How Brian Chesky Is Redesigning Airbnb for the AI Era

No one is born a good CEO. I think people are basically born good founders, or, said differently, it's innate. You don't have to learn how to be a good founder.

The job of CEO is completely counterintuitive, and almost all of your intuition about what to do is wrong. We founders were taught to learn by doing, and that's great for a founder. It's not good as a CEO. You do not want to learn on the job how to be a CEO. So I learned the hard way, and it was really about not apologizing for how you want to run a company and being in the details.

Before we hit “go” here, we were talking about industrial design, which you studied at RISD. I have this weird affinity for the history of this topic just because Raymond Loewy, one of the famous industrial designers, helped me a lot in my career indirectly.

1. Studying Industrial Design

I'd love to hear you riff on the influence that guys like him had in your early studies and why you studied that in the first place. Such an interesting background.

I was an artist growing up, but I didn't know what to do with my life. I went to the Rhode Island School of Design, and at RISD, when you're a freshman, you have to pick a major. I'm 17 years old, and I'm like, “Okay, in 3 months, I have to decide what I'm going to do for the rest of my life.” There were 18 majors.

I remember the department head for industrial design came. I had never even heard of the term industrial design. I didn't know what it was. They said, “Industrial design: design of everything from a toothbrush to a spaceship and everything in between.” I immediately said, “That's what I want to do with my life,” because I was thinking of maybe being an architect or something like that.

I started learning about industrial design, and I learned about Charles and Ray Eames and Raymond Loewy. Raymond Loewy was probably the most important industrial designer of the 20th century. He designed so many incredible products. He designed the first Air Force One and a lot of consumer products—very beautiful consumer products. He had a profound impact, I think, on society.

As I was studying the history of industrial design, it was so incredible because the industrial design field is a deeply technical field. Architecture is fairly technical, but it has a more known boundary. There are buildings, and there are commercial, residential, and retail buildings. There's only so much variation. It's a multithousand-year-old field.

Industrial design, for the most part, really started with Josiah Wedgwood. It's really about mass industrial products. Industrial design is really new, from the Industrial Revolution. It used to be analog things. The first industrial design was chairs and tabletop dishes and bowls. But as technology grows, suddenly industrial design becomes cars and airplanes. Now you have microwaves and refrigerators. Eventually, it becomes medical equipment, and with computers, the most famous industrial design probably in the world is the iPhone. The vastness of industrial design is unbelievable.

The intimate relationship you have with a product is incredible. I grew up in the 1980s, and I loved video games. I played with a Game Boy, a Game Gear, and a Super Nintendo. I remember Nike in the ’80s and ’90s, and those sneakers that were the Reebok Pumps. These products captured kids’ imaginations, and they had a very intimate relationship with you. They really had a sense of personality.

Computers, in particular, were something I was really interested in. Then, of course, you get to the golden age of Apple, starting probably in 1998 with the iMac, and Jony Ive, who was my hero. I went to RISD, and when I was at RISD, Apple was in the golden age of industrial design. They really educated the public about design. Once people were educated, they couldn't unsee great products. That really captured my imagination.

What I loved about industrial design was that it was very technical. You work with mechanical engineers, electrical engineers. Here's the thing about industrial design: a design is only successful if it sells. If we design an office building, architects can win awards for their office building and it can never get leased. You can design a house, but no one asks what the retail value of the house was. The awards are detached from the commercial success.

If you design a product and no one buys it, it's considered a failure. Because the commercial success matters, you have to think about marketing, manufacturing, distribution, and solving problems. It's not just about winning awards. It's about being viable to a customer.

The other thing is that it's very much a problem-solving field. It has so many different boundaries, and it's very much about empathy and user journeys. More than, I think, any other design field, industrial design always seemed like it was the kind of field where you put yourself in the shoes of the user and design these user journeys. I think they really teach industrial design through user journeys. I don't think they teach graphic design that way, at least they didn't at the time. It's a very specific type of field.

I think that really prepared me for designing. Just to give you 1 example, one of the projects I designed when I graduated from RISD was a child’s ventilator. Instead of just thinking about a child’s breathing machine or the design of the ventilator, one of the projects I had to do was imagine being the child in a hospital.

I had to imagine being a child. It's hard to do, but you're 6 years old. Imagine you're 6 and you're scared. You're looking up at a breathing machine. Imagine the parents. The parents go in and say, “Is my child going to be okay?” If this breathing machine seems ominous, like it's keeping you alive, the parents are going to freak out and think, “What's wrong with my child?”

The other thing I learned was that the nurse technicians had no problem with these things being complicated. But the hospital wanted a breathing machine that was so simple that everyone could learn how to use it. The nurse technicians, however, took pride in the fact that only they knew how to use it. So you had to weigh the stakeholders.

How do you design something from the vantage point of a child? How would it impact the parents? How can it be universally useful for everyone without threatening people's jobs? There are so many dimensions to it. That really prepared me for this field.

I think there's a reason why I became a CEO, because there are no product managers in industrial design. You are the product manager. There are industrial designers, engineers, and program managers. The industrial designer is the product manager. Design and product are 1 function.

Do you think the world is going to go that way now? You were obviously famous for helping usher in this founder-mode idea.

It seems like that was kind of pre-Opus 4.6 or whatever. There's another layer to that now. I'm curious what we would call it. It seems like, for the first time, someone like you, running a very large company with lots of people, can disintermediate lots of the steps between idea and outcome. This design stuff may be even more applicable than ever.

What is the new mode like? How would you describe it? Everyone's trying to figure out, “How do I run a company in this era?” How would you describe the new capabilities and the mode through the lens of this?

Basically, founder mode was something that Paul Graham coined based on an experience I had. The experience I had was that I felt like I was—

I think people are basically born good founders, or, said differently, it's innate. You don't have to learn how to be a good founder. No one is born a good CEO, and the job of CEO is completely counterintuitive. Almost all of your intuition about what to do is wrong.

You listen to somebody, and they tell you something, and you want to agree with them. Then you've got to be careful if you agree with them without getting the other side. There's a lot of things that are counterintuitive about being a CEO.

The problem is, we founders were never really prepared to be great CEOs. We founders were taught to learn by doing, and that's great for a founder. It's not good as a CEO. You do not want to learn on the job how to be a CEO. In other words, trial and error is bad for a CEO.

Do you know why trial and error is really bad? Because you hire somebody, they build an empire, they leave, and now you've got to unwind their empire. It takes 4 years. So you've wasted years. Actually, learning how to be a CEO is something you should learn.

I learned the hard way. I basically learned that what happened was founders were overdelegating their companies to these professional managers. I'm not disparaging them, but the founders were detaching themselves and being managed rather than managing the company. It was really about not apologizing for how you want to run a company and being in the details. That was founder mode.

Was there a moment when that clicked for you, that you had to change the mode?

Yes. The pandemic. Two things happened. Actually, speaking of Jony Ive, Apple, and another person named Hiroki Asai, I spent the 2010s riding a rocket ship.

Airbnb, Uber, and a few of us went on these crazy rocket ships that OpenAI and Anthropic are doing now. It was awesome. It was amazing. But by the end of the last decade, around 2019, I remember waking up 1 day, and the company I was running was completely unrecognizable.

I had 7,000 employees. I didn't know what anyone was doing. I felt like I was in a car without a steering wheel. I just could not turn the company. I was like, “Turn left,” and the company would go right.

Actually, not only did I feel like I was not in control, I don't think anyone felt like they were in control. It was just a free-for-all. It was just thousands and thousands of decisions being made for me, with me overly deferring and not listening to my intuition.

I got to this point where I remember having this dream, and I told my co-founders: I had a dream in late 2019 where I felt like I'd left the company for 10 years and I'd come back, and somebody had been running the company for 10 years. They had kind of turned it into this giant political bureaucracy, and I didn't even recognize the company. Then I realized, “Oh, my God, it was me the whole time.” So it was my fault.

I had actually enabled all this to happen. Then I started talking to people, and they all had the same experience. All these founders felt like we were all made to feel crazy because we had this instinct. The pandemic was what it was.

Around the same time as the pandemic, I hired a guy named Hiroki Asai. He was from Apple, and he told me about how Steve Jobs ran Apple. When Steve Jobs came back to Apple in July of 1997, Apple was 9 days from bankruptcy, and he basically just went into founder mode—what you call founder mode.

He got into the details of every little detail, and I wanted to do that. Initially, the company braced against it. It was almost like it repelled against it. Then the pandemic happened, and we lost 80% of our business in 8 weeks. We were in total crisis mode at that moment. I went from peacetime to wartime.

I just totally took control of the entire company, and I never let go. Basically, what I did is I reviewed every single thing for 2 or 3 years. I worked 100 hours a week and reviewed every little detail of the company.

My vision wasn't to do this forever. My vision wasn't to micromanage forever. My vision was, before I empower people, I need to know what's going on. This notion that great leadership is hiring great people and trusting them to know what to do—how do you know they're great if you're not auditing what they're doing?

You actually want to start hands-on, under control, and give ground grudgingly. Everyone does the opposite. They let go, they hire someone, and that person goes in the wrong direction. By the way, that's bad for the leader. You're not training them. To bring it back to your question, that's founder mode. We need AI founder mode.

AI founder mode is going to be even more intense than founder mode.

I'm not yet ready to tell you what that is. I'm in the middle of it.

What are the principles that you're thinking about as you go into it? Even if you don't have it ironed out yet.

2. AI Founder Mode

I think in AI founder mode, you're in significantly more detail because you have almost everything on demand, right? The mechanism of founder mode was that I had a lot of meetings because that was the only way I could get information. I probably did 35 hours of meetings, which is very similar to the way Steve ran Apple.

I wouldn't do one-on-ones. I'd only do group meetings. I'd do a recurring thing where I reviewed every single thing in the company, either on a weekly basis, bimonthly, or quarterly, through live, in-person group meetings. I'd have a full chain of command.

I used to tell people, a lot of companies make you get your boss to approve it, and your boss's boss to approve it, and your boss's boss's boss to approve it. I'd have the full chain of command in the room, and anyone could give their opinion. I would make all the final decisions. I would not speak first; I'd usually speak last.

I'd usually agree with the team, but 10% of the time I'd disagree. I'd ratify every decision. It was a very clear chain of command. But this is a meeting-based culture.

In AI, I think we're going to move away from meeting-based to asynchronous. We're fairly remote, and so I think that will benefit us. I think you're going to have a lot fewer layers of management.

There was an old, famous saying: The Catholic Church has been going on for 2,000 years and only has 4 layers of management. Why does every other company have 7, 8, or 9 layers of management? I know there's this general idea, as a thought experiment, of what if I could theoretically manage all 7,000 people flat? I don't think that's a good idea. I think that's an extreme, but I do think going to a few layers of management would make a lot of sense.

I'm in the middle of trying to think about how to redesign the company. I think every single person's job in this company will change. What I'm doing now is trying to get people to adopt AI tools. I want to see how everyone's job changes in the world of AI tooling, and then I want to embark on a fundamental redesign.

I don't think people managers will have any value in the future. By people managers, I mean people who only manage people. I think everyone's going to have to be a hybrid people manager or manager-IC.

Meaning they have to have contact with reality in some sense, like a thing a customer ends up seeing?

Yes. An engineer, for example, has to be technical. In other words, every engineer needs to code. Even the managers need to code. Whatever the version of that is for your field, you need to code.

If you're a lawyer, you're not just managing people. You have to actually read the case law and get involved. That makes sense, right? You can't just be these managers who are kind of people's therapists, and you're just doing meetings and one-on-ones.

I do not think people who have lots of recurring one-on-ones are going to survive, because what they're doing is that: “Oh, you come to me with whatever your problem is. I'm here to help you.” It's like a mentor or professor. That kind of leadership style is not going to work. You need to have context.

The 2 types of people that will not survive the age of AI are pure people managers who think it's all about leadership. No, it's about content and leadership. I hear about design leaders—the heads of design—and they don't actually manage the design. Jony Ive manages design. He designs and leads people.

A design leader who only manages the people—that's crazy to me. The way Frank Lloyd Wright managed his design team was through the work. I say you manage people through the work. You don't manage the people; you manage the work. Otherwise, what are you doing?

Maybe a couple of times a year you should have a check-in and go out to dinner with a direct report, have a heart-to-heart, ask them about their family, and build relationships. You should do that. You should have relationships. That's not a day-to-day thing. You're not their therapist. You're managing people through the work.

The 2 types of people who will not make the shift to AI are pure people managers and people who are rigid and don't want to change and evolve. As long as you've got a growth mindset, I think the tools are going to be very easy.

There's an economic incentive for the tools to be so easy that everyone can figure them out. I don't think the AI tools are going to be complicated. Right now, there's a lot of command line. I think Claude Code and Cowork are not the most intuitive to an average person, but I think the economic incentives will be for this to become incredibly intuitive.

Maybe one last thought is that AI is really an enterprise thing right now. If you take out ChatGPT and people screwing around with image generation, it's pretty much just an enterprise phenomenon.

I'm on the board of Y Combinator. There were 175 companies in the last batch; 159 were enterprise. There are no consumer companies. Because there are no consumer companies, the incentive to make the interfaces really simple is not there, because it's their job to figure out the interface.

The next wave of AI is going to be consumer AI. Consumer AI is going to be the big prize. Can you think of a consumer AI company? Maybe OpenAI, but most of their energy is now going to Codex. Google, yes, with Gemini, but most of its energy is still going to search. They don't want to cannibalize their business.

I think that's where it's all going to go. I'm trying to start thinking about AI as a consumer play and how we make tools so simple that everyone here can figure out how to use them.

It’s surprising that so few have tackled consumer businesses. So many of the biggest companies in history are consumer companies. You built one of the great consumer companies of the last generation. What advice would you give to people who do want to build consumer businesses using this technology? If the next batch of YC startups were to invert because of your advice, what would you tell them? How would you guide them?

Yeah, this is really interesting. Here are the 3 or 4 reasons I think it’s happening. Number 1, I think a lot of people, when ChatGPT came out, were afraid. They were afraid ChatGPT was going to kill their business, and I think a lot of investors didn’t want to invest in something where they thought ChatGPT was going to kill it.

Number 2, the business model is tricky. For ChatGPT, there is no consumer business model for AI yet that I’ve seen. For example, ChatGPT has 3 ways it can monetize: subscriptions, ads, and e-commerce. Unfortunately, they’re probably going to hit a local maximum in the percentage of users subscribing because Claude and Gemini are giving their products away for free. Ads, again, are hitting a local maximum because Claude and Gemini are not going to do ads. Then there’s e-commerce, but they shut down the third-party apps. The inference costs are expensive enough that they’re burning a lot of money.

I think the first thing is that you need to have a business model around consumer AI. You can’t just be in the business of information because people are not trained to pay for information. They’re not trained to do that. So that’s the first problem.

The second problem is distribution is mature. Now, again, the top 3 apps in the App Store are AI. So it does prove that if you have something revolutionary, you’ll find your way to the top. The third thing is that, while we in Silicon Valley like to describe ourselves as rebels, I think—and maybe it’s a little bit like the always-on nature of Twitter—I think it’s very trend-based and vibe-based. I think there’s a sense that everyone kind of does what everyone kind of does, if that makes sense. I think the trend is enterprise.

The other thing is with Y Combinator—and this is, I’m on the board of Y Combinator, so I have a good sense of this—we tell entrepreneurs to get other YC startups to be their first users. It’s a really great distribution strategy. The way we got our first users is you do things that don’t scale. Now what happened was that took the logical extension that everyone just keeps making enterprise companies.

Maybe, finally, the reason people aren’t doing consumer companies is they’re just harder. They’re more hits-driven. The prize is bigger, but the risk is higher. It’s more all-or-nothing. You can pick a narrow vertical, build a good medium- to large-sized business, and it’s pretty straightforward. You can get other YC companies to adopt it and grow into larger and larger enterprise companies. You can pick a sliver, vertically integrate with AI, and it’s very straightforward.

It is a much more hits-driven business. You have to be good at a lot more things. You generally have to be better at design, marketing, culture, and press. It’s not purely technology and sales, which is what I’d say enterprise is like. You make a product; it can be a technology-based product. Oftentimes in enterprise, the person using the product is not the person buying the product, and so sales becomes really important. But you can start sales really small with smaller companies. It’s really hard to figure out how to start small in consumer. Who do you start with on the street?

So I think these are the reasons. My prediction is that we’re living in the age of enterprise AI, and I think in the next 12 to 24 months, you’re going to see the beginning of a consumer AI renaissance.

Almost every app on my home screen has not changed fundamentally since AI, including Airbnb.

I think that’s going to change in 2 years.

Yeah. On your most recent earnings call, you referenced this thing, Project Hawaii, I think it was called, which is the on-the-ground, direct application of the soon-to-be-defined founder mode or whatever. Maybe just describe what that is, how you as an incumbent consumer company are trying to make yourself into one of these AI companies, and what’s possible with a project like this.

This is such a great story. I had this conundrum. We had 7,000 people—we were down to 5,000—and I wanted to basically take the magic of the founding of the company, the early stages. We were in this little apartment working together, and I wanted to work with a team of 10 people. I wanted to have that team work on 1 problem.

3. Small Teams and Focused Problems

We said, “Let’s put a team together to focus on improving the guest experience and improving the conversion rate.” Conversion rate is basically search-to-book: the conversion rate of people typing in a location and dates and booking. There’s a funnel, and you can basically measure the funnel and do A/B tests. But more than A/B testing, I wanted to do something where the north star was, “Let’s make the experience better and increase conversion.”

We were going to start with a better user experience. We put together a team of, I think, 10 or 12 people: designers, engineers, a couple of product people, and data scientists. This was mostly just a pure software team. We treated it like a little startup, and we said, “We’re going to just focus, and we’re going to do a system of crawl, walk, run, then fly.”

Crawl

fix the bugs, fix the problems with conversion. Once you build a little more confidence, walk: start to develop features and really start to reframe the journey. Then run: rethink the entire flow and build big features. Fly: completely reinvent yourself, and everything is going to be measured.

The team’s results were phenomenal. They ended up delivering the equivalent of, I think, $200 million in incremental revenue for the company in year 1. The following year was like $400 million or $500 million. Now we’re at a run rate of over 600 basis points—600 basis points of $134 billion. You get a sense of how much of a lever that is.

It was just 1 team. It maybe grew into dozens and dozens of people, maybe 50 or 60 people, but it was this really lean team. We took that team and said, “What if we apply this to the next problem? Pricing.”

Same people?

Another team—totally different team, same model—then another model, then another model. So I really tried to work with the team. Initially, I would meet with them every week, then it became every other week, then every month. My general philosophy is to start really hands-on and let go over time.

I’m not a golfer, but I took a couple of golf lessons with a golf instructor. Here’s an analogy for management: if you learn golf, you want to learn with a golf instructor before you build any habits, because if you learn on your own, you’re going to have a weird swing. Then, when you get a golf instructor, they have to change your muscle memory. The golf instructor has to watch you swing thousands of times. Eventually, they don’t need to see it, and you let go over time.

What most founders do is the opposite. They bring these people in, let them figure it out, and then intervene later, but they already have the wrong muscle memory. So I decided I was going to be totally hands-on. I was going to do everything with a team, teach them everything I know, and let go. Then do it with the next team. And then I had teams learn from other teams.

When we launched Services and Experiences, we basically found this other way of innovating. Here’s a riddle—or it was a riddle to me. Airbnb had this core business that was really successful. It did nearly $100 billion a year in gross sales. For every $1,000 spent in the world, $1 was spent on Airbnb.

Except we had the problem of being a one-hit wonder. For 18 years, I couldn’t get a second hit out. I kept wondering, “Why is this not working?” The answer was too obvious. It was staring us in the face. But we kept having the burden of trying to scale these businesses at a global scale from the beginning.

When we started Airbnb, we started in 1 city, New York City. We had 100 users. I was in Y Combinator. Paul Graham goes, “Where are your users?” I’m like, “They’re in New York.” We didn’t have many, but they were in New York. He goes, “You’re in Mountain View, and your users are in New York. What are you doing here? Go to New York.” We went door to door meeting the users.

The basic philosophy is: make the problem as small as possible. Get to product-market fit, then scale. So we launched Services and Experiences last year, and it didn’t work right away. I’m like, “Oh, shit.” We launched Services and Experiences in 100 cities.

I went back and thought to myself, “Wait a second. Airbnb launched in New York, Uber launched in San Francisco, DoorDash launched in Palo Alto. Let’s make the problem small and just perfect a city.” And so we started doing this with new businesses.

We basically go from 1 to 10 to many. We'll pilot in one market. If we get the market to work, we'll go to 10. You get to 10, it works, and we'll industrialize.

It took us 16 years to get to our second and third businesses. We started getting those 2 working. Now we have 10 to 20 pilots. Eventually, we'll have 50 to 70 new verticals. This is like the Hawaii system. It's basically taking this giant company and making it a really small, elite team.

It's like the Navy SEALs. I work with the teams really, really leanly. Make the problem as small as possible. I think that's a key thing: make the problem as small as possible. Dominate a niche.

Peter Thiel used to say this. He was one of our first investors. He said, “It's better to have a monopoly of a tiny market than a small share of a big market.” This is counterintuitive. Every investor wants to go into big markets. I don't like big markets. Big markets have a lot of competition. Go into a small market and make it big.

Is the reason for both of these things—the idea that it works in Toronto but not at 100-city scale, and the reason a 10-person team can outperform a 100-person team—is the shared reason some sort of better contact with reality? Somehow, reality starts getting distorted as you get bigger or something?

The general principle comes back to the most important piece of advice I ever got. The first day at Y Combinator, Paul Graham said, “It's better to have 100 people love you than 1 million people sort of like you.” That came from Paul Buchheit. Paul Buchheit was a partner at Y Combinator. He created Gmail. I think the old famous story was that he created Gmail, and it took him 2 years. They said, “You can't ship until 100 people inside Google loved it.”

It actually took 2 years to get 100 people to like the product. But once 100 people like something, 100 million people like it. The sample size is enough. The problem is, you try to make something that 1 million people like, but you can't talk to 1 million people. You end up with this shallow swimming pool. It's like you're trying to heat up an ocean, and the ocean just takes too long to heat up. You can't tell.

Instead of heating up an ocean, heat up a bathtub. Just make the problem as small as possible, and you're close to the customer. In fact, if you're only focused on 1 city, or even a subset of a city, you can talk to every person. You can put all these resources on a tiny problem. I guarantee you, if you take a ton of resources and put them on a tiny problem, the smaller the problem, the more you'll change the numbers and the trajectory, and that will teach you lessons.

You do things that don't scale, then you scale. The scaling is industrialization. But product-market fit is a distinct problem from industrialization. You want to basically make the problem as small as possible. Understand the user. Put yourself in their shoes. Blow their mind. Do things you've never thought of before. Do them by hand. Make them unscalable. Don't worry how much it costs. Just prove the model. In other words, it's like R&D.

This is a lot like industrial design.

This is what we call prototyping. Before you manufacture something, you prototype, and you make prototype after prototype after prototype until you make something that you love for yourself or that someone loves. So, yes, the smaller the problem, the fewer abstraction layers there are. You're actually on the ground. You're talking to people, and that's how you prove it.

Hawaii to these pilots—it's all the same thing. By the way, the same thing with AI: you're removing abstraction layers, and you're making the problem as small as possible. You're going directly to the source. I think that's a principle that all these things have in common.

It's like we're playing this game of telephone if we don't do it that way.

Yes, and you just lose information each time there's communication. This is why founders don't like running large companies, because they end up in a game of telephone. They say something, and then it goes down 5 layers, and then it goes back up 5 layers. Then there are these meetings, and the meetings become system reviews. Literally, the lowest point for me, when I was having meetings about meetings—

It was very meta.

You've gotten into this new mode. It's called founder mode. It's now called CEO mode. Do you think you're now a good CEO?

I think I am. I think I was naturally a good founder, although I would say I also got really lucky, because I had 2 great co-founders. Damn, did I luck out on that.

I think I was a very good early-stage CEO, and I think the moment I had to have an executive team, I really struggled to make the shift from founder to CEO. I really struggled. In the 2010s, I do not think I was a great CEO, and I think we paid the price for my learning curve. The pandemic was a rude awakening for me.

4. The Evolution from Founder to CEO

I think I was conflict-averse. Somebody once said, “A pitcher never takes himself off the mound.” As a manager, you've got to go take him off the mound. I was always helping people. I didn't want to hurt people's feelings. I wanted to take them off the mound, but I wouldn't. The longer you leave a pitcher on the mound, the more home runs they give up and the more upset they get. They're still going to be angry at you, no matter when you take them off the mound.

So, I don't think I was naturally a good CEO. I remember, during the run-up to the pandemic, at one point I wondered, “I wonder if I'm just not meant to be a CEO. Maybe I'm not meant to do it.” Then the pandemic happened. We had a near-death experience, and I said, “Well, screw the rumination. It's do or die.” I feel like I learned how to do the job.

There are really a few phases of being a CEO: have an idea, get to product-market fit; go from product-market fit to hypergrowth; go from hypergrowth to scale, to become a real company—a real company as in profitable and public—and then the last stage. I did all that. We have around a 40% free-cash-flow margin. We're very profitable. We do $100 billion in customer sales.

The last phase of a CEO is to reinvent the company through product extension. The reason our stock has been flat is because we only do 1 thing, and we've started to saturate a little bit of the core idea. We've had to reinvent ourselves. We had to do product extension, so I still have to prove myself.

Then there's another proof point: can I navigate this transformation of AI? By the way, I think founder mode is going to be the only way to operate in the age of AI. If you're a giant professional CEO, I think you can operate in founder mode. But if you're risk-averse and you want to be incremental, those types of people are not going to survive the age of AI.

I think there was an old Albert Einstein quote. He said, “The best way to keep your balance on a bicycle is to keep moving.” You're going to have to keep moving. I think founders are going to be really well-primed, or really well set up, for this age of AI because we kind of have to redesign our whole company from scratch again.

Was there anything else that Hiroki Asai taught you? Steve was perhaps the literal, ultimate example of everything you just said: focused on the details and in the weeds forever, with the reinvention of the company.

Yeah, Hiroki Asai. Before I say anything, I would love to say who Hiroki is. Everyone knows Jony Ive. Hiroki is a bit of an unsung hero.

I always heard about him. He was this legendary, mythical figure who was elusive. There are almost no photos of him online. There are no videos of him. He was never out in front, but he was Steve Jobs' creative director. It was a function under marketing. He did the ads. He did the graphic design. He was really responsible for the black type with the gray font and the product in front of white. That was really his aesthetic.

He taught me 2 principles of Apple that I brought with me. One was simplicity. When you start a company, because you have no money and you're so constrained, you're naturally simple. Lack of abundance creates natural constraints, and so simplicity is thrust upon you. That is good for you.

Then, once you raise a bunch of money and hire a bunch of people, you go in a lot of directions, and then you lose your sense of focus. How many startups can we think of today that have struggled from a lack of focus? Probably—name a few. So, you start to lose your muscle for simplicity.

Hiroki taught me simplicity, and he taught me that simplicity is not removing things. Simplicity is distilling something so fundamentally that you understand its essence. I know Steve used to say, “The fundamental soul of a man-made creation is revealed through successive outer layers of its design.” Isn't that a beautiful saying?

In other words, great design is about distilling something to its essence. It's kind of what Elon does with SpaceX, where he talks about first principles. First principles is kind of like a physics term, but it's also a design term. It's about understanding that if I'm going to reinvent this product, I have to understand the properties of glass. I have to understand everything about it to distill it to its essence.

So, I got obsessed with simplicity: simplicity of our products, simplicity of our organization, simplicity of everything. The other one was a sense of craft and attention to detail. How you do anything is how you do everything. I said everything must be perfect.

It comes from a book that a lot of people in Silicon Valley recommend, The Score Takes Care of Itself. Bill Walsh, the coach of the San Francisco 49ers, and John Wooden, the winningest coach in college basketball history at UCLA, followed the same principle. John Wooden won 10 NCAA championships over 12 years. On the first day, the first hour with his team, he spent an hour teaching you how to put your socks on.

One hour, and he said, “Put your socks on this way.”

Mr. Miyagi. Yeah, one hour teaching you how to put your socks on. It’s a metaphor. Everything was that rigorous. Bill Walsh said the way you tuck your jersey into your pants was one of 10,000 details that determined whether you won or not.

Basically, don’t focus on winning. Focus on getting all the inputs perfect. If you get everything perfect, then you will win, and you don’t focus on the scorecard. We do focus on growth, but we stopped focusing on growth. We started focusing on making everything perfect.

If everything is perfect and you don’t grow, then you focused on the wrong inputs. But if you have the right inputs and make them perfect, then you’ll grow really fast. That’s really what I learned from him. He really taught me, I think, founder mode, because I never met Steve. I only knew him through history.

I said, “I love this. I’m an artist. I’m a designer. I get to have more control of the product. I get to make everything perfect.”

The initial attempt at founder mode created giant revolts. Everyone hated it because everyone thought I was micromanaging them. I learned something fundamental. Initially, everyone hated it, and by the end, everyone loved it.

Now, the people who hated it left, so maybe there’s selection bias. The people who liked it stayed. But even the people who thought they wanted autonomy, independence, and empowerment didn’t realize that control and power are not zero-sum.

It’s not like if I have all the power, you don’t. There’s a scenario where we’re all powerless. There’s also a scenario where, if I have power, I can therefore give you power. It’s not zero-sum. This is the problem people don’t understand.

If I have more power and control, I can give you more power and control, and I can hand it off to you. It’s about the idea that the car has a steering wheel: you turn it left, and it actually goes left.

That’s the basic idea. I do think it’s all about the company rowing in one direction. That’s it.

The thing that you’ve said historically that had the largest impact on me was this notion of the 11-star experience: the exercise of going from not a 5-star but a 6-star experience and actually forcing yourself to write it. I have this idea in mind because of simplicity and distillation, and it’s a beautiful thing, right? I guess it’s ultimately empathetic with the customer.

But why is that idea in practice so powerful? What happens as you go down or up the star count to 11 stars? Why is that such a valuable exercise?

Let me do a 1-minute explanation of what it is. Basically, when you book an Airbnb, most people leave a 5-star review, and if you leave a 4-star review, it’s a bad experience. A 5-star experience means everything went as planned. It’s called review compression.

Similar to Uber, you always leave a 5-star review. If you leave anything other than a 5-star review, something really went wrong. But what if the driver was really amazing? You can only leave a 5-star review.

5. The 11-Star Experience

So I started imagining: What if we could give a 6-star review? I did this exercise from 6 to 10 or 11 stars. Let’s say a 5-star experience takes one moment: checking into an Airbnb. A 5-star check-in is that you get there and the host greets you, or there’s a door code and it works. In other words, nothing went wrong. You give it 5 stars.

Anything went wrong, you give it 4 stars or less. But that’s review compression. What if you went above and beyond? What would a 6-star experience look like? A 6-star experience would look like you get to the Airbnb and there’s your favorite wine on the table, fruit and snacks, and a handwritten card. That’s better than just letting me into the house.

What’s a 7-star experience? A 7-star experience is that there’s a limousine waiting for me at the airport. They know I like surfing, so there’s a surfboard waiting for me, and they’re showing me around the city. There’s all this stuff.

What’s an 8-star experience? An 8-star experience is that I get to the airport and there’s an elephant. I go on the elephant and go on a parade in my honor. I’m like, “Wow, I feel really special.”

What’s a 9-star experience? I call it the Beatles check-in. I get off the plane and it’s like the 1964 Beatles: there are 5,000 teenage girls screaming my name with cards, making me feel like I’m a pop star. I get to the front lawn of the Airbnb, and there’s a press conference in my name.

What’s a 10-star experience? Elon Musk greets me and takes me to space.

Right. The reason you do this is that it’s an exercise in the absurd. You keep pushing to go so absurd—up to 11 stars—that suddenly 6 or 7 stars doesn’t seem crazy at all.

The way to get to product-market fit is to create a 6- or 7-star experience. But you can’t create a 6- or 7-star experience without going beyond—in other words, going beyond the edge of reality and working backward.

It’s kind of a fun exercise. What’s the craziest possible way to blow one person’s mind—one customer’s mind—and maybe try that? Maybe you can’t scale that because it’s an 8-star experience, but you can probably scale a 6-star experience. The difference between 5 and 6 stars is probably the difference between you and a competitor.

And if you can find a way to industrialize it and scale it, you might have product-market fit and something special. One of the things that I think about when you give some of the absurd examples at the high end of the range is this feeling I’ve experienced with AI: my imagination had almost atrophied.

Yes.

By using these tools, I realized how hard it was. I thought, “I can make anything.” And then I sit down and I’m like, “I have no idea what to make.” As I started making little things, all of a sudden my imagination got rebooted, and it feels like this exercise is an imagination exercise.

One of the sayings is that great writing is great thinking, but I find that—I don’t know about you—some people have ideas, think of the ideas, and write them down. Sometimes I figure out the ideas through the act of writing.

The act of writing is the act of coming up with ideas. The act of designing is the act of coming up with ideas. It’s really hard to just sit in a room and abstractly think of ideas. You need to do something.

6. AI as a Canvas for Creativity

I think what was happening was we didn’t have enough tools to express ourselves. A lot of the tools were very passive tools. Increasingly, we were spending more and more time on a sit-back experience, like social media. I think AI shifts our attention from consumption to creation.

Because social media is something a lot of us spend our time on, and the only type of creation is giving your opinion or posting, but you’re mostly consuming.

What I love about AI is that it’s not about opinions. Suddenly, all of us have a paintbrush and a canvas to make stuff, and I think AI is going to lead to a renaissance in creativity.

I was an artist growing up. I was a pretty good artist, so I had the ability to express ideas. Here’s an analogy: You ever meet a person—there’s probably a musician you could think of, like Prince—you name a musician who probably couldn’t express themselves in words, but then through music there’s a dimension you never knew.

An artist can seem really reserved, but their art is really emotional. So many of us have this creativity inside of us, but we don’t have the craftsmanship or tools to express it. Suddenly, what AI is going to do is give us the ability to express it.

We’re going to realize there are a lot more creative people than we thought, because we typically think of creative people as people who know how to express their creativity.

It turns out: What if everyone can express it? Pablo Picasso once said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” Every child is creative. If every child is creative, that means every adult could be creative. I think that every human on this planet is creative.

You ask the average person, “Are you creative?” About 1 in 2 says they’re not. That’s my experience.

That’s not true.

It’s just that they haven’t exercised the muscle.

And I think that the magic of AI is that what’s in our head can manifest. But also, as you said, we can develop new ideas in our head because it’s a relationship. We may have a small idea, we try something, it gives us another idea, and we go on this journey.

A lot of people call founders visionaries. We’re more expeditionaries. We’re on these expeditions. We only call it visions later. We’re really just putting one foot in front of the other.

Can you talk about the difference between the act of creation in pursuit of achievement—notches on the belt—versus creating just for the raw, pure joy of it, which seems to be more the mode you’re in now?

I think when I started Airbnb, I don’t think we were totally trying to be successful. I mean, literally, I won’t go through the whole founding story, but basically I inflated 3 air mattresses, and Airbnb stands for Air Bed and Breakfast. I like to joke that if I was trying to make money, I would have come up with a better idea than Air Bed and Breakfast.

I truly did it for the love and the fun. Somewhere along the way, I got really successful, and that almost became a curse because success became a scorecard. Then I wanted to get even more successful. It stopped being intrinsic and started being a version of status and people-pleasing.

You see, it took me a little while to realize what I was doing. What I really wanted was love. I learned growing up as a child that the way to get love is to be special, and the way to be special is to do special things. If I do special things, I get praised and I feel loved.

I think that translated into, if I'm really successful, I will get adulation. If I get adulation, I'll feel that feeling that I'm always seeking. But I didn't do this consciously. I'm not saying this is what I was doing; it took me many years to realize it.

The problem with adulation, by the way, is that adulation is kind of like seeking status. So many people seek status, but the problem is that's not where great products and great companies come from. Adulation is like a cup with a hole at the bottom. You keep filling it, thinking it's love, except it just keeps coming out the bottom.

At some point, you have to confront, who am I doing this for? Am I doing it for other people—for them to briefly love me and commend me, then move on? By the way, that's a drug. It's like real drugs: you need a greater hit to get the high, and eventually it stops working. Eventually you reach a peak, and it gets really meaningless and empty.

That happened to me. At some point around the pandemic, we go public, and we have a $100 billion valuation. It's one of the best days of my life. The next day, I wake up, and because of the pandemic, we're on Zoom. I put on sweatpants and go on a Zoom meeting. It was like it never happened.

It became the saddest day of my life because I realized, okay, what now? What do I do now? I got all this adulation, and I don't feel any different.

That made me reevaluate what I'm doing this for. I had to come to terms with the fact that I want to do things for pure, intrinsic reasons. I had to detach myself from people's approval, from status, and from worrying about how hot Airbnb is or how successful I am—which I never gave a shit about when we started.

You start getting accolades and you want more of them, but you have to let go of that because it's a losing game. I started focusing on just being heads-down and doing the work like I used to do. Like when you were a kid, there was delight. Just make stuff. Make it for yourself.

In that great book, The Creative Act: A Way of Being, Rick Rubin says an artist is an artist when they make it for themselves and don't try to make something successful. I stopped trying to be successful and just went back to the basics. I realized a person who doesn't know you will never love you, and that's okay. The people who love you are the people who know you, and the most important person to love you is yourself.

The thing you should love is the thing you're doing. This became a whole thing. It became about just doing it because you love it and putting your heart and soul into it. The score takes care of itself. It goes back to that: don't try to be successful. Try to do something wonderful that you love for yourself.

Maybe you'll be successful, maybe you won't, but don't focus on who you want to be. Focus on what you want to do. That's what President Obama once told me. He said, “If I focused on who I wanted to be—if I focused on being President of the United States and I wasn't—my life would have been a failure. But if I focused on what I wanted to do—I wanted to help people, I wanted to be a community organizer—then I didn't need to be president.”

So many entrepreneurs focus on what they want to be: I want to be a giant tech founder. I want to run a $1 billion company. I want to do this. I want to do that. Instead of focusing on, what do I want to make?

And then suddenly there's no way to fail if you're making what you love. It's an incredible set of ideas. I'm curious what most fell away in your life during this recent period as a result of this shift in mindset. What do you do less of that you used to do a lot of when you stopped chasing adulation?

Mostly ruminating.

You ruminate less.

Yeah, just worrying about people's opinions of me. There's something mildly narcissistic about worrying about everyone's opinions, as if they're all thinking about you.

No one is.

7. Detaching from Success

The reality is that even people watching this—I'm going to be self-conscious—except for a moment, they're going to think about me, but then they're going to be mostly thinking about themselves. That's okay. All of us are thinking everyone's thinking about us, but they're thinking about themselves or the people in their life.

They're not thinking about some guy on a podcast except for maybe an hour, and then it's over. Then they're thinking about the people in their life. Letting go of what people think about you is important because that's a prison. Suddenly, you're making things for approval.

And then you lose your courage. That's the main thing. It's just the mental energy.

But I really try to do things that are meaningful. Meaningful things are really 2 buckets: making and spending time with people I care about. Those are the 2 things. Anything else is kind of an obligation that I'll do once in a while.

There are two very different ideas I'm curious for you to react to. The first was made famous by Warren Buffett, who said, “You want to buy, as an investor, businesses that a ham sandwich could run because eventually one will.” Think about the card payment processors like Visa or Mastercard—just extremely elegant business models. Network-effect businesses like Airbnb tend to be in this category.

Then you've got this opposite end of the spectrum, which is one of my favorite early-stage investors. He tells every founder that they should think about the company as a platform or a vehicle for their own personal growth.

Yeah.

Their ability to grow will set the ceiling for the company. These are sort of opposite ideas, and we've been talking a lot more about leadership in this second bucket. I'm curious how you think about whether you care if, eventually, a ham sandwich ran Airbnb—whether the business model would be so perfected that it wouldn't matter in the Warren Buffett sense—and, in general, how you think about whether it's true that your ceiling is the company's ceiling as its leader.

I think they're both true. Let me try to square those with one example. Here's an example: Walt Disney. People watching, I want you to try to name a Paramount Pictures film.

Hard.

I want you to name a Warner Bros. film. Maybe you'll think of Batman. I want you to name a Universal Pictures film. I want you to name something from the MGM library. Pretty hard, right?

But I bet you can name a lot of Disney films and probably Pixar films during its golden age. There's a big difference between those two. One is that Disney was very founder-led and that Disney was all about the personal expression of 1 man.

The irony is that the longer a company is run by founders in a founder mode, the more I think it can let go and anyone can run it. I think Disney—not to take away from Disney's CEO—the new guy, Josh D'Amaro, is really great. I've met him. He's great, and I think they've had a lot of good CEOs.

But I generally think the CEO of Disney has the bases loaded, right? You've got this incredible theme park that people are going to visit no matter how well it's run. They've got this incredible IP. It's not that it's an easy job, but Walt left so much.

I remember I was speaking to the former CFO at Disney once, about 10 years ago, and he said Disney hasn't really done anything new since Walt died. Walt died in 1966. Since 1966, we still make feature animated films, TV, and Magic Kingdoms.

Of course, they do new things, but fundamentally that's the same playbook. I do think that's an example where the founder's reinvention of the company and personal expression created such a reservoir of IP and momentum. He died 50 years ago.

8. Founder-Led Moats

50 years later, Walt Disney's spirit seems very, very omnipresent. Whereas Louis B. Mayer—I don't know if most people can tell you which studio he was with. I think it was MGM, and I couldn't even tell you the other two people. You see what I'm saying? There's a huge difference.

Huge difference.

So I generally think this is a paradox. I think the ham sandwich theory is: have a business so good that a ham sandwich can run it, because sooner or later they will. The best businesses are ones that founders run, reinvent, and create so much equity and such a great moat that, when they hand them off, they will endure and grow after them.

I think Apple is very similar. They have not had to invent new products for the most part. They're still running the iPhone. What a gift Steve left them: they were a few-hundred-billion-dollar company when he died, and they're a multitrillion-dollar company now.

I think the one caveat is that tech companies are different. Warren Buffett generally didn't invest in tech companies. We didn't invest in tech companies, with the exception of Apple. Coca-Cola was a big investment of his, or See's Candies. These are things that don't get disrupted. I think technology is a synonym for change. If we're in the change industry, you need to be more in founder mode more of the time.

I think that's how I square it: the company is the upper bound of the founder's potential, and the longer you're in founder mode, the more it will endure. I remember one founder told me, "I want this company to last 100 years, so therefore I can't be in all the details. Therefore, I need to empower people." I remember saying, "If you want something to be around for 100 years, you want to control it as long as possible and keep it in founder mode as long as possible," like Disney. That's my theory. I think that's counterintuitive.

People say, "Oh, but the company's going to get very dependent on you." Well, yeah, but the alternative is you're going to have so institutionalized this magic that it can't endure after you.

Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid, was very famous for using Ansel Adams as his ultimate tester of his equipment. He cared about what the most important, maybe best, photographer of all time thought of his device.

That comes to mind when you talk about Disney, because I have this visual of Walt just continuing to drill down to some sort of bedrock. That's the mission that you're on as a founder: bedrock.

Yeah, I love that.

What is that for you from this point forward? As you keep drilling, what is the nature of what you think you're still after? Where is there still room for your ceiling to raise so that the business can continue to grow?

A few things come to mind. When people think of Airbnb—if you close your eyes and say, "I want you to think of a picture of Airbnb"—you probably think of a house.

We're a noun and a verb, like Kleenex, which is amazing and not amazing. It's amazing in that we're kind of the category leader. It's also tough because when you're Kleenex, you want to sell shampoo, and they're like, "Wait a second. I'm not putting Kleenex on my head." So it's a double-edged sword for the brand.

The bedrock for me is: How do I change the atomic unit of Airbnb from a home to a person? I do not want Airbnb to be about homes. I want it to be about people, and I want the person to be the atomic unit.

On Airbnb, you can get a home, an experience, or a service; eventually, a flight, eventually this, that. I want to imagine a person in the center with a ring of 50 things around them. These are the things you can get. The bedrock of Airbnb is going to be an identity profile: the person's preferences.

I want to develop the most authenticated identity on the internet. Proof of personhood is going to be really important in an age of artificial intelligence. I want to develop the most robust profile on the internet. It used to be Facebook, but they've kind of abandoned that strategy. I want to build one of the richest preference libraries of you as a person.

That would be useful to have. I want to build a social graph, but in the real world, and I want to eventually have a membership program where you get all these different benefits. So the bedrock is the person.

Then I want to basically figure out how we can launch, like Amazon, from books to 100 things. I don't want us to just have homes. I want us to have 100 things. We need to develop this industrialized machine of understanding what the atomic units or primitives are that are consistent across all these different businesses.

The last one is AI. We have a bit of the innovator's dilemma. Plus or minus $100 billion goes through our app. I have all these visions to totally change it, but you're a public company, giving guidance, and the difference between missing and hitting earnings is real. It's not just being a public company: people's livelihood depends on Airbnb. If we mess with something, somebody could go from making a living to not making a living.

You have to be very careful, and yet that is not an environment for mass innovation when you're being really careful. So I'm also exploring little sandboxes—maybe almost like a separate app. What is a radically different Airbnb? What's after Airbnb? Airbnb. What's the next thing?

9. The Next Chapter of Airbnb

Those are the three things I'm thinking about. Number 1: How do we take the atomic unit from a home to a person? Number 2: How do we industrialize what Airbnb offers to do 50 things, not 3 things? And then, how do we disrupt ourselves before someone else does with AI without screwing over our investors and our hosts who depend on us?

Maybe the last thing I'm thinking about, just as a CEO, is that I think I've reached a certain level of mastery. I've reached mastery of product-market fit, hypergrowth, and profitability. I'm beginning Level 4. Level 4 is reinventing yourself and product extension.

I think there's something potentially even beyond that in the age of AI. One of my strengths is all my experience, and that's also my weakness now. I'm 44. I'm not old, but I'm not young. I'm not AI-native in the same way a 22-year-old is.

When I started Airbnb, I was 25 or 26, and we were competing against Expedia. They were on Outlook, and we used Google Docs, and we had an iPhone. It all seems anachronistic now, but back then, that was innovative. We were on the coolest new tools, and we just moved faster.

Pablo Picasso had another quote. He said, "The older you get, the stronger the wind gets, and it's always in your face." You have to stay light on your feet. You have to stay young. You have to keep reinventing yourself. You have to have curiosity. I don't want to become this old-school person in the groove. I have to reinvent myself.

One of the things that, as I've been building stuff myself really for the first time—I'm not an engineer. I used to build stuff, but I'd tell people, and the feedback loop was painfully slow and lossy. Now it's 5 to 15 minutes and pretty high-fidelity, and soon it'll be 5 seconds and perfect fidelity.

I always loved Brett Victor's idea of wanting to be as close to the output as possible, with the input and the output being as linked as possible. We're getting to that stage.

The anxiety I have from having this experience is that it feels like nothing will last. As I think about it, I love business. I love business as an art form. Historically, there have been these ways to have enduring moats. People would always call them moats.

You have 200 million people that you know a lot about already. You've got hundreds of millions of reviews and lots of information on places. You have these embedded things that I can't just get from you. But it seems, as I build this stuff, that it's going to be really hard to have something enduring and lasting.

Do you share that anxiety? How does that make you feel—that as the frictions fall, it also feels like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is disappearing into the distance or something?

Take a fashion brand like Hermès, I think the most valuable single fashion brand in the world. The Birkin bag and the Kelly bag are like—they have a new product every decade or something. These are multidecade-old things, and they appreciate and resell.

Then you've got Zara, fast fashion. I feel like we all want to make these things that endure, but we're living in the hyper-fast fashion of software. If you look at software from 10 years ago, no matter how great it was at the time, it looks really old and dated.

You look at hardware from 10 years ago, and it looks pretty decent. You look at interior design, and it looks pretty good. You look at buildings, and after a certain period of time, they've got this patina and they're wonderful. You go to Paris, and old endures.

Environments and physical worlds have huge endurance. Hardware and physical things have medium endurance. Software is extremely ephemeral. Opinions are like that, but some ideas permeate. This is something that I'm wrestling with myself, because I want to make things that endure.

And I don't know how I've reconciled it except to say this. I obsess over our app, Airbnb's app—its design, its interface. And yet, no matter how great it is, 10 years from now, I'm going to look at it and think it looks like crap. Because I look at the interface from 10 years ago and think it looks like crap, no matter how good it was. That software never looks good.

10. What Endures in the Age of AI

So then you have to ask: What endures? I do think there are things that endure. Airbnb—the community—endures. I started realizing the software won't endure, but the network effect will decently endure, and the ideas of Airbnb—its principles, its mission, the organization, the company, the brand, the identity, the logo, the voice, the community, what it stands for—those things will endure. Most importantly, the community.

I realized at some point, I told the company, "We're not building an app. We're not building a service. We're building a community," because that's the only thing that will last. I don't think there will be apps in the future. I think there'll be agents.

So, if we're attached to apps, I don't think there will be apps. So, we better let go of that.

Many of the themes that we've talked about are steady progress and learning through time, applied in service of others. What did bodybuilding, when you were young, teach you about steady progress over time?

Weirdly, bodybuilding taught me so much that I could apply to Silicon Valley. It taught me 2 important principles. Just as background, my dad was really into ice hockey and wanted me to be an ice hockey player. Unfortunately, I was very skinny. I hit puberty really late, and I went to a sports academy for hockey.

When I was 13, I thought I could be a really good hockey player, but by the time I was 14, I hadn't hit puberty. I didn't hit puberty until I was 15 or 16. That's a death sentence in hockey, because suddenly I went from first or second line to third or fourth line. I went from thinking I'd be a Division I athlete to a Division III athlete. I'm like, "Okay, it's not really going to work out for me."

And so I started weightlifting. I was like 135 pounds, and I told my friends, "I want to be one of the top bodybuilders in the country by the time I'm 19." They thought I was out of my mind. I ended up, by 19, competing at the national level.

The first lesson I learned from bodybuilding was: If you can change your body, you can change your life. That was actually the most fundamental thing to change. Everyone wants to change things around them, but what if you change yourself first, physically? I even think that, if you could start somewhere, a lot of people say, "Change your thoughts." I would change your body first.

Change your physical biology. If you're unhappy, I would get healthy before I went to therapy. That's first: biology. I think that fixes a lot, and then you can do other things. But really start with your physical biology. If you can change your body, you can change your life. It was the ultimate expression of empowerment. "Okay, now I changed my body. What else can I change?"

It's a metaphor for eventually being able to design the world around you. I can change my body. I can change my environment. Eventually, I can change the world. You just go inside out.

But the other thing it taught me, which might be even more helpful, is that you can't get in shape in 1 day. If you go to the gym and work out for 20 hours, you're not going to get in better shape. In fact, you're going to overtrain.

The way you get stronger is through an adaptation from progressive overload. You stress the body. The body doesn't get stronger during exercise; it actually breaks the muscles down. It's an adaptive response, like an immune system. It gets stronger, and you just keep doing it.

The basic idea is that you can't get in shape in 1 day, and it's about being 1% better every single day. If you compound 1% a day, then you can actually have massive gains. So it's really about discipline.

It's also very analytical. Bodybuilding is this wonderful thing where it's judged. It's a subjective sport that you judge visually, but you measure it scientifically. You weigh your food. You have to put yourself in the right caloric deficit. You have to write down your training. You have to write down your weights. It taught me to be very analytical and metrics-driven, and that it's really about discipline and consistency.

I think that's important because I think a lot of founders just give up too early. It's about discipline. If you train for a month and take a month off, you're starting over.

And that's the key: You never quit. You just keep going.

11. Lessons from Bodybuilding

One of the nice things about it is the visual feedback. You just judge visually. You can literally see it. You can look in the mirror. Other people can look at you and say, "You've been working out."

Probably some of the skills that you would want to apply the same progressive-overload thing to as a leader are very invisible. How do you figure out the objective function? How do you apply that same thing to something else that other people can't see?

Well, that's interesting. I stop trying to focus on how good of a company everybody is, and I take it to the project. One project I focus on is that I want to build the best team possible.

Twice a year, we do this giant thing we call Roadmap Review, and there are the top 100 people in the room. I see the quality of the people in the room. We did one over the last 2 days. One of my most important jobs—the most important job I do at Airbnb—is hiring. That's a whole separate topic.

The visual feedback is that twice a year I get the top 100 people in the room, and I can see the quality of the people in the conversation. In other words, there are many metrics that I use and obsess over. Maybe it's the app, and I just look at the design of the app. Maybe it's how well the company operates, and I look at decision-making. It's always about breaking the problem down to something that's observable and measurable.

By the way, this is a really important point. Basically, as a leader, you can choose if you want to spend time hiring or managing. One or the other.

The better the people, the less they need to be managed. The more time you spend on recruiting, the less time you have to spend on management. It's one-to-one.

I remember when I was starting Airbnb, Sam Altman—who obviously everyone knows now from OpenAI—was kind of a wunderkind. I was one of the first Sequoia-funded companies out of Y Combinator. Before me, there were 2 people who had ever been funded by Sequoia from Y Combinator: Sam Altman and Drew Houston from Dropbox. The first one was Sam Altman, with his company called Loopt. It was a way to see your friends on a phone before the iPhone.

I remember him telling me—I was like 27 or 28—"Sequoia just funded us $600,000 at a $3 million post-money valuation, the highest valuation at Y Combinator. Now the average valuation is $30 million." And he said, "You're going to spend 50% of your time on hiring."

I never did, by the way. It was my death blow, not spending more time on hiring. The less time I spent on hiring, the more time I spent managing. I started learning that my number-one job was hiring. Every day I wake up, and the first person I call is my recruiter.

I actually think people should think about their first employee being a recruiter, not an engineer, because they're the most important person. They're the ones who get you every other person.

I mean, a company is as good as its people, and the difference between the good companies and the great companies is the people. I think AI kind of makes that clear now, that it's all about the people. But I obsess over recruiting. I spend hours a day, and I don't recruit executives. I recruit 2 or 3 layers deep.

What are you doing? Are you beyond talking to them?

I try to map out all the best people in the Valley. Here's how you hire good people: Do not do searches. Generally, what you want to do is build pipelines.

Here's the mistake people make when they hire. They think, "I need to hire a blank," so they do a search. They hire a search firm. The search firm scans, gives you 50 profiles, and then you narrow it down to 10 people. You contact 10. 5 are interested. Of the 5 who are interested, you interview them. A couple drop out. Now you have 3 candidates, and you pick the best one and hire. That's how almost everyone does it.

12. The CEO's No. 1 Job

Then you do references. You ask them for references. They give you a few references, and of course they're positive. Then you hire them and let them do their thing, and a year later you realize they're good or bad. If they're bad, uh-oh, they've already hired their own team.

That is the wrong way to do it. The best way to do it is pipeline recruiting. You're constantly recruiting. You're constantly meeting people. Here's what you do: You basically are constantly meeting people.

Let's say I need to hire really good engineers. I don't do searches. I just informationally meet the best engineers in the world. Every meeting, the job is to get the next meeting—to meet someone else. If I were to meet you, I'd say, "Hey, who are the best people you know? Can you introduce me to 2 or 3 people?"

So what you're doing is constantly meeting people in advance of searches, and you're just building your pipeline.

You just need to know lots of talent, and all of it is referral-based. There are 2 ways to find out if people are good. One way is that you're just good at assessing talent, but the 2 best ways are to start with the results and work backward to the people.

A lot of people say, “I want a really good marketer. I’m going to go to Nike. They do really good marketing.” No, don’t do that. Find an ad you like and figure out who made that ad. Start with results. Work back to people. Don’t start with the résumé.

The other thing to do is keep asking people to build your Rolodex. I’m constantly building a Rolodex, and the moment I find somebody who’s really good, I ask them who all the best people they know are. I basically build these little mafias. Every company has a little mafia of talent. Uber has an operations mafia, Apple has a design mafia, and you build these little ecosystems. They tell you who the other good people are, and you’re constantly finding more people.

What I do is, I am the co-hiring manager for the top 200 people in the company. This is very radical. A lot of CEOs think it’s their job to hire their executives, and their executive team hires their team. I think that is fatal.

Theoretically, yes, you should live in a world where you have such good people that they can all hire their own people. Most entrepreneurs, if they have 10 executives, would be lucky if 2 or 3 were able to do that without any support or help. In other words, you always want to be marrying up, hiring people for the future.

I sometimes used to say, “My executives should hire people so good they would never work for them without my help.” In other words, it should be like we’re reaching. If you can hire them without my help, we’re not reaching far enough. You want to hire the very best person you can.

I’m constantly meeting people, constantly interviewing. The first and last call I make every day is to the recruiting team. Still, I probably spend 2 or 3 hours a day on it. Every year, I spend more of my time on recruiting and less on management.

In the 2000s, I thought it was all about having a good idea, having a recruiting machine, and managing people. The great thing is, I don’t manage this much anymore. The more time you spend recruiting, the less time you spend on management, because the really good people just self-manage.

This is amazing. If you have to manage people, then maybe you should think about upgrading the talent. You said before that founders are born, you think, and CEOs can be more shaped, for the most part. Maybe the caveat to that is that maybe founders aren’t born, but we’ve spent our whole lives tinkering and building. You can’t simulate being a CEO.

I was going to ask whether or not you think they’re activated in some way—maybe there’s the raw material, but then some event happens. Shyam from Palantir would call this the Bruce Banner gamma-ray thing or something. What have you learned about activating talent?

I think the way to activate somebody is to give them a problem or opportunity and see if they can do it. The people who have a high level of agency are going to do it.

I don’t know how to teach motivation. I don’t know if it can be taught, by the way. I think you can motivate people, but I don’t think you can make a person who’s not motivated become motivated. I think all entrepreneurs have the trait of being self-motivated, so it’s really about giving them a challenge. Then it’s up to them to step in and activate.

Having plugged the leaky bucket of motivation and activation, what’s your motivation now as you attack this next chapter?

Most of my heroes are artists. I’ll pick 4 people: 2 I’ve mentioned repeatedly—Leonardo da Vinci, Vincent van Gogh, Walt Disney, and Steve Jobs. There are many things they had in common, but what is something they all had in common? On the last day or the last week of their lives, they were working.

Leonardo da Vinci carried the Mona Lisa with him until he died. He definitely didn’t paint the Mona Lisa for anyone else, because he never showed it to anyone. Vincent van Gogh sold 1 painting in his life. He died an obscure artist in a cornfield. It’s unclear what happened, maybe he was killed, but he did it because he loved it.

On the last day of his life, Walt Disney was lying in a hospital bed. His brother Roy was rubbing his cold feet. Walt was dying of lung cancer, looking at the ceiling tiles, which were a grid, and imagining Disney World. Hiroki Asai said that, in the last couple of weeks of his life, Steve Jobs was still showing him marketing and looking at products.

Some people might interpret that as, “Oh, that’s sad. They weren’t spending time with family.” By the way, Vincent van Gogh and da Vinci didn’t have families. My understanding is that Steve and Walt spent time with their families at the end of their lives.

But I don’t see that as a sad story. They were working at the end because they did what they loved. Mozart, the great artist in history, did what he loved.

My motivation is the motivation of an artist. I just want to create something great. That is my motivation. I would like to be successful. I want our shareholders to get a return. I would like employees to feel they’re at a great company. I would love to make a huge impact in the world. But mostly, I just want to make something.

I feel like I’m a designer more than I am a CEO. I might be afforded one of the biggest canvases of any designer in human history, because usually designers just aren’t given this many resources. It’s almost like a glitch in the system. I figured it was almost accidental, like some error allowed me to crack this glitch and get all these resources I wasn’t supposed to get.

But I’m not letting go. My motivation is that of an artist. I just want to make incredible things.

It’s a beautiful, almost closing thought, given the tools now at our disposal—that everyone can do that if they want.

13. Activating Talent

I think everyone’s an artist. All children are born artists. The problem is what happens as you grow up. AI is the opportunity for all of us to become artists and scientists and creators. We don’t have to be consumers anymore. We can be creators.

What a shift.

True creators. When we hear the word “creator,” we think of a social media performer. That’s one way to create. You can perform. The problem is, I think “creator” has been performance. Now “creator” can be “create.” Make. Everyone can make now. It’s amazing.

Maybe I’ll just share one other thought. God, this seems like the most exciting time to be alive in human history. I mean, I’m biased, but this is probably the greatest invention in human history. AI is the ultimate creative expression. It is the ultimate platform shift of platform shifts of platform shifts.

At the most recent Y Combinator dinner, I looked at all the entrepreneurs in the audience and said, “I’m kind of jealous, because here I am onstage pretending like I’m the successful guy talking to you, the young kids.” 2 or 3 years ago, I used to say I would never do it all over again, because I was afraid I would never have this level of success again.

Part of me wishes I could be 26 and get rid of all success and see what’s possible again. Then I realized age is a number. I can still act like I’m 26. I’m still young. I’ve still got more in me. I’m just getting started. We’re all just getting started.

This is the most exciting time to be alive. My God, we can design anything now. It’s unbelievable.

The last question I ask everyone is the same: What is the kindest thing that anyone’s ever done for you?

Oh, it’s such a good question. The kindest thing, the biggest gift anyone’s given me, is believing in me. I think the biggest gift you can give somebody, or one of the biggest gifts, is believing in them.

A couple of examples: When I was 16 years old, I transferred to a public high school. I was really into art. I was a pretty good artist, but I didn’t know how good I was. I had a teacher named Miss Williams, and she believed in me. I remember her telling my parents, “He’s going to be a famous artist.”

I never became a famous artist, but it gave me confidence that I was actually good at something, because I wasn’t that good at hockey. I wish I was, and I wish I could make my dad proud with ice hockey. I just didn’t get very far.

Suddenly, that belief set me on a path. At that moment, I said, “I’m going to go to art school.” At that moment, I realized I could decide to be happy for the rest of my life.

When you’re a child, you do things because you’re forced to. 20% of your life, you get to do whatever you want, and 80% of your life, you go to school and do things that you’re forced to do. I said, “I can be happy for the rest of my life.”

I came to Silicon Valley. I met Michael Seibel and the guys at Justin.tv, and they believed in me. They were early Y Combinator people. Paul Graham made an exception to let me into an early YC batch. He believed in me. I wasn’t an engineer, and he almost never funded non-engineers.

He thought the idea wasn’t a good idea, actually. He said, “People are actually doing this.” I said, “Yes.” He said, “What’s wrong with them?”

My investors—I can go down the list of investors—they believed in me. Joe and Nate believed in me. I had no business being a CEO.

Joe somehow believed in me. I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the generosity of people believing in me and helping me. I think the greatest gift I can give back is believing in others and helping them—not pulling the ladder up behind me, but really showing them.

14. The Kindest Thing

I had the great privilege to eventually join the Giving Pledge, and you have to write a letter. I remember my letter was, “If you could ask my high school teachers who would join the Giving Pledge, they wouldn't have guessed me.” The basic idea in my life philosophy is that we all have unknown potential. I think we have these stories in our own head about what we're capable of.

To go back to John Wooden, somebody once asked him, “What's the secret to success?” And he said, “I only ask my players to do their very best.” The person goes, “Oh, wow. That seems weird. That sounds like what a parent says of the kid who loses all the time.” He goes, “Here's the catch: I saw potential in people they didn't see in themselves.”

That's my management philosophy. When I tell somebody it's not good enough, I'm not saying you're not good enough. I'm saying I see potential, and you don't see it in yourself. That is the most motivating thing you can do: to say, “I believe in you, and I believe you can do even more.”

And people will climb a mountain for that type of thing. Maybe the way to finally end this whole conversation is that the most important person ever that you can believe in is yourself. I think a lot of us who are entrepreneurs were driven by insecurity. We're driven by some hole—not all of us, but a lot of us.

Something in our childhood, something. A lot of us were not the coolest kids or whatever, and there was something in us we wanted to prove. Then you get really successful and you still have impostor syndrome. A lot of the path to happiness and salvation is just the path of learning to believe in yourself.

For me, I only believed in myself long after other people believed in me. Now my gift is to try to give it to others.

Beautiful place to close. Brian, thanks for—

Thank you very much. Thank you.

Thanks, man.