At Home With the Billionaire CEO Behind Airbnb | The Circuit

foreign let's just say this isn't your typical Airbnb [Music] hello how are you doing thank you for having us happy hosting Sophie Sophie she'll be co-hosting with us today she's such a good host and this is your house it's my house [Music] I love it yeah here we are this is the infamous Airbnb of all airbnbs this is this is where it all happens I love your coffee table book game I'm like really into coffee oh yeah it's cool right yours are pretty good there's a lot of like cool design books here um and like a lot of memorabilia like there's a Obama owes this is literally how we funded the company we sold collectible breakfast cereal and you became serial entrepreneurs yes you'll see that one's autographed by the actual president Obama and you hand made these right we hand made these we designed these with a team and I literally hot glued this one myself Joe made me this one this is my IPO gift this would be my kids favorite jeske's charm Jessica's charms see if Jessica's chips chesky's charms I love this house it's beautiful honestly it's a nice balance because you know I live alone I don't want to like a you know weird Technic Mansion you know it's super modern I'm not gonna name names but you know people my age buying 100 million dollar homes yeah yeah not my thing what's it been like playing hosts so far oh my God it's been it's been a lot of fun um uh I'm a co-host I got Sophie Supernova she's uh nearly one Euro a two-year-old golden retriever it's been cool because I haven't really hosted that much since the early days you're kind of busy you're running a multi-billion dollar company like what made you want to make time for this I never wanted to be one of those CEOs that's kind of an ivory Tower just looking at data and spreadsheets all day when you first build a company you make something usually for yourself people aren't just numbers they're people and that means that you need to be emotionally connected to what you're doing I understand what hosts are complaining about something or your customers complaining what do they mean so that's like the main reason I did it but then there was another reason I wasn't expecting which was this fun it was crazy to think you were going to rent your house to a stranger or that you were going to stay in some stranger's house and now it's just what we do yeah does the level of human openness to that idea still surprise you I think I'm less a Visionary than expeditionary in the sense that I didn't have a vision I discovered something one week and I couldn't pay rent I decided to let people in my house only to make money for the most part I thought it'd be fun and I ended up becoming friends these people but it made me realize that like these homes are these private spaces that you you'd never let anyone in but you understand why there's no trust and we thought well if we could solve a system of trust and make them not feel like strangers this would be an idea that spread on the world I think we have trouble imagining sociological changes sometimes harder than technological changes we can all imagine things getting bigger faster but it's hard to imagine us changing Behavior but Airbnb has actually been a big part of like maybe a major sociological change probably I mean it's been now been used 1.4 billion times and if you had told me when we first started that 1.4 billion people from 220 countries and regions will live together that on a typical night we'd have nearly the population of Los Angeles staying together people from the Middle East and Texas like cultures you wouldn't necessarily think mixing together I think we all would have said you were crazy it's like most tech companies have to understand laws of physics we call these first principles and we also have to know a different law which is a law of human nature like who are we at a very basic level and if you can start to understand that then you can start to design for people you know obviously the pandemic hit travel comes to a screeching call the majority of your Revenue almost vanishes also nobody wants to see other people right in that moment did it feel like you were standing on the edge of a cliff I thought we had made it before the pandemic you know we had a business that was doing like let's call it 35 billion dollars in sales that's more than Starbucks that's almost like the size of Nike if you told me in like the 1980s growing up we'd have a business that baby you're totally crazy I thought we're making working IPO if they don't lose 80 percent of it in eight weeks I mean you remember there were articles like is this the end of Airbnb will Airbnb exist I gotta tell you like that changed my life and it changed my life and the company for the better how you ever hear people say that they had a near-death experience and they had this Moment of clarity well thankful I've never had that but I felt like I got that Clarity from the business perspective how did you change as a person we'll see my hair is a little greater but um I think I really grew up during the pandemic I think I felt my responsibility more employees were worried about their jobs investors worry about their investment guests were worried about they can get their money back when they're traveling and they were all reaching out to me at the same time and not in a low-key composed way and I remember my board member Ken Chenault who's a CEO of Amex he was CEO during 9 11 in the financial crisis 2008 and he basically said I've been through two of the biggest crises my lifetime and this is 10 times bigger than either of them he said this is your defining moment as a CEO and I think I had lessons that have now been seared in my brain and I'm never going to forget that what are the lessons so the first thing I learned is who people really are the good news is that the vast majority of people turned out to be great people I learned to focus the entire company and point them every single person to One Direction and I learned to stop apologizing about how I won around the company because you hire people and they come from Google Apple Microsoft Amazon and they bring their way with them and what I realized I was doing was trying to find some midpoint between how I wanted to run the company on how they wanted to run the company which actually made everyone miserable it's like I had to go into wartime mode and the crazy thing was is as I took more command more control became more decisive more bossy so to speak I think people were happier because they had Clarity and Direction and then the tide turned or maybe it's like the Titanic didn't hit the iceberg you go public Airbnb goes public yes at the end of 2020. I'm interviewing you live you can't even speak like you're completely tongue-tied I actually want you to I want you to watch it it's such a moment we just got indication on your opening price uh shares indicated to open right now at 139 a share which is more than double what you priced at I mean are you at all concerned about froth what do you think about that number and the potential that you're leaving billions of dollars on the table that's the first time I've heard that number um that is that's a uh you know when we in April we raised money um and it was a debt financing oh my God that price would have priced us around 30 bucks so I I don't know what else to say it's that that's a that's a that's a very that's um wow I've watched that in a long time that actually makes me a little emotional what's going through your head in that moment um I think that moment it was like my hard drive crashed and I think it's that like the pandemic happens we have this emergency board meeting all of a sudden I realize like this is going to be a 24-hour thing I probably never stopped at any point to think of anything you took a whole year and you made it like a 15 second trailer and I was like oh my God and it just maybe at that moment it all hit me this is just so crazy interview went viral it did people could see it hit you yeah yeah yeah my eyebrows went to the top of my head and um I didn't know they went that high that was that was one of the most surprising moments of my life I'm not usually speechless I mean 2020 was an intense and emotional Year and that was the Capstone do you ever think about where Airbnb would be if the pandemic didn't happen that's the crazy thing like your culture is often forged in your darkest moments I think people think of culture as like you know the perks yoga free food snacks no culture or the shared behaviors that you all have based on lessons you've learned together and the lessons you remember most are during the moments of trials and tribulations the things that Forge you we basically made like five years of progress in like six months and you can't ask for an occasion like that you can only hope that if it happens you will rise we've seen a lot of founder CEOs step back whether it's you know Amazon Google Twitter Pinterest Slack you're still here I think when I was starting out I think I was afraid to run a giant company but the thing that's most surprised me is I have more excitement today than I did when I was in y combination the job today as a public company CEO is more fun really than the job as a private company I feel like I often hear the opposite you often do because you know by the time you run a public company you're trying to pee shareholders you're trying to piece employees you're negotiating I stopped obsessing over making money and we ended up generating 300 million free cash flow there's a paradox there I like to entrepreneur think of the growth of your company you have to grow faster than that and if you don't grow fast in your company then your company is going to be pulling you and then you're going to eventually be holding it back does it ever feel like this immense responsibility that you have to stay or does it feel like a burden I only want to keep doing this if I'm the best person to do this and the interest in these the longer I do it the more I probably become the best person because I have both the history the founder of being a Founder that you can never replace and my biggest weakness was probably I was young and I didn't have a lot of experience but now I have that too I think that our day is just getting started we're like Phase One have an idea bring it to Market get product Market fit phase two hyper growth phase three become a public company and like generate Prof and be a real company phase four reinvent yourself extensively I'm an entrepreneur and a business person but I think of myself as kind of Designing and making and the reason I like have more fun now is because now it's more creative than it used to be are you an artist designer first and CEO second is that what you would say I think you're always what you were growing up you know there's something about what you are growing up that's always in your heart and probably I approach problems more like a designer than a CEO although I probably set the interception and how does that change the company how is that mentality infused into the company I have like books like this frankly I'd write book here right my favorite architect or Charles and Ray Eames to the great industrial designers of 20th century Charles Eames said the details aren't the details they make the product and I am absolutely involved in the details I think design is not just how something looks it's how it fundamentally works it's about simplifying something and people think simplifying is removing things and it's not simplifying is understanding something so deeply that you can get to the essence of something even like how we became profitable I like we kind of designed the p l you know like most people cut we didn't cut we designed because cutting you're just like lopping things off but designing says well instead of cutting all these expenses what if we just thought about the whole operation differently to have fewer Parts fewer components and it really takes creativity to do that what's A Day in the Life of Brian chesky outside the office I like to learn I like to draw I like to hang out with people I care about and I like to travel I guess those are things I do yeah so this is all this is my life before Tech did you do these yeah so I did I did this in uh freshman year RISD this is like a thousand triangles glued together to turn into a self-portrait I didn't realize you were such an artist I mean I knew you were a designer but I feel probably yeah more artist out artist I started as an artist became a designer then I guess an entrepreneur in that order is this another one of yours yeah so this was like my big high school senior project this is me basically hanging off a ledge of the Grand Canyon there's a lot going on there probably highly symbolic to how I felt Senior High School which was like oh my God like my life is changing so much I was planning to go to art school I thought to be an artist I at that point I didn't even think I'd be a designer designer was like well leap yeah and I had to go the whole journey of realizing like I love drawing and then I get to campus and I realized I was born like 100 years too late for what I wanted to do freshman year is do you have to pick a major and the department head of industrial design came to pitch and they said industrial design is a sign of everything from a toothbrush to a spaceship and every single thing in between and I thought to myself that's what I'm gonna do with my life so Airbnb was the thing in between I guess we're between the toothbrush and spaceship [Music] over the years you really emphasis Community or connectedness what does it take to make something that people really love when I joined y combinator the first day they give you a t-shirt it's a great t-shirt and it says make something people want and if you get an exit they send you a black T-shirt and it says I made something people want and that was something that always stuck with me and I think the way you make something that people want is you have to care about people and you have to understand people we did this thing 10 years ago I named it Snow White after the movie Snow White Snow White was basically the Advent of the storyboard Walt Disney's one of my heroes this film was so long he had a storyboard it and I said why don't more businesses do that why don't businesses understand who their customer is storyboard the experience and then try to put themselves into shoes that person in just every single opportunity is a detail that you could perfect talk about being in the details oh yeah I mean is your team like should we invite Brian or not if they had the choice that you're presuming they have a choice I don't intend to be in the in the details of everything forever it's like I'm a coach and I'm like trying to teach a level of detail and Excellence I think there's this like idea that I think is a bit of a myth that great leaders hire great people and Empower them to do great work and that sounds great but they're missing something and what they're missing is you got to be in the details of the people it's not micromanaging it's auditing and understanding what they're doing Tech is going through it tumultuous time oh yeah tens of thousands of people getting laid off in waves how do you think about how Amazon and meta and other companies are handling these layoffs I always felt like when I would read some of these corporate Communications that like they weren't written from by people they seemed to be like written by committees and I felt like maybe a bunch of lawyers HR people had sanded the edges off the person to the point where the person speaking wouldn't actually talk like that any communication I write a lot of CEOs don't write anything that they have their name on the second thing is I think when you do like a layoff if you're gonna cut you need to cut once and therefore you better cut deep enough try to avoid doing multiple layoffs I think multiple layoffs can be very difficult from a cultural standpoint because if there's more than one then people can't trust they'll ever they'll ever end and the company is like in a paralyzed standstill if that happens you started Airbnb at the depths of the financial crisis 2009 what's your advice to entrepreneurs now I mean I honestly think hi Sophie she's like this is going on a really long time I get it we've been talking a while hello I think she likes me all right what's your advice look it's like yeah banks are collapsing like what's your advice to entrepreneurs right now I think this is a great time to start a company if you look at the history of companies like apple Microsoft I think we're starting a down economy Google emerged during the.com crisis we started during the Great Recession I like to tell people the best time to start a company is the moment you're ready if your idea is really good and you can make it in a tough economy you can definitely make it a good economy and I think the discipline of being in a really difficult environment will teach you something so what do you want the next phase of Airbnb to be say five years I feel like at this point we've all these capabilities it would be such a shame not to use that to solve a very important problem and the problem that I'm most concerned about that I think we can help is that I think this is the Loneliest time in human history if people lived this isolated alone thousands of years ago before modern technology would be dead right there's a reason loneliness hurts it's because some people would say like Tech is connecting us all and making us less lonely loneliness has been rise United States since 1970s as far as I can tell so it's definitely not All Tech but I do think that we need to have a reality check the average American spends 10 more hours alone every week than 10 years ago we're sleeping less exercising less spending less time with friends and family you know your Instagram followers aren't coming to your funeral no one changed someone else's Mind YouTube comment section so we need to marry the best of the digital technology with the best of the physical world I went the next chapter Airbnb I want to be less about housing less about travel but new things we're going to do are going to be a lot more about bringing people together [Music] not bad at all it's so beautiful yeah Sophie loves to hear I mean look at this view of the city it's amazing so yeah here we are Dolores Park I mean you've been doing this like 15 years yeah 15 years that's a long time this is a long time does it ever in Tech standards does it ever get like Lonely at the Top oh yeah you can have all the money in the world all the success in the world but the thing that makes most people happy is there's Connections in relationships you talk about your parents and your family family like do you want oh yeah definitely it's probably the one thing I haven't done I got a dog that was a starting I'll be kind let me take care let me take care of something really like low-key first if you had told me in my 20s what my life would be like at 41 I would have told you I have a family and maybe I wouldn't be that far in my career and now I have like a huge public company and I don't have a family and so I did things in a different order and the last 15 years has been work and all consuming Airbnb so what's the goal for the next 10 years of Brian chesky I think I have to do things I haven't done before as long as you're in a constant state of becoming and changing and growing you're going to be okay and I think for us like we're in the tech industry it means we're in the change industry so we have to change and reinvent ourselves you obviously you lived around the world in airbnbs you've interacted with so many cities and and people in different countries many of them welcomed Airbnb with open arms and some are still resisting yeah why do you think that is so every city is a community and every Community has many different stakeholders and they have many different circumstances some cities need more tourism other cities have been going through a housing affordability crisis and they're very very sensitive about housing intake off the market and so the lesson I've learned is you gotta like there's no one-size-fits all you have to treat every city personally try to make a system for them that works people think Airbnb is driving up costs enriching landlords bringing in floods of tourists changing the character of a place like what do you say the people who are like I I hate what this is doing in my community well I never want Airbnb to do anything other than strength in a community I also think it's really important to never presume that we're the good guys is what we're doing like good for the world and to constantly reevaluate and so for example affordable housing a lot of cities said you know we want to have some basic restrictions on how everybody can be used in our city so we have like we comply with registration systems for cities we want to make sure that like cities say they want to be able to that we have to collect our fair share of taxes but I also want people to know that we want to strengthen communities and if that means that they need to like change the way Airbnb exists in their City we'll have that conversation are you long SF ultimately I think the cities my God has it had its fair share of challenges and I think that I'm saddened that the Tech Community in the city haven't worked better together that being said the city is so resilient yeah and just when people said there was going to be a massive Exodus there is a new kind of probably the word revolution is not an understatement to say what's going to happen Ai and a lot of it's happening right here how do you think AI is going to change Airbnb I think we can design some of the best interfaces for AI in the world and I think what I ultimately want to do is Imagine One Day the app is more like a concierge that knows you it can match you to the perfect airbnbs can I think that's ultimately what it could be all right well you know what would make this world a little more perfect tell me chocolate chip cookies all right let's do it Sophie you want cookies all right exactly what she wants the key to a good chocolate chip cookie is lots of brown sugar lots of vanilla extract that's pretty much all you need I have a chocolate chip cookie recipe too so I'm very excited to see what your secrets are you like baking in general is this like a thing of yours I do it's like it's a little like reminds me of like drawing drawing is like baking and painting is like cooking how many chips you put in I like less chips anymore me too I prefer more cookie than chip does that seem good that looks great so now we have dough all right so ready we're gonna do like this piece okay the test is it um it's pretty good right all right so now yeah we are yeah they're kind of yeah yeah yeah all right so we're gonna ask a couple real questions yeah what's overhyped crypto was overhyped and now it's not but crypto was overhyped I think AI is probably appropriately hyped but there is a risk that people will have unrealistic expectations of what it can do going forward like the whole world has to move with the technology or the technology will get ahead of itself so how much do you really want AI in your life like would you want chat GPT in your kitchen there is such a thing as too much technology in our life technology is not inevitably a solution to our problems technology is a tool it's power and power can make things better and it can also make things worse it can simplify our lives or add complexity it can bring us together or divide us and the speed at which things are about to change is something that we have to be very careful about 10 minutes 10 minutes yeah it's ready yeah all right let's see what they look like let's do it and here they are yum oh my gosh they look amazing boom there they are look at that okay shall we let's do it okay Cheers Cheers these are 10 star cookies I was I was skeptical I know I know it's how can you believe greatness until you see it you know [Music]

Channel: Bloomberg Originals

Views: 29,428

Keywords: News, bloomberg, quicktake, business, bloomberg quicktake, quicktake originals, bloomberg quicktake by bloomberg, documentary, mini documentary, mini doc, doc, us news, world news, finance, science

Id: AKxPIWTQYys

Length: 24min 1sec (1441 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 22 2023