The Secret Art of Micromanagement with Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky | A Bit of Optimism Podcast

what I'm trying to parse out is somebody who will use your words to justify being a micromanager and or or follow your advice incorrectly and become a micromanager by accident what is a micromanager and is it even bad and I don't even know if it's ever been properly defined so I don't know if I can argue whether it's it's certainly a pejorative like it's got a negative association it doesn't feel good when it's happening to us potentially leadership isn't something innate it's something we have to learn and practice I got to meet Brian chesy the

CEO and one of the founders of Airbnb a whole bunch of years ago and unlike other leaders I've met I had the chance to watch him grow as a leader what started as air mattresses in their living room literally an air bed and breakfast to accompany now worth $80 billion Brian has navigated countless challenges all with vision and resilience but here's the kicker Brian doesn't believe that Airbnb has reached its peak and he doesn't think he's hit his full potential as a leader either it's a powerful reminder that leadership is a continuous journey and not

a final destination this is a bit of optimism I have seen who you've become in the world of leadership and I love listening to people tell me that they got information Direction inspiration from you it's been great to watch The Journey oh thank you so much Simon I mean I think that one of the most important characteristics for a leader there's many but I think it's curiosity and the ability to learn because like when I started Airbnb I was like 26 and I don't think most people would have hired me to be their intern and

so how do you go from that to Leading thousands of people running a public company my parents are social workers I had no real like model for leadership so everything was like just discovering it one foot in front of the other and I uh yeah I'm a student I feel like I'm still a beginner still learning and I think that like being a Founder I felt like was very intuitive like I was pretty good the first time I was a Founder I think being a leader and a CEO is not intuitive and I think almost

nobody is born a good CEO and I think a lot of your instincts are to like want to be liked and do things to be liked and avoid conflict and so I think your instincts sometimes aren't always correct and you have to really learn it and it was a very long journey to go from being a good founder to a not good CEO to hopefully a much better CEO so and and you know you were very good about asking advice and you're very good about getting outside points of view what advice did you blindly follow

in the early days because the person you were asking advice from was highly regarded or famous or you know a big deal in in the business world and if you got that advice today you'd be like absolutely not I think you know in Silicon Valley in particular there's this whole like Venture Capital industrial complex developed around companies when I join ycombinator yator is like famous incubator they give you a T-shirt and there's these white letters in the front of the great t-shirt and it says make something people want it's like the best montra for like

starting a company it's very simple if you make something people want or even love they'll tell other people people will grow and it really focuses your company in the most important thing we are a company we live to make a product or service and we should make it really great but then once you go on the Venture Capital industrial complex what ends up happening is there's this really like intense focus on growth and that is within reason good like companies need to grow because growth Is Like Oxygen you need momentum and especially company like Airbnb

is a network effect you need you know more people to use it for its utility to grow and there's going to be competition and you want to it's kind of a race a little bit but I think there was like this Temple of growth that you worship and the problem is and we've talked about this it's like you you you've talked about like our our goal is to go north but where exactly are we going we want to go north we want to or our goal is to go 60 M an hour but which way

I don't know but we have to go 60 M an hour because investors like cars that are going fast we got to go at the speed limit and it's like where are we trying to go and I think that what we ended up doing in the like the hypergrowth era is we focused so much on growth that I think we really traded both profitability and efficiency but more importantly quality of the service and I learned the hard way because when the pandemic hit I I went on Simon like one of the craziest 10-year runs ever

in Silicon Valley you know 2010s from 2010 to 2020 we went from a like $70 million company to a $30 million company it's only happened a few times before it was a rocket ship we got to the pandemic then we lose 80% of our business in 8 weeks people start asking is this the end of Airbnb will Airbnb exist this is around the time I went on your podcast the last time and I felt like our business flashed before our eyes and it's almost like you have this near-death experience we had a near-death business experience

and in that moment it became so clear to me that the way out of this crisis is get back to the basics to get back to making something people want and so we got back to like focusing on making hundreds and hundreds of improvements and and that's kind of me undoing a a lot of the advice that I got I don't blame anyone for listening to their advice but everyone is telling people to grow and I think the best thing you can do is focus on creating something great and if you do customers will follow

you no one cares how fast you're growing no one cares that your company is succeeding they care about themselves and if you're enriching their life and so I think that's the key and so that was probably a big lesson for me what you're basically articulating beautifully is what it means to be customer focused like I think people overdo or sort of don't really understand what customer focus means and it's it is a very simple idea was as you said which is make something people want which might be different than what your Venture capitalists want which

might be different than you know who whoever else has skin in the game and this is the great irony like we're going to talk about these things like they sound profound but it's so stupid the things that we're saying which is for a business succeed somebody has to buy the thing you're selling and then keep buying it I mean that's pretty much it and you run an efficient business so that it's profitable and and you know it's amazing because like people go to Business School and the business school has a way of like making the

business sound so complicated that you lose sight of the fundamentals you need to make something people want you need to build a company people want to work at it's actually very freaking simple and everything else are constraints their guard rails but I remember want somebody once telling me like numbers the language of business and I remember thinking to myself no they're not numbers are just the language of board meetings and they're language of shareholders but that doesn't mean it's the language of a business the language of a business is if people actually love your product

and they want to want to they want to buy it and the other thing Simon is like I'm a designer by training and so I started looking at like how are companies designed and I did a talk it was supposed to be an off the Record talk at y combinator but Paul Graham was sitting in the audience decides to write a a blog post about it and he calls it founder mode he basically said there's these two modes running a company one with a manager mindset one's a Founder mindset I never coined that but I

basically had a few principles and I think the most important principles were if if you're a leader you should be in the details and being in the details doesn't mean you tell her what to do you can still trust people but you're in the details like if you're like a general you're on the battlefield with them now you might trust them but you can't support them and help them if you aren't on the battlefield with them and the other principle is getting the entire company to row in the same direction you know I if I

have a thousand people on a I'd rather a thousand people in one ship than a thousand people in a thousand little boats going a different direction this may sound obvious to people listening this sound might sound like the way everyone does it this is not how almost any Fortune 500 company runs almost every Fortune 500 company they manage the company through numbers they divisionalized the company the CEO is often not in the details they are not rowing in the same direction um and they're trying to make the quarter or to make the plan this has

become the the kind of conventional way companies are run and I think that there's a different way of doing it so when you talk about founder mode what I'm curious about is it something that is constantly on or is it something that you turn on when you needed and here's where the question is coming from which is we don't fully understand military leadership as civilians right we think you know these officers and ncos walk around barking orders everybody and everybody has you know yes sir yes sir yes sir yes ma'am yes ma'am and sort of

just follow blindly and that command and control is necessary but it's not always on so like in peace time or in training there is question and asking and they and and and leaders do get input and feedback from their folks from their troops and they then do use that information to make decisions but in chaos in the in the chaos of warfare a good leader turns on the switch of command and control does bark orders does not want to hear your opinion but trust has been built already because of all of the interaction prior so

that now they follow the orders blindly not purely because of the authority structure but because they trust their leader and they know that their leader would put them In Harm's Way unnecessarily even if mistakes are made but when they leave the chaos of combat that switch has turned off and I think a lot of CEOs have this sort of like either command and control or micromanagement because they think that's what works best is that what founder mode is is it something that you always have or is it is it situational and if so what are

those situations I do think there's more Hands-On leadership moments and more hands-off leadership moments let me give you an analogy I'm a pretty bad golfer but I've taken a couple golf lessons and one of the worst things you can do if you learn golf is to teach yourself your own swing and if you teach yourself your own swing you're going to teach the wrong swing and then the more you golf with the wrong swing if you do get an instructor they're going to it's going to take them longer to fix your swing so you really

need the instructor to teach you the swing and you really don't want to swing without the instructor for a while but eventually hopefully like you're able to swing a club without an instructor there and they're only occasionally checking up on you to me that was the analogy for how I had to get Airbnb I wanted Airbnb to be the most creative place on Earth an incredible execution company some of the best people of Our Generation and I really wanted to establish a standard of Excellence so what I did is five years AG got very very

Hands-On and I said I'm trying to teach a standard I want to calibrate that standard but over time this is going to become muscle memory and I will have to be as involved and I'll be more selective in where I'm Hands-On and where I'm involved so I reviewed every single thing we shipped over time I've been to let go and the standards become self-reinforcing and then when I get involved now are new teams that need new standards if I need to increase the standards or I need to change direction of the company like we need

to do something different and that's now how I can be more selective and like just to to give you a really specific example a press release when I first really took back the Reigns of the company I said I want to do everything perfectly so our first press releases I was eding with the team we probably did like 70 edits of the press release and you think that doesn't justify the few number the few reporters that ever read it but I wanted us to learn how to be perfect about something and like really establish a

standard of Excellence and over time each press release I would do fewer and fewer edits where now I just look at it edit my like write my quotes do a little bit of editing because this real muscle memory so to me like just to summarize now you know rowing in the same direction being in the details being small lean being long term these I think are always on and there there's something in the military General mistal told me eyes on hands off which I think people think you're either handson eyes on or hands off eyes

off and general mccristal who actually ran joint Special Operations can J with the Special Operations reported to and famously gave them a lot autonomy did say there was a leadership principle of eyes on hands off but you're still eyes on and I think I don't think being eyes on necessarily means you're manager CU you're not Hands-On I want to push a little bit because I think so often good advice is given of which this I is among that I think people misinterpret and misunderstand because I still want to try and understand the Nuance of when

this becomes micromanagement because even even something like eyes on hands off feels to some people big brothery and like you have to show me everything I'm I'm not going to you know I'm not going to be working on it I'm not going to write the press release with you but I want to see everything before it goes out and I I understand what you're saying I understand that there is a difference but what I'm trying to parse out is somebody who will use your words to justify being a micromanager or follow your advice incorrectly and

become a micromanager by accident yeah yeah I mean like you're having we're having like the Crux of the conversation what is a micromanager and is it even bad and I don't even know if it's ever been properly defined so I don't know if I can argue whether it's it's certainly a pejorative like it's got a negative association it doesn't feel good when it's to us potentially um I will tell you as a CEO of a public company like I don't feel micromanaged but I do feel like the board like kind of sees everything and I

operate under a policy of transparency and I think the shareholders see a whole lot as well I'm pretty transparent in my employees so I think people are pretty eyes on in my job and I don't feel micromanaged just to give you a quick story about micromanaged um I I remember asking Johnny I this question Johnny I was the head of design of apple and Steve was famously in the details I mean Steve was I think one of the greatest CEOs last 50 years and I asked Johnny IV I said did you ever feel micromanaged by

Steve Jobs and he said no and I said why and he said because he was partnering with me and so to me this is a Nuance I had an executive once said is this your job or is this my job I remember saying to them it should never be either to me that's a secret you don't do your job I don't do my job we do the job together we're on the field together we're on the field together and so if I'm not in the details if I'm not there with you I can't help you

and if I can't help you I'm not adding any value and so how can I help you it's not about telling you what to do I don't really tell a lot of employees what to do I do set standards I'll tell them if I like something or don't like something but they have a dis opportunity to disagree and often they convince me though this is the best way to do it but the most important thing is this creative partnership that like what about this and have you talk to them and what about these three and

we're a functional organization sign so like I want I need to make sure engineering is talking to design is talking to marketing it's talking to sales it's talking to the creative team it's talking to the lawyers talking to policy so it's kind of a way of synthesizing things together but I think that's the Nuance it's not a I mean by the way in a functional organization I can't really tell people exactly what to do like I'm not an engineer so I can't really tell the engineers exactly what to do because I don't even know engineering

as well as they do I can't tell the lawyers how to do their job but what I can tell them is the outcome I want and I can say is are we really at the edge of what's possible and have you talk to them and what if we did this so it's really this like partnership and that's what I think great leadership can be it's actually a resource and a partnership and then the question is why can't be everywhere all at once so there are going to be teams where they only need me episodically and

there are going to be teams where I'm on the field a lot more but I think there's a shift that goes from teaching in standards education to actual partnership where like I'm not the expert teaching you I have held you to a standard where it's now muscle memory but now we're partnering together and I think that to me is the secret has being a weightlifter made you a better executive absolutely bodybuilder for sure I mean by the way you know the old say yeah weightlifter bodybuilder yeah you know what it is there's an old saying

like you can't get in shape in one day right and so like if you decide one day you want to get in really good shape going to the gym for 10 hours isn't going to help you in fact it's going to be counterproductive you can only like instill enough like so much trauma on your body in one moment so bodybuilding I mean I this is a side note but I was 16 years old I was the skinniest person probably in my high school when I said I want to be one of the most muscular teenagers

in the country and I felt like if I could change my body I could change my life I was like 16 17 years old this in '90s I taught myself weightlifting taught myself bodybuilding and bodybuilding taught me that you basically like you build your life one repetition at a time that it's all about consistency that there's not one moment that you get into shape that you actually it's about the discipline and consistency of one year after the other after the other and that you're improving like 0.1% every day but if you compound 0.1% every day

consistently and never quit and keep going that you'll reach the mountain top and Airbnb was like a Ry project that we just never stopped it was like the world's biggest Ry project like this where I went to school and we just never stopped in 17 years later of consistency you know just like if you can like change your body you can change your life the same thing with Airbnb if you can change a company and how people how a company runs you can potentially change entire industry so let's talk about that you're you're bodybuilding and

you badly rip a muscle things happen you get an injury I don't know you go skiing or something and it goes sideways literally figuratively and you know you're not sure you'll ever be able to bodybuild again this was Co for you you said it was yes traumatic sudden and I'm so curious how many companies went out of business because of the shock of covid and how many companies went out of business because they didn't know how to manage through the shock of covid and yours superficially you're in the travel business you shouldn't be sitting here

right now and uh I'm very curious how you took a company that got smashed in the face kept the lights on long enough that you could sort of Limp through and then and then how you rebuild it yeah Simon um I'm one of our board members this is a interesting story is a guy named um Ken chanal he was the CEO of American Express during 91 and the 2008 financial crisis and Ken Chanel told me before the pandemic he said at least once in your career you're going to have to deal with a 911 or

2008 and it is going to be like you it's going to be your defining moment as a leader Andy Grove had a quote Andy Grove was you know former CE of Intel he said bad companies destroyed by a crisis good companies survive a crisis but great companies are defined by crisis so I always had in my mind that like I would have a def moment and I didn't know what it was and then the pandemic broke out the world had shut down and Ken called me and he said Remember the whole conversation I had with

you about your defining moment as leader that you'll have a 911 or a 2008 he said this is not like 911 this is like 10 911s at once I think you learn a lot about people in a crisis and the thing I learned most about in the crisis was myself and I think the hardest thing to manage in a crisis is your own psychology because I think the psychology leader becomes the psychology the organization and I think it really matters and I think if you ask why me why is this happening oh my God and

if you look to the employees to reassure you then I think that's going to be a mentality that's going to like permeate the organization if you're paralyzed you can't make decisions if you make decisions out of fear not hope and love then you're going to probably make the wrong decision I've never heard anyone make a good decision out of fear by the way but if you can tell yourself this is my defining moment well if it is my defining moment how do I be remembered I don't remembered for being bold I want to be remembered

for being courageous I be remembered for this being my best moment I want to be optimistic I am going to be optimistic because that mentality is what's going to create creativity and curiosity and it's going to make us Brave to actually handle the crisis and I'm going to model the behavior and I think that's ultimately what I tried to do and you know um hopefully most people felt like you know a whole bunch of us were in the Foxhole and I'm one of those people that like I'm actually like calmer in a crisis I don't

know what it is it's almost like my mind and body find equilibrium and I'm one of those people that when everything speeds up I slow down and I just became very very clear and I realized like you know the world still needs Airbnb people are asking if we're going to exist it's like I had to run into Airbnb it was a burning house we were going to lose half the things and you have to ask yourself well what's most important and to us what was most important was getting back to the basics back to the

roots of Airbnb back back to building that Community back to building what was most important to build the service that people loved connecting people together making them feel like they can belong in any community in the world that's that's that's I agree and that's all fine and good and absolutely with the mindset but you still had the reality that there was no money coming in and nobody was using the service like and I'm very curious yes you had to make a lot of hard I'm so curious you know you know what did like what actually

happened like what did you actually do to keep it alive I love that you the right mindset but there's some very those courageous bold decisions that you wanted to be remembered for what were they yeah so I had a board meeting the first thing I said is I wrote down a bunch of principles and I said Hey listen I'm going to have to make a whole bunch of decisions I'm not going to be able to run every decision by you this is kind of speaking to the crisis so let's agree on some principles so um

the first one was act decisively the second was preserve as much cash as possible the third was try to be heroes not villains of the crisis the fourth was let's prepare to win the following travel season we're going to be on offense so the first thing I did was I increase communication amongst my board and employees I had a you know all hands meeting every week counterintuitively I answered every question people ask questions and some of the advice was don't do team meetings because you might get asked if there's going to be a layoff and

you don't want to have to answer the awkward question and I just said all things are on the table like we're looking at it and I just tried to be as honest as possible I spoke to every board member every week we had weekly board meetings not quarterly board meetings cuz I felt like we had to communicate that's the first thing the second thing we had to do was we had to simplify the company so we audited all the projects in the company there were over a thousand projects and programs happening in the company I

said this is going to be the ultimate editing process the fight the house is on fire you can't do everything we probably cut 70 to 80% of the projects it was a mass exercise in prioritization then we looked at organization we said we do have too many people we need to preserve you know like were a ship we need to preserve the supplies because this storm might go on longer than ever we made the very difficult decision to lay off 25% of the employees I tried to make sure that we weren't algorithmic in the way

we cut so I literally look through every single person there's no way I made the perfect decision but I said I don't want to emotionally detached from the decision I'm going to be as close to this decision as possible we got L of layers of management you know we took pay cuts we did a number of things to really simplify the company and then I think we we handled the layoffs with quite a bit of compassion and I end up writing this layoff letter that got quite a bit of attention because I think we really

really went above and beyond to take care of people um that were affected we even created an outplacement agency to find other positions for them we created this alumni directory we gave people like a year of health care when that was like not kind of standard to do that in the United States so we did a number of things and and then um once we were smaller we're Nimble we don't have a lot of projects we have this new found sense of urgency I told people this is our defining moment moment then I really focused

on my leadership team and I gathered like the few dozen top people in the company together and said I really need you guys I need you all like this is our defining moment and everyone just rallied together and and those were just like I mean I could go down the list there's like 50 things I could probably mention but those are some of the big principles but it was it was about action I mean I think the other thing if I said before the first principle was like optimism and like having the right like mentality

and projecting the right istion and think that like so many people and this is the problem with people that rely too much on data is they struggle in times of change and crisis because the data is murky or they have to rely on their intuition and they like start making pros and cons listing you know you just these things are generally not the best decision-making framework for uh crisis and so we were all about making Fast decisive bold actions and it's like if you're on a highway and you're not if you get off the exit

the worst thing you can do is kind of like uh I don't know which way to go and you like hit the divider and it's you have to have this like intensity of decision making and I think that's very very hard for people I think it's not natural how do you maintain uh beginners mindset when you're working at an extremely high level you've been working at that level for quite a while I mean you said you you know you started running this unicorn at 26 years old and uh and it's a huge company it's a

significant company you know everybody knows what Airbnb is the entire world you do know a lot about how to do these things you've learned you know you've got the scars to prove it and I'm always curious how you what is it that you do to keep yourself humble and keep yourself open-minded to things you don't know because you don't know what you don't know yeah it's so um it's so fascinating I'll try to think of a good analogy I have um season tickets the Golden State Warriors and I'm fortunate enough to sit close to the

bench and so I got to see like the right kind of mindset to win a championship and I also got to watch them when they weren't winning championships and there's some fine line where you need to have confidence you can't be so confident that you phone it in you start becoming complacent you see like teams that get complacent they think they're going to win the game they lose and then teams that beat themselves off and they don't have confidence they also lose and so there's this really interesting thing where you're like conf but you're like

you're still a beginner and the way I try to be still a beginner you know somebody asked Steph Curry how do you bring all to every game and he used to say something I'll never foret he says I find the game within every game there's a game within every game there's always a way to improve I am obsessive about not doing like I I don't want to just do what I've done before I want to try to say something I've never said before and I I may not but like there's a goal to not do

to do something I've never done before the goal of the company is to like reach to constantly be reaching Beyond its comfort zone to like assume that you're either growing you're dying so I think it's about like continually like trying to be in this constant state of self-improvement every minute of every hour of every day and we're constantly in a state of reinvention we're trying to constantly push ourselves to become better so like we're literally doing this right now like and and maybe this is part of me just being like self-critical on the one I

could say like aring be is this noun and verb used all over the world we do over $80 billion of sales everyone knows Airbnb other hand I'm like man we haven't really fundamentally changed who we are in 17 years we could be doing so much more we still have people that aren't having great trips so I think it really comes down to like staying grounded talking to your customers being in the field being in the community and continually reaching for that ideal I feel like I haven't made it yet I feel like we haven't made

it yet and I hope we never quite arrive there was a study done a million years ago um about kids who are in honors classes they actually the kids who average students in high school actually outperform the honors kids because the honors kids are always told growing up you're so wonderful you're so amazing you're so fantastic you're so smart and they're on a pedestal and they're very afraid of falling off right um because of what they've achieved whereas your more your more average student um is constantly told good effort keep improving you're doing better good

effort so they don't perceive a ceiling or a pedestal I like that yeah it's funny my dad raised me like that and I never realized at the time but my dad never told me I was talented or smart and he probably did me a service he only rewarded effort and I think there's a lot of studies about the growth mindset that if you reward a child for being intrinsically good they're going to be afraid to try because they don't want to disprove you but if you reward effort it's easy not to uh you know e

the only way to fail is to not give it your all and I think there's something about this like there's a basketball coach from UCLA named John Wooden he was the winning basketball coach in NCA history and somebody once asked him like what is your secret to success and he said the secret to success is all I asked my players to do was do their very best and somebody asked him like do your very best that sounds kind of like what parents say about kids who lose and he goes well here's the secret I saw

potential in people that they didn't see in themselves and so I was always trying to get people to reach beyond their potential I think the role of a leader is to just get everyone to do their best but not participation trophy best I'm talking about like better than you ever think you could if I tell somebody you could do better I'm not saying you're not good enough I'm saying I see potential in you that you may not see in yourself and I know that we can do more and I think so much of leadership is

believing I think the biggest gift a leader can give to a person is to believe in them and that can come in saying you're great you're wonderful but that can also come to say I believe we can do more and it's kind of funny that some of the best coaches in history are ones that didn't even focus on winning winning they just focused on doing their best and I think John Wooden Bill Walsh these are like these are numerous coaches espousing the same philosophy that like rewarding effort that like we're seeing potential I'm curious what

you've learned about having to adapt your leadership style to get that push to get that drive or or is are you so public with it that it's understood before you walk in the door I like to think that now it is not to overuse like a military analogy but I want people to almost think it is like the special forces and so it's going to be more difficult but you're going to know it's more difficult and you can opt in or you can opt out so I think like when we used to hire people I

think our recruiters are more like salespeople and they were basically trying to sell people on how amazing it is and they were selling people on the experience of working here I mean there was this incredible um job ad you ever if you ever um I might read it to if you have you ever heard the Ernest Shackleton job ad I've written about it oh you have okay well if I can just for the sake of your viewers read it out loud for a second um men needed for hazardous Journey long hours bitter cold survival doubtful

yes yes recognition yes safe return doubtful honor and recogition and case of success and I think that that in some ways that's probably the most famous job ad ever and it turned out to be a very honest representation of what the journey was so jackon went on a journey of the was it the North Pole yeah yeah and like he had like and they they got they got Shipwrecked for like 13 months or something ridiculous and the story is that no one died yes and it kept them all together and a great example because the

reason it worked is because he recruited the right people he recruited people that liked insurmountable odds that's basically My Philosophy I want to recruit people that like to do the impossible that want to push themselves beyond their limits I don't think this is for everyone I don't manage the host Community this way I don't think 5 million hosts want to be pushed the extent of our employees although I do try to hold the host to a higher standard than other websites I just think it's really important that you're honest and I do also think it

makes a difference s and that people understand your motivations I may push people harder than they've ever been pushed in their life sometimes they won't like that but I think it's also important they understand where I'm coming from and where I'm coming from is like I want everyb be to reach this potential and that's only possible if you do too and I'm I I'll never try to ask you to do something that you can't do um I might get wrong and I might overestimate what people can do and my expectations could be unrealistic but I

do think I've not had challenges but I think it's those two things it's recruiting the right kind of people with your motivations not being polanish and selling something that's unrealistic and then the second thing is just telling people where do you come from why am I doing this yeah it's very Steve Jobs right people talk about those days that it was so hard to work there but the people who didn't want to be pushed didn't go work there yeah I got a tour from the Apple historian and telling me like these uh they get all

these fancy engineers and folks coming in from Google and Facebook and you know wherever they came from that they were hiring and they'd walk around like you know that they're the bees knes and you know they would say in a meeting do you know what I've done and maybe they invented some famous who knows what at some other company and invariably somebody would look up and say we don't care what you've done we care what you're gonna do yes exactly and it's so ingrained in the culture this is being said years after Jobs died you

know it's so ingrained in the culture that you come here to be pushed like the people who who want to be pushed to do the best work with their lives go work there otherwise it's okay if you don't I this is kind of the thing you know people ask me about Amazon all the time so much has been written about what a difficult culture and even the people who like it there only survive two years kind of thing and my answer is always the same which is they didn't lie yeah it's out in the open

that if you kind of like that then give it a try and if you don't like that then don't go there like could they do better of course every comedy can do better but they didn't lie and I and I think that's really interesting I think culture and values are really in a company but I think when people hear like culture they often like get a very superficial um sense of what culture is it's the it's the food it's the yoga classes it's the kind of the amenities I think culture is the unique way that

you do things that distinguish you from everyone else I think it's really important that you have a strong culture I don't know if I mean there are such things as bad cultures but usually there's like strong cultures and weak cultures and the weak cultures are where there isn't really a shared way of doing something I think it's really important that like we have our way the arnb way and we're open we're honest and people that feel like they're part of that tribe opt in and people that feel like it's not for them well the good

thing is like a lot of leaders aren't like me and so like if anyone's listening like well I wouldn't want everyone to run their company like you I say well you don't have to worry about that because the point is that every person is different every leader comes from a different background and I'm going to run air be one way and don't worry probably no one else will run it quite like that and every leader should run it the way that is best for like their company their market and what is most natural to them

and I think it's really important that you're open but I think a lot of people apologize for how they want to run their companies they try to run their company as a midpoint between how they want to run it and how the people want to be led and what often ends up happening is that midpoint makes nobody happy because it's a compromised way of leading it's like all these like half measures like don't really appease anyone that's a brilliant Insight that a lot of leaders lead I'm say it again a lot of leaders lead as

a combination of the way they want to lead and the and combining the way other people want want to be LED versus saying this is how I lead and attracting the people who want to be led that way exactly and the problem is very nuanced and and very good Insight yeah and I think it's really important that like people like spend a lot of time asking like how do you want to lead what's important to you being deeply introspective and then being clear with people and and then getting their input like maybe some of your

theories are wrong but like really working through that and then getting everyone aligned and saying we're going this way cuz if you don't do that if you hire people from 10 companies they're going to each bring their way and you're going to basically be the compromise of 10 different ways of doing things I just had this conversation literally right before I got on with you where somebody asked me the question uh you're like what do I do I don't think my senior Executives believe in the cause it seems like either the leader failing to articulate

some sort of higher cause that motivate that inspires or they didn't fill to the people they should be hiring if that's the question at this point you know not everybody's going to believe in in Airbnb in Your Vision but I hope your senior Executives do like that's the minimum standard I mean the senior Executives have to believe because like somebody once said leadership is the upper bounds of how much people care and people generally aren't going to care more than the leaders and if they do that's a bad sign the leaders have to be the

standard and they have to be the standard for passion for belief for why you're doing what you're doing and if you have team where you feel like there's a gut feel and you always can feel in your gut that the team doesn't believe in what you're doing then you're totally right it's probably two steps kind of clearly articulate the vision and seek total buy and commitment and the second part is a choice the second part is people might not be able to totally Buy in but it's really really important that you don't avoid I think

those hard conversations and if I'm honest to you Simon I've hired many leaders I've hired many execs that didn't believe in what we were doing and I think it was a little bit of like probably on both of us I probably at times wasn't clear about what we're doing you know you know how it manifests it's more like you're selling the person and you're like you're trying to like convince somebody to do something um rather than filtering like Ernest Shackleton wasn't trying to sell people to join his mission quite quite the opposite quite the opposite

and I it's a weird thing as you sell people too hard they feel sold to and they lose their sense of agency and even if you do convince them you might convince them to do the right thing for the wrong reasons which is still the wrong thing so I think it's really really important I think this is especially problematic for really hot companies because people could join you for the wrong reasons which is you're cool you're hot you're growing and that might always be true and then they won't be with you so yeah I think

this is a really important thing like your value should be a filter like your Valu should be things that people disagree with if you have values in a vision in a culture and everyone agrees with it it probably doesn't stand for very much so I do think it should be a filter for the right kinds of people the best definition of culture I ever heard was culture equals values plus Behavior oh I like that and and so to have a strong culture you have to have clearly articulated values and you hold people's behavior accountable to

those values and you hire to those values etc etc and if you have a weak culture it's because you either don't have values or you don't hold people accountable to them yes I think that's exactly right and so that's kind of like the job of a leader you ask me like relationships to like weightlifting and like that the thing that is consistent is like leadership is presence not absence that leadership is about enforcing the standards of quality and behaviors day after day after day after day and eventually yes you can let go and you can

trust people but it's really really important that those standards are enforced that the values are you know consistent you said you know Airbnb you still see it as you know you haven't succeeded yet what is the vision that is so big that you feel you still have so much work to do um you know when people see Airbnb they see a Marketplace for short-term rentals for stays but I think that there's something so much bigger and Simon you and I have worked on this together we've talked about like what's our why like why do we

exist I think I go back to the first weekend when Airbnb was started and you know Joe and I inflated three air mattresses and we called the air bed and breakfast for a design conference three designers stayed with us and it really wasn't just about a place to stay it was about connection it was about the idea that these designers can stay in our house walk in our shoes we could have this way of they could experience San Francisco like a designer I think at some fundamental level when airb B works the reason people are

emotionally connected to it is because it's really about human connection it's about this feeling that you can go to any community and you can feel like you can belong you can belong anywhere and that is the basic idea I think that's a fundamental need that everyone has and I think post pandemic I think people have that need more than ever I think people feel disconnected they feel divided they feel like like loner than ever and I think we really are seeking genuine connection and I think the most genuine connection is not going to be on

the Internet it's going to be in the physical world face to face how has that promise changed because in the early days of Airbnb you literally stayed in someone's house you know sometimes they were in the other room and sometimes they had left the house for a week but you were in their house and with their stuff and you to your point it was a connective experience and as the business has matured and the market has sort of I think it's become less about you don't really stay in somebody's real house anymore you know I

think I think it's less about connection between the guest and host temporarily I think there is more con it's more Group Travel and family travel so there is the house is a vessel for people connecting as groups and our group sides are getting bigger and bigger and bigger and often people want to connect with each other but I don't think Airbnb is doing enough today currently around bringing people together I think we're on this Earth to help bring people together in communities all over the world and so if we are successful if we achieve our

vision what we become as a community not a Marketplace but a community where you can travel you can live anywhere in the world and one day you could wake up you go to a different city and you could feel like you've been there your entire life that would be the vision of where we want to go one of the challenges that you don't have yet but you will have is succession you've been the only CEO at the company and we've seen it happen time and time again uh these great sort of Visionary CEOs who are

not driven by the numbers um have to replace themselves the board tends to push the CFO or the COO to replace the CEO which is a different skill set and we see great companies become short-termist and myopic over and over and over again maybe it's too soon because you still got a few years left in you you're very public about rejecting you know sort of the traditional ways businesses are run that you know that the people come first the numbers come second you're the the one of the new breeds of CEOs rejecting the old Jack

Welch sort of Milton Freedman ways you were one of the guys on the list so I'm curious how you think about succession and if it's different than the way that it's traditionally or currently done that's the reason for the question yeah probably um I'll just yeah I'll I'll make three points the first point is hopefully this is a long time from now I'm started this company I was 26 I'm 43 I hope to be doing this through my 50s maybe into my 60s we'll see so hopefully this becomes a mulai decade question and the only

reason I probably um you know bearing good health so bearing good health I think I'll be doing this for a decade so hopefully this is a theoretical question for a long time the second point is you know Walt Disney so for example Walt Disney was a famously difficult succession plan Walt Disney died in 1966 and the company for a while was paralyzed they asked what would Walt do and and it was very difficult and the company almost got taken over and then Michael Eisner came and he kind of helped save the company and Bob Iger

took it to the next level but that was a really big problem the one thing I'll say about Disney is I think that Disney has had much more staying power than Paramount or Warner Brothers or MGM I MGM is now owned by um by another company and I think there's something about the longer the founder runs the company the in a weird way I I think it's paradoxical I think the easier it is to hand it off because the culture gets very fervent it gets very brain there becomes a really set way of doing something

like so say when Steve Jobs died the Apple culture even though they handed over to a CEO Tim Cook who's done a pretty good job like a really good job it's it's still pretty strong it's not quite what it is with a Steve but it's a very very strong culture so I think you want to like create a very strong institutionalized founder culture where it's almost like muscle memory like where you don't have to check and it's almost like you're always there even when you're not there and then the third thing is that like the

actual mechanics of um of of succession planning and for that yeah I I haven't gotten there yet but um I I just because because you do think differently I do think people I hope I have the like courage whenever that day comes to appoint someone that is not necessarily a compliment to me what and people end up doing is they're like the Visionary founder and they get like the operator or the finance person and I think that can be quite risky but that's the safe move because you know what you know what's the awkward thing

people generally like there's a little bit of a social taboo to like work for people younger than you unless you're the founder so like I'm afforded the ability to hire people older than me because I'm the founder but there's this kind of notion like whoever the successor is at Apple they're not going to give it to somebody in their 40s because these people in their 50s and 60s you know there's going to be this like weird dynamic where you're not a big enough company person but that person who's a little younger who's a little more

visionary might be the person with the vision the spirit to remake the company and I think we're going to need to stay young we need somebody to remake the company so I think we're going to need somebody that like you really want somebody that's got 10 to 15 years Runway who is visionary because I I do not think the the vision dies of the founder I I think if the vision dies of the founder then you become a Heritage brand and you if you're a Heritage brand in technology that's a big problem because technology is

a synonym for the word change so that would be what I would think I would not think that you wouldd want to hand it over to like a like grownup you know safe Pair of Hands and if you do to me that's a transitional leader that leader is transitioning for the Visionary the vision should not die with the founder it must live on with somebody new somebody probably with a long Runway head well I wish more companies followed your lead Brian always a pleasure I always learn something new thank you thanks for taking the time

I really appre love talking to you and I look forward to seeing where BNB goes well get stay tuned if you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts and if you'd like even more optimism check out my website simon.com for classes videos and more until then take care of yourself take care of each other