Leading through uncertainty: A design-led company - Brian Chesky (Config 2023)

foreign [Music] welcome back to the closing keynote of day one of config 2023 I'm Sarah Culver I'm a design manager at figma and I'm shokuamoto vice president of product um first of all I just wanted to thank everybody for being here with us today I know a lot of you guys have traveled and taken time of your out of your day to come here and I also know that not everybody could get into the talks that they wanted to get into due to capacity so I just wanted to acknowledge that and thank you guys we're going to make some changes oh now I think they took the clicker because uh I they gave me the thing okay anyway they're gonna Advance it okay this is like a actually this is a comedy routine you didn't realize this but it's going to be comedy um so anyway so we're sorry about that and uh we're gonna make some tweaks tomorrow to some of the room assignments and layouts and things like that so hopefully that would be better for tomorrow and also all the talks are recorded and we're going to try to email them out to you as fast as possible so that we can you can see them when you uh get back so thank you for sticking with us but we're not done yet for today we're back to introduce our closing keynote sessions uh the theme for this afternoon is navigating uncertainty what does that mean to you show um okay so uncertainty to me well the world as we know is um you know going through a lot right now we've had pandemic closures we've have an economy that's affected a lot of people's jobs we have ai which is exciting but every month every week There's new news and you know it's hard to even know what is the world going to look like 20 years from now or even five years from now and the way that I think about it is that design is fundamentally about what do we want to build what do we want to make what do we want the future to be like and it's hard to think about that when things are so uncertain so you know times aren't certain and I think uncertain times call for more vision and that's hard but it's important so design is kind of a solution to uncertainty ultimately I like that a lot um our first Speaker of branchesky has really taken the approach of putting design at the center of everything and his leadership of Airbnb to me Airbnb is the epitome of a design-led company you know you can see it in both the product and in the culture and it's been really impressive to me to see how Airbnb has navigated the ups and downs of the past few years yep so please join us in welcoming Brian in conversation with Dylan [Applause] [Music] [Music] welcome to config Brian well thank you for having me thank you all and for being here uh I think that Brian probably needs no introduction but just in case uh Brian is the CEO and co-founder of Airbnb and I looked at the entire Fortune 500 all the CEOs and I believe correctly if I'm wrong that you are the only designer CEO in the fortune 500. if there's another one I'd love to meet them so you know maybe we can start off with uh we were talking last week about this you were telling me that at some point in the company Journey you sat down and realized uh that you were doing things in a very conventional way yeah despite your design training and uh maybe you can tell us more about that what that realization was like yeah so let me take you back to um 2019 the end of 2019. I had this suspicious feeling that like I mean well actually you can go back further I went to the Rhode Island School design with um my one of my co-founders Joe gebbia and um it was kind of crazy the idea that a founding team would have two designers and one engineer it was so crazy that I remember when we pitched one of our First Investors he said we love everything but you and your idea and one of the things they managed strangers will never sleep save those strangers and designers don't start companies and at RISD in the year 2000 when I was there I studied industrial design and there was this whole mantra how do you get design in the boardroom and Joe and I maybe we didn't know any better we thought what if design just ran the boardroom and that was the whole premise behind Airbnb and so we had these magical ideas of what everybody could become and for a moment for a while I felt like it was really special and magical and then 10 years later it's now 2019 and I wake up one day and I have this like I have this horrible dream and the dream is it's as if I've been gone for 10 years I come back to the company and it's unrecognizable and I go on a hike in Bolinas California with my two co-founders Joe and Nate and I tell them about this dream and they said what happened and I said that dream that we had that company that would be magical that was like an amazing product people loved that we were starting to lose it it was starting to wear down wear out and let me explain what was happening see I basically was a designer and I kind of noticed there's two types of people and companies never become CEOs Engineers become CEOs at Silicon Valley marketers become CFOs Finance people come CEOs operators become CEOs but the two people that never run companies are designers and head of HR I started thinking why is this and I think it's because design in some ways is fragile because companies are organized around the scientific method and the creative process is something that requires nerve and over the years I started losing my nerve and I brought in a lot of people from a lot of different companies and they brought their way of working towards us so what do we do we had divisional we basically divisionalized so we had like 10 different divisions they had like 10 different subdivisions we were very much run by product managers we had a plethora of a b experiments and the thing I started noticing is the more um people we added the more project we pursued the less our app changed and the more the cost went up and I didn't know what to do it's now late 2019 and I tell Joe and I'm like this is like I don't know what to do and they're like well what are you going to do and I said well I don't know because we're about to go public and so blowing up the company before you're like ready to go public is kind of a bad time so I go back uh home for the holidays and it's now early 2020.

we're preparing to go public and I actually it's right before 2020 I meet two people that changed my life the first person I meet is a guy named Hiroki assai Hiroki assai was the creative director at Apple and he reported Steve Jobs and he worked at Apple from like 1998 to 2016. wow and the second person I already knew but I got reacquainted was Johnny Ive and Johnny I've ran designed apple and at that moment I kind of forgot about the magic of this design Renaissance that Steve Jobs had and they described this company to me and the way of running a company with a design at the center where like it was a totally different way of running a company than everything I was taught everything I was taught about how you run a company was opposite of what Steve Jobs and Johnny Ive and Hiroki did at Apple so I hired Hiroki Johnny had this firm we brought him on we became our number one client and now I have this idea there's maybe a better rate around company but there's still a problem we're going to go public so what do we do all of a sudden I remember our business drops 80 in China it's January 2020.