How Brian Chesky Is Redesigning Airbnb for the AI Era (Transcript)

No one is born a good CEO. I think people are 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.

This is great for a founder, but not good as a CEO. You do not want to learn on the job how to be a CEO. So I went through a hard way, and it really relates to not compromising on how you want to run your company, being in the details.

Before we began, we talked about the industrial design you studied at RISD. I have a strange affinity for the history of this topic, simply because Raymond Loewy—one of the most famous figures in industrial design—helped my career indirectly a lot. I'd love to hear you talk about the influence that people like him had on your early studies, and why you chose to study that major in the first place. This background is really interesting.

I went... I grew up as an artist, but I didn't know what to do with it. I went to the Rhode Island School of Design, and when you're a freshman at RISD, you have to choose a major.

I was 17, and I thought, "Okay, I have to decide what I'm going to do for the rest of my life in three months." There were 18 majors at the time. I remember the department head of Industrial Design came. I had never even heard the term "industrial design." I didn't know what it was. They said industrial design is designing everything from a toothbrush to a spaceship. I immediately said that is what I want to do for the rest of my life, because I was considering becoming an architect or something like that. So I started

Raymond Loewy. Raymond Loewy is probably the most important industrial designer of the 20th century. He designed many incredible products. His first design was Air Force One. He designed, like, you

When I studied the history of industrial design, it was just incredible

Industrial design largely really began with Josiah Wedgwood. Like it was indeed a lot of industrial products. So, industrial design is indeed very new after the Industrial Revolution. And in the past, everything was analog stuff. The initial industrial design was chairs, tabletop tableware, and bowls.

But as technology grows, suddenly industrial design becomes cars and airplanes. And now you have microwaves and refrigerators. And then eventually

famous industrial design is probably the iPhone. And the breadth of industrial design

The intimate relationship you have with a product is incredible. I remember growing up in the 1980s, I loved video games; I played with a Game Boy, a Game Gear, Super Nintendo. Those devices—or remember Nike in the 80s and 90s, the 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, and computers in particular were something I was really interested in.

And then, of course, you get to the golden age of Apple, starting probably in 1998 with the iMac and Jony Ive, who was, like, my hero. So 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 they're educated, they couldn't unsee great products, and that really captured my imagination.

What I loved about industrial design was: A) It was very technical; you work with mechanical engineers, you work with electrical engineers. B) Here's the thing about industrial design: it's almost different than any other design. This is also true of fashion design. A design is only successful if it sells. So, 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 looks at the retail value of the house. So, the awards are detached from the commercial success. If you design a product and no one buys it, it's considered a failure. And so, 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 it's very much a problem-solving field. It's got so many different boundaries, and it's very much about empathy and user journeys, more than I think any other design field. I think industrial design always seemed like it was the kind of field where you put yourself in the shoes of the user and you design these user journeys. And 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, and I think that really prepared me for designing.

Just to give you one example: one of the projects I designed when I graduated RISD was a child's ventilator. And so, instead of just thinking about 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 six years old—imagine being six and you're scared. You're looking up at a breathing machine. And imagine the parents; the parents go in and they're like, "Is my child going to be okay?" If this breathing machine seems ominous and like it's keeping you alive, the parents are going to freak out, like, "What's wrong with my child?"

The other thing I learned was that one of the interesting things that happened was the nurse technicians—they had no problem that these things were complicated. But the hospital wanted a breathing machine that was so simple that everyone could learn how to use it. Except the nurse technicians had pride 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 affect the parents? How can it be universally useful for everyone without threatening people's jobs? You see, there are so many dimensions, and that just really prepared me for this field. I think there's a reason why I became a CEO, because there's no product managers in industrial design—you are the PM. There's industrial designers, there's engineers, there's program managers. So, the industrial designer is the product manager.

Do you think the world's going to go that way now? You were obviously famous for helping usher in this "founder mode" idea. It seems like there's now—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. But it seems like for the first time, someone—even like you, running a very large company with lots of people—can disintermediate lots of the steps between idea and outcome. And this design stuff may be even more applicable than ever. What is the new mode like? How would you describe the new capabilities and the mode through the lens of this?

Like, "founder mode" was something that Paul Graham coined, but it's based on the experience I had. To back up, I think people are 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, and almost all of your intuition about what to do is wrong. Like, you listen to somebody and they tell you something, and you want to agree with them, and then you've got to be careful to know if you agree with them without getting the other side. You know, there are a lot of things that are counterintuitive about being a CEO. And so, the problem is we founders were never really prepared to be great CEOs.

And I think 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. Why is trial and error really bad? Because you hire somebody, they build an empire, they leave, and now you've got to unwind their empire, and it takes, like, four years. So you've wasted years. So learning how to be a CEO is something you should learn. And so I learned the hard way. And I learned that what happened was founders were over-delegating their companies to these professional managers. I'm not disparaging them, but they were detaching themselves and they were being managed rather than managing the company. And it was really about not apologizing about how you want to run a company—being in the details. That was "founder mode."

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

Yes, the pandemic. Two things happened. Speaking of Jony Ive, Apple, and another person named Hiroki Asai. I spent the 2010s riding a rocket ship. Airbnb, Uber—a few of us went on these crazy rocket ships that, like, 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 one day and the company I was running was completely unrecognizable. I had, like, 7,000 employees. I didn't know what anyone was doing. I felt like I was in a car without a steering wheel, and I just could not turn the company. I was like, "Turn left," and the company would go right. And not only did I feel like I wasn't 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—me overly deferring, not listening to my intuition.

I got to this point where I remember having this dream—I told my co-founders—in late 2019 where I felt like I'd left the company for 10 years and I'd come back, and it was like somebody had been running the company for 10 years and they'd turned it into this giant political bureaucracy. And I didn't even recognize the company. And then I realized, "Oh my god, it was me the whole time." And so it was my fault; I had enabled all this to happen. Then I started talking to people, and they all had the same experience, and all these founders felt like we were all made to feel crazy because we had this instinct. The pandemic was what it was.

So, 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. Steve Jobs, when he came back to Apple in July 1997, was nine days from bankruptcy, and he 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, but initially the company braced against it. It was almost like it repelled against it. And then the pandemic happened, and we lost 80% of our business in eight weeks. We were in total crisis mode. At that moment, I went from peacetime to wartime, and then I just totally took control of the entire company, and I just never let go. What I did is I reviewed every single thing for two or three years; I worked, like, 100 hours a week, 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—well, how are they great if you're not auditing what they're doing? You want to start hands-on, under control, and give ground grudgingly. Everyone does the opposite: they let go, they hire someone, they go in the wrong direction—and by the way, that's bad for the leader, you're not training them. So 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?

I think in AI "founder mode," you're in significantly more details because you have almost everything on-demand, right? The mechanism of "founder mode" was I had a lot of meetings because that was the only way I could get information. So, 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 review every single thing in the company—either on a weekly, bi-monthly, or quarterly live, in-person group meeting—and I'd have the full chain of command.

I used to tell people, like, in a lot of companies you have to 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, but I'd ratify every decision. It was a very clear chain of command. But this is a meeting-based culture.

I think in AI, we're going to move away from meeting-based to asynchronous, and we're fairly remote, 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 they only have four layers of management. Why do every other company have, like, seven, eight, nine layers of management? I know there's this general idea—like as a thought experiment—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.

We're in the middle of trying to think about how to redesign the company. I think every single person in this company's job will change. What I'm amazingly doing now is trying to get people to adopt AI tools, and 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"—people that only manage people—will have any value in the future. 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—or, recall, they have 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. So, if you're a lawyer, you're just not managing people; you have to read the case law, and you have to get involved. And that makes sense, right? You can't just be like these managers where you're kind of people's therapists and you're just doing meetings, you're doing 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, "Oh, you come to me with whatever your problem is, I'm here to help you," like a mentor or professor. That kind of leadership style is not going to work. You need to have context.

I think a lot of people will survive this age of AI. The two types of people that will not survive the age of AI are pure people managers who think it's all about just leadership. No, it's about content *and* leadership. And by the way, I hear about design leaders—the heads of design—they don't manage the design. Jony Ive managed design; he designs and he leads people. A design leader who only manages the people? That's crazy to me. The way Frank Lloyd managed his design team is 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?

A couple 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, build relationships—you should do that. You should have relationships. But that's not a day-to-day thing. You're not their therapist. You're managing people through the work. So, the two 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 have 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. So 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 Cursor are not the most intuitive to an average person—but I think economic incentives will be for this to become incredibly intuitive.

And I think maybe one last thought is 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—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, yeah, with Gemini, but most of it is still going to search—they don't want to cannibalize their business. So, 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 do we make tools so simple that everyone here can figure out how to use them.

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It's surprising that so few have tackled consumer; 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 that do want to build consumer businesses using this technology? Like, 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 three or four reasons I think it's happening: Number one, 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 two, the business model is tricky. ChatGPT—there is no consumer business model for AI yet that I've seen. For example, ChatGPT: there are three ways it can monetize. Subscriptions—unfortunately, they're probably going to hit a local maximum percentage of users subscribing because Claude and Gemini are giving it away for free. Ads—again, they're hitting a local maximum because Claude and Gemini are not going to do ads. And then e-commerce—they shut down the third-party apps. And the inference costs are expensive enough that they're burning a lot of money. So I think the first thing is 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, top three apps in the app store are AI, so it does prove you have something revolutionary—you'll find your way to the top. The third thing is, while I think Silicon Valley likes to describe ourselves as rebels, I think it's very trend-based and vibe-based. I think there's a sense that everyone kind of does what everyone else is doing. That makes sense. I think the trend is enterprise.

The other thing is with Y Combinator—and I'm on the board of Y Combinator, so I have a good view—we tell entrepreneurs, "Get other YC startups to be your first users." It's a really great distribution strategy. Like the way we got our first users: you do things that don't scale. Now what happened was that has taken 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 hit-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—it's pretty straightforward. You can get other YC companies to adopt it, and you can grow into larger and larger enterprise. You can pick a sliver, vertically integrate with AI—it's very straightforward. Enterprise is a much more sales-driven business.

You have to be good at a lot more things for consumer. You generally have to be better at design, marketing, culture, press. Like, 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. Often times 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 startups and companies. It's really hard to figure out how do you start small in consumer? Like, who do you start with on the street? So, I think these are the reasons why 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 two years.

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

This is such a great story. So, I had this conundrum. We had like 7,000 people—or down to 5,000—and I wanted to take the magic of the founding of the company, the early stages, where we were in this little apartment working together, and I wanted to work with this team of 10 people, and I wanted that team to work on one problem. We said, "Let's put a team together to focus on improving the guest experience—improving conversion rate." Conversion rate is search-to-book. The conversion rate of people typing in a location and dates and booking. There's a funnel, and you can measure the funnel, and you can do AB tests. But more than AB 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. And so we put together a team of, I think, like 10 or 12 people—designers, engineers, a couple product people, data scientists. This is mostly just a pure software team, and we treated it like a little startup, and we said we're just going to focus, and we're going to do a system of crawl, walk, run, then fly.

Crawl: fix the bugs, fix the problems of conversion. Once you build a little bit more confidence, walk: start to develop features, really start to reframe the journey. Then run: rethink the entire flow, big features. Then 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 in year one, $200 million in internal revenue for the company. The following year was like $400 or $500 million. Now, we're at a run rate of like over 600 basis points—600 basis points of $134 billion dollars. You get the sense of how much of a lever that is. It was just one 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 we said, "What if we apply it to the next problem? Pricing." Same people, another team, totally different team, same model, then another model, then another model.

I really tried to work with the team; initially I would meet with them every week, and then it became every other week, and then every month. My general philosophy is: start really hands-on, and let go over time. It's like—I'm not a golfer, but I took a couple golf lessons from 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, and then when you get a golf instructor, they've got to change your muscle memory. So, the golf instructor has got to watch you swing like thousands of times. Eventually, they don't need to see it; you let go over time. What most founders do is the opposite: they develop, they bring these people in, they let them figure it out, and then they intervene later, but they already have the wrong muscle memory. So, I decided I'm going to be totally hands-on. I'm going to do everything with a team, teach them everything I know, and let go. Then do it the next team. And then I had teams learn from other teams.

So 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 thousand dollars spent in the world, $1 was spent on an Airbnb. Except we had the problem of being like a one-hit wonder. For 18 years, I couldn't get a second hit out. And I kept wondering why is this not working? And the answer 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 one 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." He goes, "You're in Mountain View. Users in New York. What are you doing here? Go to Mountain View." 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/experiences last year, and it didn't work right away. And I'm like, "Oh sh*t." We launched services/experiences in 100 cities. And I went back, and I 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 go to any new business, we're going to do one, to 10, to many. We'll pilot in one market; any idea if we get the market to work, we'll go to 10; you get to 10 and it works, we'll industrialize.

It took us 16 years to get to our second and third business. We started getting those two working; now we have like 10 to 20 pilots. Eventually, we'll have 50 to 70 new verticals. So this is the Hawaii system. It's taking this giant company and making it a really small, elite team—like the Navy SEALs. I work with the teams really leanly. Make the problem as small as possible. I think that's a key thing. 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—the shared reason some sort of better contact with reality? And somehow reality starts getting distorted as you get bigger?

The general principle—this comes back to the most important piece of advice I ever got. The first day of Y Combinator, Paul Graham said, "It's better to have 100 people love you than a million people sort of like you." And that came from Paul Buchheit. Paul Buchheit was a partner at Y Combinator; he created Gmail. And I think this old famous story was he created Gmail and it took him two years, and they said, "You can't ship until 100 people inside of Google loved it." And it took like two years to get 100 people to like the product. But once 100 people like something, 100 million people like it. It's like the sample size is enough.

The problem is you try to make something a million people like, you can't talk to a million people. And so 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 and you can't tell. Instead of heating up an ocean, heat up a bathtub, and just make the problem as small as possible, and you're close to the customer. In fact, if you only are focused on one city or even a subset of a city, you can talk to every person. You can put all these resources on a tiny problem. And I guarantee you take a ton of resources, you put them on a tiny problem, the smaller the problem, the more you'll change the numbers—the trajectory—and that will teach you lessons.

You do things that don't scale, then you scale, and the scaling is industrialization. But product-market fit is a distinct problem from industrialization. So you want to make the promise 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 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 someone loves. So yes, the smaller the problem, the fewer the abstraction layers. You're on the ground, you're talking to people, and that's how you prove it. Hawaii, these pilots—it's all the same thing. By the way, same thing with AI: you're removing abstraction layers, 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. And 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 like five layers and then goes back up five layers, and then these meetings—meetings become system reviews—and literally the lowest point for me was when I was having meetings about meetings.

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 was a naturally good founder, although I would say I also got really lucky because I had two great co-founders and 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 a founder to CEO. I really struggled. I think in the 2010s I do not think I was a great CEO, and I think that we paid the price for my learning curve. The pandemic was a rude awakening for me. I think I was conflict-averse. By the way, somebody once said a pitcher never takes himself off the mound—as a manager, you've got to go take them off the mound. I didn't want to hurt people's feelings. And the longer you leave a pitcher on the mound, the more home runs they give up, and 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 lead-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." And then the pandemic happened, we had a near-death experience, and I said, "Well, there's no… screw the rumination, it's do or die." And I feel like I learned how to do the job. And there are really a few phases of CEO: Have an idea, get to product-market fit. Product-market fit to hyper-growth. Hyper-growth scale to become a real company—real company as in profitable, public—and then the last stage, and I did all that, we have like 40% free cash flow margin, we're very profitable, we do $100 billion dollars in customer sales. The last phase of a CEO is reinvent the company, product extension. The reason our stock has been flat is because we only do one thing and we started to saturate a little bit of the core idea, so we've had to reinvent ourselves, we've had to do product extension. So, I still got to prove myself.

And 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 a "founder mode," but if you're like risk-averse, you want to be incremental, those types of people are not going to survive the age of AI. So, I think there was an old Albert Einstein quote: "The best way to keep your balance on a bicycle is to keep moving." You're going to have to keep moving. So, I think that 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—isn't Hiroki?—that taught you? Because Steve was perhaps the literal ultimate example of everything you just said—focused on the details, in the weeds forever, reinvention of the company.

Yeah, Hiroki. So just—I would love to say, and before I say just 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 that was elusive. There's almost no photos of him online, there's 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 that black type with the gray font and the product in front of white. That was really his aesthetic. He taught me two principles of Apple that I brought:

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 and that is good for you. And 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 who have struggled from 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, "Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that reveals itself through subsequent layers." 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 a physics term, but it's also a design term. It's about understanding, "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 details. "How you do anything is how you do everything." And I said, "Everything must be perfect." It comes from there's 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, winningest coach in college basketball history, UCLA. Same principle. John Wooden won 10 NCAA championships over 12 years. The first day, first hour on his team, he spends 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 depend on whether you won or not. Don't focus on winning; focus on getting all the inputs perfect. If you get everything perfect, then you will win—don't focus on the scorecard. And so we kind of do focus on growth, but we kind of stopped focusing on growth. We started focusing on making everything perfect. And if everything is perfect and you don't grow, then you focus on the wrong inputs. But if you have the right inputs and you make them perfect, then you'll grow really fast. And so that's really what I learned from him. And he really taught me I think "founder mode," because I never met Steve, so I only knew through Hiroki. And I said, "Well, 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. And 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 and independence and empowerment, what they didn't realize was control and power is 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, and 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 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 five-star but a six-star and forcing yourself to write it. And I have this idea in mind because of this idea of simplicity and distillation. It's a beautiful thing. It's ultimately empathetic with the customer. But why is that idea in practice so powerful? Like 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 one-minute on what it is. When you book an Airbnb, most people leave a five-star, and if you leave a four-star, it's a bad experience. Five-star: everything went as planned. So it's called "review compression"—similar to Uber, you always leave a five-star, and if you leave anything other than a five-star, something really went wrong. But what if the driver was really amazing? You can only leave a five-star. So I started imagining what if we could give a six-star, and I did this exercise from six up to 10 or 11 stars.

Take one moment: checking into Airbnb. A five-star check-in is 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 a five-star. Anything went wrong, you give four stars or less. But that's review compression. What if you went above and beyond? What would a six-star look like? A six-star would look like you get to the Airbnb and there's your favorite wine on the table, and there's fruit, and there's snacks there, and there's a handwritten card. Okay, that's better than just letting me in the house.

So what's a seven-star experience? A seven-star experience, there's a limousine waiting for me at the airport. They know I like surfing—there's a surfboard waiting for me and they're showing me around the city. There's all this stuff. So what's an eight-star experience? An eight-star experience: I get to the airport, there's an elephant. I go on the elephant, I go on a parade in my honor. I'm like, "Wow, I feel really special." What's a nine-star experience? I call it the "Beatles check-in." I get off the plane and there's 1964 Beatles—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.

So, it's a 10-star experience. 10-star experience: Elon Musk greets me and takes me to space. The reason you do this—and it's an exercise—it's an exercise in the absurd. You keep pushing to go so absurd to 10 stars that suddenly six or seven stars doesn't seem crazy at all. And the way to get to product-market fit is to just create a six or seven-star experience. But you can't create a six or seven-star experience without going beyond. In other words, go beyond the edge of reality and work backwards. And so it's kind of a fun exercise. What would be the craziest possible way to blow one person's mind? One customer. And maybe try that, and maybe you can't scale that because that's an eight-star experience, but you can probably scale a six-star. And that difference between the five and six-star 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 the absurd examples at the high end of the range is this feeling that I've experienced with AI—that my imagination had almost atrophied. That by using these tools, I realized how hard it was, like, "Oh, I can make anything." And I sit down and I'm like, "I have no idea what to make." And as I started making little things, all of a sudden my imagination got rebooted. And it feels like this exercise is an imagination exercise.

It is. One of the sayings is "great writing is great thinking," but I find that some people have ideas and they think of the ideas and they 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. So I think what was happening was we didn't have enough tools to express ourselves. I think a lot of the tools were very passive tools. I think 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—a lot of us spend our time on it, and the only type of creation is giving your opinion or posting, but you're mostly consuming. What I love about AI is it's not about opinions; suddenly, all of us have a paintbrush and a canvas to make stuff. And I think that 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. You ever meet a person—you could probably think of musicians like Prince—who in words couldn't express themselves, but through music there's this dimension you never knew. An artist, they 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. And suddenly, what AI is going to do is going to 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 that know how to express their creativity.

It turns out, what if everyone can express it? Pablo Picasso once said, "All children are born artists. The problem is remaining an artist as one grows up." Every child's creative. If every child's creative, that means every adult could be creative. I think that every human on this planet is creative.

You ask the average person, "You're creative?" About one in two says they're not. That's my experience.

That's not true. It's just that they haven't exercised the muscle. I think that the magic of AI is 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 maybe have a small idea, we try something, it gives us another idea, and you 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—you said "people pleasing" earlier, "notches on the belt"—versus just for the raw, pure joy of it, which seems to be more the way the mode you're in now.

I think when I started Airbnb, I don't think we were totally trying to be successful. Literally—I won't go through the whole founding story—but I inflated three air mattresses, and "Airbnb" stands for "Air Bed and Breakfast." And 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. And somewhere along the way, I got really successful. And that almost became a curse, because success became a scorecard. And then I wanted to get even more successful. And it stopped being intrinsic and it started being a version of status and people-pleasing.

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, the way to get love is to be special. And the way to be special is to do special things. And if I do special things, I get praised and I feel loved. And I think that translated into, "If I'm really successful, I will get adulation. And if I get adulation, I'll feel that feeling that I'm always seeking." But I didn't do this consciously. It took me many years to realize this is what I was doing. The problem with adulation, by the way—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 in thinking it's love, except it just keeps leaking out the bottom. And 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, to then move on?" And by the way, that's a drug. It's a drug that you need a greater hit to get the high, and eventually it stops working, and eventually you reach a peak and it gets really meaningless and empty. And that happened to me.

Around the pandemic, we go public, we have a $100 billion valuation. It's one of the best days of my life. And the next day, I wake up as if it were… we were on Zoom because of the pandemic… I wake up, I put on sweatpants, I 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 my life—I don't feel any different." And that made me re-evaluate what I'm doing this for. I had to come to terms with, "I want to do things for pure intrinsic reasons." And so I had to detach myself from people's approval, from status, from worrying about how hot Airbnb is or how successful I am—which I never gave a sh*t about when we started, but you start getting accolades and you want more of them. You've got to let go of that, because it's a losing game.

I just really started focusing on being heads-down. Do the work, like you used to do. Like when you were a kid, there was light—just make stuff, make it for yourself. That great book, Rick Rubin, he says, "An artist is an artist when they make it for themselves and they don't try to make something successful." And I stopped trying to be successful, and I 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. Just do the thing you're doing. So this became a whole thing—it became about just doing it because you love it, putting your heart and soul into it. It's like "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. And 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 was what Vice President Obama once told me. He said, "If I focus on who I want to be—I focus on being President of the United States and I wasn't—my life would have been a failure. But if I focus on what I wanted to do—I want to help people, I want to be a community organizer—then I don't need to be President." And so I think so many entrepreneurs focus on what they want to be. I want to be a giant tech founder, I want to run a billion-dollar company. I want to do this, I want to do that. Instead of, "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 in this recent period as a result of this shift in mindset? Like 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. Like, the reality is 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, and that's okay. And all of us are thinking everyone's thinking about us, and they're thinking about themselves or the people in their life. They're not thinking about some guy on a podcast except for like maybe an hour, and then it's over, and then they're thinking about the people in their life. So, letting go of what people think about you—because that's a prison, because then suddenly you're making things for approval, and then you lose your courage. That's the main thing. It's just mental energy. But I really try to do things that are meaningful, and meaningful things are really two buckets: making things, and spending time with people I care about. Anything else is an obligation where I'll do it once in a while.

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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." And think—not to pick on anyone, but think about the card payment processors like Visa or Mastercard—they're just extremely elegant business models. Network-effect businesses like Airbnb tend to be in this category. And then you've got this opposite end of the spectrum, which is one of my favorite early-stage investors said he tells every founder that they should think about the company as a platform or a vehicle for their own personal growth, and that 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 or not you care that if eventually a ham sandwich ran Airbnb, the business model would be so perfected that it wouldn't matter—in the Warren Buffett sense—and just in general how you think about if 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. One example: Walt Disney. People watching, I want them to try to name a Paramount Pictures film.

Hard.

I want you to name a Warner Brothers 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 during their golden age. There's a big difference in those two. One is that Disney was very founder-led, and that Disney was all about a personal expression of one man. And the irony is 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 the CEO of Disney, the new guy Josh is really great, I've met him—they've had a lot of good CEOs. But I generally think they've got 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, this was like 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. And of course, they do new things, but fundamentally that's the same playbook.

And so I do think that's an example where the founder reinventing the company and their expression created such a reservoir of IP and momentum that—he died 50 years ago—50 years later, Walt Disney's spirit seems very omnipresent. Whereas Louis B. Mayer—I don't know if most people can tell you which studio he was…

I think it was MGM, and I couldn't even tell you the other two people.

Huge difference. So, I generally think this is a paradox. I think the "ham sandwich" have a business so good it can run itself, because sooner or later it will. The best businesses are ones that founders run and they reinvent, and they create so much equity and such a great moat that then, when they hand it off, it will endure and grow after them. I think Apple's very similar. They've not had to invent new products for the most part; they're still running the iPhone. What a gift Steve left them, that they were a few hundred billion dollar company when he died. They're like a multi-trillion dollar company now. I think the one caveat is tech companies are different. Warren Buffett generally didn't invest in tech companies, with the exception of Apple. I think technology is a cinema for change. If we're in the change industry, you kind of need to be more in "founder mode" for more time. But I think that's how I square it: that the company is the upper bound of the founder's potential, and then 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, so therefore I need to empower people." And 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. That's counterintuitive. And I think 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 endure after you.

Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid, was very famous for using Ansel Adams as his ultimate tester of his equipment, and he cared about the most important—maybe best—photographer of all time. What he thought of his device comes to mind when you talk about Disney, because there's something about I have this visual of Walt just like continuing to drill down to some sort of bedrock. That's the mission that you're on as a founder is like bedrock.

Yeah, I love that.

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

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. People say, "Wait a second, I'm not putting Kleenex on my head." So, it's a double-edged sword 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 people to be the atomic unit. On Airbnb, you can get a home, you get an experience, you can get a service, eventually a flight, eventually this, that. Imagine a person in the center with a ring with like 50 things around—these are the things you can get.

The bedrock of Airbnb is going to be 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 AI artificiality. I want to develop the most robust profile on the internet—it used to be Facebook; they've kind of abandoned that strategy. I want to build one of the richest preference libraries of you as a person, because 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. And then I want to 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 a hundred things. So we need to develop this industrialized machine of understanding what are the atomic units—the primitives—that are consistent across all these different businesses.

And then 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 and you're giving guidance, and the difference between missing and hitting earnings is… but 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. So 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 a separate app. Like, what is a radically different Airbnb? What's after Airbnb? Airbnb—what's that? What's next? And so I'm starting to think about that. So those are the three things I'm thinking about. Number one, how do we take the atomic unit from a home to a person? Number two, how do we industrialize what Airbnb offers to do like 50 things, not three 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, just as a CEO, is I think I've reached a certain level of mastery. I've reached a mastery of product-market fit, hyper-growth, profitability. I'm beginning "level four." Level four is reinvent yourself, product extension. I think there's something potentially even beyond that in the age of AI, which is: 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, 26, and we were competing against Expedia, and 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, and we were on the coolest new tools, and we just moved faster. Pablo Picasso, another quote: "The older you get, the stronger the wind gets, and it's always in your face." You've got to stay light on your feet. You've got to stay young. You're got to keep reinventing yourself. You've got to have curiosity. And so I don't want to become like this old-school person in the groove. I've got 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 it would come—the feedback loop was painfully slow and lossy. Now it's like 5 to 15 minutes and pretty high fidelity, and soon it'll be 5 seconds and perfect fidelity. And so there's this… I've always loved Brett Victor's idea of wanting to be as close to the output—the input and the output being as linked as possible—and we're getting to that stage. The anxiety I have having this experience is that it feels like just nothing will last. And as I think about—I love business, I love business as an art form—I guess that historically there's been these ways to have enduring moats. People would always call them: you have 200 million people that know about you already. You've got hundreds of millions of reviews that add lots of information on places. You have these embedded things that I can't just get that from you. But it just seems as I build this stuff, "Oh, 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?

Take a fashion brand like Hermès—I think the most valuable fashion brand in the world. And like the Birkin bag and the Kelly bag, it's like they have a new product every decade or something. These are multi-decade-old things, and they appreciate, and they're resellable. And then you've got like Zara, fast fashion. I feel like we all want to make these things that endure, but we're living in like 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, it looks pretty decent. You look at interior design, 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. So environments and physical worlds have got huge endurance. Hardware and physical things have medium endurance. Software is extremely ephemeral. Opinions are like that, but some ideas permeate. And so 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 realized 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. Digital software never looks good.

So then you've got to ask, "What endures?" I do think there are things that endure. Airbnb the community endures. I started realizing the software won't endure—the network effect will decently endure—but 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." And that's because that's the only thing that will last. I don't think there will be apps in the future; I think there will be agents. So if we're attached to apps, I don't think there will be apps, so we better let go of that.

So many of the themes that we've talked about is this 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 two important principles. By way of background, my dad was really into ice hockey, wanting 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 didn't hit puberty till I was like 15 or 16—and that's a death sentence in hockey, because suddenly I went from first or second line to third or fourth line. And I went from thinking I'd be a division-one athlete to a division-three athlete. I'm like, "Okay, it's not really going to work out for me." And so I started weightlifting. I was like 135 lbs. And I told my friends, "I'm going to be one of the top bodybuilders in the country by the time I'm 19." And 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 it was the most fundamental thing to change. Everyone wants to change things around them, but what if you change *you* first physically? I would change your body first—if you're unhappy, I would get healthy before I go to therapy. Like, 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, you can design the world around you. But the other thing it taught me, which might be even more helpful, is that you can't get in shape in one day. And 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. And the way you get stronger is an adaptation from "progressive overload"—that you stress the body; the body doesn't get stronger *during* exercise, it breaks the muscles down, and 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 one day, and it's about 1% better every single day. And if you compound 1% a day, then you can have massive gains. And so it's really about discipline. And 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, metrics-driven, and that it's really about discipline and consistency. And I think that's important, because I think a lot of founders just give up too early. It's about discipline. And it's about, if you train for a month, you take a month off, you're starting over. You never quit; you just keep going.

One of the nice things about it is the visual feedback. Like, you judge visually, you can literally see it. 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. So I'll give you one example of a project I focus on: I want to build the best team possible. So twice a year we do this giant thing we call "roadmap review," and there's the top 100 people in the room, and I see the quality of the people in the room—and we did one the last two days. And one of my most important jobs—the most important job I do at Airbnb—is hiring. And the visual feedback is every twice a year I get the top 100 people in the room, and I can see the quality of the people in the conversation. So in other words, there's many metrics that you use, and I 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, just on this—because this is a really important point—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 like a kind of wonderkind. When I was funded by Sequoia, before me were two people that had ever been funded by Sequoia from YC: Drew Houston from Dropbox. But the first one was Sam Altman, this company called Loopt. And I remember him telling me—I was like 27 or 28, Sequoia just funded us $600,000 at a $3 million post-money valuation—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 on management. And I started learning my number one job was hiring. Every day I wake up and the first person I call is my recruiter. I think if you could have—I think people should think about their first employee being a recruiter, not an engineer. Because they are the ones that get you every other person. A company is as good as its people, and the difference between the good companies and the great companies are the people. And I think AI kind of makes that clear now.

I obsess over recruiting. I spend hours a day, and I don't recruit executives; I recruit two, three layers deep. I try to map out all the best people in the Valley. And the basic way—okay, here's how you hire good people: Do not do searches. Do not do searches. Generally, what you want to do is build pipelines. So, here's the mistake people make when they hire: "I need to hire a blank." So they do a search, they hire a search firm, and the search firm scans, they give you like 50 profiles, and then you call it down to 10 people. You contact 10. Five are interested. Of the five interested, you interview them. A couple drop out. Now you have three candidates, and you pick the best one you hire. And that's how almost everyone does it. And then you do references—you ask them for references, they give you a few, and of course they're positive, and then you kind of hire them and let them do their thing, and a year later you realize they're good or bad. And if they're bad? Oh, they've already hired their own team. That is the wrong way to do it.

So the best way to do it is pipeline recruiting. You're constantly recruiting. You're constantly meeting people. So this is what you do: you 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—meet someone else. So if I were to meet you, and I say, "Hey, who are the best people? Can you introduce me to two or three people?" So what you're doing is you're 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's referral-based. The two ways to find out if people are good: one way is you're just good at assessing talent. But the two best ways: start with the results, work backwards to people. So, a lot of people say, "Oh, I want a really good marketer; I'm going to go to Nike, they do really good marketing." No, no, don't do that. Find an ad you like, and then figure out who made that ad. Start with results, work backwards to people. Don't start with the resume. The other thing to do is just keep asking people to build your rolodex. And so I'm constantly building a rolodex, and the moment I find somebody that's really good, I ask them who all the best people they know are. And I build these little mafias—every company's got like a little mafia of talent. Uber has an "ops mafia," Apple has a "design mafia," and then you build these little ecosystems, and they tell you who the other good people are, and you're constantly finding more people.

And 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 executive team, and their executive team hires their team. I think that is fatal. You always want to be marrying up, hiring people from the future. And so I'm constantly meeting people, constantly interviewing. The first and last call I make every day is to the recruiting team. I probably spend two, three hours a day on it. Every year I spend more of my time on recruiting. The great thing is I don't manage as much anymore. The more time you spend recruiting, the less time you spend on management, because the really good people are just self-managing.

You said before that founders are born, you think, and CEOs can be more shaped. And maybe the caveat to that is just like maybe founders aren't born, but we've spent our whole life tinkering and building. But you can't simulate being a CEO.

I think the way to activate somebody is to give them a problem or opportunity and see if they can do it. And I think the people that 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, motivated. But I think all entrepreneurs have the trait of being self-motivated. And so it's really about giving them a challenge, and then it's up to them to step in and activate.

Having plugged the "leaky bucket of motivation" of adulation, what's your motivation now as you attack this next chapter?

Most of my heroes are artists. I'll pick four people: Leonardo da Vinci, Vincent van Gogh, Walt Disney, Steve Jobs. There's many things they had in common, but what is something they all had in common? The last day of their life, or the last week of their life, they were working. Leonardo da Vinci carried the Mona Lisa with him until he died. And he definitely didn't paint the Mona Lisa for adulation, because he never really showed it to anyone. Vincent van Gogh sold one painting in his life; he died an obscure artist in a cornfield. Walt Disney, the last day of his life, he was laying in a hospital bed—his brother Roy was rubbing his cold feet, dying of lung cancer—looking at the ceiling tiles, which were a grid, imagining Disney World. Steve Jobs—Hiroki said the last couple weeks of his life, he showed him marketing, like he was still looking at products. Now, some people can look at that interpretation as, "Oh, that's sad, they weren't spending time with family." By the way, my understanding is Steve and Walt spent time with their family at the end of their life. But I don't see that as a sad story; they're working at the end because I think they did what they loved. My motivation is the motivation of an artist. I 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, and I might be afforded one of the biggest canvases of any designer in human history. It's almost like a glitch in the system—Airbnb allowed me to crack this glitch and get all these resources I wasn't supposed to get. But I the end, I'm not letting go. And so 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.

I think everyone's an artist. All children are born artists. The problem is remaining an artist as one grows 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. True creators. And we hear the word "creator," you think "social media performer." That's one way to create. But now, creator can mean "create." Make. Everyone can make now. It's amazing.

God, this seems like the most exciting time to be alive in human history. This is the greatest invention probably in human history—AI. It is the ultimate creative expression. It is the ultimate platform shift of platform shifts of platform shifts. In the most recent YC dinner, I looked at all the entrepreneurs in the audience, and I said, "I'm kind of jealous," because here I am on stage pretending like I'm the successful guy talking to you, the young kids. And two or three years ago, I used to say I would never do it all over again, because I'm 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. And then I realized age is just a number. I can still act like I'm 26. I'm still young. I 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, and my god, like, we can design anything now. It's unbelievable.

The last question I ask everyone's 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 is to believe in them. When I was 16 years old, I transferred to a public high school; I was really into art. I didn't know how good I was. And 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 good at something, because I wasn't that good at hockey—and I wish I was, I wish I could make my dad proud of ice hockey, but I just didn't get very far. And suddenly, that belief set me on a path, and that moment I said, "I'm going to go to art school."

I came to Silicon Valley; I met Michael Seibel and the guys at Justin.tv, and they believed in me. Paul Graham made an exception to let me into early YC—he believed in me; I was a non-engineer, and he almost never funded non-engineers. My investors, I can go down the list—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 in helping me. And I think the greatest gift I can give back is believing in others and helping them.

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 we all have unknown potential. And 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." And the person goes, "Oh,哇, that seems weird—that sounds like what a parent says to the kid who loses all the time." And he goes, "Here's the catch: I saw potential in people they didn't see in themselves." And 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 in you that you don't see 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: the most important person ever that you can believe in is yourself. A lot of us that are entrepreneurs are driven by insecurity, driven by some hole—not all of us, but a lot of us. Something in our childhood. A lot of us were not the coolest kids, or whatever. And there's something in us we wanted to prove. And then you get really successful and you still have impostor syndrome. And 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. And now my gift is to try to give it to others.

Beautiful place to close. Brian, thanks for everything.

Thank you very much. Thank you.

Thanks, man.