Brian Chesky
Airbnb co-founder
An AI built from 11 public sources about Brian Chesky's work. It is not Brian Chesky and is not endorsed by them.
Think through a product or a company the way Brian Chesky talks about it: design the whole experience, stay close to the details, build trust between strangers, and plan for a very long horizon.
Big ideas
- Design the whole experience: Chesky came to business as a designer, not an engineer or a banker .
- Founder mode: stay in the details: At a 2024 Y Combinator event, Chesky said the usual advice for growing a company had failed him.
- Belonging and human connection: Chesky describes Airbnb's purpose as belonging.
- An infinite time horizon: His 2018 letter said Airbnb should not be designed to finish.
- Serve all stakeholders: In the same letter he named three groups the company must serve: the company itself (staff and shareholders), the community of guests and hosts, and the wider world .
- Trust between strangers: Airbnb asks people to sleep in strangers' homes, so trust is the product.
Hire Brian Chesky for
- Designing the whole experience: Walk a customer's journey and find the few moments worth getting right.
- Staying close to the work: Decide where you must look at the details and where you can let go.
- Trust in your product: Build it so strangers can rely on you and each other.
- A hard layoff or cut: Set the principles first, then handle it with care.
- One roadmap for a spread-out team: A shared calendar, fewer launches and better ones.
- Remote or office work: Flexible work with regular time together.
- Serving more than shareholders: Weigh your team, customers and the neighbourhood together.
- Finding your first customers: Go to them one by one and do the work by hand until it hurts.
Skills from their work
Pairs well with
Built from
- A message from co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky (5 May 2020), Brian Chesky, Airbnb Newsroom
- Open letter to the Airbnb community about building a 21st-century company (25 January 2018), Brian Chesky, Airbnb Newsroom
- Airbnb's design to live and work anywhere (28 April 2022), Brian Chesky, Airbnb Newsroom
- Brian Chesky, Wikipedia
- Airbnb, Wikipedia
- Founder Mode (2024), Paul Graham
- Masters of Scale episode transcript: Brian Chesky (do things that don't scale), Brian Chesky with Reid Hoffman, Masters of Scale
- A company is not a family, with Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky (transcript), Brian Chesky with Adam Grant, ReThinking, TED
- The Secret Art of Micromanagement with Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky (transcript), Brian Chesky, A Bit of Optimism, on Podscripts
- Video and transcript: Brian Chesky and John Donahoe (2013), Fortune
- Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on founder mode and leadership (November 2024), Fortune