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Stanford Graduate School of BusinessBrian Chesky, Co-Founder and CEO of Airbnb: Designing a 10-star Experience
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Transcript
55 min read · 10,804 words- 0:00 – 0:05
Intro
- JYJames Yan
[upbeat music]
- 0:05 – 1:56
Yearbook prediction and early perspective on success
- JYJames Yan
Well, Brian, it is a great pleasure and even greater honor to have you with us at Stanford GSB.
- BCBrian Chesky
Well, thank you for having me. Wow, it's a big room here.
- JYJames Yan
I'm pleased to say that you are seated in front of hundreds of globe-trotting MBA students.
- BCBrian Chesky
Whoa.
- JYJames Yan
Many, if not most of whom, are your most loyal customers.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- JYJames Yan
That I can assure you.
- BCBrian Chesky
[laughs] So thank you. Well, thank you. I, I gotta, I gotta, hope I, hope I do well.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- JYJames Yan
As I was, uh, gathering materials for this interview, Brian, I found myself transfixed by a certain photo in your high school yearbook.
- BCBrian Chesky
Oh.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- JYJames Yan
What captivated-
- BCBrian Chesky
[laughs]
- JYJames Yan
What captivated my attention was not the photo itself, which was perfectly fine, but rather the caption underneath the photo.
- BCBrian Chesky
Yes.
- JYJames Yan
Why don't we take a look on the big screen?
- BCBrian Chesky
I didn't know there'd be visuals today. This is gonna be...
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- BCBrian Chesky
Oh, God.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- BCBrian Chesky
Already. Oh, my God. [laughs]
- JYJames Yan
Brian, the, uh, good news is-
- BCBrian Chesky
[laughs]
- JYJames Yan
As of the close of yesterday's trading session, your prediction turned off to be, uh, turned out to be slightly off the mark.
- BCBrian Chesky
Yes. [laughs]
- JYJames Yan
By $8.4 billion, to be precise.
- BCBrian Chesky
Yeah. [laughs]
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- BCBrian Chesky
My, uh, my dad was not very happy about that.
- 1:56 – 3:25
From art kid to industrial designer: finding a path that fits
- BCBrian Chesky
Yeah, I'll do the, I'll do the quick version. But so, so I'm from, uh, upstate New York. Um, my, um, my parents are both social workers, and I remember my mom telling me one day, I, I think I was, like, in high school, and she said, "You know, I chose a job for the love, and I didn't really get paid any money, so you should make sure that you get a job that pays you a lot of money."
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- BCBrian Chesky
And so then one day, I was really interested in art and design, and then, like, like, I asked Santa for poorly designed toys so I could redesign them, like, really peculiar things like that. And then one day, I tell my mom, I said, "I'm gonna be an artist." And she said, "Oh, my God, you chose the only job in America that'll pay less than a social worker.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- BCBrian Chesky
You're gonna get paid nothing." And that was probably the pretext to that yearbook quote. And I said, "No, Mom, I promise I'm gonna get a job." And she said, "A real job?" I said, "What's a real job?" She said, "A real job's a job that gives you health insurance so you don't have to live in my basement."
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- BCBrian Chesky
So that was the context. And I said, "All right. I'll promise you I'll get a real job with health insurance." I get to RISD thinking I wanted to be an artist, and then I, I felt like the moment I got on campus, I was born like 100 years too late for what I wanted to do because, you know, like, I was, like, an artist. I was a painter, a drawer, and photography had replaced a lot of the need in society to do a lot of things I wanted to do. And I didn't know what to do at RISD, and all of a sudden you have to pick a major. And I was a freshman, and there was a department head, and
- 3:25 – 6:01
First jobs, entrepreneurial itch, and the move that changed everything
- BCBrian Chesky
he said, "There's this field called industrial design. It's the design of everything from a spaceship to a toothbrush and everything in between." And I thought to myself, "Okay, that's what I'm gonna do." So I got into industrial design. I graduate RISD. I'm now, I moved to California. I, I wanted to come to California. I was like, I didn't really know the difference between LA and SF very mu- never been to California. So my friend was wanting to come to LA, so I got my friend to come to LA with me. I get a job as an industrial designer at a design firm. I'm, like, designing products for, um, for, like, entrepreneurs. And I even, um, I, like, uh, the, the firm I was at was, like, they had, like, really small budgets, so I would do, like, products, like, all the different times. And so people would bring me ideas, and we'd think about what's the market strategy, um, you know, how, what, how are we gonna design this product? How do we manufacture it? Where do we distribute it? And because we were so small budget, I got to actually do the entire thing. Now, it's 2006. One day, I, my boss comes to me and he says, "You're gonna be on a reality TV show." And I said, "What?" And there was a precursor to, uh, Shark Tank, this show called American Inventor, and it was like a spinoff of American Idol. And there were these contestants, and they would get $50,000, and they have to hire a design firm, and I was the firm that one of them hired. And so all of a sudden, before I knew it, I was designing a toilet seat for a magician, and that's kind of-
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- BCBrian Chesky
And that, at that moment, it was, it was a cool project, but I realized that myself, "What's the difference between me and this magician?" And I thought to myself that the difference is they made the chance to be an entrepreneur. I didn't, and I was designing other people's products. So my life is like I'm in a car, and the road in front of me looks exactly like the road behind me. And all of a sudden, I get a package in the mail. It's the seat. It's, uh, it's a package, and it's a seat cushion, but it looks in the shape of a human buttocks with a handle.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- BCBrian Chesky
And it's, it is a product called Crypt buns, and it's from my friend from RISD. And he says, "I started this company. We're manufacturing this product." Now, by the way, the product's beautiful. Ended up getting sold in the Museum of Modern Art gift shop, so it's a really nice product. And he, and he said, "Come to San Francisco." And this was, like, my call to adventure. And you know, like, there might be a few times in your life where you make a decision, and everything about your life changes after that decision, and that's what happened. I pack everything in the backseat of an old Honda Civic. I have $1,000 in the bank. I get to San Francisco, and then Joe tells me the rent is $1,150. And I thought, "Wow, I should have asked that before I came up to San Francisco."
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- 6:01 – 6:47
Airbedandbreakfast.com: turning a rent problem into a concept
- BCBrian Chesky
But it turns out that weekend, an international design conference was coming to San Francisco. All the hotels are sold out, and we had this idea. We said, "Well, what if we just turned our house into a bed and breakfast for a design conference?" Unfortunately, I didn't have any beds, but Joe had three air beds. We pull them out of the closet, and we call it airbedandbreakfast.com.
- JYJames Yan
Hmm.
- BCBrian Chesky
And at that point, my mom said, "So I guess you don't have that job with health insurance anymore."
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- BCBrian Chesky
And I said, "No, Mom, I'm an entrepreneur." And she said, "No, you're unemployed."
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- BCBrian Chesky
And that's when I realized when you're starting, it's mostly in your head.
- JYJames Yan
Wonderful.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- JYJames Yan
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
[clapping]
- JYJames Yan
Back then, the idea of renting out your bedroom to strangers sounded completely foreign-
- BCBrian Chesky
Yeah
- 6:47 – 11:42
Investor rejection, early pitching pain, and the cereal detour that funded survival
- JYJames Yan
... and even risible to Silicon Valley investors. In 2008, you sought to raise $150,000 for your budding enterprise.
- BCBrian Chesky
Yeah.
- JYJames Yan
You approached more than a dozen investors-
- BCBrian Chesky
Yeah
- JYJames Yan
... all of whom sadly turned you down.
- BCBrian Chesky
Yeah.
- JYJames Yan
In fact, I have here a couple of those rejection emails-
- BCBrian Chesky
Oh. [laughs]
- JYJames Yan
... that those investors sent to you.
- BCBrian Chesky
These exhibits are great.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- BCBrian Chesky
And it's slightly embarrassing, but, well, it's good for it.
- JYJames Yan
Would you be so kind as to read one of them aloud-
- BCBrian Chesky
Yes
- JYJames Yan
... for our edification?
- BCBrian Chesky
Yes.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- JYJames Yan
Thank you.
- BCBrian Chesky
You want me to read them?
- JYJames Yan
Yes.
- BCBrian Chesky
Okay, so we'll read this one. Uh, oh, I know this pers- okay.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- BCBrian Chesky
"Hi, uh, hi Brian. Apologize for the delayed response. We've had a chance to discuss internally, and unfortunately don't think this is the right opportunity for blank from an investment perspective." This is my favorite part. "The potential market opportunity did not seem large enough for our required model." Now, it's travel, about the same size as oil, but it wasn't large enough.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- BCBrian Chesky
But you can imagine, like, they didn't see travel. They saw strangers sleeping in other people's homes. Like, I'll give you an example. The first investor j- Joe and I ever met was in University Cafe, this cafe.
- JYJames Yan
Mm-hmm.
- BCBrian Chesky
An investor walks in, he goes to the get a smoothie, he sits down. He never picks his head up. He's drinking a smoothie. He's, like, on a straw, picking up the smoothie. We're pitching him. Halfway through the presentation, he gets up 'cause he has to, like, move his car. We still haven't seen him since.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- BCBrian Chesky
So that was our first pitch. We pitch Paul Graham at Y Combinator. We end up getting Y Combinator.
- JYJames Yan
Mm.
- 11:42 – 15:08
“Make something people love”: focus on 100 true fans and storyboard the journey
- BCBrian Chesky
Okay, so it's the first day of Y Combinator. It's January 2009. By the way, I wanna set the stage for you. Do you remember what was going on in January 2009, like, like, like economic crisis, the Great Recession? The economy was so bad, um, and Y Combinator has a thing called Demo Day. So the end of three months, all these investors come. Paul Graham sends us an email. Before Y Combinator starts, he says, "The economy's so bad, we don't know if any investors will show up for Demo Day, so if you wanna defer, you can defer." That's how bad it was. And so we said, "No." We're gonna do this. So we get to Y Combinator, it's the first day, and I get the worst piece of advice I ever got and the best piece of advice I ever got. The worst piece of advice I ever got was Paul Graham, "You have to move to Mountain View." We never did. I'm like, "You don't need to move to Mountain View. You can be anywhere." Um, although it's cool in Mountain View.
- JYJames Yan
[laughs]
- BCBrian Chesky
Um, but then I got the best piece of advice I ever got. He goes to the whiteboard and he draws, like, it's a little hard to visualize, but he draws, like, imagine if you were to take a section plan of the Washington Mall, that, like, that long, like, it's just like a little stream of water. And then he does another section of what would look like a well. And he said, "These are the same volumes."
- JYJames Yan
Mm.
- BCBrian Chesky
But he said, "It's better to have 100 people that deeply love you, if this axis is number of people and this axis is love, s- focus on 100 people that love you, rather than getting a million people that kind of like you."
- JYJames Yan
Mm.
- BCBrian Chesky
And I think this is a profound piece of advice. It may have been the best piece of advice I've ever gotten. And it actually runs counterintuitive to almost everything that everyone says. Everyone focuses on scale, but scale requires people to have a deep passion. Because if you focus on 100 people that love you, there's two things that happen. The first thing is, how do you know how to make something for a million people? I, I don't know where to start. But if I pick one person in the audience and I study you, and I take your journey and say, "How do we, like, improve this part of the journey? How do we improve that part of the journey?" You can actually do something really personal. And if you design something, keep iterating till they love it. And don't stop improving until that one person loves it. And you're not allowed to get the second person till the first person loves it. And then you get the second person, and you keep iterating till they love it. And then the third person. And what ends up happening is two things. One, you design this perfect experience, which is a different part of your mind-
- JYJames Yan
Mm-hmm
- BCBrian Chesky
... than the industrial part of your, the, your, your, your mind that has to figure out how to scale this. And the second thing is when people love your service, they become your marketing department.
- JYJames Yan
Mm.
- BCBrian Chesky
They tell other people.
- JYJames Yan
Mm.
- BCBrian Chesky
So the first day of Y Combinator, they give you this T-shirt. And on the T-shirt it says, "Make something people want." And we thought, "What if we went even further? Make something people love." And so we've now done these exercises. We had this process I named after the movie Snow White. I learned that Walt Disney, in 1937, created Snow White. It was one of the first uses of the storyboard, because it was, like, this really long feature length animated movie. And he storyboarded the experience.
- JYJames Yan
Mm.
- BCBrian Chesky
And I thought to myself, "What if we storyboard the perfect experience for the Airbnb?" We actually hired Pixar storyboard artists to do this.
- JYJames Yan
Mm.
- BCBrian Chesky
And then we, what we like to do is, like, pick one frame of the experience. So the moment of truth in Airbnb is when you check in, right? You're like, "Is this gonna be what I think it is?" And there's a really bad version of check-in, like the host didn't show up. And there's kind of a good version of a check-in, they showed up.
- JYJames Yan
Mm-hmm.
- 15:08 – 17:28
The 10-star framework: designing beyond ‘good enough’ and reverse-engineering scale
- BCBrian Chesky
But we wanted to think to ourself, "What would make the experience something people love?" And so we created this exercise. We thought, like, you know when you go on Airbnb, this is also true Uber, like a five-star mostly means, like, nothing bad happened.
- JYJames Yan
Mm.
- BCBrian Chesky
And we thought, "Well, what if there was, like, a six-star? What would that be when you check into your Airbnb?" And the six-star is you get to your Airbnb and, you know, there's, like, a bottle of wine waiting on a table, and there's, like, some fruit, and they, like, have a handwritten note to you. And we're like, "Okay, that's, like, really nice." And then I thought, "Well, what would a seven-star experience be?"
- JYJames Yan
Mm-hmm.
- BCBrian Chesky
A seven-star experience is they get a limo, they pick you up at the airport, and there's this, like, whole curated experience. You get to the, you get to the house and they know you like surfing, and there's a surfboard there waiting for you, and all that stuff. So then I thought, "What would an eight-star experience be like?"
- JYJames Yan
[laughs]
- BCBrian Chesky
An eight-star experience, you get to the airport, there's a giant elephant.
- JYJames Yan
[laughs]
- BCBrian Chesky
And you get on the elephant, and there's a parade in your honor.
- JYJames Yan
[laughs]
- BCBrian Chesky
And you go to your Airbnb.
- JYJames Yan
[laughs]
- BCBrian Chesky
So what would a nine-star experience be?
- JYJames Yan
[laughs]
- BCBrian Chesky
The nine-star experience is the Beatles check-in. You land, and there's 5,000 teenagers cheering your name.
- JYJames Yan
[laughs]
- BCBrian Chesky
And you get to your Airbnb and have to do a press conference on the front lawn.
- JYJames Yan
[laughs]
- BCBrian Chesky
So what's a 10-star experience?
- JYJames Yan
[laughs]
- BCBrian Chesky
We keep going. A 10-star experience, you show up and Elon Musk says, "We're going to space."
- JYJames Yan
[laughs]
- BCBrian Chesky
And you do get back eventually.
- JYJames Yan
[laughs]
- BCBrian Chesky
And the point of this story is that you maybe can't make an eight, nine, or 10-star experience. But most people try to design something that's just good enough. But if you can add that six or seven star, if you can design something really amazing, and you p- use the part of your brain, the handcrafted part of your brain to create that perfect experience, then you can reverse engineer how to industrialize this millions times over. And what happens is people love your product, and they tell everyone else about your product. And what ended up happening in our business is Hilton was started in 1919, over 100 years ago, and we were able to have the entire growth of Hilton in 10 years.
- JYJames Yan
Hmm.
- BCBrian Chesky
And this is how you do it. Without, you know, we had some marketing, but not, you know, initially, not a lot.
- 17:28 – 21:36
Facing regulators by getting close: listening first and tailoring city-by-city
- JYJames Yan
As you said, word of mouth marketing really helped Airbnb get off the ground in major cities around the world. Yet one corollary of your newfound success is that government regulators and the powerful hotel lobby were now breathing down your neck. How did you deal with those regulators?
- BCBrian Chesky
Oh, man. Um, yeah. I, I, I, um, there, there were some things that were initially out of my depth. Like, they did not teach you at RISD how to, um, work with government regulators. Um.
- JYJames Yan
[laughs]
- BCBrian Chesky
So I, I, I always grew up thinking if, like, people don't like you, you should avoid them. That seems kind of intuitive, right?
- JYJames Yan
[laughs]
- BCBrian Chesky
Um, or you should fight them, and, like, disagree with them. They're your opponent. And then in 2011, um, I hired a w- uh, an exec- my first executive. Her name is Belinda Johnson. She was our, uh, chief legal officer. Eventually became our COO. And she told me something that was cou- counterintuitive to me. She said, "If people don't like you, you should meet with them." And I said, "Really? Why would I do that? Wouldn't it go horribly wrong?" And she said, "No, because it's hard for people to hate you up close." And I think that's a really important lesson. You know, so I said, "Okay. Well, who, who doesn't like me?" And it turned out a lot of people.
- JYJames Yan
[laughs]
- BCBrian Chesky
And so instead of me having a tour where I went on tour to meet everyone to like me, I told our team, "Um, I wanna meet everyone who doesn't like me." And it turned out they kept me busy for a long time.
- JYJames Yan
[laughs]
- BCBrian Chesky
And, um, but I would meet with these government officials, and sometimes the meetings would start a little hos- a little, they were a little hostile at first. But I had a rule that I would always listen first and seek to understand them. And I think, you know, my dad used to say, like, "90% of life is just showing up."
- JYJames Yan
Mm.
- BCBrian Chesky
It's actually not true in tech, but when it comes to showing respect, 90% of life sometimes is showing someone respect and listening to them.
- JYJames Yan
Mm.
- BCBrian Chesky
And if you just get in the mindset of listening to people, then through creativity you can decide, you can realize a win-win. And I'd realize they, you know, like, I would hear from them, we'd tell the story, and then through that, I had this image that we'd create this model city, and we'd roll out the regulation everywhere.
- JYJames Yan
Mm.
- BCBrian Chesky
And I did it in one city, and I'd get to the next city, and they're, were like, "Yeah, uh, but we're different. You know, we're not Portland. We're not San Francisco. We're not Los Angeles." And so then I realized we had to treat every city personally.
- JYJames Yan
Mm.
- BCBrian Chesky
So we actually started meeting with, like, hundreds of cities. We have now 90% of the top 200 markets have a regulation in place. We've, uh, collected $6 billion of transient occupancy tax since we started. And I, I, I, I think maybe the final lesson I'll just say to this is somebody asked me, um, "What is the biggest thing you've learned or the biggest surprise that you've learned starting Airbnb?" And I'll tell you what it is, and this is proven from firsthand experience and from data. You know, Airbnb's been used more than a billion and a half times. It was, like, the worst idea that ever worked. It wasn't supposed to work. In fact, the first time I told somebody the idea, he said, "Brian?" I said, "Yes." He said, "I hope that's not the only idea you're working on."
- JYJames Yan
[laughs]
- BCBrian Chesky
But a billion and a half times later, what I've realized is the thing that surprised me is not how different people are, it's actually how similar people are.
- JYJames Yan
Mm.
- BCBrian Chesky
And I think we live under this illusion that we're so different than everyone else, and I think we tend to focus on the 1% that makes us all different, and that's really good. There's really positive, um, parts of preserving our culture and understanding our diversity, but when you start to think the other is so other from you, that gets very, very pernicious. And having met with, you know, people all over the world, I realize the people with strongest opinions about other people are the ones without passports, and the people with the strongest opinions about businesspeople or government are people that never worked in those businesses. And so if we can build bridges, meet people, bring people together, we will realize the other is not so other, that we're 99% the same, and actually through creativity you can actually find win-wins through everyone. So that's probably what I learned from that lesson.
- 21:36 – 25:18
Design as leadership: why “design running the boardroom” shaped Airbnb’s culture
- JYJames Yan
At the same time that regulators were encircling you, you had to navigate internal growing pains. Uh, in short order you found yourself at the helm of a multinational company with many hundreds of employees around the world. As you mentioned earlier, you are a designer by trade, not an engineer.
- BCBrian Chesky
Yeah.
- JYJames Yan
How did you leverage your background as a designer to inspire loyalty and followership among your employees?
- BCBrian Chesky
Whoa.
- JYJames Yan
[laughs]
- BCBrian Chesky
[laughs] Wow, loyalty and followership, I like that. Um, well, to g- so let's go back to RISD. When I got to RISD, and I'm 41, so I, I was there in the early 2000s, there was this huge obsession with the idea of designing ha- design kinda like having a seat at the table. You know, there's this kinda thing that, like, artists and designers are usually not in positions of power. I mean, you take the Fortune 500. How many CEOs of Fortune 500 companies went to design school? I don't know if there are any. Very few. So how many board members? There's probably an average of, like, maybe 12 members or 10 to 12 members per board, so maybe approximately 600 board members in the Fortune 500. How many of them are creative people or designers? Not many. Okay, let's go down the list. How many executive teams do you have designers or creative people on the executive team? And even today, not very many. And so at RISD there was this whole movement, well, how can we get design in the boardroom? And Joe and I had this kind of audacious, y- almost arrogant thought, "Why would design be in the boardroom? Why wouldn't design run the boardroom? Why don't we start a company?" And I think I'll just start by saying to me design, I think a lot of people think of design as how something looks, and to me design is a much deeper idea. Design is how something fundamentally works. You know, I think design makes the complex simple, and it focuses on every single detail. Design is really about understanding the essence. I think it was Steve Jobs that said, "Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that reveals itself through subsequent layers." And so I think of, of design as not just how something looks, it's how... a way to think about the world, and a way to simplify. And engineers, I think, tend to wanna narrow in, reduce very... Like, my co-founder, Nate, likes to narrow in and, and, and get very focused on a problem he can contain, 'cause he gotta build it. And designers, we tend to wanna zoom out, to the frustration of engineers, and be very, very holistic. But I do think that that holistic thinking, um, affected everything. I think it changed how we ran the company. You know, I can talk in a second about how we run the company. It's really different than most other tech companies. It, you know, at RISD you have to tell a story constantly, so we had to learn how to be really good storytellers. A lot of people build products, they don't understand stories. It helped understand how we design our products-
- JYJames Yan
Mm
- BCBrian Chesky
... how we make our products. So it was really kinda everything. And it's weird, it's almost like I'm an anomaly that I'm even here. Like, the fact that I went to a design school and I ran a giant tech company, it is a kind of a weird anomaly. And if you imagine, like- A human body, there's the head and the heart, and if you were to cut off the, the body at the head and take the head, and you cut it off at, like, the left side or whatever, that's kind of the, uh, the world of business. We don't usually use our full minds to, like, run companies, and I think we tend to get very myopically focused near term on that which is extremely measurable. Um, you know, not everything that counts can be counted, not everything that, um, that can be counted counts. And so, uh, that was a quote by, uh, Linus Pauling, a Nobel Prize winning, uh, um, scientist. And so I think, I think that's kind of how I think about design, is just really trying to understand the essence of something and really distill it down.
- 25:18 – 31:28
Pandemic shock: managing psychology, acting on principles, and rebuilding the company
- JYJames Yan
Brian, let's fast-forward to the pandemic.
- BCBrian Chesky
Yeah.
- JYJames Yan
Airbnb lost 80% of its revenue over eight weeks in March and April of 2020. You had to lay off nearly a quarter of your workforce. That's nearly, uh, 2,000 employees. What lessons in crisis management can you impart to us?
- BCBrian Chesky
Oh, geez. Um, well let me just, let me start by saying this. Um, for many years I would tell this founding story of Airbnb. I've literally told it now, like, thousands of times. And I remember saying to myself, "Um, I'll probably never have a crazier chapter in my life than starting Airbnb," and little did I know about a pandemic that was about to come that would turn our entire world upside down. But let me actually go to a few minutes before the, few, few months before the pandemic. So Airbnb, we started, we go on a rocket ship. It's amazing. And it's late 2019, and we're preparing to go public. And I go on a hike in Bolinas, California, it's, like, couple hours north of here, and I go on a hike with my co-founders, Joe and Nate. And we're reflecting on this amazing company we built. It was, like, at the time valued at $30 billion. And we're feeling really proud of ourselves, but something is gnawing at us, and the thing gnawing at us is, it's maybe it's like Airbnb was an adolescent, and it was about as awkward as my actual adolescence. You saw that photo.
- JYJames Yan
[laughs]
- BCBrian Chesky
And, um, you know, we, we kinda like looked like a human, like an adult, but we, like, we had the body of adult, we were, like, kinda still kids. And it was like I realized that, like, the company was, like, we were, like, growth was slowing, costs were rising. We had 10 divisions at Airbnb, so, like, a homes division, experiences, we had a transportation, a magazine, and then each division had subdivisions. We had basically, like, 10 marketing departments. We were building software the way most tech companies do, which is you try to, uh, you know, kind of decentralize as much as possible, allow people to move quickly. Every person is like a cell in a body. You have a individual task, but you have the information of the entire company. We democratize data, and you do a lot of experimentation and A/B tests to figure out, like, what you wanna do. We were spending a lot of money on performance marketing. In the aggregate of this, I felt like we had lost that magical, like, 10-star experience. It was starting to become like another company. There was a bit of bureaucracy. It was difficult to get work done, and I just, I didn't know what to do. And I remember telling Joe and Nate, "I feel like I had a dream that I left the company and I just came back."
- JYJames Yan
Hmm.
- BCBrian Chesky
And they said, "What'd you find?" I said, "I was kind of horrified, because this is not quite the company we set out to build." But we had an IPO coming up, and they're like, "What do you do?" And I said, "I don't know. I mean, we have an IPO. We're not gonna rebuild the company." So we're going into the new year, and I'm, like, thinking, "We need to make some changes, but I don't know what we're gonna do." And all of a sudden, the pandemic hits, and our business drops by 80% in eight weeks, and we were doing tens of billions of dollars. And when you're our size and the business drops by 80% in eight weeks, that is like being in a 18-wheeler going 80 miles an hour, and then you slam on the brakes. Nothing good happens. And this was, like, you know, I, um, I've never had, you know... Within weeks, journalists were predicting, "Is this the end of Airbnb?" This is weeks after we're preparing for what's supposed to be, like, one of the hottest IPOs in years. And it was completely bewildering, and I, I, you know, I've been- I'm lucky that I've never had, like, a near-death experience, but what has been described to me is like your life flashes before your eyes, and I think we felt like we had a, what at least felt like at the time, a near-death business experience. And at that moment we realized not everything mattered, and it was like if you have to go into house and your house is burning, and you can only take half the things in your house, what would you take? And that was the exercise we had to do. And you can learn a lot about people in a crisis, and the person that I think you sometimes learn the most about in a crisis is yourself. And the hardest thing to do in a crisis, there's a few things you need in a crisis, but the hardest thing to manage the crisis... You know what the hardest thing to manage a crisis is? What I found? The hardest thing to manage in a crisis is your own psychology. Because people look in your eyes and they, and if you think you're screwed, they see in your eyes and they say, "Well, you have the most information." And so you need to be optimistic, but it can't be optimism that's, like, delusional. It has to be rooted in some, some truth, some reality, that people still want us to exist, and this is why. And so that optimistic mentality is the mentality you need to be creative, and you need to be creative 'cause in a crisis you often have no good solutions. So the first thing is you need to be optimistic. The second thing in a crisis that I found is that you need to be decisive, and I think this is a struggle for a lot of data, uh, driven people. Because there's not a lot of data in a crisis. All the data is out the window. And what do you do when there's no data? You have to lean on something. You need to have courage. But what does courage lean on? Courage has to lean on principles. In other words, in a crisis, I don't think you make business decisions as much as you make principle decisions. And a principle decision is like, if I can't predict the outcome, how do I want to be remembered? And I think if you think of yourself as this is our defining moment, how do we want to be remembered? That is the mentality that you need to navigate out of the crisis. And so we use those principles, and we basically, 1,000 of us, got into a foxhole and rebuilt the company from the ground up. We had to reduce the size of our company and do a layoff. That was the hardest thing probably I ever had to do.
- 31:28 – 35:56
A new operating model: functional structure, fewer priorities, and coordinated releases
- BCBrian Chesky
You know, we reduced the pay of c- uh, of all the executives. We had... We're spending nearly a billion dollars on marketing. We took it to zero. I became our marketing department. I started just doing press interviews. I did 100 interviews that year, and we just really got focused, and we actually changed how we ran the company. And I'll, I'll just say for a second now we now run the company. So most large companies are divisional, right? So you have like a, like whatever, like if you're a company, you may have like a bottle division, and you have like a snack division. So you're like a divisional structure. We got back to being a functional organization. So we have a design group, a marketing group, a finance group, an operations group. We basically reduced all the things we're working on in the company to just a few things. And then I decided that I wanted only leaders that were gonna be in the details. I didn't want anyone that was just a manager of people. It was like, if you're, um, like a general in the cavalry, you have to actually know how to ride a horse. And so you had to actually have your hands dirty. And so we had a team of experts, and we all huddled together, and we basically said, "We're not gonna do just this agile, continuous shipping of features every single hour of every single day." And I'll, I'll give you a sense of what I think is wrong with software development in Silicon Valley. The general princ- pr- premise of software development in Silicon Valley is to like democratize data, and anyone can ship anything. And this initially is faster. But when you start adding thousands of people, this slows you down, and I'll use an analogy. Let's say we're all making a car, and one team is designing the tires, and they design this new type of tire, but now that tire has to fit on a wheel. So they have to work on the wheel team. The wheel team's like, "Oh, wow, we need to actually make the wheels bigger to work with this tire." But to do that, then that actually changes the shape of the car. So now you need to update the body of the car. But maybe that makes the car heavier, and so maybe you need a different battery. And to manufacture a different battery, you need to actually capitalize that, but the finance team needs to like set different expectations of investors. And do you see how everything starts to tie together? So we basically had this idea that what if we thought of the entire company as just one continuous, like one fluid organization? I don't push decision-making down. We pull it in. We try to pull as many decisions into us as possible and be in the flow, almost like an orchestra conductor. Each executive doesn't have their own swim lanes. We all work together on a few discrete things. Every project in the company, every major project, we review ev- either every week, every two weeks, every four weeks. We have these two releases a year. These releases are where all the work together converges to make sure everyone's coordinated. We make sure that product and marketing are in lockstep. At most companies, product people are like chefs and marketing people are like waiters, and if the waiter goes in the kitchen, the chef yells at them, and there's just no collaboration. And I thought, "Well, what if product and marketing were like working in f- in, in, in, in tandem with each other?" So it was just like really different way of working, and I think the way to summarize it is we took the best of software and the best of hardware development, and we put it into one system. Because the problem with software is there's no constraints sometimes, and so things can be a bit of a free-for-all, and the free-for-alls can slow you down. So we basically rebuilt the company from the ground up. And to give you the punchline, before the pandemic, that year before the pandemic, we lost a couple of hundred million dollars. There was a question of could we be one day profitable? And fewer than three years later, we have now done three point four billion dollars last year in free cash flow. Nearly forty percent of our revenue becomes free cash flow. So for every dollar, almost forty cents becomes free cash flow. And the amazing thing about this whole system is we never even focused, I never focused on trying to make a lot of money. I just focused on s- being as efficient as possible, obsessing over the experience, focusing on every single detail, and getting really, really detailed, and we would immerse for hours on a certain topic. I... You know, we wouldn't, you know, we didn't have strategy sessions. We lived with a strategy. We would have like 20 conversations, not one deep dive. And I think that way of working, which I think came a little bit from my design background, really helped us create this huge business turnaround.
- JYJames Yan
I've got two more questions for you, Brian, before we turn it over to the audience. I've got an easy one and a slightly tougher one.
- BCBrian Chesky
Okay.
- JYJames Yan
Uh, why don't I give you the more difficult one first if that's okay with you?
- BCBrian Chesky
Great. Let's do it. [laughs]
- 35:56 – 38:36
Housing affordability concerns and unintended consequences: working with cities to mitigate harm
- JYJames Yan
One long-standing criticism of Airbnb is that it might be exacerbating unaffordability in densely populated cities like San Francisco by diverting housing stock that otherwise would have been made available to long-term tenants who reside in those cities. Is there any merit to those concerns?
- BCBrian Chesky
Yeah, there absolutely is merit to the concerns, and let me just zoom out for a second and back up. When we started Airbnb, we started it, the origin story is Joe and I couldn't afford to pay rent. In other words, Joe and I couldn't afford to pay for our housing. And in 2008, many people turned to Airbnb, 2008, 2009, during the financial crisis, to put their homes on Airbnb. But over the time, I learned a lesson. You know, when I came to Silicon Valley in 2007, the word tech may as well have been a dictionary definition for the word good. And if you were in tech- You are taking a step forward for humanity, and therefore making the world a better place. And so therefore, if you grow, and what you're doing is virtuous, therefore you're making things better. And I think, you know, 15 years later, we've now realized another truth. That if you create something really powerful, a tool, or a platform, and you put it in the hands of hundreds of millions of people, that they are almost always gonna use it, and there are gonna be unintended consequences, things that you didn't foresee. And the faster something grows, the more it can hit you very quickly, and I think there is a concern about how fast technological progress-
- JYJames Yan
Mm
- BCBrian Chesky
... is going. And so this was a huge issue. Th- Airbnb wasn't designed for people to remove housing from the market. So this kind of coincided with our working with cities. And we'd meet with regulators, and they said, "We have these concerns." And we said, "Well, how can we fix it?" A lot of them would say, "Well, we wanna know, in our city, that people who are renting their homes, this is the home they live in, or at least they live there some of the time." So we said, "Okay, how will we solve that?" And we ended up coming up with a registration system, where they would register, they may have an available number of nights they can rent a year, maybe have to show proof of residence. We will handle, like, hotel tax that will go to bettering cities. But I think, again, it's all about working with cities, not believing that your product is inherently v- like virtuous. Maybe your idea is, but always knowing there's unintended consequences, and that's what we've tried to do. And I'll just say again, the heart and soul of Airbnb still lies in the everyday people. 90% are individuals, and that's kind of mainly where, where most of our activity is. That's a great question.
- 38:36 – 44:06
Post-COVID travel shifts and a broader concern: longer stays, more destinations, and loneliness
- JYJames Yan
For those, for those entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs in the audience, what are some post-COVID trends in travel that have captured your attention?
- BCBrian Chesky
Well, um, I wanna-- Can I talk about a travel trend, and then I think a driver of the travel trend?
- JYJames Yan
Sure.
- BCBrian Chesky
I wanna talk about, like, two trend. Okay, so when, when the pandemic occurred, people had to shelter in place, and suddenly people were doing their jobs on a laptop. And then many people realized, "Well, I could take my laptop anywhere." And so suddenly, people were untethered from the place they lived. And so we started noticing that Airbnbs were starting to be booked for, like, 30 days or longer. Um, last quarter, a fifth of our nights booked were for stays of m- longer than 30 days. Nearly half our business is now longer than a week. Very few people stay in a hotel for a week or longer. And so it's actually become a fundamentally different use case. In other words, people are living on Airbnb. That was a really big trend. The other trend that happened was because people weren't going to cities, 'cause many things in cities were closed, they couldn't cross borders, they couldn't, uh, you know, there wasn't really a d- urban travel available across border. People started going to small towns, rural communities, national parks. In other words, they started going from 100 cities to 100,000 places all over the world. So the two pandemic trends were people staying longer and going everywhere. We've now seen a rebound of a lot of people-- And now, now this goes my other, my other point. So the other trend is that a lot of people have been, like, kind of stuck in the house or landlocked for the last few years, and they wanna get out, and the pandemic is ending. W- who knows when exactly it's over. But the pandemic's ending, and I think there's a lot of people that have pent-up demand. But I'll just end with one last trend, uh, a trend I'm actually concerned about that I think we can, um, maybe help a little bit. So during the pandemic, we hired, um, the now Surgeon General of the United States. He's-- He was also Surgeon General for Barack Obama, um, Dr. Vivek Murthy. And he said something to me that-- And we hired him, by the way, 'cause COVID had occurred, and we wanted to keep the homes safe, and so we designed this, like, cleaning protocol. And he said something to me I'll never forget. He said, "Do you know what the number one killer in America is?" And I said, "Hmm, I don't know. Is it heart disease? Is it cancer?" And he said, "No. In a larger sense, the number one killer in America is loneliness." That there's a lot of studies that show that people that are lonely, the, the pernicious health effects is e- is equivalent of smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, and people that are chronically lonely live, uh, 15 years shorter than people who aren't. And I always thought, "Okay, that's really bad," but I had this image in my mind of, like, maybe elderly people being lonely. And so I started looking at the cohorts, and it turns out that the loneliest people in America are not senior citizens, they're teenagers. That depending upon the stats you see, some- somewhere, like, two out of three teenagers are chronically lonely. That correlates to feelings of hopelessness and depression. One out of three adults in America is lonely, but two out of three teenagers is lonely. One in five teenagers has made a suicide plan in the last, uh, year. And I, I, it's like, why is this happening? This is so crazy. And I think what's happening is I think modern life is making us lonely, and I think what's happening is like, you know, you know, 10, 15 years ago, we had these amazing, magical devices where they brought us to this world, and we could connect with everyone, but social networking, which was two-way friends, became social media, which was an audience and followers, and you're performing. And the thing about-- And it's not that social media's causing this. I mean, fewer people have families, people b- people go to a church or a bowling alley. There's less physical proximity. Now the office is Zoom, the mall is Amazon, the theater is Netflix, the grocery store is Instacart. And, and, and all these things are a forward step for humanity, and I think they're all really great inventions, but they're like ingredients. You can't, you, you, we've gotta balance, um, people being online and connecting with people having meaningful physical a- interaction in the real world. And this is something that I think we're not gonna solve. I'm not under some delusion that we're gonna solve this problem. But it, I would like for us to be able to focus on helping, because I think travel is a great way for people to connect, and I wanna move Airbnb even more towards a platform where it's either a way to do reunion trips with your friends, 'cause a lot of people now, their friends don't live in the same city. When you guys graduate, many of you are gonna live in different cities than your friends, and you'll never see your friends again unless you, some of you travel. And the other thing is, how do people meet each other these days? And so I'm thinking a lot about how can Airbnb's platform be used to bring people together, to make the world feel a tiny bit smaller, because we verify the identity of more than 100 million people on our platform. And if we could bring people together, make things feel a little bit more intimate, that's something that I think I'd be very interested in. So it's like if I'm a designer, it's almost like we're designing how people connect together.
- JYJames Yan
Excellent. Well, thank you very much for sharing with us your insights today, Brian.
- BCBrian Chesky
Thank you.
- JYJames Yan
Would you like to take a few questions-
- BCBrian Chesky
Yeah
- JYJames Yan
... from the audience?
- 44:06 – 52:06
Audience Q&A: co-founder cohesion, operating principles, and how to start as an entrepreneur
- SPSpeaker
Thank you so much for sharing your stories, Brian.
- BCBrian Chesky
Thank you.
- SPSpeaker
My name is Florian Dahle and I'm a second-year MBA student here, and I would love to understand a bit more about the co-founder dynamics. I find it really interesting that in Silicon Valley, so many co-founder stories end with conflict or lawsuits, but you at Airbnb seem to be one of the companies where co-founders have stuck together through thick and thin. So I would be curious to understand what the secret to the cohesion between you, Joe, and Nate was.
- BCBrian Chesky
Oh, man, that's a great question. I like to think, like, why am I on stage right now and not the person I thought maybe I would be, um, in my high school yearbook? And the answer, you know, in addition to a lot of hard work, is a lot of luck. But I don't think of my luck as that we came up with this idea at this time. I think the luck I have is having met my co-founders, Joe and Nate. Uh, that was, is what makes me so lucky. You're kind of, like, the average of the people you surround yourself with. And I remember when I met... Uh, I knew Joe from RISD, but Joe and Nate are really special. Each of them had businesses in high school. I think that it's really important that when you pick partners, they're people that you could be friends with, they're people you could imagine spending more time than your spouse, 'cause you're gonna probably spend more time with your co-founder than your partner, actually. And they're people that are so good, they almost intimidate you. They challenge you. But they're also complementary. One y- time, like a decade ago, we each did, like, some kind of personality test. I don't... It wasn't, like, an Enneagram, but it was, like, one of those kinds of things. And there's, like, you know, the, the personality tests are on, like, a wheel, right? And they, they kind of put you in a wheel. And it turned out that when they plotted our three personalities, they formed a perfect equilateral triangle.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- BCBrian Chesky
It was like cr- And, and, and, and it, and it made so much sense that it's about the sense of mutual respect, people that are so good they almost intimidate you, but they're so complementary. And there was such a deep respect, and we had a rule, and the rule was that w- that winning an argument was never more important than preserving the relationship. And the reason that's important is because if you start a company, you're gonna have to debate, like, 100,000 things. At least 10,000, right? You're probably debating, like, three things a day, and so it's like 1,000 things a year. 10 years, that's 10,000 things. So no one argument can be the thing. It ha- There has to be this larger sense that we're a band. And I think you gotta really work hard at the relationship, almost like exercising. If you don't keep exercising, you lose, you get out of shape. And so we worked really, really hard, and one of the things we did in 2009 is we said every single Sunday we're gonna meet, no matter how busy we get. Uh, well, now it's like sometimes Sunday becomes Thursday, but we basically meet every single week. And to this day, we still do those calls, and I think a lot of human connection requires constant contact, constant connection, a deep sense of respect, a sense that, like, you know, I'm only here because of them, a sense of humility and gratitude, and a sense that I'm never gonna try to win. Because if I win alone, I'm not going very far.
- SPSpeaker
Hi. Uh, my name is Tomo, MBA '21. Um, I was curious to learn about the principles you mentioned when you were talking about COVID response. Uh, what are your current principles? Have they changed a lot? Are there any, uh, design process, so to say, or redesign process when you're thinking about principles you operate on?
- BCBrian Chesky
Sorry, when you say principles, can you elaborate a tiny bit more?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. You, you mentioned in the COVID, uh, response section, um, that, uh, princ- w- everything come, kind of comes close-
- BCBrian Chesky
Oh, yeah
- SPSpeaker
... to the principles, uh, that you rely on. So I was wondering what are those and how it has been formed.
- BCBrian Chesky
Yeah. I, I mean, I think that, like, I like to come from a, a sense of first principles and, um, every, I think every different situation, I actually... Like, there are some universal principles for the company, but, like, say, the crisis. We wrote down a number of principles. The first principle we said is act fast, and that's why we said we have to be intuitive, we have to be courageous, we have to move very quickly. A lot of people... It's like imagine being in a car chase, and you're like, you, like, pause, "Which should I turn?" You're dead. So we had to act fast. The second thing is we had to preserve cash. Cash was like oxygen. The third is we said, "Let's act with all stakeholders in mind." We didn't want to be villains of the crisis. And the fourth principle I said is we want to play to win the next travel season. So even when everyone else were trenching, we were thinking about, like, kind of going forward. And I think that principles are really important because they become like your guiding light in the sky, and they also... I remember going to the board. We had th- you know, when the crisis was going on, we had to have Sunday board calls because it was almost like three months was happening every week. And instead, and I told them, "I'm gonna make, like, 1,000 decisions. I can't run every decision by you, so here are the principles I'm gonna use. Let's align on these principles, and if I stick to those principles, we can then stick to this." And I generally think that's just one example, but every project I do, I try to id- to identify what are some immutable, foundational truths that you couldn't further distill down than those things, and make sure that you communicate them to people.
- SPSpeaker
My name is Roman Scott.
- BCBrian Chesky
Okay.
- SPSpeaker
I'm a sophomore studying political science, and I just wanted to ask, um, for somebody who's aspiring to be an entrepreneur, if there was one thing you could tell yourself when you were growing up or one piece of advice you could give yourself, what would that be?
- BCBrian Chesky
One piece of advice. Um... I would say just start making something. You know, for example, I went to RISD, and I took all these classes. Um, but it's funny enough, one of the things that probably prepared me more for entrepreneurship than RISD is that Joe and I both ran, like, student organizations. So I ran, like, a club hockey team. Joe ran a club ba- a, a basketball team, and Joe and I had the hardest marketing challenge in the world. How do you get art students to go to a sports game?
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- BCBrian Chesky
And we had, like, little budgets, but the point is, like, I think, I think that a lot of the inte- I think there's gonna be a temptation for people in this a- for you all in this audience to seek prestige because you're at a prestigious school. I think the problem with entrepreneurship, and it summarized my mom's story, is when you're starting out, the line between being an entrepreneur and being unemployed is kind of in your head, and so you have to be very careful about seeking prestige because seeking prestige sometimes means you won't get your hands dirty, and if you don't get your hands dirty, you don't actually learn the underlying principles. How do you make something? How do you struggle through something? How do you describe a story? How do you convince someone else? And so I think making something, it could be, like, a little toy. It could, you know, I mean, not a physical toy, but, like, like a, like a thing for fun, and I think just, it, the other thing I'd say is somebody asked, like, "How do you start, um, becoming an entrepreneur?" I say you start. You just start. You start. You don't think. You act. You start. Very few entrepreneurs make plans. Um, you know, I, I, I, like, the business plans, like, expire the, like, moment you do the first thing, and so instead of making plans, I would just make something. And make something with the resources you have, with you and your friends, anything. That process of making something is great, and by the way, the other trick I'd say is make something for yourself. Solve your own problem. The first weekend, Joe and I were like, "Wait a second. Let's make a little website so we can rent our apartment and make some extra money." That did not seem like a billion-dollar idea, renting three air mattresses in an apartment. And so there's a lot of investors that say, "We like to invest in big markets." Well, what's the market size for people sleeping on air mattresses? So the problem is that, like, I wouldn't focus on markets. I'd focus on solving a problem for yourself or somebody in your life. It doesn't even have to be a big problem. It could be something kind of fun, and just start making, just start doing something.
- 52:06 – 55:03
Rapid-fire wrap: memorable stays, hosting his own place, and Airbnb as connection
- JYJames Yan
Brian, before I let you go, it is a View From The Top tradition to end each session with a number of rapid-fire questions.
- BCBrian Chesky
Uh-oh.
- JYJames Yan
May I invite you to play along?
- BCBrian Chesky
Yes. Let's do it.
- JYJames Yan
When was the last time you stayed in a hotel?
- BCBrian Chesky
Um.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- BCBrian Chesky
When I had these fake glasses and fake mustache, um, I, I think I stayed in one, I think it was, like, last year for, like, an event.
- JYJames Yan
And what is the most memorable Airbnb you've stayed in?
- BCBrian Chesky
Whoa. Um, I stayed in a tree house in Burlingame, California, by this couple, Doug and Linda. I'll tell, tell this very quick story. Uh, I guess it's not rapid fire, so maybe I should not tell the story.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- BCBrian Chesky
Well, anyway, I will tell the story 'cause now I've half started to tell my story. So this woman named Mackenzie, her mot- her mother and father were Doug and Linda. The father built her a tree house in the backyard. She plays in the tree house growing up, then she graduates high school, goes to college, and they have this tree house in the backyard, and they're like, "What do we do with the tree house?" And one day, Mackenzie's like, "Why don't you put it on Airbnb?" The house ended up paying for the mortgage, and it was this amazing experience.
- JYJames Yan
And finally, I learned that you, your own apartment in San Francisco is listed on Airbnb. How much do you charge per night, and-
- BCBrian Chesky
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
[laughs] [claps]
- BCBrian Chesky
Well, um.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- BCBrian Chesky
It's free, but boy, I, do I have some cleaning fees.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- BCBrian Chesky
No, j- just kidding. Um, um, it's free, and, um, when you stay with me, um, you know, it's a pretty cool experience because, um, it's me and my co-host, Sophie Supernova, who's my 18-month-old golden retriever, and, um, I make what I call Chesky's Chips. Chesky's Chips are, uh, an old family recipe of chocolate chips that I got actually off of Google. But, um-
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- BCBrian Chesky
And then we make dinner together, and then I take them on a tour the next day to the office where I tell them the story of Airbnb. And, and I think I'll just end by saying this. Um, you know, I think on the surface, Airbnb is about space.
- JYJames Yan
Mm.
- BCBrian Chesky
And it's like, "Oh, stay with me." But I think below the space is the thing about Airbnb, when it works the best, it's really about people. It's really about connecting to one another. It's the idea that y- the best way to change someone's mind about someone else is to walk in their shoes, and the best way to walk in their shoes is literally to be in their home.
- JYJames Yan
Yeah.
- BCBrian Chesky
And I think that if more people could live together, then I think, you know, obviously a lot of minds would be changed, and so that's kind of what we're trying to do.
- JYJames Yan
Perfect. Thank you for making the time today, Brian.
- BCBrian Chesky
Thank you all.
- JYJames Yan
It's been a great pleasure.
- BCBrian Chesky
Thank you.
Episode duration: 55:28
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Transcript of episode V6h_EDcj12k
