Airbnb CEO: “Airbnb Was Worth $100 BILLION & I Was Lonely & Deeply Sad!”

You lose 80% of your business in eight weeks, and I knew there were questions. Is this the end of Airbnb? Will Airbnb exist? Brian Chesky. Founder and CEO... Of the $100 billion company... Airbnb, one of the most successful and most disruptive companies in the world. Airbed-and-breakfast was just a way to keep paying rent before we came up with the big idea. We did not think airbed-and-breakfast would be a company where four million people a night would use. Don't focus on the mountaintop. Focus on the first step. A lot of breakthrough ideas don't seem breakthrough at the time, they seem crazy. People tend to overestimate what they can do in a year, and underestimate what they can do in 10 years. 10 years is a profoundly long period of time if you're disciplined and focused. And you can have a small idea, a small dream, and you can build something vast.

Airbnb is gonna IPO. And then disaster strikes.

The Coronavirus... Emergency. Stay at home... Stay at home. You lose 80% of your business in eight weeks, and I knew there were questions. Is this the end of Airbnb? Will Airbnb exist? We had to make some incredibly difficult decisions. So I write this letter to the entire company. Here's what I said.

Is it hard for you to read that?

Yeah. Yeah, no, now I get a little emotional reading that.

Why? (instrumental music plays) Brian, I'm a firm believer that our external world can change and evolve and look different, but it tends to be the case that our internal world is much more stubborn, which is who we are at our core. And I also believe that who we are at our core is often shaped by our earliest experiences. That's been supported by a lot of the psychologists I've sat here with. To understand you, the way you think and who you are, I think it's best to first understand that early experience, and how it shaped the internal Brian that remains regardless of how everything else in your life has changed.

Well, yeah, thank you for having me on. I, um, I came from a pretty normal, nondescript background. But in parallel to sports and all the regular things kids had, I had this other interest. It was the thing that most defined me, and that was that I was an artist. I would be drawing and drawing, and I have these pads of paper. And I go through hundreds and hundreds of pages, almost compulsively drawing, um, both trying to learn how to mimic an environment and reproduce it in reality, and when I was, you know, 10, I could probably draw like an adult and by the time I was in high school, I could, you know, draw like, you know, probably akin to a professional artist. I love to design worlds. I wanted to design an escape. And at the age of 17, I, I decide I'm going to design school. So I've already taken like 100 opportunities in life, and now I'm like, "Okay, I'm gonna do this. I'm not gonna be like a politician, a doctor, a lawyer, a astronaut, I'm gonna be a d- some, an artist or a designer." Halfway through freshman year, they have to, they tell you to declare a major. What kind of artist and designer? I'm like, "I'm still 17. And I gotta tell you what type of artist and designer?" This guy comes in and he pitches an department called Industrial Design. It just sounded cool, Industrial Design. And I was like, "What is industrial design?" And I remember him saying something like, "Industrial design is the design of everything from a toothbrush to a spaceship, and everything in between." To design a physical object, you have to understand three dimensions. You can't just design an object, you have to understand how to make the object. If you were a graph designer, you didn't really have to know how to make anything. I guess you had to know how to print it. But you had to know manufacturing. What kind of materials is it? Are the materials sustainable? Where do you manufacture it? Well, how much is it gonna cost? Because h- like, how much it's gonna cost, like, has implications on how you design it. Well, how much it's gonna cost depends on who is the audience. How are you gonna market it? You see, when an architect designs a building, no one, like, blames the architect if the office building doesn't get leased out.