you're in the little scene, but not really, certainly not from a dude going to RISD, going to a design school who, when you were younger, you redesigned broken toys, shoes, friends' backyards, and possibly also the layout of the city of what

Was it St. Louis when you were seven? St. Louis. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So I was a very peculiar kid that was really interested in art and design. And I used to ask Santa for poorly designed Christmas toys so I could redesign them, which is, I don't know if that says something about my curiosity for design or something else.

I'll let the audience decide. When I was seven years old, it was the first time I was an airplane. I got to St. Louis. And I have a memory of wanting, I don't know why I was obsessed with urban planning at the age of seven. And I wanted to like redesign the city. And I don't know where this came. from. I don't know why I was like this. And then like, you know, like, what was big in the 80s? Like Air Jordans and a Game Boy and like, I love these objects, but mostly to redesign them and to really

understand, I would disassemble them, try to learn how they were taking them apart. One day, I'm like, I think I'm like 10 or 11 years old. I go to my friend's house to play. And his father was redesigning his backyard. I guess he was having like landscaping done and having a deck built. And he was doing it himself. So on the kitchen table were all these architectural drawings and all these like architectural tools, like a T-square and a drawing triangle and a protractor in a compass. And I just thought that is the coolest thing I ever thought of. So I started trying to redesign my parents' backyard, but they had no interest in my poorly designed deck. So I would go door to door to neighbors trying to convince them to install decks.

I did not have anyone redesign their backyard. But I just had this real deep interest in making, creating, designing, not really ever knowing what that would lead to. I was like, should I be an architect, should I be an artist, should I be a designer? I didn't really know what I wanted to be growing up. And, you know, the arts is not something that is fostered a lot. Art and design is not something fostered a lot for kids anymore. I mean, a lot of schools are cutting their art programs, the design programs. There's just huge push to standardized testing, which doesn't really like celebrate very much creativity. You know, STEM, science, technology, engineering, and math. There's no A in that for art or design. You know, I was a little bit more on my own. And I did a lot of my own

studying, I would be dropped off of art museums. So that was kind of what my child was like. Yeah, it's unusual, but in a cool sort of like, well, nowadays it's cool. Back then it was like design nerd, you know, same as any other probably. Yeah, no, it wasn't, it did not get you a date to the prom. I can confirm that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's a lot of us are in the same boat, man, for sure, in different needs. Each of our niches were equally just like, oh man, you had to pick that one, huh, son? I think that, I think like, it might be appealing as an adult to be our artistic, not when you're 12.

No, no, it's just a good way to attract unwanted attention. I wanted attention. It's just attention from other guys that will punch you. Yeah, exactly. So, all right, so you started the business. I heard that when you first started the company, you used to go to people's houses or homes, I should say, in New York, right? The hosts on the app and visit who essentially your customers are face-to-face.

And this is really incredible to hear this massive company like Airbnb doing something that is so small in scale and frankly, totally. totally unscalable. And also that anybody just let you in in New York, like, hey, you know that app that you're using that you used to like let strangers in? I'm the guy who runs it. Can I come in and talk to you a total stranger? I mean, that's just, that's highly unusual, man. Yeah, well, the way it worked was, let me tell you the quick story, because this is kind of a little funny story. So we start Airbnb. We enter this incubation program. I guess it's called the incubator, Y Combinator is probably the most well-known company doing that. And the guy who started Paul

Graham's very famous investor. And he gave us the most important advice I ever got. He said, what we're asking him like, you know, everything was just getting started. We don't have a lot of users. And he goes, where are your users? And we said, we don't have that many. But the few people we have, we have a few people renting their homes in New York. And we're in Mountain View at that point. And he said, so your users are in New York and you're here with me in Mountain View. I said, yes. He said, again, you're using New York and you're here in Mountain View. What are you doing here? Go to New York. And we're like, all right, but what are you going to do New York? He's like, go to your users. We didn't really know what to do. So we just flew to New York. And this is the winter

of 2009, like January, February, March. So it's snowing. There's snow in the ground. And we're kind of like trying to meet up with different hosts. We don't really know how to be helpful to them. Now, in 2009, it was really hard to take photos and put them on the internet on a listing. Now, obviously, it's very easy to do because every phone has a camera on it. But back then, it was quite difficult. We had this idea. We said, what if we had this button where you could press a button and a photographer would just magically show up the next day at your house, photograph all your home, and then the photos will you magically upload it. And the whole thing would be streamlined. We basically sent this email. We said, click this button if you want

your home, photographed by a photographer. We didn't describe who the photographer was. So all of a sudden, the next day, we'd knocked the door. We were the photographer. And it was only when they found out that we were the founder that they realized how small this company was. In fact, I remember one time a host asked me, oh, by the way, how do I get paid? And I said, oh, you want to get paid? So I take my backpack off. I opened my backpack and I had a giant bank ledger with like 500 blank checks in it. And so I basically just opened it and I wrote her a hand check.

And that was how I paid people. I literally, before we had basically wired ACH online banking or PayPal, I was handwriting checks every day and putting them in the mail and paying people. So the lesson is you do things that don't scale to prove out the concept and then you scale it because to scale it is to build technology. Building technology is essentially expensive. It's kind of like don't film the movie until you perfect the script. You can rewrite the script.

It's very cheap. Once you get on set and you start burning a lot of money. So prove the concept in as low tech a way as possible. But the other way that maybe the more important lesson is you don't need to worry about building a company over 100 million people. There's a famous story of the creation of Gmail, which is obviously Google's mail product. And this guy, Paul Bukkite said when he created Gmail that Larry Page, I think, wouldn't let him ship Gmail until 100 people inside of Google love the product. And he thought, oh, this will take a couple weeks. It turned out, I guess, to take like a couple years until he actually built a product people loved.

The idea is that to start a successful business, even 100 million people, all you need to do is build a product that 100 people absolutely love. And as long as those 100 people are not like the only 100 in the world that exist. They're representative of a large population. If 100 people love something, they're each going to tell 10 people. And everything in the world that is large has started small at some point. And so that's a really simple process. And it's really easy to do something, I think, that 100 people actually love. you get to know them, you follow their journey, you perfect every detail. It also makes your company

more personal. If you think of people like numbers, just like in multi-million data sets, you're going to be very incremental and you're not going to provide a great experience. So that was the basic principle. What it led for me to do, though, was walking through snow with a camera mind my neck. And I remember saying to myself, when Steve Jobs, like when you bought on iPhone, Steve Jobs didn't come to your house and sleep on your couch, but I did. Yeah. And so I didn't know if that was a good or bad sign. At the time, it didn't seem like a good sign, but it did help us. It's funny because it's kind of like Mark Zuckerberg coming over to sit in my living room and tell me what all my ex-girlfriends are up to. That would be funny. Well, speaking of Mark Zuckerberg,

I also, again, talk about tale of two startups. Mark Zuckerberg, you know, my recollection is created Facebook and, you know, he obviously launched it on the Harvard campus and within two weeks it was a campus sensation. And then, of course, he went through the Ivy League schools, campus by campus. Airbnb did not start that way. We were not a sensation. We launched for the Democratic National Convention in 2008. So if you remember, you know, the biggest thing happening in the summer 2008 was Barack Obama running for president. Right. And in August 2008, because his demand was so big for him, they moved him from a basketball arena to a football stadium. I don't know if you remember this. So he's now doing the keynote in Denver in a 60,000

seat stadium where the Denver Baccos play. And all of a sudden, we're thinking to ourselves, we're all these people going to stay? And that's when we came up with this idea to like basically relaunch Airbnb for the DNC. We ended up having like, I don't know how many bookings, like 80 bookings. At that point, I thought we were huge. And then the following week, we got like one booking because the convention was over. And at that point, I realized if only there were political conventions every week, we'd have a huge business. So we're totally broke. You know, those binders that kids put baseball cards in growing up, those plastic binders. Any kid today won't know what we're talking about, but you and I would know. We put credit cards in them.

In other words, that's what we funded the company. We take a credit card, $5,000 limit, max it out. Take another credit card. We probably had $30,000, $40,000 of debt, you know, and we were making $30,000 a year. So that was kind of a mathematical challenge right there. So we're totally broke. We're now been working on the idea for almost a year. It's October 2008. And we're bed and breakfast. This is still our name. And we're like, the airbed thing is not working. Maybe we should get into breakfast. I know what you're thinking. Amazing idea. And so, of course, we weren't going to sell like perishables, like eggs. And Barack Obama and John McCain have this obviously, you know, election looming in November. So it's only a month away. And we realize, what if we sold collectible breakfast cereal? I don't know

why we thought that was a good idea, but it was probably after midnight, we're fairly desperate, tens of thousand dollars in credit card debt, desperation creates creativity. So we end up designing a Barack Obama and John McCain-themed breakfast cereal. We designed this big blue box, the Barack Obama-themed cereal. We called it Obama-O's like Cheerios, the breakfast of change. And then we figured if we're going to do a Barack Obama-themed cereal, we should come up with the John McCain-themed cereal. So we made a box that was red for a Republican, had John McCain on the cover. And we called it not, we learned he was a captain in the Navy. So we said, said Captain McCain's, a Maverick in every bite. So we designed these two boxes. And I thought,

okay, we can sell like a few hundred thousand boxes. Like, these are really cool. They're going to be a fun like, and there was a lot of Barack Obama themed memorabilia and kind of Chochies and stuff in October. So we're going to get on this trend. And so we call up General Mills and say we've got this incredible idea for John McCain, Barack Obama themed cereal. And like all of a sudden, I heard a dial tone. Like, it's not working. So then we went to like a much of medium, serial companies, try to get them to make the cereal boxes. And they all thought we were like maybe mentally ill. And they're like, this just seems really weird. Sure. So all of a sudden, my co-founder Joe finds an alumni my college at RISD who lives in Berkeley, who's got a small print shop. He doesn't

even make cereal boxes, but he does like oversized prints. Sure. And he said, I can't make you like 100,000 boxes of cereal, but I'll print you a thousand boxes for free. And if you sell, them, just give me a little royalty because I want to help out a couple of Ristie guys. So we're like, thanks. So we print a thousand boxes each of a total of Barack Obama and John McCain themed cereal. We charge $40 a box. And to get the word out, I heard that there were these things called media lists, like that you like startups paid money to get media lists, which are, as you would know as a journalist, like, basically the contact info of producers. And so we got a media list and we got like 100 addresses of like the producers of Good Morning America, Today Show.

We actually made these boxes of cereal. To be clear, we went to the grocery store. We bought a thousand boxes of cereal. There wasn't like just go to Amazon and put a thousand vines of cereal in your car. We would actually every day go in our big old red Jeep, stuff the Jeep with cereal boxes, come home, disassemble them, and in hot blue new cereal boxes, we ended up sending them to these producers. They ended up getting on Today's show. was on CNN and all these stories.

We ended up selling over $30,000 of cereal boxes, and that's actually how we funded the company. We actually funded the company selling collectible breakfast cereal. At that point, we said we're basically serial entrepreneurs. I see what you did there. Exactly, exactly, yeah. And my mom thought, are you a serial company now? And of course, I mean, it wasn't really clear what the answer was

because technically the answer was yes. Of course, we didn't really want to be a serial company. The reason I say all the story is, I remember thinking in the middle of night one night, assembling cereal boxes of hot glue, like getting on my fingers. I wonder if Mark Zuckerberg ever assembled breakfast cereal to get Facebook off the ground. The answer was no. It was a foreboding sign for us, but that's actually how we fund the company.

But I think it goes to show that sometimes the most implausible ideas do turn out to work and if you just have enough resilience. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest Brian Chesky. We'll be right back. Thank you so much for listening to and supporting the show. You know, I've really put a lot of work into it. My team puts a lot of work into it. I know there's a lot of sponsors and you're probably jogging around or driving. You don't want to write down the code. We put all of the sponsor codes and URLs in one easy place. Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals is where you can find it. So please do consider supporting those who support this show and make it possible.

Don't forget, we've got worksheets for many episodes. If you want some of the drills and exercises talked about during the show, those are all in one easy place, namely the The worksheets, those are in the show notes. The show notes are at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. Now, back to Brian Chesky. It's funny that you were in the bed business, and then you were forced to become the breakfast business to get back into the bed business. And now here we are, right?

Exactly, here we are. I like that. It's not Airbnb. It's air, and then it's also Little to B and the Little B, and then back to the other B. No air anymore. Don't worry about it. Yeah, no air.

Yeah, we went to from B, to B to B. Yeah, I like that. Yeah, yeah, you can use that. No problem. Thank you. I'm going to use that. So you were in a cash crunch. You solved it with counterfeit cereal or, you know, custom cereal. I prefer unlicensed cereal to counterfeit. Yes. It was actual cereal. It was real cereal. It's real cereal just was unlicensed. Right, right. It was like Captain Crunch inside one and then Cheerios and the other. Exactly. It really was Captain Crunch and Cheerios. It was actually discount Cheerios because we couldn't afford the brand. Yeah, exactly. It was actually cheaper than Kirkland.

Yeah, there's a level underneath it and you don't want to know what it is. Just buy the box and keep it on your shelf. Exactly. Exactly. The great thing is that that kind of serial never expires for like generations. Right. No, it's a hand-me-down kind of cereal. So speaking of crunches, right, now you're in a pandemic. Last year, I assume it was much more of a critical, oh my gosh, is this going to work kind of issue. You forewent, foregone your own salary, all the founders for six months, raised a couple billion dollars during the early part of the pandemic. And I assume that was kind of like, we don't know if we're going to use all this money, but we damn well sure better have it because anything could happen right now. That's exactly the case.

I mean, it was inconceivable. Again, I think it's important to like paint a picture. By the beginning of last year, we were like this worst idea that ever worked that actually did work that hundreds of millions people used. We had a valuation of nearly $40 billion. So here I am, the son of two social workers, went to design school. we had like 10 years of incredible success. And that was like part of identity that like we had the successful company.

And then all of a sudden, within eight weeks, we go from feeling like Airbnb's here to stay to Airbnb may not be here to stay. We lost 80% of our business, but we didn't know what would happen the other 20%. And at this point, we were estimating that we were going to lose literally billions of dollars. We were at one point estimating losing, you know, a few hundred million dollars a month. losing a few hundred million dollars a month, which is just kind of numbers that are a little hard to wrap your head around. And so at this point, the analogy was I was like a captain of a ship. The ship had holes in it. We didn't know how long would take to fill the holes, but we're really far from land, and we needed a lot of rationing. And so we're like, if this storm goes on for a couple

years, even if I cut expenses, how much money will I need? We estimated that number was around $2 billion. Now, in the middle of a pandemic, when you're in a travel business and you lose 80% of your business, people aren't really looking to fund travel companies in the middle of pandemic. So it was quite difficult to raise money. So we actually took on debt $2 billion. We did it in record time, but it was a very, very scary period of time. And I just commend the investors who stepped up because you kind of like, it was a little crazy to believe in Airbnb 10 years ago when, you know, when it was starting. For a brief moment last spring, it also seemed a little crazy to bet on Airbnb in the middle, in the beginning of a pandemic.

but, you know, some people stepped up and they obviously did really well. And good for them because that is serious risk tolerance. And then, of course, to have this hit right after and they're just going, no, we were just counting this as part of our portfolio is something we didn't regret. Yeah, exactly. We were supposed to be the winner in so many people's portfolios. And we go from the winner to like, you know, not the winner. And kind of like, you know, like they're like, wow, this could go to nothing.

Yeah. You sort of mentioned that like the news headlines, is this the end of Airbnb? be, I assume you must stay away from reading all that press now so that you don't freak out, right? I mean, not that you would. Yeah, yeah. I try not to read too much press when it's, when times are good, because you don't want to be inconsistent. It's like, oh, I only read good stories about myself. Right. And when press is bad, it's really painful to read like all the predictions of your imminent demise. It's kind of weird, too. It's like reading a memorial about yourself, but you haven't died yet. So it's pretty weird to read those. And that's what it was like

last year. And so I just, you know, we use that as motivation. And, you know, I remember Jeff Bezos once said to me, don't get too hung up on the new, you know, the press, today's poster boys, tomorrow's pinata, just kind of don't get too high, don't get too low. And, you know, that's kind of one of the things I've tried to do. Because as not true, the highs are hot, man, you can lose a lot really quickly as well. Yeah, that is certain. And there's no way you can really, well, how do you prepare for a crisis like this? I think you phrased it once, better to be pessimistic and be right, than optimistic and be wrong. But also, like, that kind of sucks, right? Yeah. It's a bummer to do that, to have to do that, but it's part of your job. You know, I don't know how,

yeah, how do you prepare for a crisis? You know, unfortunately, the preparation I had to prepare for the crisis was other crisis. In other words, like, there was no way to actually prepare for COVID. Like, it had never happened before. It was unprecedented. None of us could ever predict it. But the benefit I had was the army was born in a crisis. We couldn't pay rent. In a great recession, 2000. We had a lot of growing pains, a lot of challenges along the way. So unfortunately or fortunately, I had been prepared and I was fairly battle tested before the pandemic. And a lot of professional CEOs, CEOs of major travel companies, had never themselves been in a crisis

because they just became CEO. A lot of them weren't even CEO during the Great Recession. You know, a lot of these big public companies, they have a little more of a revolving door of CEOs whose tenure is only four or five years. I had been doing it for over 10 years. So I'd seen quite a bit of challenges. And I learned some lessons in a crisis. The first lesson I learned in a crisis was to be decisive.

I think that sounds kind of obvious when I say it. You wouldn't believe the number of people who get paralyzed in a crisis because in a crisis there are a few good options. And people like perfection. And so what do you do when you have only three crappy choices and you've got to pick one? And if you don't pick one, now you have two crappy choices. Right. And if you don't pick one, now you only are left with that one really, really crappy choice.

So decisiveness is really key. That's the first thing. Or another analogy, like, imagine, like, you're not sure if you should get off on the exit and the highway and you're, like, hesitating. You're going to collide. Right. So the second thing in a crisis is you have to be very principally oriented. You know, I had a prior crisis where things were so bad that at one point I remember saying

to myself, I don't know what the hell is going to happen. How do I want to be remembered regardless of the outcome? And so I kind of call that a principal decision, not a business decision. A business decision is I'm making a rational. decision to optimize a certain outcome to win. A principal decision is, I can't possibly predict how this is going to end? So how do I want to be remembered? So to do that, I ended up writing down a series of principles. Act what all stakeholders are mine. Like, don't be a villain of this crisis. Like, play for the long term for this company. So you make a series of principles. And those

principles can govern lots of decisions. The third thing I learned in the crisis is you have to communicate a lot more. If you're used to communicating like every week, Now you've got to communicate every day. The faster things change, and the more freaked out people are, the more communication, the more assurance that you need to have. But the most important thing I learned in the crisis was that the hardest thing to manage in a crisis, to be honest, is your own psychology. You know, when you feel like you're going to lose it all, it's really easy to say,

why me, to get really down. And the problem with that is that everyone's looking to the leader. And if the leader thinks they're screwed, then everyone else thinks they're screwed. Yeah. And everyone thinks they're screwed. They kind of stop working to fix the situation. And so you have to be optimistic. Not blind optimism, but you have to be optimistic because when you're optimistic,

you're typically more creative. And when you're optimistic, you don't quit. You're like, I'm going to figure this out. And so to manage your own psychology is probably actually the hardest part of managing a crisis. It is unrelenting. And it can be like staring into an abyss of despair if you aren't really strong mentally. Yeah, I mean, to give people, well said, first of all, but to give people an idea of what

this meant for Airbnb. So the pandemic hits about a billion dollars in reservations, wanted refunds, pretty much instantly overnight, whatever, and issued an extenuating circumstances policy and gave people refunds that normally, you know, hey, the refund policy, this trip is tomorrow like you can't screw over the owner. We overrode the host cancellation policy. Right. And now the host are pissed off. Right. Because the hosts are like, wait a second, it's a pandemic. some of them are saying, I'm losing my job. I needed that money. Right. Like this is my backup plan. This is my backup plan. And we're like, we don't want to create a moral conflict for guests where they're traveling even though they really shouldn't be because they're not going to get their money back. And people are

advising against crossing borders. We have a lot of cross-border reservations. And so one of the hard decisions I made, it turned out to be the right decision, but it was really hard was to number one, override the cancellation policies. But number two, we took $250 million off our balance sheet, $250 million. Wow. And we gave it to host. And, you know, when you're like a $100 billion company, you can do that. When you're a company incinerating cash looking to raise emergency money, the worst signal

you can give to investors is to just give $250 million of someone else, as if like you're just, the concern was like a rational person would have said the worst possible thing to do right before trying to raise $2 billion emergency funding is to just shovel out $250 million of oxygen that you needed. Right. Like was that for advertising? No, we just gave it away. What? Yeah, we just gave it away. Like, so wait a second, what are you going to do with the next two billion dollars? That probably did scare off some investors. Cudos to the one that stepped in,

that they realized that actually, without our host, we don't only have anything. So we need to really take care of them. Yeah, it was a bold move. And of course, it worked out. And then Airbnb staff donates a million dollars in travel credits from the company. So if I work with you, then I can travel and use it as a credit in the app. So they ended up collecting another 10 million for super hosts, which, you know, that's got to be kind of a proud daddy CEO. Actually, don't react to that. Proud Daddy sounds creepy. Proud founder moment for sure, right?

I'm trying to, yeah, I try to like not remember the proud daddy. Yeah, sorry about that. It came out. It slipped up. Yeah, I was really proud of our employees. You know, the context Jordan was our employees didn't know. I think they saw the writing on the wall that there was probably going to be a layoff. I was getting asked questions every week.

At this point, we hadn't done a layoff. But it seemed imminent. People were asking me in team meetings, is there a layoff? I didn't say yes, but I didn't say no. I said all things are on the table, which is kind of like, don't be surprised. Right. And at this point, while employees don't know which of them are going to have a job, which them aren't, and they don't even know if they get laid off,

how long it's going to before they get the next job, because at this point, people are predicting we're entering an economic depression, not recession. Yeah. For them to have stepped up and, you know, put all that money in, it was pretty cool. It's just one of a few things that you've done that are, that I didn't really expect, but that turned out to be, well, surprise, surprise, in accordance with the values that you were raised with and the values of the company, right?

Like getting 225,000 places to stay for frontline workers so they could stay quarantined from loved ones so they wouldn't spread COVID. And it's got to be inspiring. So proud daddy, inspiring to see your sort of like rented air mattress on the floor slash gimmicky election serial company pull off boss moves like this sort of one after the other, right? I appreciate that. Yeah, it was the thing that I think I'm maybe most proud of is that most the ideas that we did last year weren't my ideas. There were ideas that came from the culture. So like when you have a company, like we have 5,000 employees. On the one hand, I can't be responsible

for every decision everyone makes. Like they're adults. They make their decisions. Right. But what I am responsible for is the culture that I create. And that culture, you know, people do bad shit your company. Like, as a CEO, you're kind of responsible because you created a culture that presumably condone this. Conversely, you know, if you create a great culture, people step up without having you ask them to do things. And so one of those things that you called out was our employees came to us and said,

hey, I've been reading a lot of reports that we have firefighters, nurses, doctors, EMTs that are working in the front lines and they need places to stay. Either they don't want to stay with their family because they feel like they're being exposed to COVID. Exactly. Or they're serving in another town, and so they don't want to be commuting. So we worked with our host community, and our host offered 225,000 homes for people working on the front lines. That was probably one of the greatest acts of generosity I'd seen in our community. It was pretty cool. And actually, that was an example of the culture permeating not just our employees, but our actual host community.

I also think, Jordan, like one of my theories is, you know, the company did eventually rebound. And even after, you know, a layoff, after having to restructure the company, we rebound. And I think one of the reasons Airbnb came back and had a really huge comeback was I think a lot of people were rooting for the company. I'm not saying everyone was, but there was a lot of goodwill. Not the hotel industry, for example. Not the hotel industry, but they had way bigger problems to be focused on us last year. Yeah, they had bigger fish to fry.

That's way bigger. Yeah, just their own existential survival. And I think people were rooting for the company last year because of, I think, much of the acts of generosity, not of me, but in many cases of our own employees and our host. The pandemic for you, it's got to kind of be like rebuilding a house that was still on fire, right? Like, did you feel like you maintain the scrappiness of startup life, at least in the C-suite at Airbnb? Because it looks that way from the outside. I know it's kind of impossible to maintain that as you scale, right, because you hire like an HR manager from Proctor and Gamble,

and they have like a six-figure budget for something where you're eight years ago, you were like, Can you do it for 50 bucks, right? Or can you do it for nothing? Yeah. You know, take everyone to Chuck E. Cheese. And now they're like, oh, I rented an entire hotel, like a whole resort or something like that for this event, you know, like a whole golf club. You hit on a whole bunch of things there that completely resonate.

Number one, the metaphor of, and I've said this actually, a metaphor of like you're running in a building, your house, your house is on fire. You have to save the house, but you can't save every part of the house. So we had to like basically focus the company on a core of our business. We'd just shutter a bunch of divisions, but then we had to remodel the house, but it's still on fire and still smoldering. So that was, like, quite difficult. The second thing is you call this out.

When you start a company, basically, every company starts small. Every single company's ever been started, for the most part, started with one, two, three, or four people. When you're two or three people, you do every job in the company. Right. You do it quickly. You do it scrappily. You might not do it really well, but the one thing is you also have no money, so everything

is efficient, it's fast, and you make decisions quickly because time is kind of the end me, like, you need to get momentum. You need to do things really quickly. Suddenly, you start hiring more people, more people, more people. You hire people from larger and larger companies. And often people at large companies have less of a sense of urgency. It's a nine to five. Maybe it's not nine to five, but it's a little bit less urgency. You don't move as quickly. And it's like the frog boiling. As you get larger, you don't notice that you're introducing lots of new processes. You're having meetings about meetings, literally. Like, you're not even meaning about the product. You're meeting about meetings. You get very internally oriented. You start focusing on the culture,

what's good, but then you can get so myoply focused on the culture that you're kind of forgetting outside the walls of the company. All these things start to creep in that we kind of call becoming like a big company. And I didn't realize that this very subtle pernicious thing was starting to happen to Airbnb, that we were moving a little slower, becoming a little bit bigger company, getting a little less connected to our community and becoming a little less focused. None of that was clear until suddenly we had to snap into action, save the company, and all of a sudden we were working day and night, Monday through Sunday. And I think what the pandemic did is it made us a more focused company, but it also made

us more like a startup again. It almost like thrust us back in time, back to the roots of our original vision of people to people, back to like making really fast decisions, back to a bias for action. And I really think that I want to see the best things that happened to us because that, you know, was a crisis, but, you know, it was awful tasting medicine, but, you know, maybe we needed it at that point. And I do think that there was a famous co-founder of Intel, Andy Grove, he said, bad companies are destroyed by a crisis. Good companies survive a crisis, but great companies are defined by a crisis. And I wanted us to be that third category. And so I said to the company

at the beginning of the crisis, and this was how I kind of played a trick on my own psychology, instead of saying, why me, I said to the company, this is our defining moment. I had this premonition that this was our defining moment. But I also think in life, like if you focus on something, if you say it, you can to some extent manifest it. And I said, this is going to be our defining moment. We're going to use this crisis as an opportunity to rebuild the company better. If the house is on fire, we will rebuild the house, but it will not be just rebuilt.

It will be better than it was before. And that became a rallying cry. Had it not been for that mentality, there's no way we would have made it through crisis the way we did. Yeah, I agree. I mean, a lot of people were surprised. I read those articles and I thought, no, it can't be the end of Airbnb. One, we use it. My brother-in-law uses it to rent out a room, but it's like, you can't find unique properties to stay at anywhere else, right? I mean, you can find a unique hotel here and there, but like, I want to stay in some weird guy's cave that he has that, like, is next to his private beach or something where he like sets up a campfire for you, you know? Weird caves by guys of private beaches is the kind of core. That's what you specialize. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we have a lot of really interesting spaces in Airbnb.

I've seen people rent the space under their kitchen table and get rented before. So you never know what people rent on the Internet. It depends on the event in that area, I suppose. But also, like, some of the famous stuff around here anyway, around the Bay, right, is like tree houses that have working bathrooms in it that are just kind of incredible, that normally somebody wouldn't have the incentive to build, even if they really wanted to do it, because they're just like, well, who's going to use that?

I'll use it occasionally. My kid will use it. Now there's people who are like, let me throw some AC in the tree house because we have people staying in it every single weekend. Exactly. So you get this sort of unique character from a lot of that. All right. So you go public.

Congratulations, by the way. What was it like finding out that your stock in Airbnb was worth, what was it like twice that it had been priced? You're on live TV. Yeah. That's got to be kind of a crazy moment. You know, you're trying to hold it together. And then I'm imagining a montage of things going through your head.

Like, this is great. Should I say that? Don't act too surprised. Keep calm. And then maybe like a yacht floats by or something like a. And then you're like, wait, I'm on live TV. Like the share price might be affected by what I say next. You know, like, what do you do in that moment?

I love the like the portrayal you have this kind of internal conflict. You can imagine. Yeah. You're right. Like when you're on camera, you're wondering like, look happy, but not too happy. Right. Let me tell you what's going through my head. In April of last year.

So, you know, we went public December 10th. So just like a little over half a year before, we raised emergency financing. and we were valued at approximately $18 billion. Now, that's still in the grand scheme of things a big number, but it was less than half of what we were only eight weeks before. And that was warrants that were part of a debt round. Had we raised a full equity round, it might have been less than 18. Could have been like 15, 16, 17 billion.

So that was the number in people's heads. Like we were worth about 15 to 20 billion. When we started preparing to go public July, August, the number in my head that I wanted to clear was $31 billion, because that was the price of the last round of financing. And I just wanted to feel like no one lost money in Airbnb. I wanted to feel like even the last investors made something. Maybe they made just a little bit.

Maybe they would have made more money if they invested somewhere else. But they didn't lose money. So my thing to the bankers was we have to clear $31 billion. We have to clear $31 billion. We can't allow anyone who's investing in the Airbnb to lose money. That was my goal. Suddenly there's more momentum. There's more hype.

People get excited. We're starting to approximate that we can maybe go public at $4. billion. And of course, I think the day that we actually issued the stock, you know, it would have valued Airbnb in the high 40s. And so the number I had in my head was this is going to be like a 40, 45, maybe 50 billion dollar company. And so then I do a series of interviews. So we basically do the like thing on NASDAQ. Of course, the thing of NASDAQ, I'm not in a suit and the stock exchange. I'm in sweatpants on Zoom, like dressed up from the waist up with a light white button down T-shirt, but I'm still looking pretty casual on the waist down. You do like a series interview.

So I do like CNBC and I do all these different interviews in advance for the stock trading. And no one ever tells you what time the stock trades. The stock doesn't trade until they have an equilibrium of supply and demand. And it's actually still a fairly minute little thing. So you don't know what time you go public. You go public at a certain time. And the more demand there is, the more the delay was. There was a really big delay. We didn't realize there was so much demand. So I'm in an interview with this woman named Emily Chang and Bloomberg, thinking that we were a maybe $45 to $50 billion company. And at this point, she says, we are now getting reports that your stock is going to be opening at $150 a share, which would have valued us not at $50 billion, but $100 billion.

And so at that moment, our company had increased in value in this matter of minutes by $50 billion. At that point, it was like my hard drive crashed. I had those weird flashbacks. Like, I had, I started thinking about starting the company, hot-blowing cereal boxes, the crazy rives, then to almost losing everything, the emergency financing. She then opens up to me. There was a clip of me on the internet. It was like the only time in my life I think I've been actually speechless, and I took 20 seconds to say anything.

And it's actually kind of embarrassing. But the good news is I became a TikTok meme, apparently. Like all the kids on TikTok turned me into a meme because it was kind of funny. And I'd never been relevant on social media until that moment. So that was a claim to fame there. Few companies in the history of corporate America probably had a year like us last year, where you're about to go public, you almost lose everything. Then you go public at $50 billion and double the same day.

Like, that's a pretty unusual story. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Brian Chesky. We'll be right back. Now for the rest of my conversation with Brian Chesky of Airbnb. Because the look on your face, and of course, was speechless, but also like kind of what I had described before. But also some of it, there's like, now that you tell the story, I'm like, ah, that look that you couldn't identify, that was relief. Yeah, and I didn't know my eyebrows went so high.

Yeah, they went like halfway in my head. I was like, I almost became a cartoon character for that moment. You're doing quick math in your head, like no one lost money, but also, wait, wait, that sounds like a lot. Right, it was just, it's a, it's a funny clip. We'll link it in the show notes on the website as well. Look, I know connection, community, they're a huge part of the stated goals of Airbnb, and how are you as you've become a public personality, the CEO of one of the most successful

companies the last few years, how have you kept yourself connected and open without either digging in because of work or putting up defenses because of your new socioeconomic condition, right? Like, how does someone in your position as a tech CEO date during a freaking pandemic? Like, that's got to be hard. Let me know if that's too personal. That's not too personal. You don't. I was working 16 hours a day, so there wasn't a lot going on in my house except for working and doing stress baking of one chocolate of cookie recipe that I knew. I mean, maybe like another way to answer the question is, how do you become really successful without losing your mind? Yeah. Because, you know, I won't name names, but certainly there's plenty of stories of people that seemed kind of normal. Then they

became very successful, made a huge sum of money, had a lot of power, and they seemed to change. And they did things maybe they weren't proud of, or they became, they kind of became characters in themselves. And I, of course, never really wanted to be that. What's the point of being successful to not like what you see in the mirror. And I don't know if I have a great answer, except to say that you have to stay pretty connected to who you were before you started the company. And one way to do that is stay connected to people you knew before you started the company. You know, no matter how successful I become, I have some friends who will remind me that, you know, they'll humble me very quickly. You ain't shit, boy. Yeah, there's a lot of that.

Yeah, those kinds of people. And so I think that's like really important. I think it's also like a lot of success, especially like being a tech founder, there's this really pernicious temptation to develop like these weird, I don't even know what you want to call it, almost like messianic tendencies. Yeah. You almost think you're like, you're a master of the universe because I get how it can be disorienting. Like you have an idea. All of a sudden becomes part of our culture. You have more money you ever know what to do with.

But also, unlike being like a celebrity or something, you also are responsible for hundreds of millions of people. And that can really distort you because it's a lot of responsibility, a lot of power. And I think it's important to remember that there's no real such thing as a self-made person. You know, I think when you start to believe that you made it on your own, that's when you start to feel separate from everyone else. And that isolation can allow you to become really narcissistic, really crazy. Your ego can really grow. You know, narcissism isn't really, I don't think about thinking you're better than somebody.

It's about thinking you're separate from everyone else. I think it's about the separation. So I think the problem is a sense of isolation. I did it on my own. I'm on my own. And you know, when you get really wealthy, you start to like sequester yourself. Yeah. And so I think the key is to never lose connection. You won't lose your mind if you don't lose connection, usually. I mean, you know. Well, there's a, yeah, of course there's exceptions, but yeah, I see what you're saying. But for the most part, if you stay, I think there's like a saying, like staying being rooted.

Well, what does that actually mean? Rooted is connected. You're not disconnected. And so I think that that's really, really important. You start to see some people, they have, massive success. So we don't really change that much. They still have the same values and principles. And then other people, they are completely affected and the power completely gets their head. But they also, I think, get really disconnected. I also think massive success is the amplifier. Whatever you had in your childhood gets amplified. If you have like some insecurity, can get massive, massively amplified. So you have to be very careful. But I just think being humble, keeping your head down is the key.

The moment you think you've made it is the moment you stop making it. And I think you got to be hungry, be curious. And it helps that I was an artist. You know, when you're an artist, it's not cool to make a lot of money. So you're kind of like making a lot of money means you're a commercial, you sold out.

And so by those measures, I'm not cool at all. But, you know, it is just a good reminder. Look, if you want to throw me a couple shares at Airbnb to tamp things down, not going to say now. So I could be kind of like a true artist again. That would be great. Right, yeah. Yeah.

But I think like just whatever you have to do to like not lose your shit, that's what you got to do. Yeah, that completely makes sense. It's funny about the art culture and like not making money because then you're a cell. I hadn't thought about that. I definitely agree with staying connected and staying grounded. And I think it's important. I know you, I can't remember if I've read this or someone just told me about it, but I know you have like a standing call every couple weeks with like your college buddies.

And I can't, I thought that has got to be the number one way to stay grounded because they're all like you can't probably get away with anything. If you're like, oh, yeah, you know, I wanted to get, I got a new bike. They're like, oh, you got a new bike. Oh, you're feeling pretty good about yourself, huh? And it's like, you just can't get away with anything with those kind of guys. There's two things I do every couple weeks that I think, you said one of them that I think have helped me through this crisis. One is, I have a bunch of friends from college, but three that we are all like used to live together. And we kind of hang out and we have like a standing kind of call or Zoom or FaceTime. and they're not tech founders, so they're my kind of route to who I was, and that is really,

really important. And they basically just make fun of me the whole time, which is probably good therapy for me. Yeah. The other standing call I have is with my two co-founder who I started the company with. And that's really important as well, because when you start a tech company, you have massive success. It's like a band that has a lot of success. And what often happens is eventually the band breaks up. Yeah. In fact, it's much worse for tech companies than bands. Most, I think a lot of bands stay together. I'm not aware of very many tech companies to have three founders, the size of Airbnb, and has stayed together for 10 years. I'm not sure of any, actually. So usually people break up. There's some huge, like, blow up and you usually read about it.

So I'm pretty proud that, like, I was able to also stay connected to my old friends and my co-founders. And I kind of felt like if we as co-founders can stay together for 14 years, that's the ultimate indication of our culture and who I am as a leader that people, like, don't hate me so much to leave the company, like that we want to stay together. So I think that's been a pretty important thing. that keeps me pretty rooted. Yeah, there's not a lot of companies, like you said, with multiple co-founders, or three especially. It's like, where's the lawsuit?

I was just waiting. And I looked, and I was like, I can't believe that there aren't a bunch of crazy ones. It just, it's almost unheard of. I'm not aware of a company, you know, there might be some. Name a company that has a market cap of $100 billion or more with three founders that have been together for more than 10 years. Maybe there are some, but I'm not aware, not many. Yeah, not many.

Certainly not many. And certainly, I mean, we could go down the road for a while, but I'm speculating. I don't know of any off the top of my head. It'd be an interesting experiment. But the fact that we can't name a ton of them, but we can name a ton of, you know, single founder companies that I have CEOs doing crazy stuff on Twitter, that's a higher number, right? Are you worried at all about the fight that a lot of cities are putting up against Airbnb hosts? You know, what do you think of the argument that like Airbnb is ruining local communities by making housing unavailable? It's not totally unfounded, but I assume you disagree with the fervor with which these people are making that argument? Well, this is an argument that's going on for about 10 years. Right. Really, since Airbnb really got going, let me just kind of back up and just give a little bit of context of this because, yeah, I take it very seriously. You know, you go back to the founding story, Joe and I, that first weekend, were totally broke.

The reason we started Airbnb was because we couldn't afford to pay rent. And so we basically started Airbnb to be able to stay in our homes, to be afford our home. to afford our homes. And the story of Joe and I became the story of many hosts in our community. I mean, what people don't realize is that the number one profession of Airbnb host are school teachers. The number two profession of Airbnb host are health care workers. The number three profession are people that are students. So health care workers, school teachers, students, these are mostly everyday people. They're mostly not property speculators. Now, there are some, but they're mostly everyday people. That would be the first thing I'd say. Fifty five percent,

for example, for our host or women. That being said, let me just say, this, we want to strengthen the communities we're in. I don't want to be like having a pernicious effect on communities. And so what we did starting 10 years ago, we've come up with agreements with more than a thousand cities and jurisdictions. The basis of agreements are two basic principles. Number one, we will pay our fair share of taxes. And so we are now one the largest collectors remitters of hotel tax. We've collected more than $3 billion of hotel tax on our platform. So we collect a lot of tax on behalf of our host. But the second thing, is we comply with local regulations.

And this involves like a city may say, hey, we're concerned about people taking housing off the market. So we want to have a registration system to be able to know that these people are people that are maybe local residents. We want to limit the number of nights people rent. So they're going to register and they're going to count the number of nights.

And so there's a number of protocols that we've entered into with cities all over the world. But the most important thing is like, we want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. and we're constantly trying to update the platform to make it work better and better for cities. But the other thing I'd just say,

one more thing is this. I think that a lot of this, what you're talking about was before the crisis. I'm not going to say nothing is like this is happening during the crisis, but the tables turned a little bit because what ended up happening is cities started reaching out to us

when the crisis began for help. Because suddenly cities that were used to tourism surpluses or even over tourism and rising housing prices, suddenly had multi-billion dollar tourism shortfalls. People stopped traveling to the cities. Suddenly they had a lot of empty spaces available. And so a lot of cities and a lot of communities

reached out to us for help. And we actually have agreements with a lot of local destination and marketing organizations, cities, all of the world, to provide us to spread tourism. The name of the game is there's not too much travel in the world. It's just that there's too many people go to two few places at the same date. And so what we want to do is be able to help spread out travelers. And so what we did on Airbnb is to try to help solve this problem.

We have this feature called I'm Flexible, where instead of typing in a location and adding a date, you can just click a button, I'm flexible. And we can show you places and destinations you never thought of. Like maybe you stay in a tree house in Aptus, California, maybe you didn't know about that. We also have this product called flexible dates, where instead of saying, I want to go from September 10th to 15th, you say, I want to stay somewhere for a night, a weekend, a week, or a month, anytime in the next few months. that feature has been used 500 million times.

Wow. So we want to point demand to where we have supply, try to balance the market, comply at local laws and regulation, and just also remind people that the vast majority people on Airbnb are regular people that are making about $8,000 a year and we'll help them. That does sort of change things because I think the quote unquote villain in this story from the city's perspective is the person who rents out like an entire apartment building or half of one and then just uses it as an Airbnb business and now like no one.

can live in Russian Hill on that block because this dude's got 40 units or something for sale. That's not the average user of the app. That's absolutely not the average use case. And I want everyone, if they're listening, they're part of a city to know, like we have a neighbor hotline. We're working as close as we can with cities

and we want to be able to solve any disturbances happening in local communities. And we're working really, really hard. I do think we were late. You know, like most internet companies, when I came to Silicon Valley 2007, the word technology may as well have been a dictionary definition of the word good. It might as well be in a synonym. The basic idea was

technology was a forward step for humanity and any forward step for humanity was making the world a better place. That's why of the old cliche, we're changing the world. We're making the world a better place. And I think the problem with that theory is that anything that you build that you unleash and you put in the hands of hundreds of millions of people is by definition going to have unintended consequences. How could you possibly predict how hundreds of the most of the of people will use a powerful tool, whatever that tool is. And I think that we had a fairly simplistic view that technology was good. So therefore, if it grew and was adopted, everything was a four step for humanity. I think we're now all reckoning with in Silicon Valley that

things have unintended consequences and that we have to take more responsibility for what's on our platforms. And this is something that, you know, I think most every tech companies would say they wish they were earlier in coming to terms with. We probably, I think, were early. to the most companies because, you know, we started getting a lot of scrutiny 10 years ago because Airbnb represented the internet moving into your neighborhood. So, you know, we grew really quickly, but when you grow quickly, you know, it takes a while to catch up. What the pandemic did because our growth went down a lot is allowed us, I think, to have a bit of reset in our relationships with cities. And I'm hoping that despite some of the history of the last

10 years with some of our cities that we have some challenges and conflicts with, that we can turn the page and be actually a model of how a city can actually work with local governments and people could actually say, like, I think they're actually really good actors. And there's a new model for a company. And so that's the vision to build a company that takes responsibility and serves multiple stakeholders. Obviously, easier said than done, you're never going to be perfect. And especially when you're at massive scale, you're always going to find, obviously, exceptions to that. But that's the idea. Yeah, it's got to be scary being the CEO of a company in like 50 or 550, cities are like going to war with you.

And you're like, no, I have so many other things I have to worry about. We're about 100,000 cities in local communities. We're in 100,000 communities. You know, we're one of the most international companies in the world. We're in Cuba. We're in China, Brazil, Korea, Russia, Japan. I mean, very few companies are in all those countries at all those local markets. How are you in Cuba?

Is that even, that's a thing that's a thing that's legal? You can do that? That's a thing. It's legal and you can do it. Yeah. Wow. President Obama's administration, the Treasury Department, a loud trade between Cuba and the United States. We had a huge moment in 2000, I think it was 16, where we launched Airbnb in Cuba, so we're still there. And we're actually one of the largest businesses in Cuba.

Wow. So it's actually pretty wild. I didn't think that was still allowed. I guess it shows what I know. That's incredible. Yeah, we have, just to give you a point of reference. You know, this summer, our big nights, this summer, we had about four million people every night staying in a home on Airbnb. Wow. And these people came from 220 countries and regions. So think about it.

You had 4 million people coming from 220 countries and regions, staying in 100,000 cities. Imagine all the different cultures living together for the first time in human history. And we have to essentially keep those 4 million people every night safe. We have to make sure they're complying with local laws and regulations. We have to facilitate payments. We have to facilitate trust between them. You know, imagine all the people that call you when you go to a hotel,

you're used to a front desk. So we have to handle millions of phone calls. Our customer service calls are much more complicated than Amazon's. It's not like the package did or didn't arrive. It's like I'm feeling unsafe. I can't get into my building. I'm locked out. The sprinkler broke.

There's a neighbor to, you can imagine the hundreds of unique issue types. We have some really interesting and sometimes bizarre stories that come to customer service. So you can imagine like the kind of long tail of issues that we see. Yeah. some point. When we have you come back on the show in a few years, I'm going to ask the comms department, assemble me a list of five super weird things that have happened that he's had to deal with. We'll have to do that. That's his own interview. The one in a million happens four times a day.

Yeah, like there's a snake in the house somewhere. What do I do? I'm sure we have a whole category of those. Yeah. The one of a million happened four times a day. So just to put that in perspective. Yeah. There can only be, and it's just got, someone somewhere is dealing with like a rodent that got out of a cage and the owner's not home or worse, or like there's a panther locked in half the house and they're afraid it's going to come. There has to be that. Oh, yeah. We've had a lot of situations where we get a call, like, we got some pretty weird ones. Like, I mean, this is the more sanitary of them because we got some really crazy ones. But we had a call and somebody says, like, my husband can't speak. He's just staring into the abyss. I don't know what's wrong with him. And we're like, well, what's wrong

your husband? He like won't speak. He's just like a zombie. He's like frozen at the kitchen table. And they're like, well, what does you do? Well, we did eat a whole tray of brownies. And it turns out they weren't normal brownies. And so, like, you get a lot of stories like that. But they get even crazier than that. Yeah, you got to clear it with comms and legal before we share some of the next ones. But, oh, man, there's some crazy ones.

I know we're coming up on time here, but I know, I assume Airbnb is primed to just explode once travel opens back up. When we were doing prep for the show, I saw, like, there's a bunch of influx of new search traffic during the pandemic. I will warn you that a few thousand of those daily searches are, me staying up late at night, fantasizing about where I'm going to go once things open back up. But what's being, are there any changes, anything coming down the pipe that you can tell us or disclose that's not a secret that we might be able to look forward to? Travel trends are more like what we're launching in products. Yeah, what you're launching. Yeah, what you're launching in the company.

Yeah, probably can't say much about that. I figured. We're seeing some pretty big changes to travel. I'll just share this. You know, I don't think the world is ever going back to the way it was before the pandemic. And I think if you believe that, then you have to also believe that travel is never quite going back to the way it was before the pandemic. Before the pandemic, I'm guessing I would have been in the same room with you, for example, like doing this interview. Oh, yeah, sure. And so, like, so many things like this are on Zoom or online. And so a world where so much of our life can now be done on Zoom, so much work can be done on Zoom, is a world where so many of us aren't necessarily all going back to the office because we've realized how productive we can be remotely.

and it also means now a world of much more flexibility. In a world on Zoom, and a world of more flexibility is a world where while you're working, you can travel on Airbnb and even live on Airbnb. So what we're seeing is, first of all, we're seeing people being more flexible about when they travel. It used to be that people traveled certain times, times when they could get time off from their boss.

Now you can travel year-round because you can travel and work the whole time. So suddenly the calendar is open 365 days a year for a number of people. where they go is totally flexible. I think a lot of times now people are like, you know, I just want to go anywhere a car ride away where I can gather my friends in a home. They're not necessarily saying, I need to go to Paris to see the awful tower.

They're much more flexible. But even more profound than that is this. People aren't just traveling Airbnb. They're now living at Airbnb. Because a fifth of our business, approximately by nights booked, is not even travel. It's for stays longer than 30 days.

This is a profound shift. I actually think this is one of the biggest shifts and travel since the invention of the airplane or the automobile, which is to say that the whole nature of travel is blurring with living. It used to be that traveling was something you did a couple days for a business trip or a week here or there for vacation. Now, people are just nomadic. They're moving around and I don't think this is just a temporary phenomenon because of the pandemic. I think this is the permanent part of where we live. And this is what borders closed. People going away for summers, living a month here, a month there, a bunch of family saying,

let's all go live here for a month or two. Wait till borders open up. Suddenly, people aren't just going away to Colorado for the summer. They're going to another country for the summer. And so I think you're going to have this fundamental shift in where people live, where people work, where people travel. And this is probably the biggest change to our daily living at one time since really World War II. I think it's mostly an exciting change. We have to be careful, though, because, you know, like when things change very quickly, people can get left behind, but also, you know, this is also one of the loneliest times in human history. We're living in a pandemic, but there's another epidemic occurring. It's a loneliness epidemic. There is a lot of desperation,

a lot of loneliness in the world. And so one of the things that I'm thinking a lot about is like, you know, if we allow four million people a night and some nights to live together, you know, really we're not just providing housing. We have like kind of like the vision of couch We can help bring people together. And so the thing that's driving me at this point is how can we stave off this huge loneliness epidemic? What are different ways that we can help bring people together, make this world feel a little bit smaller in a time where it's very exciting.

Technologies affording totally new flexibility, but more and more people are spending much of their life online in these relationships that aren't necessarily as nourishing as meaningful offline connections. So these are some of the things that we're thinking about. And I think that's going to keep us busy for quite a few years to come. Well, you got your work cut out for you, man. This has been an amazing conversation. Thank you so much.

I really appreciate you taking the time, man. I know we went like a little bit over, but for me it was worth it. I don't know how you did. I appreciate it. Thank you so much. No, it's great. Thank you so much for having me. You got it, bud.

All right. I'm glad we finally made that happen. This has been in the works for a while, and it always tends to come down to, oh, he's got a board meeting. Oh, there's a lot of other thing. I mean, he's got quarterly earning reports. This guy's life is, it's very busy, disabled. There's a lot of stress going on at any given point in time. But no surprise, hosts have earned over $110 billion

by hosting over 900 million guest arrivals in Airbnb over the last five years or so. That is incredible. By the way, they kept sending me updated numbers over and over and over. And this is kind of like when McDonald's had to keep changing the signs from over a million served to over a billion served to now I think they just all say billions and billions served because they just kept racking them out.

Offline, Brian and I talked about designing for an 11th, star experience. This didn't make the show, but we talked about how in order to design an experience, that's not just three, four, or five stars, but 11 stars, right? Like you go to space with Elon Musk when you register. This is an exercise that they frequently go through at Airbnb in order to design top-notch guest experiences as much as they can. And it really is interesting how they go through this process, because at Airbnb, especially during the early days, they had to really get to know each individual user. And then the magic was going to be somehow scaling that. relationship across the entire company and customer base, which is an enormous challenge.

It's similar to design, it would seem. And Brian is a designer by trade and by training, you've got to design something for one person, but then manufacture it for a hundred thousand or a million or a hundred million people. That is a nearly impossible challenge for a person or company to do. They actually designed an amazing trip for someone in San Francisco that blew the guy away and he literally started crying at the end. So I guess that's how you know you've really nailed the 11-star experience when somebody breaks down and cries at the end, right? Brian also said that the biggest leaps you'll make in a company is when you're small. The bigger the company, the harder it is to actually change anything, which actually makes

a lot of sense. You've got to start that culture, the values, and enforce that culture, and those values early, because later on, it's really going to be too late. You're going to have to give at some point, but if you're too flexible on this too early in the game, you kind of end up with a problem when you're trying to build these later on. And also with great power comes great responsibility. We talked about the power of a platform like Airbnb, and they really do have a lot of power. An app like Uber can leverage their network to, say, send cars to get people to go vote or something.

Airbnb, they actually threw a ton of money and fostered a ton of connections with frontline workers. I think we mentioned this on the show. When frontline workers were dealing with COVID and they were afraid to go home and maybe bring it to their families, Airbnb stepped in and housed a bunch of them. They're housing 20,000 Afghan refugees who need places to live and that are vetted as secure as possible by the government, people who helped us in the war over there. Also, Brian has pledged to give away the majority of his wealth and has already started doing that, which is pretty admirable. I mean, when you are a billionaire, you want to hand some of it down. And I'm sure that he will

hand some of that down to his kids if he ever has any. But, you know, it's also tempting to just spend a lot of it on yourself. And I just love to hear the fact that he's taking the giving pledge along with Warren Buffett and Bill Gates and all those folks, giving away the vast majority of their money. This kid was obviously raised right. I'll tell you that much. Links to all things, Brian Chesky and Airbnb, will be on the website in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com.

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