Transcript for:
Leadership Lessons from Brian Chesky

you lose 80% of your business in 8 weeks and I knew there were questions is this the end of Airbnb will Airbnb exist Brian tesy founder and CEO of the100 billion company Airbnb one of the most successful and most disruptive companies in the world airb and breakfast was just a way to keep paying rent before we came up with the big idea we did not think airb and breakfast would be a company where 4 million people a night would use don't focus on the mountain top focus on the first step a lot of breakthrough ideas don't seem breakthrough at the time they seem crazy people tend to overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in 10 years 10 years is a profoundly long period of time if you're disciplined and focused and you can have a small idea a small dream and you can build something vast Airbnb is going to IPO and then disha to strikes in the Corona virus emergency stay at home stay at home you lose 80% of your business in 8 weeks and I knew there were questions is this the end of Airbnb will Airbnb exist we had to make some incredibly difficult decisions so I write this letter to the entire company here's what I said it's a hard for you to read that yeah yeah no now I get a little emotional reading that why [Music] Brian I'm a fan believer that our external world can change and evolve and look different but it tends to be the case that our internal world is much more stubborn which is who we are at our core and I also believe that who we are at our core is of in shaped by our earliest experiences that's been supported by a lot of the psychologists I've sat here with to understand you the way you think and who you are I think it's best to First understand that early experience and how it shaped the internal Brian that remains regardless of how everything else in your life has changed well yeah thank you for having me on I um I came from a pretty normal non-descript background but in parallel to sports and all the regular things kids had I had this other interest and it was a thing that most defined me and that was that I was an artist I would be drawing and drawing and I have these pads of paper and I go hundreds and hundreds of pages almost compulsively drawing um both trying to learn how to mimic an environment and reproduce it in reality and when I was you know 10 I could probably draw like an adult and by the time I was in high school I could you know draw like you know probably akin to a professional artist I love design worlds I wanted to design and escape and at the age of 17 I I decide I'm going to design design school so I've already taken like a hundred opportunities in life and now I'm like okay I'm going to do this I'm not going to be like a politician a doctor a lawyer a astronaut I'm going to be some an artist or designer halfway through freshman year they have to they tell you to declare a major what kind of artist and designer I'm like I'm still 17 and I got to tell you what type of artist and designer this guy comes in and he pitches an apartment called industrial design it just sounded cool industrial design and I was like what is industrial design and I remember him saying something like industrial design is the design of everything from a toothbrush to a spaceship and everything in between to design a physical object you have to understand three dimensions you can't just design an object you have to understand how to make the object if you were a graph designer you didn't really have to know how to make anything guess you have to know how to print it but you had to know manufacturing what kind of materials is it are the materials sustainable where do you manufacture it well how much is it going to cost because like how much is going to cost like has implications on how you design it well how much it's going to cost depends on who is the audience how are you going to Market it you see when an architect designs the building no one like blames the architect if the office building doesn't get leased out but in industrial design you can't design a product it not sell and you say it was a good design I would have never imagined that would have come to you to run a tech company it turns out industrial design was one of the best educations to run a tech company but I had no idea I was going to do that I'm G to walk back through that because there's couple of words you said across the way that really stuck out to me the first word you said when you were talking about wanting to design design your own worlds is I was trying to design a world that I could escape to yes the use of the word Escape is quite a intentional but quite a um strong word what were you trying to escape a great question I think I was a very sensitive child I think I was a very idealistic child and I think I was trying to escape what might one might describe as the the numerous challenges of childhood I think childhood is really hard for people and I think for me especially like I was young small undersized I had trouble fitting in at school I remember just having a really intense environment and I remember when I was a kid I would watch like the uh like the ABC where like they were like a dis Disney you know they had this thing called The Wonderful World of Disney and I would see these old videos of Walt Disney on television from the ' 80s but it was from him in the 60s and he described these like magical worlds I was just so obsessed with designing a world that was different and better than the one I was in I just think I had a lot of kind of anxiousness as a kid and I never really I I didn't really feel like I was at home you know I felt like I was I was searching for home and I I there's this great Bob Dylan quote he said it took me a long time to find my way home and I think it did for me as well I feel like I never found my way home until I was surrounded at school with other creatives but other before that I was just it's kind of an outsider and things were very challenging and painful so am I right in thinking that your desire to design a new world was also a desire to design a home where you might fit 100% if you if you design the world as well you get to control the world and you get to I I think I want to design a world that I could live in that I could fit into because I probably didn't think I fit quite into the world that I grew up in absolutely that's 100% the case you you said in some of your interviews that you are a hyperactive child hyperactive impulsive um difficulty concentrating I was never diagnosed with ADHD maybe today if I was growing up somebody might have may may have said that but I don't know but I had an intense energy I was I was always trying to do things differently I remember like in junior like Middle School I would try to like redesign the school curriculum or something like just kind of interesting frankly kind of bizarre things I was was a bit of a performer I wasn't into acting or anything but I did a lot of like public speaking and I would do a lot of creative writing but I remember I always was like I was always different and different wasn't good growing up that was maybe the core thing I think the core thing is I was different I was different in almost every way and different wasn't good I sat here with a therapist and she said to me there's two things at a very human level she's I mean her clients are royalty and CEOs at the top of the world and athletes and gold medalists she says all my clients come to me with two one of two things and it's usually both either they don't believe they're enough or they feel like they're different and those two things really haunt people in a world you know we we're tribal animals as you know from I've watched airbnb's IPO video and this idea of connection really coming through strongly we want to belong we want to be in our tribes and feeling like you're different I was thinking about this through the lens of a tribe means that I don't belong in the tribe feeling like I'm not enough means I'm not valuable to the tribe 100% and those and that and I would think though both of those identified I felt like my entire life many people have like turned to addiction and if I turned to one was work and luckily my addiction was very productive and so no one ever called it that like no one says that somebody's working all day and night especially if they're doing something creative if you're an access to entrepreneur and it was mostly I mostly was made me happy but the challenge is that if you are doing something hoping to become something hoping you become something and then therefore you're going to feel certain way because people are going to treat you certain way it turned out that what I wanted was love and what I was actually retracting with agulation and so the problem is we try to seek conditional love we do something great we get noticed and then people show us love and admiration but it's probably not love admiration is probably agulation and agulation I think is like a cup with a hole at the bottom and the problem is you fill up the cup but then something leaks out the bottom and so it kind of comes down and down and down you have to keep filling it and keep filling it and keep filling it and the problem is that like anything you can't just do keep doing the same actx you must do even bigger axe you have to go bigger to get the feeling you had before I think this is incredibly typical of people like I know Tech entrepreneurs where a lot of them were had Challen with authority didn't fit in wanted to be loved and were really good at something and it's not to take away any of that but just to know where it comes from now that I know what it where it comes from I've been able to have a much healthier relationship with it I still love what I do but I now it's really interesting my motivations have gone more internal more intrinsic instead of wanting to be super successful to feel a certain way part of me says why I not felt that way I probably never will and I you know if I no amount of additional status or money or anything is going to make me feel good better because this amount hasn't actually changed how I feel it turns out that like when you're when you go on a rocket ship you initially the success and the status and everything makes you initially probably happier because it's new there's a novelty and it's distracting and at some point you adapt to it and the moment of adaptation is the moment you probably go back to reverting to the way you felt before all of it you're not worse but you're presumably not better life is so much more than just climbing a ladder and getting to the top and realizing you're not much higher than you ever were before that the world is you you had everything inside of yourself mostly to be happy before the journey started and probably what you needed most is purpose you have that health and relationships and I think that you know a lot of people take the last one for granted those relationships and that's that's kind of that's kind of probably been my journey the cost of your addiction to work in hindsight you can maybe point at the cost and say this was something I sacrificed at the expense of happiness because of that addiction to my work what are those things let me first say that like it it was mostly worth it yeah and so I want to be clear about that that I wouldn't have done it dramatically different I am let me just say I am it it's like the the Journey of Airbnb of being able to build Airbnb has been unbelievable it's been the great joy of my lifetime and if people could experience what I had experien I would say to them it would be the most unbelievable ride of a lifetime and I wouldn't want to change a ton because it's been amazing but if they're about somebody's listening and they're about to go on this journey I would forar them about some things that no one told me and no no one told me when I started this journey is two things the first thing is how lonely it would be and it doesn't have to be but it's almost like by default you see when I started ARB I started with my friends to my friends then we hired people and those people there were employees but they were also kind of our friends and this notion that I was the boss there was a power and balance well we're all like broke at a three bedroom apartment so what does it mean that I'm CEO like that's kind of just a title and so I felt really connected we weren't a family but we were more like a family than a business if if it was one of the other and then as we got successful then it became more of a corporation there was a chain of command there were more boundaries you know like you you started hiring people that had families and people families don't hang out with you on nights and weekends and then like you know you know it's just like it becomes more formal and that's the moment that your employees become your employees and less your friends and that gets more and more isolating and then people start looking at you a little bit differently and it's it feels really good but you can just find yourself working more and more to live up to the responsibility and you feel like you're never working enough and you're working 60 hours a week then 80 hours a week and 100 hours a week and you just almost feel guilty any second you're alive and you're not working and I again I'm huge proporn it and pouring your life into something but I think that what thought was every incremental hour would make me more productive but it what turns out that like we need to step away from work we need to be happy we need to have some healthy relationships to probably make good decisions I don't lonely leaders are probably not the best leaders and when you're lonely you're probably less empathetic your sense of vigilance is up um you don't necessarily see problems really clearly you don't have people to bounce ideas off of when there's a challenge it can feel like you're alone you don't have as much resilience and so I remember going from being incredibly happy to feeling incredibly isolated not having been prepared now I was prepared for all the business challenges people told me what it's like to scale a team hire Executives but we weren't really well prepared for the psychological and emotional Journey that we would go on that turned out to be some incredibly intense Journey so that was the first thing the first thing that I didn't know no one forewarned me about and that I've now learned is about the lonely Journey can be and I would just tell people it doesn't have to be lonely keep in touch with your friends meet other entrepreneurs like you've got to almost fight the world as you go on this journey is going to isolate you into a bubble that's going to completely detach you from reality and if you're not careful you can lose a sense of yourself and you have to fight every single day like a person in the ocean without a without a the life jacket just staying above water and that staying above water is fighting the temptation of isolation so that you can remain connected and if you're connected you're going to be okay but it's not going to just happen most people don't like you don't have to think about breathing you just breathe you have to think about staying connected the other thing is you can't try to be successful to think it's going to solve something inside of you being successful other than maybe a sense of purpose it turns out having a purpose and serving others and being focused in something that's generally good for you beyond that no amount of status and power is going to fill something inside of you whatever is inside of you that you're missing you need to probably fill you know through introspection like we might call it Solitude connection to self or maybe you know like many of us growing up we kind of lonely and so we wanted to be loved so we decided to pursue these things so that people would be connected to us but then by working we're just loner more and more isolated in fact maybe the thing we had to to do the entire time was reach out and bring people in maybe that was the thing we were missing and that was probably what happened with me if I could speak in if you could talk to Brian Zer in October 2007 when you were 26 years old and you arrived in San Francisco and you could say Brian listen here are some practical things I'm going to do here's how I'm going to change your schedule for the next 10 15 years I'm going to add one extra hour of something to your schedule every week what would that one hour be it's completely obvious to me that I would make time for the people I love who who is that I would start my family especially my sister I'm now really close to her but through a bunch of the airb journey we would go weeks without talking for no other reason I was just busy and like well like and and and there's this Paradox that when you go on this crazy Journey like I do a lot of people don't reach out to you because they're afraid to reach out you because they think they're bothering you but you're so busy that you're dealing with inbound from the business that if no one like you're just reacting all the time so if your friends don't re reach out to you you're not going to reach out to them because you're just reacting to everything and they're like well they're so busy if they want to talk to me they reach out to me and you see how you end up in this like drift and drift and drift I would have stayed connected to my high school friends I would have kept I I have high school friends I now do an annual trip with some of them I didn't talked to for almost 20 years I graduate I didn't keep in touch with them it's one of the great regrets I have I had College friends that I lived with after Ry but every year as I went on my airb journey we talked less and less and less and I drifted more and more away and I could go down the list I actually I had this thing I've said I talked about it once before but I would it was 20021 it was like May or June and I I had developed a at this point long relationship with President Obama he had left office and he became a bit of a mentor to me and he mentored me un like leadership and business at one point he took a personal interest to me and I remember I was single got out of a relationship and I kind of felt lonely and I remember telling him I think need to be in another relationship and he said I don't think you yet need to be in a relationship I think what you need are friends and I thought to myself but I have friends what do you mean but then I then he explained that like he had these like 15 people in his life many of them before you know mostly before he was president and he like they were totally connected and I realized I had all these people in my life but if I call them first they go what's going on like what's new with you and I have to get them all up to spe in my life and if you have someone in your life where if you were to call them or text them you have to get them up to speed then you're not connected people you're connected to are already up to speed and I actually think that most of us being alone or being lonely is an illusion or maybe the illusion is that like people don't love us and the fact is we have all these people but we're not reaching out to them and they're also not reaching out to us and everyone's waiting for someone else to take some initiative and it seems crazy cuz we're just a text message away way from our entire life and yet what do we do we open the phone and instead of texting people or FaceTiming them or like seeing them we what do we do open social media so opening social media is like going to a dinner party except you don't go inside you're looking in the window and you know like and like it's great if it's a Way Station to meet people but if you're look just look in the window and that's your social life then that's you're going to feel really sad so knock on the door and walk in and start talking to people start hanging out so this is that that would be the thing I would do I wouldn't have been totally isolated I would have REM con stayed connected to my family my close friends and really the only other thing I'd say is I I'm now friends with a bunch of other entrepreneurs including you said you had Daniel L on the show and I would call him a friend and I spend time with him and others so in other words I would have old I would keep my old friends and I would be friends of people my situation M So Daniel doesn't know the Brian before Airbnb so maybe he doesn't know the real me that that me but he does know a different real me that my childhood friends can't know because my high school and college friends can't possibly know what it's like for me to go through I'm going through and I can tell it to them and they can have compassion but they can't possibly know what I'm talking about but Daniel can and Daniel can know what it's look like when an executive leaves you where everyone's kind of the walls are caving in and you feel like you're not scaling and you're like drowning in this you know there's all these things I can describe we have a shared experience so I think those two groups are really important your roots and your friends from the past and your friends from your present day shared experiences and there was a period of time where I didn't have either of those really as you saying that it reminded me of a phrase I heard many years ago in a book I read that said the things that are easy to do are also easy not to to do and as you're talking about the um the just sending the text is so easy to do which is also why it's so easy not to do it because we're always just one text away so what's the point sending it but also it reminded me of why I have that sandtimer on the W on the Shelf over there because it's funny I think I've lived so much of my life believing that I could do life later like I could pick up the relationship with my family later and then that's it's almost like we're living through the frame of that we're going to live forever like when you look at our decision- making you think think [ __ ] you're giving like three decades of your prime years to building this thing like and we we're assuming that we can pick up the rest later it'll all be there and that's what I learned I tried to pick it up later and there was nothing there I think that metaphor of The Hourglass with the sand slowly dripping every day of your life is a window and every day that window gets a little narrower and a little narrower and a little narrower should I tell you the difference though just with the sound timer tell me is you you know it's dripping but you can't see how much you have left oh that's a really good point so it's and that's why you should almost cover it up because we can you know with the sand timer we can see how much sand we have left but in life I could I could live for another six minutes and so could you or it could be six months or 60 years and yes that's a profound thought and you're right we don't really live our lives imagining if we had a limited time left how would we live I like to I I an exercise I've done is imagining you know at a young age I had 10 years left because if I had one year left I might be so dramatically different that I might not do something sustainable I might like not work and just only spend time and that's not sustainable but I think we always go about life thinking we have many decades and I think that creates a sense of procrastination and if you say to yourself you have this decade What would you want to do it gives you enough urgency but also it long enough to have routine to build towards something and I think that like the one of the most important things people can do i i two thoughts come to my mind the first thought is that you probably heard this saying you can people tend to overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in 10 years that 10 years is a profoundly long period of time in some ways if you're disciplined and focused and you can have a small idea a small dream a small goal and you can build something vast and I've only done Airbnb for 15 years so you think about what 10 years is I you wouldn't have hired me as your intern 15 years ago the other thing about 10 years though is think about the Amazing Life Experiences you can have with other people and I think life is about experiences but the best experiences are the ones you share with other people like on Airbnb 80% of our trips are with other Travelers like 80% of people Trav with other people and I think as I think about my memories growing up you know I rolled the school bus like 180 days a year or more than 10 years that's thousands of days and all those memories blend together I don't really remember those but I remember basically every vacation I've ever took taken I remember the first time I went to this city the first time I went to that City and they're burned in my mind and I think that when I look back on my life I'm going to remember all the experiences I went all the places I saw the friendships and the and and the people I loved and who loved me and what I poured my heart and soul into and I think that like that is an important way that I've thought about my life and I made time for some of it but I think the pressure of being successful made me so focused on trying to climb a mountain that maybe I didn't focus enough on who I was climbing with and who is along the way way with me Bron we interviewed Pala of patients on their last days on Earth so she interviewed people on their deathbed and asked them what their biggest regret was hypothetically if you had six minutes left and I was interviewing you to find out what your biggest regret might be now you had six minutes left what might you say to me I think my biggest regret would be the time I didn't spend with people I love maybe making sure those people knew how I felt about them and then I'm 42 I've created many great things the one thing I haven't created that I've always wanted was probably a family I just couldn't even explain exactly rationally why but it's just you know like we all I think humans have an many many people have an urge to to create a family maybe they feel like they've created something and they can leave something behind I've I will have left a company behind but maybe I could leave more than that behind so those would be the things that I would regret but importantly I'd also like to say I feel like in other ways I've lived multiple lifetimes and I would be filled with so much love and gratitude for what I've been able to experience because I never thought in my lifetime I would be able to experience what I've experienced right now up to this point the amount of people I get to meet the amount of work I get to do I get to work come to work every day to obsess with some of the most creative people in the world and you know most people they don't get to be surrounded with the people they choose when you're a CEO you get to pick the people you're surrounded with there's something really special and I've gotten to select some of the most creative kind compassionate intensely driven people in the world making some things that I'm so proud of that have affect millions of people's lives so but I tend to think we regret the things we didn't do not the things we did do and I think we tend to regret you know the people we didn't spend time with the people we loveed that we didn't tell or the people we you know could have met and didn't I think this is fascinating I looked at the back end of our YouTube channel and it says that since this channel started 69.9% of you that watch it frequently haven't yet hit the Subscribe button so I have a favor to ask you if you've ever watched this Channel and enjoyed the content if you're enjoying this episode right now please could I ask a small favor please hit the Subscribe button helps this channel more than I can explain and I promise if you do that to return the favor we will make the show better and better and better and better and better that's the promise I'm willing to make you if you hit the Subscribe button do we have a deal there sacrifice involved in everyone's Journey especially when it's a great journey and you're talking about being I think 25 years old when Walt Disney inspired you yeah Neil gabar I've read this book twice yes I've read this book twice this book okay so this book had a big effect on me and there's two chapters that really affected me so this is the Neo gabler book it's the definitive biography and it's pretty extensive it's like over 600 pages so you can see it the W Walt Disney's bi biography yes the biography about the man Walt Disney and there's two entrepreneurs that I've always looked up to more than any others and those are Walt Disney and Steve Jobs partly because they built companies that have lived Beyond them but more importantly they were creative people that were basically running tech companies I mean Apple was clearly a techan Disney was at the time very much a like a technological Marvel the first chapter that really affected me was this chapter I think it's go-getter it describes the period of time where he moves from Kansas City to Los Angeles and he his early 20s he moves to Los Angeles he convinces his brother Roy Disney Roy uh Roy Disney who I think has like uh I can't remember what ailment he has but he has like this horrible ailment and they don't think he's even going to live and Walt says come to California it's going to be good for you and Roy they were like BR they were literally brothers and I always thoughted of Joe my co-founder as like brothers if we were like like non-blood related Brothers but you know when you're a co-founder you're almost like brothers and him going to LA in the 20 I think it was the 20s was like me going to San Francisco in 2007 the gears of the world felt like they were turning there in some really important way so this book I read right before I started Airbnb I'm living in Los Angeles I read this biography and I thought to myself I don't have to work for someone like Walt Disney I can try to become something like that even if I don't get to that level of scale of success that's okay I can do something much smaller but I can do something like this and then there was another chapter um four years into Airbnb called Folly Folly Folly is the title of the chapter about Snow White and they called it Folly because they named it Disney's Folly and the reason he named it Disney's Folly is because he bet the entire company on this featurelength animated film and everyone thought there was this terrible the company was going to out of business and I thought I was reading that chapter and that's when a light bulb went off I he basically invented the storyboard for that movie because the movie was so long right no one had done a feature like anime film they had to storyboard out the scenes and I remember thinking to myself once I read that chapter I said what if we created a storyboard of the perfect vacation on Airbnb from the time you book to the time you check in and what if we literally designed the end to-end Journey you might call this service design and this became a Guiding Light to how we design our service we didn't just design the screen the apps the emails we designed the experience the endtoend experience kind of like when I was in industrial design school and we were like designing a ventilator or some product and you're trying to put yourself in the shoes of the user so this book became very influential for me and maybe the final thing I'll just say is like somebody once said numbers are the language of business and I remember thinking to myself no language is the language of business numbers is just the only way we have to measure them but that you ever notice there's 500 companies in a fort 500 how many of them are creative people I don't know how many but like I I might be one of the only ones that went to design school they have Boards of directors let's say there's 12 PE or 10 people per board so that's like 5,000 board members how many of them are creative people or designers or people from the humanities not many how many EX CEOs have creative people reporting to them not many and so we have this world now where we many people are dissatisfied with the way the world is we are often given two bad options we tend to be fighting Zero Sum when we could imagine something better but we don't have a lot of people in positions of power that can take creative leaps of the imagination and really understand how to design something better that we're in right now and I think creativity is kind of being systematically squashed from Maybe Corporate America you know paabo Picasso said it took me four years to learn the paint like Raphael but a lifetime to learn to paint like a child I think that childhood curiosity is something that creative people are able to typically I think hold hold on to and and I think that's being a little bit lost and what I loved about Walt Disney and I also liked about Steve Jobs was since they were truly creative people that had truly creative companies they empowered them and they had an intuition they didn't just paint the company by number and that's the kind of company I've always tried to do I've had this dream of creating one of the most creative places on Earth like Disney or apple we may not get there but at least we'll have the ideal I want to talk about that moment where creativity won out over what a CFO or the numbers might say but taking a step back to that what something else you said there which is um kind of alluded to this idea of creating for creating for yourself being the path forward to creating for others and I saw that it's actually one of the big things as an entrepreneur taken away from the Airbnb story that you don't have to sit there and think about what a million people want in a product you just have to solve a problem for like you and your best friend and you can build an an amazing business out of that and that's really like the Genesis of Airbnb if you go right back to that's almost every company in the world by the way almost every company in the world maybe Enterprise companies are not that people have this thing people forget take any giant company in the world nothing large started large they always started small it started with a few people one or a few people and many times they were making something that looked like a toy it looked like a hobby I remember one of my First Investors said Brian don't worry about people stealing your idea because if it's any good everyone will dismiss it everyone will dismiss it everyone will dismiss it it turns out that a lot of breakthrough ideas don't seem breakthrough at the time they seem crazy or they seem unserious or they seem like Hobbies they seem something small Airbnb we did not design a way for a millions of people to stay in homes Airbnb started one weekend it was October 2007 a design conference was coming to San Francisco all the hotels are sold out and we had this idea we said what if we just turned our house into a bed and breakfast for the design conference we can make enough rent I think I actually have that email oh yeah you have the email that Joe sent me yeah yeah you have the email that Joe sent sent me and so that's I thought of a way to make a few bucks turning her place into a designer's bed and breakfast offering young designers who come into town a place to crash during the 4day weekend this is September 22nd 2007 we thought we were just creating a way to create a bed and breakfast for the conference unfortunately we didn't have any beds but Joe had air beds we pulled the air beds out of the closet and we called it airbed and breakfast.com now I can assure you we did not think airbed and breakfast would be a company where 3 four million people a night would use to sleep in we did not think I'd be doing podcasts and I'd be a giant public company we thought it was going to be a way for three people one weekend to stay in our apartment sleep on some airbeds pay us money we'd have a cool weekend adventure and we go about our lives and the funny thing is we thought it would pay the rent while Joe Nate and I or Joe and I at the time thought of the big idea we kept talking about the big idea an airb and breakfast was just a way to keep solving our own problem paying her rent before we came up with the big idea but when I joined yator it's a very well-known startup incubator of sorts the founder Paul Graham used to have a saying and it's the most important advice they ever got and it's what you were saying and it's counterintuitive he said it's better to have a hundred people love you than a million people that just sort of like you if you have a 100 people that love your service they when they love something they'll tell everyone they know I remember talking to somebody she loved airing be I'm like how many people you've told a be she goes I probably told 10 or 20 and her friend standing next to her go no she's told like one or 200 people and I started realizing people who love something become your marketing department and they'll tell other people and if they tell other people that grows by what we call word of mouth so how do you get somebody to love something I don't know how you get a million people to like something at the same time when you're starting from nothing but I do know how you could get one or two people to like something you could meet with them you can understand what their needs are and you could design something so perfectly spoke just for them and you could literally think of them as recruiting one person at a time if you have a business idea you don't need to get to a million you before you get to a million you need to get to 100,000 before you get to 100,000 you get to 10,000 and before 10,000 you get to a th000 and before 10,000 you get to 100 so all you have to do and all roads lead to 100 don't Focus focus on the mountain top focus on the first step Don't focus in a million Focus just in 100 and as you do that you make the problem small and manageable because a million has to build systems and just you start developing complexities you can't deal with so all you got to do is get to 100 once you get to 100 now you get to a th and what you do is when you get thousand you just keep going in orders of magnitude and the job changes but people get paralyzed because they think they have to make something big and they're like well Apple wasn't like this or Google wasn't like this well actually Apple started by selling black these blue boxes in the back of like a trunk of a car Google was this like research project they were going to sell for like low millions of dollars and they didn't really know what they had these things all start as unres toys that seem hacked together and they're only made for you and your friends that's almost always how it starts and that question there about creativity beating rationality from like a corporate Amer America standpoint the Airbnb story story is riddled with moments where you chose creativity and customer experience over scalability and profits but that wins out over a long period of time in the story it always does doesn't it I think it's in our soul to be creative I think most entrepreneurs are creative it's funny almost every business is conceived intuitively maybe sometimes people have a business plan and they have some like statistical insights and data but most people start a company they have no data like they have no customers and you no customers you probably have no data and so everything is started with intuition with insights and understanding and then the problem is as you get more successful you get more data and as you get more data you get more reliant on the data and as you get more reliant on the data you get more derivative you get more iterative and data is good it's what we might call necessary but not sufficient but why if something made you successful would you AB abandon it if you follow your intuition if you follow your heart if you had ideas why would you seize to have them the bigger you get you don't just have to found a company you have to continue to refound it to rebuild it continue to have new ideas and I think the difference between Airbnb and a lot of other large multinational corporations if you think of a company like a body most companies it's like they're cut off at the head they're disconnected from their heart and they're kind of cut off and they're focused on the one more analytical side of their brain I think what most companies need is more creativity and maybe a little more heart and soul most people at companies are loving well-meaning people they just don't act that way you know like the HR and legal departments are mostly really good people but the the Departments sometimes work where the groups overly defer to these groups they're very risk averse they round the edges off it they sees to take risk not realizing the biggest risk is we don't change in a world that we know will change but no one wants to be the one to make a change to take a risk the organization starts focusing on itself rather than why it exists to serve other people so all these things start happening and you start appointing more and more analytical people and then pretty soon you wake up and the only people on your board are only analytical people and they only value what can be measured and the only things you are measuring are on are measured on a short-term Horizon so the quality of your product the brand how happy people are the vision whether you're moving in the right direction are you about to be disrupted in latest technology these things are all hard to measure there's an old Sig by a a Nobel Prize winner named lonus Pauling says not everything that counts can be counted not everything that can be counted counts so we tend to have a bias towards short-term Financial measurements it doesn't mean they're unimportant but if you only optimize for them then you are going to be imperiled and it's a pretty damn good guarantee that you're going to be Irrelevant in the future so I feel like there needs to be more heart in business more creativity in business and not for the sake of the creative people for the sake of the businesses for the sake of the world we live in don't we want to live in a world that's more interesting than more exciting we need to bring the creativity that artist and scientists come together to bring and it's that marriage of artists and scientists and operators all coming together that I think can design a significantly better world than the we loan we have in now we have all the technology we need to design a a Better World We believe it or not have all the money we need we can say we need more money but actually we can be more efficient and more productive with the resources we have this is going to require creativity though we've got an exciting new sponsor on this podcast and I couldn't be more excited to announce that we're now working with Shopify and if there's one tool that I use pretty much every single day in my businesses that is certainly Shopify I'm sure you've all heard about Shopify but for some reason if you haven't then Shopify is the Commerce platform that is revolutionizing millions of businesses is worldwide whether you're starting a side hustle a new project with a friend or a global business Shopify has you covered you guys may know that we recently sold a product on this platform called the daro conversation cards which featured questions from the guests in these episodes and from start to finish from launching that product we used 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it saves my life in terms of those busy days where there's a higher probability of me reaching for something I might regret if you haven't tried HS RTD you could probably seen it in a couple of supermarkets but you can order it online and the link is in the description below let me know which flavor is your favorite and also tell me if it ends up adding value to your life in the form of making you nutritionally complete on those difficult days at the very beginning I saw this email which I think is really important because maybe it's the most important thing because there are going to be people uh starting companies now that are getting a lot of emails like that this is from August 1st 2008 we were by the way so let me give the context of this email so Jo Joe and I were trying to raise money for everyone trying to raise money I want you to know that Airbnb was trying to raise $150,000 at a $1.5 million I think post money valuation I'll give you that right now exactly and and here's one of many rejection letters hi Brian apologies for the delayed response we've had a chance to discuss internally and unfortunately don't think that it's right for fill-in-the blank investment firm from an investment perspective the potential Market opportunity did not seem large enough for a required model now I want you to just put in this perspective Airbnb handles nearly as much money as the entire GDP of the country of Croatia today one in about every $1,500 spent in the world about $1 spent on Airbnb that's a pretty large market and our business is pretty much the same idea as the idea that we proposed that person who said our Market opportunity wasn't large enough so there's probably a myriad of lessons in that aren't there and I think that it's a reminder that the world doesn't just change or at least it doesn't just transform toward WS our dreams ideals and Ambitions that require certain types of people we might call them entrepreneurs inventors all sorts of people in different domains that believe the world could be a little different than the one that they live in that have the audacity to believe that they can do it and they have the ability to convince other people to go on that Journey with them but along that Journey everything's going to be different you're going to get lost you're going to be cold you're going to you're going to have like obstacles things are going to attack you you're going to fall down pits and the question is when people are cold and they're shivering and they're not sure what to do and you're running out of resources and rations can you find your way up that mountain do you know why you're going can you invent all these different apparatus like there's a stream you can't figure out you can build a bridge to cross the stream with the limited resources you have can you recruit people along the way and can you beat the drum and when people are tired and they say I want to sleep you say yes we're going to rest but we got to go just 500 more steps I know it's it's right over the edge I think we can do a little bit better and can you push people outside their comfort zone not enough to hate you but enough to feel like like a trainer you're like three more reps and you don't want to do it and then that very moment they're not your friend but the end of the workout you're like thank you for pushing me that hard this is that kind of person and can you take Divergent ideas that no one's ever seen before and just continue to reformulate them could you store these ideas in your head a thousand competing ideas and just reformulate them in your mind that turns out the stuff is difficult but you can work your way up there most people watching this have the skill set to be an entrepreneur not everyone has a skill set or the desire to run a giant company I don't think everyone needs to do that but a lot of people have the skill set to do something to start something this is what you need to get up the mountain and the problem is imagine we got up the mountain and then somebody was dropped from a helicopter having never walked up the mountain and you tell them okay now you lead this group up the next Mountain can you imagine how hard it would be for that person to drop from the sky or maybe they joined a third of the way up the mountain but they weren't there at the very beginning you see a Founder brings three things that a professional manager doesn't have the first thing a Founder has is they're the biological par so you can love something but when you're the biological parent of something like it came from you it is you there's a deep passion in love the second thing a Founder has is they have the permission right like I can't tell another child what to do but if they were my child I probably could I have the permission and so you have a permission I could rename the I could Rebrand the company and a professional manager would probably come and say I can't do that but I know how we named it I know how we branded it so so you know what you can change and the third thing that a Founder brings is you built it so you know how to rebuild it you know the freezing temperature of a company you know at what temperature it melts you know like what this looked like before it was tooled where it came from the Alloys where they where they were sourced from you're not just managing it you're building it and the problem is professional managers typically don't have any of those three at least not in the abundance of Founders but the problem with Founders there's two problems the first is most them cannot scale to run a giant company and even if they do the last problem is they don't live forever and companies Great companies usually want to live longer than humans do and so therefore you end up with the inevitable challenge that Disney and Steve Jobs had which is succession planning and actually both of them died prematurely and didn't maybe Steve prepared more than than Walt did and that's the last step of the journey but I think there's something really special about Founders and founder-led companies and I think that if you want the World to Change we need more entrepreneurs we need more Founders if you want to empower more women you should make more women entrepreneurs if you want to lift up more economies around the world you should lift up entrepreneurs in those economies it's one of the greatest ways to create wealth to change the world and to just change the directory of society so powerful Brian it made me think about what Steve Jobs did leave behind and that's maybe where the word culture comes in because I would have bet against Apple surviving and flourishing in the wake of Steve Jobs's um passing because Steve was so so special but he clearly left a set of enduring principles behind culture you know I spoke to Daniel as you said as a friend of yours um he said to me 20 years old didn't care about culture 30 years old didn't know what it was at 40 years old I think company culture and team culture is the most important thing when you think about culture how important is that what is it how does one go about creating it it's funny you ask this question because last week I sent a email to the entire company to all 6,000 people and my email was about culture and why it's important and what it is can I read you a portion of it what a privilege so the context of email is I hired a a head of people in culture like a different name for HR Jon and I have always believed that you must design the culture you want otherwise you'll be designed for you and you might not like what emerges the people and the culture they create at the heart of Airbnb simply put culture is what creates the foundation for all future innovation in the long run the culture is the most important thing you will ever design because it's the engine that designs everything else all good designs start with a vision and I want working at Airbnb to feel like working at the world's largest startup I believe we can grow into one of the largest companies in the world without feeling large a company that's still like run like a startup with the best people in every discipline collaborating at high speeds with intense Focus all well maintaining mental bureaucracy and communication layers and to make this happen we're going to reimagine HR function because too many companies have lost sight of what HR was originally designed to do reducing it to merely an administrative function yet as core HR is about people and culture and it's one of the most strategic functions within a company that's why we don't call it HR because it should be about bringing out the very best in people most of all I want us to feel like we're building one of the most creative places on Earth a company that brings together some of the best people of Our Generation to dream up new products and services that capture the world's imagination a place where years from now people would say if I was alive during that time that's where I would have wanted to work I literally wrote that email last week about culture it's it's so incredible so incredible because yeah the the greatest leaders that I've met all arrive at the same conclusion about culture even if it takes them 10 years or 20 years or what they arrive there um the question though because so many CEOs could send that email yes right everyone could just you know they just heard Brian say it so they copy and paste and send it to their team the question is how do you actually create that it's so great so big huge Insight here okay I used to think you talk about the culture and you talk about how important it is and you write out a list of well what is your culture well our culture are a bunch of principles or values we live by so what what makes us most unique let's do a session let's write out a list of our values now let's tell everyone the values let's print them on the walls let's have people repeat them let's keep telling people culture is important and that stuff can help a little bit but it's not how you build culture so let me give you a few thoughts your culture is the shared way you do things and often they're based on lessons you've learned and the lessons you tend to remember the most are the ones that are seared in you they come from trials and tribulations from your most difficult times it's the way you rise the occasion in the face of adversity your culture is the behaviors of the leaders that get mimicked all the way down every single person your culture is every time you choose to hire someone every time you choose to fire someone every time you choose to promote somebody it's the way everyone does everything and the way a leader designs the culture is not by writing out a list of values it's by basically leading by example every single day and taking a survey of every single thing happening and constantly shaping it pruning it like a gardener you know you you you don't just allow the culture to happen you design the culture you have an idea of what you want to do and you're just constantly getting this group together you know you might have a culture of excellence and a culture of Excellence means I review all the work and I say not good enough not good enough not good enough and eventually I could not join the meeting but people know what I'd say they'd say it's not good enough this is our standard and the moment I cannot be in the room and the same action happens as if I was in the room that's the moment it goes from management to culture so it's like a golf swing to teach a golf swing you got to like probably I don't play golf be the instructor has to watch the person and at some point the person learns how to swing a golf swing without the instructor there that's the difference between management and culture and culture is something that people learn they develop these shared instincts and it's so important because is it's your ultimate intellectual property not your technology not your recipe s not your exclusive contract vendor relationships the way you know how to do something it that is the most important thing a company has because all a company is is a bunch of people a bunch of money and a direction that th people are using those resources to go towards people resources strategy and the culture is a thing that bonds those things together you're the smartest person I'm going to get to throw this idea of culture at so I wanted to throw it at you because I've just again a week ago I started thinking about it when I was asked the question on stage people because of in a post-pandemic world are now trying to figure out if they're remote or in office or whatever else trying to figure out their company culture and I came to the conclusion that you shouldn't um you shouldn't try and create your company culture it is already there if you look closely and try and figure it out and here's what I kind of concluded that if Trump someone trying to figure out what their company culture is think about the problem you're trying to solve in the world then from there reverse engineer the behaviors you need to solve the problem then from there reverse Engineers the philosophies and values you need to create those behaviors then from there implement the [ __ ] things hire the people so through the lens of this podcast how do we become the best in the world or what we do best podcast in the world the behavior we need because we're dealing with algorithms that changed all the time is this experimental mindset we need to constantly be leaning in every time something changes that's the behavior we want so one of our values is what we call 1% which means that we obsess over the smallest details and then how do we Implement that into the business well we had a head head of experimentation in this podcast full-time we have a full-time data scientist if you said about the vibe in the room and I said the scent the AI thing glued under the table recording the conversation with the trackpad so that's like our company culture it was the behaviors we needed the philosophies that created and then the systems processes and people we then hide through to make sure that we achieved that does that roughly you're the first person I've ever said that too that roughly makes sense and please interrogate it for Flaws because I need to improve my thinking I think it's essentially correct and I think the one thing I would add is when we say behaviors because I agree with the word behaviors but I want to like round out behaviors because for just a second I used to think behaviors as the things in addition we used to say the what and the how this is something I always got wrong there's what you did and how you did it and people tend to think of the what as competency how well you did your job and culture is how how you went about doing it and like so were you a jerk were you nice did you make people around you better and I don't think that's accurate that's what I used to think there's the what and the how it turns out the how you do something creates the what in other words you can't break the core values and succeed at making something but like trample on people along the way your values your culture is how you do something so for example let me take our example like one of our one of our we don't we don't even really have codified core values we have old codified core values but like our culture is at its strongest when it's just like one shared Consciousness so the best cultures is on shared Consciousness where everything in your head everything you care about is pered throughout the people and they can finish your sentences and people would do in a room without you what they would do if you were there and that's when you create this Collective consciousness so my thing is the culture starts with the intersection of what your vision is and what your personal values are and how you want to lead and to use this I just want to give one very concrete example of where I left this out I'm a perfectionist I am if people I who work for me will watch they' actually laugh because that's kind of like a classic understatement I want every part of the product to be perfect I want our product to be perfectly designed I want it to look like one person designed it completely cohesive I obsess over Simplicity I want to make sure that it's about reducing something to its Essence I want there to be the sense of heart and Imagination and the problem was the way we were running the company I was running it the way I thought everyone else wanted to work and they wanted to work in autonomous separate groups and divisions they wanted to do lots of experimentation and for me I like to be creative and experimental but I not want to do micro experimental optimizations for software because with that meant let me use an analogy let's say we're making a car one team is experimenting on the tires and then another team's experimenting on the wheels but it turns out those two things don't fit together and they fit together they invent this new wheel now it's got to fit on a bigger car body so now they got to go to the car body team and change the shape of the car but that makes the car I don't know maybe heavier they need a different battery so now they go to the battery team the battery team says we need to manufacture new battery but now they need to actually capitalize that so they go to the finance team and the finance team goes we have to go to the IR invest your relations to say we need to explain we need more money it's just a metaphor the metaphor is that you're all in one team rowing together and I realized that we need to be totally integrated so I did some things that no one else did I said there's no more divisions we're going to be run like a startup we have a design Department a marketing department a engineering department a sales and this is how every little companies run and almost no large companies in the entire world are running run this way people say you can't run a a a giant company like a startup but I I wanted to do that and I know Steve Jobs had done it that way it's like I'm going to try to do the same thing the next thing is people tend to do measurement when you get really big and you do small tactical micro optimizations but then you tend to bias towards Performance Marketing towards AdWords towards small optimizations and you don't take big creative leaps because big creative leaps require the entire company to organize work together you don't obsess over things you can't measure and you it's hard to measure quality if this pixels off if that doesn't feel quite right if this thing's complicated it may be hard to measure so maybe that doesn't matter I said no that matters that's our culture and somebody once said but we can't measure the impact I said that's exactly why it's our values because our culture and our values are we do something when nobody notices and we can't even measure it and we don't even know if it works the reason we do it because that's what we believe it's like you know like this this table we want it to be a certain Sheen but I can't prove to you that more people want to sit in this room but I want it that way it matters to me I always joke to people the most important customer is yourself you have to love it because real artists want to sign their name to work and you have to be willing to sign your name in the bottom right quarter of that thing to make it perfect so this is just a metaphor so it starts at you your values and then the last thing is your behaviors those are those behaviors aren't just how you act and behave it's your capabilities it's how you make something and maybe like your values are we're constantly trying new things and that has to be rigorously detailed and documented and I think you want to show by example and I tend to skip level work with a team and and watch them and keep meeting them I meet every team in the company that works on projects that I I see I meet them either every week every two weeks or every four weeks and I have them show work it's like go it's like watching a golf swing I'm the chief editor or the Orchestra conductor I don't push decision- making down I pull it in by push and making decisioning down I'm pushing the company to be fragmented by pulling decision making in it's like a solar system the planets are coming closer to Sun and at some point we're all one Collective Consciousness we're totally integrated we can Row in the same direction and we all have the same values every single thing you care about in your head as a leader your culture is as strong as everyone else caring as much as you do about every one of those things they may never be a carbon copy individuality is good but the further away from you usually it's like carbon copy of a carbon copy of a carbon copy and so I think your job as a leader is to flatten the organization to make people feel as close as possible to you by feeling close to you they're going to be close to the values because you as a leader you are the values and then disaster strikes and then disaster strikes and then you know what when disaster strikes whatever you do in your darkest hour that becomes your culture because your culture people think is the perks the yoga the free food no culture is like when everyone said you know you were going to fail in your darkest hour when you didn't know how to get out of the situation when you know you were in this incredibly difficult POS position maybe you're in a difficult negotiation maybe you're about to run out of money maybe you're in this horrible situation with a competitor whatever you do in that difficult or the P or in our case a pandemic and you're about to go public and you're working on one of the biggest IPOs ever at that point and then suddenly you lose 80% of your business in eight weeks that's what you lost 80% of our business and we had a business larger we were handle our our gross sales were probably higher than Starbucks I think at that time was $35 billion I think Starbucks is like 25 30 billion this is gross sales through the platform gross revenue gross gross booking value when a company that big loses 80% of its business in 8 weeks it's like an 18wheeler going 80 mil an hour and slamming on the brakes nothing really good comes out of that situation at least not initially was that your darkest hour 100% % it was so dark at least professionally I mean My Darkest Personnel hour I I'll talk about in a second but my darkest professional moment was I remember there were news articles is this the end of Airbnb will Airbnb exist and this is 8 weeks after we were preparing for one of the highest IPOs ever how could we go from this noun and a verb used all over the world to suddenly people were worrying will we even survive and I knew there were probably some questions not only could we survive but could I could I could I Brian lead us through this I think no one doubted I knew how to build this I did I mean that happened but was I enough of an adult and a grownup and a leader to be able to man through a crisis and that crisis occurred on March 15th that's when the world shut down the Ides of March and I remember holding an emergency board meeting and I remember there was a quote by Andy Grove he one of the founders of Intel I believe and he said bad companies are destroyed by a crisis good companies survive a crisis but great companies are defined by a crisis and I told our board that we're going to be that third category see everyone was like oh my God why us and I was like no no watch us and I told myself at that moment this is our defining moment I had no evidence that this was our defining moment but I said this is our defining moment and I said what's about to ensue over the next six months will be the best 6 months in the company's history we are going to redefine every part of our company so I learned a lesson in a crisis you make principal decisions not business decisions a business decision is you make a decision predicting the best possible outcome a principal decision is irresp of the outcome maybe you have no idea how the outcome is going to play out how do you want to be remembered what's important to you I wrote a bunch of principles some were pretty simple like act decisive and fast Everyone by the way data oriented people really struggle in crisis M because the data is changed and they don't know what to do and they are uncomfortable making intuitive decisions you better do that in a crisis the second as I said act with all stakeholders of mind a lot of people suddenly they don't think about everyone and they get really cold and heartless I mean that's a Temptation and you should not do that in a crisis always imagine how to Well Be Remembered in history maybe history won't remember you maybe we're not important enough to be remembered but pretend like we are do if we had to be remembered how would we want to be remembered act decisive with all stakers of Mind preserve cash win for the next travel season people said travel may never come back it may not come back forever I said it will come back and we're going to win and I think the final thing is to remember that a crisis is a terrible opportunity to ways if you tell yourself this is my defining moment then that creates an optimistic mindset and that optimism is what everyone looks to because in a crisis the hardest thing to you know what the hardest thing to manag in a crisis is this is what I learned what it's your own psychology it's not the employees it's not the financials it's your own psychology because if you think you're screwed people see in your eyes and they say well you have the most information so we must be screwed but if you're optimistic and that optimism is rooted in reality some basic facts that people still want us to exist and here's why then that optimism is going to be the conditions for creativity and you damn well need creativity in a crisis cuz in a crisis you often have like two bad options and you sometimes want that third path and that's what creativity is often times in life creativity is that third path that third road that doesn't exist that you pave with all the components that weren't ahead of you so that's what we did we rallied the company together we got in a foxhole basically and we rebuilt the company from the ground up we had to make some incredibly difficult decisions we had to reduce the size of Company by 20 uh 25% history will always remember how you did that I hope so and I hope they remember it well I remember it I read it one hour ago before you came here I read every article about it and you were can I read the ending of it yeah yeah yeah yeah so I wrote this long letter when I uh when I never thought I would and I just want to read the ending of it because I want to I want to um I want to I'm going to read just the close the last three paragraphs so I write this letter informing the company of a layoff this is is you know obviously very difficult and actually in a pandemic it's pretty traumatizing because it's uncertain you're isolated you're by yourself maybe and you don't know if you're laid off in a pandemic who's hiring because the economy slowed down and we were in a recession so I go through this email I write out all the benefits I'm not going to read that whole thing I want to just fill the gap for you though because okay the benefits you gave I read it upstairs the benefits you gave people were unlike any other company did that the way you looked after their mental health the way you um offered to maintain their Healthcare in the US people lose their healthare if they lose their job I looked at it and thought [ __ ] H we created an alumni directory where if you were laid off you could opt into a public directory we'd publish your information and we'd Point recruiters to your information and we ended up getting like mil hundreds of thousands of PE recruiters and people ended up visiting those profiles and lot of those people got rehired I was even calling CEOs and I I remember this is how want to be remembered I only remember that when I'm imp Peril we're in our darkest hour I'm not just worrying about how we will survive I'm trying to call CEOs of other companies to see if they can hire our people but I want to I want to read you what you made a long-term decision in that moment yeah it's so clear well I asked how do I want to be remembered CFOs wouldn't have made like I'm not saying CFOs in general but Finance focused data people would never have made those decisions it's nothing yeah and the lesson is isn't that Finance isn't good or data isn't good it's that making CI solely on a financial basis yeah yeah are usually not good Finance is an input I appreciate my CFO and the finance team I every be more than I ever have before before the pandemic before the pandemic I did not have nearly as healthy relation my CFO I saw them as somebody trying to control me and say no to me and once the pandemic heard I said thank God they're constraints but you should never only make a decision based on Purely financial reasons so I end the letter and here's what I said as I've learned these past eight weeks a price crisis brings you clarity about what is truly important though you've been through a whirlwind some things are more clear to me than ever before first I'm thankful for everyone here at airb B throughout this harrowing experience I've been inspired by all of you even the worst of circumstances I've seen the very best in you the world needs human connection now more more than ever and I know that arban be will rise to the occasion because and I believe this because I believe in you second I have a deep feeling of love for all of you our mission is not merely about travel when we started Airbnb our original tagline was travel like a human the human part was always more important in the travel part what we're about is belonging and at the center of belonging is love to those of you staying one of the most important ways we can honor those who are leaving is for them to know that their contributions mattered and that they will always be a part of Arab and B's history I'm confident their work will live on just like this Mission will live on to those leaving I am truly sorry please know this is not your fault the world will never stop seeking the qualities and talents that you brought to Airbnb that helped make Airbnb I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for sharing them with us Brian that was it's a hard for you to read that yeah yeah no now I get a little emotional reading that why because of the thing I said I had a deep feeling of love for for all of them and even the ones I hadn't met like I knew them through the work and I knew how much sacrifice they made you know the burden you have and you're a leader and you say we should do this thing and it turns out somebody actually does that thing and that person who does that thing they might sacrifice personally so that you can do that thing and maybe you know them and you devop a deep bond but if you don't know them they know you and they develop a deep bond for you and then in the darkest of hours in your dark hour it's their dark hour and you tell them that we can't be together anymore and that's difficult and imagine breaking up with somebody now imagine breaking up with 2,500 people or 2,000 people it's very difficult and I don't I sometimes some people think don't get emotionally involved it clouds your decision-making I would say the opposite I get I say get as emotionally involved as possible so you understand the consequent decisions and now try to make a decision but seeing the entire picture the emotions the financials the strategy you're a whole person bring all of it into the place that letter was one of the most defining moments of my life in my career and something remarkable happened right after that letter I got hundreds of thank you letters from people who were laid off it was the most unexpected one of the most unexpected things in my life and I think what they were thanking me for wasn't just the you know the benefits we gave I did say something I said we have great people in other companies be lucky to have them in other words people had even when they got laid off had to have dignity and dignity required me to elevate them and remind people that these people are really good and if I said people they're really good other people might want to hire them and the last thing is that I think many people just thank me because they felt like we had created a a very special place that a special place in their heart and many of them said we still want Airbnb to exist because there's no company quite like it and doesn't mean we're better than everyone else but it means like every person we're a little bit different there's something different about us and those that left that remained at Airbnb I think after that letter I think they came to work even harder and something happened after that those that remained 4,900 of Us Against All Odds on zoom in the middle of a pandemic mic we rebuild the company for the ground up we reorganize every part of the company we rebuild all the products we redo How We Do marketing we then we then then something miraculous happens our business starts recovering because people start getting in cars and staying in airbnbs like a tank of gas away and then our Bankers who put our IPO on hold say you should dust off the S1 and then we decide to go public and we go public at a valuation that probably valued at 4850 billion and by the time within an hour of opening we're a hundred billion doll and the a huge amount of the text message emails I got weren't just current employees were former employees some of the ones that were laid off or people I'd been along the journey with it was the most unbelievable seven or eight months of my life and by the end of it I remember saying I'm I think I was 39 at that point I said I'm 39 going on 59 because I've lived like 20 years this year and I think that's the moment I really grew up how did you feel in that moment your company's worth a hundred billion dollars it's ipoed how does it feel I had a lot of feelings mostly great feelings and some sadness sadness a little bit I'd say it was 70% pride and exaltation and sense of accomplishment and I think why is I think obvious I think the more insightful thing is the it wasn't I wasn't sad in the IPO or post I was mostly happy but I had 20 30% sadness in a part of me and it emerged after the high of the IPO started going down and then I went about my daily life cuz the IPO is December 10th and December 17th and December 20th and January 1st and January 10th and you know what happened the thing that shocked me was my life dayto day was exactly like it was before the IPO it was as if nothing had happened the IPO and us being a public company mostly existed in my head as a Consciousness yes we were now public and yes we now had a quarterly earnings report but like I'd wake up on Monday and nothing was really different and the point of the story is that if your goal was to be public so you could say you're a public CEO you made people all this money you became a public it's kind of like saying I became a doctor I won this gold star I did this thing these things have Merit they're great to accumulate but they're not going to fill you the way you think they will the thing that's going to fill you is not what you achieve it's going to be what you do every single day if you do things you love and you soundself be people you love you're probably going to be happy as long as you don't take those things for granted and if you isolate yourself doing things that are painful or you don't love or you do but along the way you don't make time for people that you love then you might not be happy why is it so simple I don't know but that seems to be the case you talked about your professional low moment being the pandemic your personal low moment over the last 15 years was this leads into it after the IPO because 2020 was 247 and I it was the weirdest thing in 2020 people I would get a lot of condolence messages before the IPO like before when we were down and out I would get condolences I'm so sorry I feel for you and people felt bad for me but I wasn't unhappy at that point I was on adrenaline I was working 24/7 and I wasn't at least professionally lonely because 24/7 I was in constant contact I'm in the phone with my board members my executive team my employees I'm on this rush I have a purpose maybe I'm totally isolated maybe I'm totally disconnected from friends but I'm like I'm like in the I'm I'm in the field of battle so I'm not thinking about that and it's okay that I have time for that cuz we're Sheltering in place and everyone's working and I don't feel like there's not something I'm not getting like of course and then we become aund billion company we go public we're no longer in crisis suddenly I have weekends free I have evenings free I can choose to fill with work but I know I don't have to and that moment that's when I don't have the rush the same level rush I don't have the adrenaline I'm at the top of a mountain and now I say what do I do now and who do I do it with and that was that moment of I isolation that I've been working for a year and a half from probably March of 2020 to like May June July August or some general period of 2021 and I was working basically 16 hours a day seven days a week I knew it was a singular period in my life I don't regret a minute having done it I'm thankful I did not have like profession personal responsibilities like a family at that point and I could dedicate I don't want to do that again if I don't have to but I wouldn't do anything different about that period of my life but the moment that period ended this deep sadness came in because now I'm like well I can't just keep filling it with work and that's when I realized that I can I don't want to say like like overly and I want to say I design my personal life but I can I what I could do is design how I spend my time I can be intentional and I can be intentional about spending time with people that I love and people I care about and that's when I started reaching back out to people and that became the beginning of everything that would changed how I felt personally how are you doing on that front on the personal front I still struggle with it I I can't say I don't struggle I'm doing much better I've made so much progress um I feel pretty healthy like I exercise pretty regularly um so I'm like pretty healthy I don't really drink alcohol very often ever um so I'm pretty healthy on the friend side actually this a funny story when I was turning 40 I had I was going to throw a big birthday party and then because of Co I think it was the Delta strain or uh I end up not throwing a giant party having a small party but for the first time in life I had to write who all my friends are because I had to inv send an invite list and I never it's kind of like when if you're like going to get married people have to create an invite a wedding list and maybe in your life you've never written who all your friends are why would you and the crazy thing is as I wrote a list of my friends I started realizing how many I hadn't kept up with and so then I literally went down the list of like dozens and dozens of friends and now I'm pretty disciplined about staying connected to people about romantic relationships I've I've had I've I was in two relationships over the course of 9 years they were very long relationships so I spent most of my 30s in two very long relationships um I'm single now and um I've dated some but it that's probably something I need to make more time for and it's definitely like more complicated for me today than it was when I was um in my early 30s like you know is it hard for someone like you to meet someone I think the part that's like kind of interesting is like it yes and know I think you have a lot of like you encounter a lot of people and you have a lot of access but at the same time like you know there's a pretty big infrastructure around me and my life is like pretty structured and organized and there's not maybe as much spontaneity like I'm not just going to like bump into somebody at the grocery store as frequently as I used to like not to say that's where you meet somebody but you know what I'm saying like there's a little less spontaneity it's definitely not the easiest it's not the easiest thing but I'm not sure it ever is easy I think there's always this happens St that occurs so you know I I kind of said like my job isn't to like try to find somebody my job is to it's kind of like I think I wonder finding a partner is similar to finding what you want to do with your life some people say follow your like follow your passion and I always say what if you don't know what your passion is I think the better thing is to follow your curiosity but your curiosity is something you must actively participate in you must actively put yourself out there in situations to discover what you love what you love and who you love and be opened and be openminded knowing that you might not predict what you want and that you might not have a type because to have a type is to be so prescriptive that you think you know exactly what you want well if you knew exactly what you want you'd probably already have it you said a second ago the vision really actually starts with the founder you've gone through a lot of personal changes over the last couple of years um and that's sort of inspired the next chapter of Airbnb it seems about connection and being more than just uh people renting out their their houses what is that next chapter for Airbnb so I think when people see Airbnb on the surface they see homes most of those homes are empty and the reason you book them is because you can save money maybe you can live like a local um you can have these really cool memorable vacations but you know it's it's it's a it's a it's a space and I think that the center of gravity of Airbnb over time I like to shift from the space to the people I think at the end of the day we're not just a service we're not just a product I think what I'd like every to become is more of a community more of like a Global Travel community and I think in that Community I imagine that everyone will have this really robust profile and it with with this Rich identity system so we know who everyone is and everyone knows who everyone else is which I think is the foundation of trust the profiles are really rich with public information and personal information like preferences and you come to Airbnb not just to find a space but because Airbnb the app the brand the company you feel like it really knows you and understands who you are and really what you want and maybe initially for travel but eventually you could go beyond travel and then our job as the app the brand the company is to be like the ultimate host and what a host does like what does a host a dinner party do they don't just offer you food they like oh hey like meet John meet Sally like meet meet each other and so so you can you can start to connect people to places homes experiences service all different types of things and that we can use great design in the latest technology to really be able to match and connect people all over the world and if we're successful then you know I think we can push against this dark cloud of you know loneliness that has been you know casting anything Shadows over Society all over the world I mean literally right before this I was at I the reason I'm in a dress shirt I took my jacket off was I was at 10 Downing Street but I wasn't meaning the Prime Minister I was meeting some of his um members of his staff including the minister of loneliness they have a minister of loneliness the fact that the United Kingdom needs to have a minister of loneliness and probably many countries do tells us that it's not just older people that are lonely in fact some of the lonliest people in the world are teenagers this is crazy and why is this it's because the mall is now Amazon the theater is now Netflix the office is now Zoom it's not the fault of any of these things I think these are all great inventions I I I I had this Vision once like what is my purpose at a professional level at the most fundamental level is to help bring people together that's kind of what we do at Airbnb the most FAL level maybe we bring you together with your friends to travel maybe you bring you people together people from other cultures you've never met before if we can bring people together I think we can reinforce these two core ideas that we've had since the day we started the first is we believe people are basically fundamentally good like children most children are good you you were born creative curious open-minded loving for the most part I think that we have the ability for goodness in outside of us and the other thing is I think you I think you said this in the beginning of our discussion people are basically 99.9% the same in fact Genetically speaking that we know that's true and the thing I'm surprised by is not how different we are as I travel the world it's how similar I am we are and that 0.1% that makes us all difference we might call that diversity and culture and Heritage and can we use all these different words to describe that 0.1% but as you spend time with those people you're going to realize the shared Humanity we have and if we believe that 99.9% of people were the same then it would be really hard to hate someone else because how could you hate someone that's 0.1% different than you that would seem kind of pointless and then suddenly you would find this common Bond so that's kind of at a conceptual level where I'd like us to go I'm not saying that's who we are yeah but that's saying at a conceptual level where I'd like us to go the direction of travel the direction of travel and maybe even one day beyond travel no no pun intended exactly oh I like that Brian we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're going to leave the question for oh my God so they've left this in the the official diary of the CEO for you there's a question we are often asked that we usually gloss over or lie about on a frequent basis will you answer this question and answer honestly the question is how are you I would say the feeling that I have right now is one of feeling loved because the last you know this journey I've been on has been so intense and by the way like I this isn't the first podcast I talked about this stuff I was on a couple others and after I started talking about this I had a lot of people in my life who I love who reached out to me and it's been a basis for some connections and what I've realized is I was never as lone as I thought I was and I had so many more people in my life than I realized and they loved me more than I ever knew it's kind of funny we often wait till after people die to tell them how much we love them at these like Services hoping maybe they're watching and sometimes there's a reminder that we should tell them how we feel about them while they're still alive and I've gotten the benefit of people telling me that and I've been able to tell them that I had a cold and I sometimes I I have these temporary feelings of I'm a little bit like like a little tired here and there but those feelings come and go and the feelings that stick with you are like really basic feelings and I think the most important feeling that I have is love and it's and I make my best decisions when I'm feeling that because that love is like the light and that's like a it's like a true north star and and that's how I'm feeling right now and Al also the more I think about it the more I let it in the better it feels and the more it's it's true Brian thank you thank you very much um you are I mean you are one of a kind that's for sure and you're one of a kind in the most important ways because you know those people that are different that think differently that see the world differently that are able to go back to First principles and design a new world and believe in the ability for us to design a new world end up doing that and just from sitting here with you over the last two two hours whatever it's been I I see someone who has the potential to do exactly that design a new and better world and also believes in it and in doing so inspires others to believe that that's possible too that is a truly special thing I've interviewed a lot of people not everybody has that but you're born with it and the cost of that so clearly to me is the feeling of being different yes um it's also probably a struggle to form Connections in other ways where other people might do it so seamlessly yeah but from a societal perspective the sacrifice you make in being different is one that Society will owe you for long after you're gone and it's a and it's a worthy worthy sacrifice it's a truly worthy sacrifice because if there was ever a time as you said with the lonely Nar that Theresa May appointed that we needed someone to be thinking about bringing people together and designing a new world as you tried to when you're a young boy it is now so thank you well thank you so much for having me here this has been an incredible [Music] conversation [Music] oh