And the problem is Silicon Valley is in a bubble, and society feels like AI is happening to them, not for them. But I talk to AI leaders and I say, 'Do you talk to any normal people?' I talked to one famous person — I won't mention who — and I said, 'Do you talk to a regular person?' He goes, 'Yes, such and such.' And I'm like, 'Well, that's your nanny. You pay them.' And they're like, 'Well, this and that.' I'm like, 'That's your chef. You pay them.' And I'm like, 'We need to talk to regular people that we don't pay.' And what they're going to say is they feel like they're not a part of it, that it's happening to them, they don't understand it. And I think that is very, very scary. So we have to basically bridge this divide between society and Silicon Valley.
Today on The CEO Signal, we're talking to Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO of Airbnb. Chesky started Airbnb almost 20 years ago with a pretty simple idea: make it easy for travelers to stay in other people's homes. That idea created a new category of travel and turned Airbnb into one of the world's best-known consumer companies. But Airbnb is changing, and so is Chesky's role. He's returned to a more hands-on founder approach as the company pushes beyond homes into new categories, including hotels. And he's rebuilding Airbnb to be AI-native. What does that mean for the company, its competitors, and the millions of people who use it? From Semafor, this is The CEO Signal.
Hello, Edge. Very good to be in San Francisco with you. We are actually in Airbnb's headquarters right now, and we're going to have a really interesting interview ahead of us with kind of an unconventional CEO. Brian's the first person that we've interviewed who comes from an industrial design background.
Yeah, which is very unusual in the C-suite these days. And I've interviewed him in the past, but you've known him for longer than I have. How did you first meet him?
I got to know him when I was in the Obama administration. We made him a president's ambassador for global entrepreneurship. And back then, Airbnb was relatively new, but he was on a mission to create a new category of hospitality and travel.
And he's clearly done that in the intervening years. But he's also run into some tension with big cities and other critics that allege that Airbnb's use of short-term rentals has actually inflated the cost of accommodation in some of these big cities. And I want to hear how he's thinking about that right now.
I'm really interested in how he sees Airbnb's responsibility regarding housing and affordability, but I'm also really interested, since we're here in Silicon Valley, in hearing about the biggest corporate responsibility issue of our time: AI.
Absolutely. Let's bring him in.
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Brian, it's great to see you. You know, we first met during the Obama administration. You were president's ambassador for global entrepreneurship. And it was pretty early on in Airbnb, and you were building this new category, if you will, of hospitality — but you came to it from an unusual place. You were a design student, an industrial design student at RISD.
So, tell us about how design has informed your leadership and informs your life as a CEO.
I'll just go back a second. I went to Rhode Island School of Design, RISD, and I studied a field called industrial design. Most people might know what it is, but the way RISD described it is industrial design of everything from a toothbrush to a spaceship and everything in between. So in other words, it was a very broad education. But there was a huge topic at RISD when I was there, and the topic was: how do we get designers in the boardroom? Like, how do we get a voice at the table? I interned, I worked at all these companies, and all these designers were working not for the CEO but typically for engineering, but sometimes marketing. And so it was definitely a second-rate function. And so one of my friends at RISD, who became my co-founder, we had this radical thought, because everyone was saying it's all about advocacy — how does design get in the boardroom? And we kind of thought, well, what if design just ran the boardroom? Like, what if I stopped asking permission and started a company?
So what does it mean, design running the boardroom, in a day-to-day way for you?
That's a really good question. So yeah, what does it mean to be a designer CEO? I think a lot of people think of design as how something looks, and so they say, well, how could how something looks help you be a CEO? I've always thought of design as how something works. Another way of saying it is that design is just a way to assemble something better, and that's kind of what a CEO does. You assemble resources, you assemble teams, you assemble people, you assemble product offerings. I have a rule in Airbnb that we don't ship anything unless we're proud of it first. This is antithetical to most companies, because most — that's called taste. And most companies say, how do you know better? Ship it and let the customer decide. And some people say that's arrogant, but we call that pride — like an artist signs their name to something. So we don't ship anything unless we are proud of it first. I think part of that is what a designer is. It's also about absorbing as much complexity as possible. I love to take a huge amount of complexity and distill it to its essence. There's this word in design called simplify. And a lot of people think simplify is about removing things. But that's not what simplifying is. Simplifying is understanding something so deeply that you get to its essence, and you can remove everything that is not its essence.
Can we go back to what you were saying about design and taste? You've said people think design is about how something looks, and it's not — it's much more than that, and I take that on board. But are you a visual thinker? Do you find yourself sketching out your ideas?
I'm a very visual thinker. I have my own kind of weird way. It's almost — how do I say this? Imagine like a chessboard, and you're trying to navigate in it. But imagine the chessboard is like a dice. But now imagine three-dimensional, four-dimensional. Now imagine it's almost like a sphere, and there's like a hundred games of chess, and every game, every piece affects every other piece. So what I've created in my mind is a three-dimensional lattice of the company. It's three-dimensional, like almost color and shape, and I can see like every department, every pixel, and I've basically created this three-dimensional model in my head that I don't recommend other people do. Everyone's got to find their own way of doing it. But like Airbnb is a shape and a color and a space, and I'm always kind of refining it, and so that's kind of what I do.
So let's talk a little bit about what Airbnb is.
So tell us, what is Airbnb today?
That's a great question, because you know Airbnb is a noun. We're one of the only brands that's a noun and a verb, like Kleenex. And the noun and verb means to get a house for less than 30 days for travelers. So on the surface, that's what we are. Some people call it short-term rentals. And I like to say that's what we were. So the question is, what are we becoming? I think we are becoming something much more. I think Airbnb is becoming a global community where you can travel anywhere and live anywhere. And so we're now adding services: like if you want to rent a car for your Airbnb, if you want to get a massage at your Airbnb, if you go to Paris and you want to get photos, if you want to go on an experience — like I went to Amsterdam recently, I stayed in a house on the canal, and I also went on this really cool little boat ride along the canal. So then the question is, well, what is Airbnb now? I think it's a global community of hosts that can offer these one-of-a-kind spaces, services, and experiences for travelers all over the world.
And I think that, you know, our mission, or like why we exist, is much more than just saving money. It's much more than just families being able to have a house to cook and, you know, spend time together — although that's very important. I think there's a higher purpose, a higher calling. I think the higher calling speaks to maybe a problem we have in society today, which is I think there's a lot of loneliness emerging. And so I think it's parasocial: the lonelier we get, the more we go to social media, almost like turning the TV on in the background to not be lonely. But the more time we spend on the screen, the lonelier we get. And so what we want to do, in a single sentence, is get people off their devices. We'll use a device to get you off a device, in the real world, where you connect and meet either people you don't know, or you reconnect with the people you do know and have these meaningful experiences. That's why we exist.
What are you actually finding among both hosts and guests in terms of their readiness to do that, their appetite for these experiences that you're adding?
Well, I think that on the host side, we have a saying: money is the hook, and the people in the community is the reason they keep doing it. Very few people host because they want to meet people. They host because it's a really good way to make some extra money. And then they discover something surprising. They get that first review. A guest leaves a thank you note. A host may have a child, and somebody comes from Italy, and the child learns to speak a couple words of Italian, and they realize they can travel without ever leaving their living room. They make extra money and they use it to upgrade their house. A lot of guests use Airbnb because they want to get more space. They want to save money. That's the main reason they start. They also discover something they weren't looking for, which is: I feel like I live in this community. I feel a little more connected.
I agree with you. I concur. People are lonely and they're desperate for community. And they're finding it in live events. They're finding it in travel. Sometimes travel can be lonely, though. And the fact that what you're trying to do is infuse it with humanity is really spectacular. But to facilitate that, to make that come alive, are you really just like a super booking agent or a reservation system? In other words, you're connecting the host, the masseuse who's going to provide the massage, the person bringing the boat in to your experience in Amsterdam, you know, so you can ride the canals. Is that really what's behind this?
I would say there's something larger. I think that's probably what Expedia is, and that's probably what Booking.com is. Booking.com is literally booking.com. So I think they're a booking agent. I'll answer it with a quote. One of my favorite designers was a designer called Charles Eames, a great industrial designer of the 20th century, and I study Eames. And he said, 'The role of a designer is that of a very thoughtful host, anticipating the needs of their guest.' And I think of Airbnb — the application and the company — as the kind of the Uber host, the ultimate host, and that we're like the dinner party. We're like setting up the vibe. We create the conditions for magic. We are not the magic. We always have to remind ourselves, and it's different than, say, Apple. Apple makes the magic. They make this product that's magical. We are not the magic. We set the conditions for magic, and the magic is the community. So we're kind of like — you know, Airbnb is like a city. We have 5 million people every night. So the magic are the people in the city. We're like the mayor and the city council. Like we're trying to create the conditions. We're also the fire department. We're the police department. We're the sanitation department. But we're distributed. We are a giant distributed city. And that's essentially what my job is. I'm like a mayor of a giant...
Like an Uber host. I mean, this resonates with me. I grew up in the hotel business. My father was — you know, his high school yearbook said 'there's a host born every minute.' And he was — you know, he and my mother created Hyatt. It was a concept, right? It was a name, but it was a concept, a vision about design and hospitality and experience and things like this. So what you're saying very much resonates with me, and your notion of community.
What was the quote he said?
Well, in his yearbook it said 'there's a host born every minute.' And that's what his friends said about him. You know, in his high school yearbook.
I don't mean to jump in to whatever question you asked, but I want to just say something about that, because I love that. This idea of hosting — 'there's a host born every minute' — I think it's innate in all of us. And if we actually look through history, we did not invent hosting. And I'm proud that we did not invent this. What we invented was a system of trust to allow this thing that naturally happens to humanity to happen at a scale of 3 billion people. That's all we did. This thing was innate. Your father discovered the same thing that I accidentally discovered: that there's something in our DNA, biologically, to want to care for one another.
Just to wrap up this thought, you've identified this much broader definition of what you're really doing in this company. How does it change your sort of founder ambition, you know, your sense of what the next frontier is? You cracked this — you know, you redefined hospitality at the beginning of this company. Now you've obviously expanded into new categories. We think of those as fairly kind of — I think most of us look at those as, oh, these are product extensions, you know. But are you thinking about something much broader?
Yes. I'm 45 years old. I started this company when I was 26. I never thought I'd do anything for 19 years, let alone be a founder and CEO. If my mission was to basically mainstream sleeping at home instead of a hotel, then I'm done. I can get more homes, but kind of I did. I should hand the keys over to some professional CEO and they can just kind of scale it. Thank God that's not the end. That's just the beginning. I think what we're trying to build is a community. We're going to launch a bunch of stuff next year that I probably can't preview now, but I want to basically — there was no social graph. Facebook was creating a digital social graph. I want to create a real-world social graph where we have this really robust profile, this trust credential. We've verified 200 million identities. So imagine if we verified you are who you say you are. You have a profile. You have your whole library of preferences. And then we can figure out how you're connected to everyone else in the world. And then our job is matchmaking. We can help you find a house, not just to travel, but maybe find a roommate. We can help you move into a community and integrate. We can help you find a long-term rental. We can help you go on this sojourn. In other words, we're really trying to build this community and really try to make the world smaller.
And I think we're quite a — just to be self-critical — we've accomplished the mission of mainstreaming staying in a house, but no one would say, 'Oh, Airbnb solves loneliness.' Not that we are even going to do that, but we really feel like that's the next 20 years: is building a community to make the world feel smaller. And I think the vectors of technology are against us, because AI — if you thought social media was powerful, I think AI is like social media times a thousand. And so that's what the next 20 years is about: the world is about gluing us to devices. It's going to do some really intense things, and I want to try to maybe fight against that.
There was a time when you said you were ideologically against hotels. You're now offering some boutique and independent hotels in the portfolio experience. What changed your mind?
I think a couple things. The first thing is that when I was young, I couldn't afford to stay in hotels, and I basically — I was 26, and we discovered there's this thing that's very, very affordable. And then my identity got associated with something. And I think one of the things that makes for a really good culture and mission is that you don't just stand for something, you stand against something. Great cultures kind of need enemies, and a natural enemy was a hotel. And of course, you—
So you say we're the enemy. Wow.
Not anymore. But our first tagline was 'Forget hotels.' And I just had this very ideological view that Airbnb is about local. It's about authentic. And that hotels were like hermetically sealed places that were taking you out of the community.
So it was not because you thought you'd reached the limit of what you could do in homes?
