Hi guys. Thank you very much for joining me today. I'm going to shift gears. I don't know if you heard the conversation. I don't think we got—we got other stuff to talk about here. But Joe, before we get started, I have a burning question. When you guys created Airbnb, how long did you obsess over what letters would be capitalized in the initials? Everybody, have you all wondered this question? And are you mad when people still write it air than capital B?
It drives me crazy. It's the ultimate typo. Look, you know, the original name of the company may not be widely known. You know, we hosted three guests on air beds in our apartment in San Francisco in 2007, which gave us this idea: what if anybody could host people in their home when they traveled? And so the original site was called Airbed and Breakfast, which was since truncated to Airbnb, a little more consumer-friendly. I don't recommend an 18-character URL for any entrepreneurs out there.
But you managed to slim it down even more by taking the capitalization out. And obviously, you know, while there's a lot more to design than that kind of design choice, it is an example of kind of the detail that you sometimes, I'm sure both of you have, like found yourself in these situations where like an hour later you're like, why have we been talking about the capitalization of one letter for the last hour? But I love it. Okay, so let's talk about the National Design Studio. We never had one, not in recent memory. Why do we need one now?
It's a great question. One I was asking myself the same question about this time last year. In April of 2025, I had entered the government for a six-month stint to fix a very broken process for federal employees when they go to retire. You know, it's a great perk to have in the government, the retirement package. But the process to get it once you decide to leave the government is incredibly underwhelming. I would say incredibly frustrating. It's a six-month process. It's all based on paper. Was all based on paper. And it was riddled with errors and issues. If you missed a form field or a signature, you only found out months later and had to return to go and start it all over again. People had no idea how much their check was going to be until it arrived months later. This is like kind of an injustice, I think, to civil servants who give us the best years of their life to go through this obstacle course of this maze of process. In fact, it was so complicated they had to do two required online trainings just to figure out how to retire from the federal government. So they asked me to come in and say, hey Joe, you know something about great user experience. Can you bring this online once and for all? And in fact, the government had been trying to do this for 20 years since the Bush administration in 2002. They spent a hundred million dollars trying to digitize this process unsuccessfully. And in the course of about six months with me and four of my peers from Silicon Valley, we brought the process entirely online and we rapidly, you know, fixed the way that people retire from six months to in some cases six minutes.
And then the president made an executive order to create the national design.
I wish it was that simple.
So what happened next was while I'm on campus in DC working on this initiative, word got around that for less than a million dollars with five people, we were able to solve this problem that had been, you know, beleaguering the government for many decades. And so cabinet secretaries started calling me, started getting introduced to people in the White House saying, hey, can you come do that for us? And it sparked this bigger idea of, well, wait a second, maybe there's a bigger initiative here. Maybe this isn't doing one agency at a time, of which, you know, there's hundreds of agencies, you'd never do that. What if there was a sort of top-down approach to actually modernizing the government in a way that I think we would all expect in 2026 of the United States? And so that started, the gears began to turn and, you know, it sort of led to this, well, what if there was a design studio where you could attract the best and brightest talent?
But isn't that like turning, doing a quick donut in an oil tanker? Like, you know, it's like, how do you steer a ship that's been steadily going in a certain direction for decades?
You might think so. There's a lot of stories about how we have and are doing that. But this whole thing led to a pitch that ultimately I got to the Oval Office and gave the president, which was simply this: At a certain point in history, people used to access the government by walking into buildings. And when they did, the lobbies of those buildings are beautifully designed. They're extravagant. And we know this because you can see them in DC. And the reality is that the way people access the government is through a website. So why wouldn't we give websites the same investment, care to design, and attention that we used to give those lobbies? Because that's the actual front door to the government. So let's imbue it with great design. Let's imbue it with great usability. Let's imbue it with making things simple and clear.
Yes. And so we've—I made a promise to the president. I said, Mr. President, I will procure the best talent of our time. And so I've been able to pull in some of the best talent from Silicon Valley across design, across software engineering. And the team's expanding today. And so I'm very excited to announce the addition of our team with somebody who has stewarded brands and identities and graphic design for four decades at the highest levels of culture. And it's my pleasure to announce here on stage with you that Peter Arnell is joining the National Design Studio as the first US Chief Brand Architect.
Nice. Good job. So that brings me to my first question for you, Peter. When you look at government websites, do your eyes bleed?
Yes. Succinct. The first of all, thank you everybody and thank you for having us today. There's so much activity going on in the studio now in Washington and the most important thing is to build a unity and define clarity around that publicly so that people could anticipate the great, you know, and important experiences that Joe and the team have been building. And so, it's a very, very interesting—when you talk about 27,000 websites and on and on, it's an interesting challenge.
Yeah, there's 27,000 .gov websites and they want to overhaul them all, which I think that's a lot. I think even starting with 10 or 20 would be a herculean effort. But it's impressive. Is it a rebrand? I know branding is your forte. Is this a rebrand? And if so, what are the messages that you want to convey in a rebrand?
Yeah. So, United States of America is the greatest brand in the world. So, this is a very special and different perspective on the word brand in the sense that we're not rebranding this country. Of course, what we're trying to do is very specifically have a consistency, unified look and feel and experience so that we start to build trust in the way that the American citizen, you know, daily interacts with the government. And we are convinced that we can get that going in a very, very powerful way.
So, how much is this—the entering the building metaphor really works for me? Because we've all walked into these government buildings, fewer and fewer occasions nowadays as you point out, but like it's still something we've all done. But then you go to room 32B in the back and get in line and there's someone who might yell 'next' every 30 minutes. How much of this is mechanics that you have control over and how much of it is stuff that there's a whole bureaucracy that's in place that you can't mess with?
There's something that's very special about this particular administration, which is that if I were to sum it up, it's about building. There's a spirit of building right now in DC like never before. And certainly on the digital infrastructure side just as much as anything else. And that's where we come in. So we have an incredibly proficient technical team of some of the best software engineers I've ever worked with in my career. And the reason that this works is because at the highest, highest levels, from the president to the chief of staff Susie Wiles to the cabinet members, this is a mandate and it's an exciting one. I think if you went through any agency and you said, 'Hey, would you like to upgrade and be the equivalent of a best-in-class consumer-grade app on the internet?' everybody says, 'Yes, yes, we would.' And so now we've actually been able to finally align the interests of agencies, the cabinet members that run them, through up to the White House and with the executive order, America by Design.
So then what happens? I mean, it's great. That's—and I think that makes sense to me. But then the hard work begins. The sleeve rolling up begins. What is that like? That must be a messy process.
Well, sure. I mean, anytime you're either building something new or in some case, you know, fixing the old thing, it's not always straightforward. But I think the incentives are aligned. And I think the output of what we're doing will really give three things to Americans. The first is time back. So with one of the things that we've built, that we've prototyped, the process to get something done that's a very common flow on a government website takes 87 clicks. In what we've built, it's whittled down to 12 unoptimized. And I think we'll probably get that under 10. So there's a 10x improvement to the time to get a very, very popular user flow done on a government agency. And I think that translates to just time back in people's lives. Second thing is I think we're going to give people the dignity back. We're trying to navigate the maze of government websites and getting lost or a page timing out. You lost all your data and you got to go back and start over, which is a very common thing by the way. And it's a feeling like I'm not really in control here. You know, these systems are too complicated. I think we can give people dignity back. You don't necessarily feel, you know, like you're just lost in this maze of things. And the third thing is I think we can deliver pride. I think people will actually be exceptionally proud of how the government is showing up in 2026 when it comes to a government website. I don't know why we would expect anything less in the United States of America, which right now there is a—just by a show of hands, who sort of grimaces when you think about using a government website? Like, 'Oh no, I got to go on that website again.' Okay, for those watching, that was about half the room. I'm sure other people are thinking about it. By show of hands, who looks forward to using a government website? One guy. Okay. Thank you, sir. It was one of ours. So we—that should change. All hands should go up when they look forward to using a government website. We shouldn't—we should expect anything less at this point in 2026.
Right. So, I mean, that does bring me to like the question about—one of the things I liked about having this conversation is that we—and you just demonstrated—I don't think frustration in government websites is a partisan issue. I think a lot of this red tape has never been political. It's always been a bureaucratic issue. I'm not a political reporter, therefore I'm not a, you know, so when it comes to the design of these products, how much are you thinking about trust, building trust—you mentioned briefly before, Peter—and building, like including more people? Because I think people feel excluded by the process, especially if it's too complicated, it'll take time, to your point about time. Like, how do you measure that? How do you measure success in trust and inclusion?
I could share an anecdote from just last week. I was recruiting a designer and she admitted to me. She goes, 'Joe, I just have to tell you, I'm married, but I haven't changed my last name.' I go, 'Okay.' She goes, 'Well, it's because I just know it's going to be so painful to do that on government websites. It's been years I've been married. I still haven't changed my last name.' And I thought, 'My god.' That is just one of the darkest UX patterns that you could think of.
A website, just the perception of it being hard, precludes you from even engaging in it.
Yeah. And I think that's like—we're moving beyond this. Like, enough of that. Like, this is over. Like, people should feel empowered to get the thing done with the government that they need to get done. So, if I were to continue the answer to your question, you know, there's the spirit of Airbnb here, if you want to—if you think back to what I've learned about how do you take a complicated process, which back in the day, getting a vacation rental was not an easy process. You were on Craigslist, you were wiring money to strangers, you had to deal with contracts, email back and forth. We just looked at it and said, 'Well, what if we simplified this? What if we just made this easy, delightful, secure, safe, trustworthy, and imbue it with good design that people could get done what they need to get done quickly without the angst and without the anxiety that used to go into that process?' I think there's so many parallels to us being able to translate those ideas of simplicity, of clarity. When you're looking at a government website, there's a lot going on. Can we simplify it and help people get to what they're looking for quickly?
