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$95B Airbnb CEO: People Who Know What to Build With AI Will Pull Ahead

📌 Try HubSpot's free AI CRM that updates itself for you: https://clickhubspot.com/1434b5 Brian Chesky built Airbnb into an S&P 500 company, and he says starting a business today is easier than it was 20 years ago. In this episode we go step by step: how Airbnb is becoming AI-native, why chat is the wrong interface for most work, how Brian generates 30,000 ideas a year and picks the ones worth doing, why the phone is the enemy of focus, and the one habit that separates real builders from everyone else. *Timestamps:* 00:00 We finally did this podcast 7 years later 01:23 What AI-native Airbnb actually means for you 02:49 Agents and chatbots are not the same thing 05:59 What Airbnb is building instead of social networks 08:36 How Airbnb ships 80% more features with AI 10:17 The biggest small-business opportunity on Airbnb right now 12:51 How Airbnb decides what to launch 15:09 How to know your idea is worth building 16:55 The one metric CEOs got wrong about AI 17:53 Everyone has the same AI tools, here is the catch 19:17 Why the gap between top and average is growing with AI 20:04 The Nobel laureate rule for having good ideas 21:50 How Brian picks which ideas are worth working on 25:47 Put on blinders and stop doomscrolling 28:02 Why the phone kills focus and the computer saves it 29:14 What Brian would build today if he was 26 again 30:45 Why chat is the wrong interface for AI 31:40 Why 100 more Anthropics are coming 32:33 It's easier to build a company now than 20 years ago 33:15 If AI still feels intimidating, do this *Links:* 📩 Follow my Newsletter: https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/p/7-skills-that-make-you-irreplaceable-adc6?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=description&utm_campaign=futureproof-sub&utm_content=7-Brian-Chesky 🔗 My Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ 📌 My Companies & Products: https://partnerships.marinamogilko.co

Brian CheskyguestMarina Mogilkohost
Oct 1, 202634mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 1:23

    We finally did this podcast 7 years later

    1. BC

      I think there's a lot of fear about AI outside of Silicon Valley. I understand why, because it's changing their job, it's displacing them, and some of that may be true, but I am saying that everyone has the power now.

    2. MM

      This is Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, a Fortune 500 company valued at $95 billion. He believes AI is widening the gap between people who have access to the same tools. So I wanted to understand what actually gives people an edge in an AI-powered world.

    3. BC

      AI is like an amplifier. It makes the good people better, and the people that weren't as good, it's less of a multiplier for them.

    4. MM

      I'm just trying to translate this for people who are thinking about different business ideas. How do they know that idea is viable to launch?

    5. BC

      This is what I would do.

    6. MM

      This video is sponsored by HubSpot. Hi, Brian.

    7. BC

      Hey, how you doing? Good to see you.

    8. MM

      Welcome to Silicon Valley Girl. It's been seven years since we first met, and I wanted to show you this. I don't know if you remember, but that crazy girl at the airport who saw Brian Chesky and then ran to you.

    9. BC

      Oh, yes.

    10. MM

      And you were boarding a commercial flight-

    11. BC

      Of course

    12. MM

      ... which was ours.

    13. BC

      What, what airport was that?

    14. MM

      It's LAX. Thank you for being so nice and friendly, and-

    15. BC

      Of course

    16. MM

      ... thank you for being inspiration.

    17. BC

      And look how well you're doing, and I'm so honored to be on your program.

    18. MM

      Thank you. And I invited you to a podcast back then, so seven years later, we're doing it.

    19. BC

      Well-

    20. MM

      We're doing it.

    21. BC

      Here we are.

    22. MM

      [laughs]

  2. 1:23 – 2:49

    What AI-native Airbnb actually means for you

    1. MM

      So I came to San Francisco building a travel company, and then we were going through really hard times during COVID, and seeing you navigate at those times really gave me inspiration and strength, and now we- we're in this new era, uh, of transformation, which is AI. So today I wanted to focus on how you're transforming the company for the AI era, and I wanted to make it as applicable as possible for people who are maybe thinking of starting a business-

    2. BC

      Yes

    3. MM

      ... in the AI era or maybe having hard times-

    4. BC

      Yeah

    5. MM

      ... as a professional because so much is changing. So talk to me about Airbnb becoming AI-native. What does it mean for guests? And also I'm a host. I have a place in Hawaii that we're renting out through Airbnb.

    6. BC

      Love it.

    7. MM

      So what does it mean for both sides of the table?

    8. BC

      I think it really just means, um, modernizing every touch point of the app to be more intelligent, easier to use. And so I'll give you some examples. Let's say you were a guest. Before AI, you do a normal search. You type in a location, and you get a s- bunch of results. Now with AI, starting today, you can hit a toggle and you can do AI search. It's very natural, very much natural language, like typing into a chatbot, and then it is a very intelligent search. So you can say, "I wanna go to Paris this weekend with this number of people. I want this kind of view, and I want this kind of architecture," and it will not only serve up all the results, but it will also pre-filter everything for you because Airbnb is very much about filters and controls. You

  3. 2:49 – 5:59

    Agents and chatbots are not the same thing

    1. BC

      see, the chatbots aren't really great for shopping.

    2. MM

      Mm.

    3. BC

      Chatbots aren't really good for travel, and the reason why is they're text-based. They're very hard to compare. You want things to be very inspiration-based and browse-based. You want it to be fun and entertainment-oriented. It's multiplayer, so the average Airbnb people, it's three people traveling, so they have to be able to, like, share. You have to be able to message a host. You have to be able to have filters, and you gotta be able to see, like, if I turn this filter off, I get this home. If I add this filter back, I get that home. So we had to find this interface that wasn't a chatbot but that felt chatlike that you can start to have a conversation with but you didn't take away the functionality people loved. Then when you get to an Airbnb, we have these AI-generated highlights. So AI basically will summarize the listing for you, and these are really nice personalized snippets. They're personalized to you. So we can make the listing literally written for you saying, "This is why you will like this listing." Then when you get to the bottom of the page, if you have a question, you don't even have to ask the host now. You can literally ask the page, and the listing can answer things for you. You can still message the host, but now you can message. Then if you have a bunch of listings and you want to compare them, we've got an AI comparison feature tool which makes it really smart and easy. And one of the challenges people don't realize and one of the problems with chatbot is Airbnb is very much a comparison shopping problem. Okay, I like these 10 homes. This one's got a pool. This one's got a, a, a barbecue. This one's got really high ratings. This one's new. This one's a little more expensive. This one's in a really good location. How do I make decisions, and how do I compare side by side, and how do I cull down? Then we have brand-new maps where I can... starting in Paris, I can tap and see information about each neighborhood. Eventually, this is gonna roll out to 1,000 different cities around the world, and these are just some of the features we have on the guest side. On the host side, we're gonna make the app feel more and more like an agent that can be your coach, understand your goals. It can help you price your listing. So I think the basic idea is that it's, Airbnb is getting smarter. Airbnb's whole app is gonna feel more like an agent. But when I say agent, I don't mean a chatbot. People, when they hear agents and chatbots, they think they're the same thing. They're not. Agent is an id- e- evolution of an application. It's an application that is more intelligent and understands you and knows you, and it leverages the power of AI. A chatbot is a user interface, and I think because most agents are chatbots, we conflate the two.

    4. MM

      Yeah.

    5. BC

      But they're not the same thing, and I think that a chatbot is not the right interface for travel. It's not the right interface for, um, shopping. But agents are great, and I think the great thing about agents is they're interoperable. So one agent can talk to another agent, and so I think agents are definitely the future of Silicon Valley, and chatbots are not.

    6. MM

      Yeah, and chatbot feels like more like a reactive thing, where agent is more proactive-

    7. BC

      Yeah

    8. MM

      ... knowing your interests. And I really like the comparison feature because you don't know how many hours-

    9. BC

      Yeah

    10. MM

      ... I spent. It's like two very similar bookings, but this one is quieter, but this one-

    11. BC

      Yes

    12. MM

      ... has a bigger bedroom, and you're like-

    13. BC

      Yeah

    14. MM

      ... having them side by side-

    15. BC

      Yeah

    16. MM

      ... I think makes a huge difference. And you're also

  4. 5:59 – 8:36

    What Airbnb is building instead of social networks

    1. MM

      adding a social graph-

    2. BC

      Yes

    3. MM

      ... something that I absolutely love.

    4. BC

      You know, it's so funny. Um, I came to Val- Silicon Valley 19 years ago. Um, and when I came to Silicon Valley, there was this thing called a social network And it was Facebook, and everyone was on Facebook, and it was mostly just your friends, and you could keep in touch with your friends, and they would share what they did. And now none of my friends are on Facebook. Um, and Instagram is not social networking, it's social media. So it's basically Instagram X YouTube, TikTok. They're really not social networks. They're really performance platforms.

    5. MM

      Mm-hmm.

    6. BC

      They're broadcast platforms. And this is not... I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but I'm saying now there's no place on the internet for me to know not only what my friends are doing, but one of the things I used to like was knowing where people were traveling. People in my life, where have they traveled to? Where are they going? And so here's a use case. Let's say I'm going to Chicago. I'm sure I have a bunch of friends who have been to Chicago, but I don't know which ones. And now, if I connect to people on Airbnb, I can see all of my friends who've been to Chicago, and I can see where they stayed. I might want to stay where they've stayed. But more importantly, I can ask them, like, "Hey, what's good to do in Chicago?" Because what we found is, increasingly, people want recommendations from their friends and their family rather than from, you know, celebrities or writers. They increasingly want people who feel like they know them. Like, you know me, you'll know what I like. But this is an unsolved problem 'cause you don't know where everyone in your life has traveled. Another thing about Airbnb is one of the best parts of it is meeting somebody new. You know, it's hard to meet people today. I asked my, um, my parents, "How did you meet people?" They would go to a mall. They'd go to a theater. They'd go to physical spaces. Increasingly, people today are not in physical spaces. They're on their phones. And phones are really a way for you to talk to strangers online, but it's a really hard way to meet strangers offline.

    7. MM

      [laughs]

    8. BC

      And so we want to help solve this problem by making it easier to meet people in the real world and stay in touch with them. And so if you travel, you stay in a home with somebody, you might meet them. If you go on an experience with somebody, you can stay in touch with them. So I think a lot of what we're trying to do is turn Airbnb from a kind of just a marketplace of homes to a little more of a travel community. And I think the travel graph is really cool, and if you go on Airbnb, you can basically add your friends, your family, and you can see where they're traveling. And, you know, this is a really cool use case. Wouldn't you be curious to know where all your friends are traveling this summer?

    9. MM

      I think it's pretty cool.

    10. BC

      Now, now you can know, and you can decide, "Well, if they're going, we can go at the same time."

    11. MM

      Yeah. And, uh, one of the reasons I started this podcast, 'cause I wanted to meet people offline, and whenever guests suggest do an online thing, I'm like, "No, no, no."

    12. BC

      [laughs]

    13. MM

      That's not the reason-

    14. BC

      Yeah

    15. MM

      ... I [laughs] wanted to do that in the first place.

    16. BC

      Exactly.

    17. MM

      So I can totally relate.

  5. 8:36 – 10:17

    How Airbnb ships 80% more features with AI

    1. MM

      And I think you're also opening up, uh, opportunities for new businesses, right? 'Cause you're now doing groceries, baby gear, um, restaurant deliveries. Is it 700-plus features that you're launching?

    2. BC

      I think so, yeah. We're, we're, we're launching... I think the stat is that we're, like, shipping 80% more features than a year ago. Most of it's because of AI. Obviously, AI is, like, this incredible superpower. You know, 10 years ago, even a few years ago, everything had to be coded by hand. Everything was so much harder to do. Now that you can ship things so much more quickly, we can ship features more quickly. It used to take us a year to ship, like, a new service. Now we can do it in weeks. And so now, like, for example, with services, one of the things we hear from guests a lot is, "I love to stay in homes, but they don't have all the services of a hotel."

    3. MM

      Mm.

    4. BC

      And we thought, well, what if we could have not only all the services of a hotel, but even more services. So we can have b- baby gear if you have kids. You know, sometimes hotels have cribs, but maybe they have two cribs or three cribs, and if they're out, you've got... This is what we... I don't have kids, but I hear from, from my friends who have kids. Maybe you want laundry done. A hotel has laundry. Well, now Airbnb, you can get laundry. So we just wanted to go down the list. Um, ski rental equipment.

    5. MM

      Mm.

    6. BC

      I'm gonna go skiing. I don't wanna... I don't have my own ski equipment. So going to rent ski gear can be very, very... You know, it can be onerous, right? And you just get to a city, you're tired, you don't want to figure out how to get ski gear. We can have all the sizes waiting for you, all the equipment for you. So we're really trying to make Airbnb as easy and plug-and-play as possible, so you're not just getting a home, you're kind of getting a full service experience. So eventually, I see us adding dozens, even hundreds of services that can be plugged into the home, so that when you book a home, you can get everything you need for your trip.

    7. MM

      What do you see

  6. 10:17 – 12:51

    The biggest small-business opportunity on Airbnb right now

    1. MM

      the biggest opportunity for small businesses who are trying to build to plug into your system?

    2. BC

      Let's pretend I'm a masseuse. I'm a masseuse in Tulum, Mexico. I'm just making a random place up. Right now, how do I get business? I only get business from locals who know about me, but how would I... If, if a traveler, how would I get business? I probably wouldn't be able to get business. Maybe I have to go work at a resort, and they have to give me business. Now I can have my own business. I can broadcast on Airbnb, and all the travelers coming to Tulum, if anyone wants a massage, they can go on Airbnb, and they can book the massage with me. So kind of like the original Airbnb, where I had a home, but no one knew about my home, and we gave them a distribution platform, and they could basically get an audience. Kind of like the way social media gives everyone an audience, we can give all these small businesses audiences, and we give them a global audience of travelers. And so this is really, really difficult, um, for somebody. I'm a photographer in Paris, and I take photos of families in front of the Eiffel Tower. A lot of people want to get their photos. How do you get your photo in front of the Eiffel Tower? If you're a parent, one of you is not in the photo.

    3. MM

      Mm-hmm.

    4. BC

      Or you give the camera to someone else, and they're, like, being bothered.

    5. MM

      Yeah.

    6. BC

      And it's just, like, an iPhone photo. Now you can have, like, amazing professional photos in 30 minutes. It's not too expensive, and you'll remember those photos forever. This photographer would never have known how to broadcast to all these guests from around the world. We really feel like there's a whole economy of service providers, whether there's masseuses, chefs, photographers, companies that deal with equipment or baby gear or laundry or cleaning service, car rental, welcome pickups, picking up at the airport, anything you imagine. In other words, now you can Airbnb more than just a home. You can Airbnb anything.

    7. MM

      If you're thinking about starting a business, start with something you already know how to do well. Maybe it's photography, catering, or a service people keep asking you for. Then you think about your first five customers. How will you remember what each person needs and what you promised? Our sponsor, HubSpot, helps just with that. Its new Smart CRM is a CRM that updates itself, keeping customer details and conversations in one place. For example, you finish a call about a catering job, AI Note Taker captures the details, helps draft your follow-up, and suggests next steps and updates to the customer's record for you to approve, so you can spend more time delivering an experience people want to recommend. If you're ready to build something of your own, explore HubSpot Smart CRM through the link in the description, and thanks to HubSpot for sponsoring this episode. Now back to Brian.

  7. 12:51 – 15:09

    How Airbnb decides what to launch

    1. MM

      And you were testing all of these, I imagine, before launching.

    2. BC

      Yeah.

    3. MM

      Can you talk to me about all the tests, and what's the decision-making criteria?

    4. BC

      For everything we launch, we're probably testing, like, many, many more things, and we have dozens of services, um, underway. So, like, ski, ski equipment. I'm not a giant skier, but, um, I ski a little bit. I don't ski enough to have my own skis. I don't ski enough to have my own boots, my own helmet. So everywhere I go, I have to rent equipment, and it's always like I don't even know where to go. Do I go to the mountain to rent equipment? Um, do I have to wait in line? I have to wait for someone to size me. It's so much more convenient if I were to get to the Airbnb. They know my boot size, they know my ski size, and they just have everything for me. So that is something that we're testing. I think we're-- the test is in Italy, but we're gonna hopefully bring this to ski mountains all over the world. And there are these ski rental companies, and they would love to be able to bring the equipment to you rather than you have to wait in line at the store, which is potentially really inconvenient. Surfing equipment. You know, a professional surfer probably will travel with their own surfboard, but it's pretty hard to bring a surfboard on an airplane, and a lot of people aren't gonna travel with a surfboard, and so they're gonna have to rent this equipment. What if in the house waiting for you was this equipment, or you knew exactly where to go to get the equipment? So these are kind of the ideas. So we're trying to test... You know, we usually do a test in one market, one city. If it works, then we bring it to other markets. And everything we announced today, we've been testing. So we have a lot of other services coming. There's literally hundreds, by the way. The thing that's exciting is the long tail. It's like there's so many different services, and no one service maybe is big enough to be a giant business that you've heard of that has an app. So that's the challenge. Like ride-sharing, there's an app, Uber. Food delivery, there's an app, Uber Eats, DoorDash. But most other services aren't big enough to have a global brand where you know where to go, and even if they do have an app, they're not integrated with Airbnb, and so it's pretty difficult. Like Instacart, they got an app, but now you can get groceries at your Airbnb, and you have an option where you can order the Instacart groceries through the Airbnb app. It already knows your address, it already knows how many guests, and the f- food can be sent to the house, and the host can open the door and have the food put in the fridge so it's stocked for you.

    5. MM

      Oh, that's amazing.

    6. BC

      It's just much more convenient.

  8. 15:09 – 16:55

    How to know your idea is worth building

    1. MM

      So what, what is the criteria for launching? I wonder if you have, like, internal metrics. Is it, like, I don't know, 10% of guests are using the service? I'm just trying to translate this for people who are thinking about different business ideas-

    2. BC

      Oh, I see

    3. MM

      ... when they don't have access to data like yours. How do they know that idea is viable to launch?

    4. BC

      It's a great question. I mean, we started with the most popular services, um, the most common ones, chef, masseuse, photography, car rental, airport pickup, luggage storage. But increasingly, the power of Airbnb is the idea that we want you to be able to provide anything you can imagine. So my hope is anything you offer, if it could be useful just to a couple people visiting your city, then we would love to hear from you.

    5. MM

      Mm.

    6. BC

      And I think just contact Airbnb. I think you can... There's a contact button on the bottom of our page, and we try to intake as many ideas as possible. So we have, like, a services platform. Um, if you go to list, you know, you can go to become a host. There's a button. You can basically apply to become a services host. We might tell you that this is coming soon, but we take every single lead. So let's say you do, like, floral arrangements.

    7. MM

      Mm-hmm.

    8. BC

      This is a use case. People are on vacation. They may be on a romantic trip. They want to get flowers in the listing. Maybe they want flowers in the listing. They want to get flowers for the romantic significant other. That's a service we're launching, and people can apply. We don't have it in every city, but if you have this idea, if you have an idea like that, just apply. And if we aren't ready to launch it now, we will eventually. And so it's just a matter of getting to them. But we, we want every idea. I wouldn't want to tell people what ideas to apply with because some of the best ideas are ones I don't even think of. But if you have something you think is valuable to somebody else, you just need an audience, and hopefully we can give you that audience.

    9. MM

      I love that.

  9. 16:55 – 17:53

    The one metric CEOs got wrong about AI

    1. MM

      And I imagine shipping all of these features became possible because of AI. Do you have an internal metric where you say, "Okay, AI is adding that much to our productivity and output"-

    2. BC

      Yeah

    3. MM

      ... versus just generating more stuff that we're not using?

    4. BC

      So at the beginning of the year, there was this whole, like, token matching thing where CEOs were telling everyone, "You gotta use AI," and they were measuring it by how many tokens you were using. And there was a little bit of a initial management philosophy to shame people that didn't have a lot of tokens. There were, like, token leaderboards. That might have been a good thing to do for a couple months just to make sure people were using AI, but that was clearly, like, a long-term strategy that was not gonna work. And now all of a sudden everyone said, "Wait a second. Why are we spending so much money on AI?" And so I think the most important thing is, like, the customer doesn't care if we're using AI to build our tools or not. They just want the product to be better faster. And so we look at product velocity. How fast are you shipping? How many features are you shipping? How quick are you shipping them? Are they high quality, and are they successful? And we have metrics

  10. 17:53 – 19:17

    Everyone has the same AI tools, here is the catch

    1. BC

      for that. So we're shipping 80% more features. The feature-

    2. MM

      That is crazy, though.

    3. BC

      Yeah.

    4. MM

      Just thinking about 80% more for a huge company like yours.

    5. BC

      Yeah, and it's just two things. It's the power of AI that suddenly, um, you don't have to primarily code by hand. Um, but it's also cultural. People have to use the tools, and they have to use them correctly. And it's amazing because AI is the ultimate democracy. The tools that Airbnb has is the tools every company in the world has. We all have access to the exact same tools. There's really-- there's Codex, there's Cloud Code. It's kind of like back in the day, I used Photoshop when I was a designer, Illustrator. We all have the same tools. We all have these amazing tools, but they're not equally distributed. The very best people know how to, like, immerse themselves and get the most out of the tools. And so one of the things we tried to do is we tried to make sure people learned how to use the tools correctly. And there's no replacement for, like, good thinking. You know, you need to have, like, really good data. You need to, like, still have good collaboration. AI allows an idea to get out of your head into the world faster, but it doesn't necessarily give you better ideas. You still have to be-- have great ideas. You still have to have great thinking. It's now about great thinking. It's about great understanding. It's about great curiosity. And I think AI rewards deeply curious people because you can do endless iteration. AI is like an amplifier. It

  11. 19:17 – 20:04

    Why the gap between top and average is growing with AI

    1. BC

      makes the good people better. And the people that weren't as good, it's less of a multiplier for them. So I find that the, um, dynamic range, um, the performance gap is greater with AI, that the really high performers are even better with AI. I'm a designer by training. I went to RISD. Nineteen years ago, when I started, me, I couldn't code. And today, I could code because I could prompt. And so suddenly, in that way, it is so d-democratic. All of us can do so many more jobs. At the same time, great thinking, great taste, great understanding, understanding user problems, these are things that matter even more now because it's no longer can you build it? It's what do you build? And is-- should you build it? And, and does

  12. 20:04 – 21:50

    The Nobel laureate rule for having good ideas

    1. BC

      it matter?

    2. MM

      Quick tip to people who want to upgrade. You were describing people who are at the edge of productivity-

    3. BC

      Yeah

    4. MM

      ... and generating ideas and being curious. Is there-- is this something you learned?

    5. BC

      I, I think there was a saying by this, like, Nobel Prize-winning, uh, maybe chemist, Linus Pauling. He said, "The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas." Like, Airbnb seemed like a good idea, right? It was one of many ideas, and we had a lot of bad ideas. I think it's about, like, sheer output. The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas. The best way to create a good drawing is to create a lot of drawings. The best way to do anything is to create a lot of it, just through out-sheer output. I mean, you're really good now at what you've done. You probably did it through a lot of repetition, right? There wasn't one moment where you got good. Similar to exercise, you don't get in shape in one workout. It's through repetition. So what I found is that the very best people are the ones that just practice more than anyone else, and they put in the repetitions. It-- working out is actually a good metaphor. It's repetition. And so idea repetition matters. You know, I know at IDEO, there's this-- they're a very famous design firm. They used to do this exercise where the way you generate ideas, they give every-- people probably, some people might know this, they give everyone Post-it notes, and you have to write an idea down, put a Post-it note on the wall, another idea on a wall. And they had a rule, you can never critique ideas initially. No devil's advocates, no critiquing ideas, because when you critique your ideas, you edit your thinking, and you're afraid. And bad ideas sometimes are one step away from a good idea. And so I think it's all about volume of ideas. I probably, not exaggerating, have a hundred thousand ideas a year, and I think ninety-nine thousand are really bad.

    6. MM

      Out of all the ideas, how do

  13. 21:50 – 25:47

    How Brian picks which ideas are worth working on

    1. MM

      you know which ones not to work on?

    2. BC

      It's more the good ideas jump off the page.

    3. MM

      Hmm.

    4. BC

      So, for example, I basically have a notebook, and every thought is, like, a sentence or a couple sentences, and I probably write maybe a thousand words a day. So that's probably three hundred thousand words a year, and maybe each line is a sentence. It's like ten words, so maybe that's a hundred ideas a day. So that's-

    5. MM

      Wow

    6. BC

      ... maybe thirty thousand ideas a year. And so then what I do is say I have thirty thousand thoughts a year. Ninety-nine percent of them are not useful, right? Just something. You write something down, anything that comes to your mind. You just keep writing it down. At the end of every day, I bold the things that jump out at me. And so if I wrote down, like, a hundred things, a hundred lines, I bolded five to ten, and then at each day, I bold them. At the end of every month, I look, and my AI now can just read the bold ideas. I used to have to manually, like, pull out the ideas and read them. Now the AI can pull out the bolded ideas. The AI can also read and find ideas I thought were stupid, and it can tell me really good ideas. It can see patterns, and then those become my shortlist, and then I iterate them, iterate them, iterate them. You know, I think, like, Catching the Rise, seventy thousand words, and I probably have, like, four times that output in words, and my writing is a thousand times worse. It's really bad writing. It's not high quality. Um, I'm not writing-- Like, if you were to read it, you'd be like, "This is borderline nonsensical." It's understandable to me, not to someone else. And I think that's the point, is that most of my words are bad, most of my ideas are bad, and it doesn't matter 'cause no one knows about the bad ideas. They only need to know about the good ideas. And here's the lesson. Good ideas don't die. If you write something down, you write a good idea down, a month later, you're gonna write the same idea down again-

    7. MM

      It comes back

    8. BC

      ... and you won't realize.

    9. MM

      Yeah.

    10. BC

      It comes back. So I find that good ideas, they don't wanna die. They kinda stay alive, and everything else just kinda falls by the wayside. And these good ideas, they kinda haunt you like ghosts, and you're like, "Okay, this, this thing's not going away." I don't know if that's useful. I never said this before, but I think it's about, like, just total output, just constantly... I n-I remember, um, hearing about Eminem. He would just write all day. He had a notebook, and he'd write lyrics and rhymes all day. Bob Dylan was just writing songs all the time, just writing and writing and writing and writing. Now, not everyone's like that. Like, Jay-Z apparently, like, doesn't do that. He just, like, thinks in his own head, and, like, he- that's very unique, prodigious skill that he has. Leonardo da Vinci, he left behind so many notebooks, and he was just drawing and writing and drawing and writing. By the way, most of da Vinci did was write, not draw. If you look at his notebooks, it's 80% writing, 20% drawing, and he is the most famous painter of all time. He had, like, 12 paintings ever. Mona Lisa is one of 12 or 15 paintings-

    11. MM

      Yeah

    12. BC

      ... he ever painted. So think about the sheer volume of stuff he created. Vincent van Gogh, most of his productivity was in the last three years of his life, and he painted more than one painting a day every single day, and this is in, in addition to sketches. He just, every day, he wrote, he wrote, he wrote. Hemingway, wake up at 6:00 AM. From 6:00 AM to noon, he would just write, and he would write till he had nothing left to write at noon. And it was just, it's just this discipline of repetition. Whether you're a tech founder, you're an artist, you're a writer, it's about pure volume. It doesn't mean you put out a lot of crap.

    13. MM

      Mm-hmm.

    14. BC

      Like, you don't publish it all.

    15. MM

      Yeah.

    16. BC

      You have to... You, you, then you edit. And you edit, and you only publish the very best of your stuff. But I think that what people don't understand is they only see a few things go out, and they don't see the sheer volume of what goes in. And I think the problem, and maybe I'm gonna admit to a problem I have, and I think almost every single person watching

  14. 25:47 – 28:02

    Put on blinders and stop doomscrolling

    1. BC

      has, is we spend too much time on social media paying attention to what other people are doing.

    2. MM

      Mm-hmm.

    3. BC

      My vice is X, and I, like... And most, most of us are on X or Twitter way too much, and we're way too focused on what other people are doing. Oh my God, now it's Instinct, now it's Muse, and now it's this, and now it's that, and there's just, we're all like kids chasing soccer balls, and we're all, like, trying to play fast fashion, trying to copy what everyone else is doing, and just, it's just so distracting.

    4. MM

      It is.

    5. BC

      And I wonder if we'd all be better off just, like, not- being a little bit ignorant to whatever else is going on in the world. Part of me is like, you know, Van Gogh couldn't doomscroll, and if he could doomscroll, he might not have painted so much.

    6. MM

      Wow, interesting.

    7. BC

      If da Vinci could doomscroll, he might not have had so much output. And if all of us could just block out a bit more of what everyone else is doing and say, "It doesn't really matter what people think," or even if you do care what people think, let people value you years from now. Say, "I'm gonna put blinders on, and I'm just gonna s- just dig in, and I'm gonna work for years, and I'm not gonna worry about getting attention now. I will earn attention later if it matters to me, s- but I'm gonna practice quietly, and I don't need the world to watch me practice. I'm gonna quietly practice. I'm gonna become great at my craft, and when I'm ready, I'm gonna put something out there." I think that would be so valuable. We're just, put blinders on, and just lock in, and just go.

    8. MM

      I think this is such valuable advice, such great practice we need to be doing more of 'cause-

    9. BC

      And I, and I, I will admit, I'm giving advice to others, and I have to keep reminding it, uh, myself. Stop worrying about whatever else is going on in Silicon Valley. Focus on-

    10. MM

      Hard. [laughs]

    11. BC

      It's so hard. And you don't wanna be naive. Like, you wanna know generally, if you're a comp- company, you wanna know what's going on in competition. You wanna know what's la- the latest with AI developments. But you can do that, like, 10 minutes a day. You don't need to do that two, three hours. You don't need to open X or YouTube or Instagram or whatever your platform du jour is 17 times or 25 times. This is what I would do, and I don't do it as much, but I wish I did it. Once a day for, like, 20, 30 minutes, I'm gonna go on whatever platform I go on, I'm gonna learn. Okay, now I'm done. And then this time's uninterrupted,

  15. 28:02 – 29:14

    Why the phone kills focus and the computer saves it

    1. BC

      and I'm gonna, like, not have my phone on. By the way, the phone, spend more time on a computer, less time on a phone.

    2. MM

      Mm.

    3. BC

      The computer is the ultimate tool. We designed phones on computers-

    4. MM

      Yeah

    5. BC

      ... we don't design computers on phones. The phone was never designed to be something you stare at all day.

    6. MM

      Mm-hmm.

    7. BC

      When Steve Jobs designed it, his n- vision wasn't you're on it all day. Long attention span stuff should be reserved for big screens. So you should not be staring at a phone very long because what it does is it trains your dopamine to multitask and to, like, change things, and it, what it does is it, like, the phone is an enemy to focus, and it's not designed to be something you're staring at for hours a day. The computer is great for focus. A large screen, the bigger the screen, the longer your attention span. That's why if you go to, like, an IMAX theater, you're not gonna go to the bathroom.

    8. MM

      Mm-hmm.

    9. BC

      You're in a living room and you watch a television show, you might get up. On your computer, you'll watch a YouTube film, but on a phone, you'll only be able to pay attention for 15 seconds before you scroll to the next video. Attention span is commensurate with screen size.

    10. MM

      I never thought about that.

    11. BC

      If you wanna focus, you need to have a long attention span. If you wanna have a long attention span, you need to have a big screen. Do not look at a phone if

  16. 29:14 – 30:45

    What Brian would build today if he was 26 again

    1. BC

      you wanna focus.

    2. MM

      Well, you mentioned having so many ideas. If you were not building Airbnb today in the AI era, what would you be building?

    3. BC

      I used to think I was, I, I was lucky because I was 26 when I came to Silicon Valley. And when I came to Silicon Valley, the iPhone had just launched. Facebook was, like, blowing up. YouTube was out. The internet was going global. Cloud computing meant, like, you could have an app and not have to buy your own servers. What it meant was it was kind of easy to start a company. And there was this iPhone that was distribution, so suddenly you could just put it in an app store and everyone could discover it. I felt like I was the luckiest person alive because I happened to be born at the right place at the right time, and it was just as much luck as talent that I got to where I am today because I just happened to be here at this magical time in h- in history. And I remember saying for years, until the launch of A- of generative AI and ChatGPT, I said, "Thank God I was born the time I did, 'cause now is a tougher time." And then post-ChatGPT, part of me said, "I wish I was 26 again"

    4. MM

      Mm.

    5. BC

      Because actually, as amazing as Airbnb is, if I was 26, I could probably do something just as cool, because the tools now are so much more powerful. I don't know what I would do. I'm very interested in education. I think AI can transform education. I think content, like you could build an AI Disney. You could create incredible storytelling with AI. Um, I think health is, like, an incredible area. I think that, like,

  17. 30:45 – 31:40

    Why chat is the wrong interface for AI

    1. BC

      Instinct and Muse are the beginning of consumer AI, agentic AI, but I do not think that the messaging interface is the right interface to do most work.

    2. MM

      Mm-hmm.

    3. BC

      And so I would encourage entrepreneurs to imagine other interface modalities.

    4. MM

      Like audio or even further?

    5. BC

      Way further. We're visual creatures. We're not... Most people are not text-based. Why is TikTok more popular than Twitter? Because it's video and visual. I think that's the main reason.

    6. MM

      Mm.

    7. BC

      I don't think it's any other reason. I think that, you know, increasingly, people are visual, and I think a lot of entrepreneurs are trying to fit this technology that's the most powerful technology in human history into a messaging platform. It's like putting a jet engine on the back of a bicycle.

    8. MM

      We're just starting out, I guess.

    9. BC

      We're just starting. This is

  18. 31:40 – 32:33

    Why 100 more Anthropics are coming

    1. BC

      not to say these apps aren't amazing. Here's another way of saying it. Anthropic, OpenAI are these giant companies. There's gonna be 50 more Anthropics, maybe 100.

    2. MM

      You think so?

    3. BC

      I know so. This is a cognitive revolution. If people are watching, there are gonna be so many companies that are gonna be bigger than Airbnb, bigger than Anthropic. There's not this, like, AI window. There's not this... We're not in a cycle. We're not in a window, and if we are, it's 1,000-year window. You see, if technology doubles every year for 10 years, that's 1000x. So let's say we're at the beginning of a 1,000-year cycle. If we're at the beginning of a 1,000-year cycle, why do you think there's just gonna be two big companies? There's gonna be so many huge companies emerge. But also, there's gonna be tens of millions or millions of small companies emerge because suddenly, one, two, or three people can start a whole business. It was inconceivable

  19. 32:33 – 33:15

    It's easier to build a company now than 20 years ago

    1. BC

      before. I think AI is... You know, I think there's a lot of fear about AI outside of Silicon Valley. I understand why, because I think people outside of Silicon Valley feel like AI's happening to them, and that someone else has it, and it's happening to them-

    2. MM

      Mm

    3. BC

      ... and it's changing their job. It's displacing them, and some of that may be true, and I'm not defending it. But I am saying that everyone has the power now, and that if you have an idea, you can now make something, and it is so much easier to build a company now than it was 20 years ago. I'm really proud of what I built, but the next generation of people watching are gonna build things way better than I ever dreamed of because they have

  20. 33:15 – 34:43

    If AI still feels intimidating, do this

    1. BC

      tools I never had.

    2. MM

      This is so inspiring, Brian. Can you tell me in 10 seconds, uh, the process that they all have to try in order to realize the power of AI, something that transformed the way you work?

    3. BC

      I think it's like jumping in a pool. I was, for example... And this is more than 10 seconds, but I was, like, intimidated to try Claude Code.

    4. MM

      Mm-hmm.

    5. BC

      And I just, like, didn't know how to start. I mean, I had an employee who was really good at it, and I said, like, "You're gonna tutor me." Now, not everyone watching has an employee that can tutor them, but everyone... Either you know more than all your friends about AI or someone knows more about it than you. If somebody knows more about it than you, like, have them help you. I mean, YouTube's an incredible resource. And I just think, like, just start. Just-

    6. MM

      It's jump in the pool.

    7. BC

      It's jump in the pool.

    8. MM

      Mm-hmm.

    9. BC

      And it is... The water is not cold. It just looks cold. For those that are already in the pool, just don't get out.

    10. MM

      Thank you so much, Brian.

    11. BC

      Thank you very much.

    12. MM

      Thank you for being as amazing as you are.

    13. BC

      Well, thank you for being amazing.

    14. MM

      If you want to stay updated on all the things these founders say here, we take the use cases and prompts from every conversation and put them into my newsletter called Future Proof. And of course, we also put my own beautiful use cases there. For example, we put together the seven skills that came up again and again, the ones people will need in the next few years. These are the skills that my team and I are also using daily. Subscribe through the link in the description. You'll get that one, and you can also read our previous newsletters and see what you missed.

Episode duration: 34:43

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