LIVE! from Fast Company Innovation Festival with Brian Chesky
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This is Most Innovative Companies from Fast Company, where we speak to visionary founders to understand how they think, how they innovate, and what lessons they may have for you and the businesses that you run in every shape and size. I'm James Vincent, a founding partner at Foundr.

Really excited to be sitting here with my friend Brian. We worked together over the last few years on and off and so know a little bit about each other and I'm hoping that's going to reveal the story of Airbnb of the last 14 years, right? It's really a story that's very tied to culture and what's happened and I really want to dig into a lot of that. So anyway, first and foremost...

Welcome, Brian. Great to see you. Well, thank you very much, James, and thanks, everyone, for being here this morning. So Brian, if you don't know, runs Airbnb, which is a company that has...

Let me get this right. Six million listings, four million hosts, and more than a billion stays, which is a number that's hard to boggle in your mind because it's so large. I still think, in a way, because of what you do, people see you as this rather cute solution to ways in which people stay. And yet you've become this incredible force.

and of course managed somehow to IPO in the middle of the pandemic. As a travel company. As a travel company. Here's how I'm going to set up the conversation. Brian and I worked together in 2015 and 17. So from the inception to 2017, let's call that chapter one. Chapter two is, oh my God, let's IPO. And then the pandemic happened. So let's hear that story. Yeah.

And then chapter three is where you are today. I'll do a quick chapter because I think a lot of people heard the founding story. I was actually born two and a half hours north of here in upstate New York, a small town called Niskayuna. And my parents were social workers. By the way, I never dreamed of being an entrepreneur growing up. I remember the only entrepreneur I think I knew was

Bob from Bob's Pizza. I just didn't really have a sense of what was possible in my life. And then I went to the Rhode Island School of Design. I wanted to be an artist and a designer. I didn't know what I was going to do. You know, there was this huge push at RISD, how do you get design in the boardroom? And a thought occurred to me, what if design ran the boardroom? But of course, there really weren't a lot of role models. Designers worked for people who ran companies. Designers didn't run companies. So I didn't quite know what I was going to do.

I'm living in Los Angeles. It's October 2007. And I remember at this point, I was 25 years old, and I was an industrial designer making 40-something or $50,000 a year. And my life was, I was in a car, and the road in front of me looked exactly like the road behind me. It was disappearing the horizon. I could see the rest of my life. And I thought, that's not the rest of my life. I want to be an entrepreneur. Right around that time, my friend from RISD Joe calls me, said, Brian,

come to San Francisco. Let's start a company. But we don't know what we're going to do. And now remember, at this time, this was like 2007. So Facebook was rising and everyone wanted to start a social networking company. And it was uncool if you made money. In fact, it was considered a negative signal to investors if you had revenue. This is true, by the way. There was a time when this was true.

So I pack everything in the backseat of the Honda Civic, drive to San Francisco. Joe tells me the rent is $1,150. I can't pay rent. It turns out that that weekend though, there was an international design conference coming to San Francisco. All the hotels in San Francisco were sold out. And we had an idea. We said, well, what if we just turned our house into a bed and breakfast for a design conference? But I didn't have any beds. Luckily, Joe had three airbeds.

We pulled the air beds out of the closet and we called it airbedandbreakfast.com. The rest is history. And the rest is history. The first person I told you about the idea, he looks at me with a straight face, this is a designer, and he said, "Brian," I said, "Yes?" He said, "I hope that's not the only idea you're working on." My mom said, "Are you kidding? Like strangers are going to sleep with other strangers in the same house together? This seems like a terrible idea."

And those are the nice things people said, by the way. So the idea just seemed crazy. It started by people who had no experience. We were designers. There was one engineer, two designers. Designers didn't start companies, so that was not considered a good thing. And something remarkable happened. After spending a year trying to get this site going, the Democratic National Convention was going on in the summer of 2008. Then Senator Barack Obama became the nominee. And all of a sudden,

they decided to move the convention from a basketball arena to a football stadium. So now you have 60,000 people in Denver and everyone was asking where are they going to stay? We thought Airbnb is where they're going to stay. So we ended up launching or relaunching for the Democratic National Convention and we got like 100 bookings. I thought at this point we were huge. We're like the Beatles. We're taking off now. But then the following weekend there were no bookings and I realized if only there were political conventions every week we'd have a great business.

So at this point, it's now September 2008. What else is happening in September 2008? So President Obama against John McCain. Something else is going on. The economy. Bear Stearns and everything just starts collapsing. And I remember meeting an investor who told me, I'm sitting across from this person. He tells me, Brian, I have to tell you something. He goes, yes. He goes, the economy is so bad, I'm not even interested in investing in good companies right now.

So we can't invest in Airbnb. So we had no money. You know those binders that kids put baseball cards in growing up? We put credit cards in them. So we literally started funding the company with credit cards. And then every entrepreneur has a rock bottom story. I think I've had a few of these. But my first one was, we're now providing housing for the Democratic, Republican National Conventions.

We didn't get enough business to sustain the company. And we realized the beds didn't work. Maybe the breakfast might work. Of course, I know what you're thinking. Yeah, of course, that's where you go to. So we ended up creating this collectible breakfast cereal, Barack Obama-themed breakfast cereal named Obama O's, little Cheerios, the breakfast of change. LAUGHTER

Hope you change and eat breakfast. Exactly, but we didn't want to be associated with just one political party. We were about bringing people together, so we had to create a John McCain themed cereal, and we found out he was a captain of the Navy, and we called it Captain McCain's, a maverick in every bite. So we found a printer in Berkeley. A guy went to RISD with me, and he said, listen, we're not going to print a

hundred thousand boxes for you but I'll print a thousand boxes for free if you make any money give me a royalty and we thought wow we only have a thousand boxes of cereal if we sell these they have to be collectors editions otherwise this is not a very good idea so we actually position them that they were collectors there was only a thousand and I hot glued them myself I really put my heart and soul into this and so that's how we ended up funding the company and it didn't really work and

A little more than a year later, we enter Y Combinator, and Paul Graham ran Y Combinator. We went to the interview. And the first question Paul Graham asked us is, people are actually doing this? Meaning strangers staying with their strangers? We said yes. And the second question is, what's wrong with them? This was our interview. It's a 10-minute interview. And the interview kind of went downhill from there. So we could tell we were about to get rejected for Y Combinator. And Joe, on the way out, takes a box of those Obama O's.

And he hands them to Paul Graham. Paul Graham's like, "What the hell is this?" "A collectible breakfast cereal, thank you." And Joe said, "This is how we funded the company." And he realized, if you can figure out how to get people to pay $40 for a $4 box of cereal, maybe, just maybe, you will figure out how to get strangers to sleep in other people's homes. So we go to Mountain View, Y Combinator,

Paul Graham goes, first AY Combinator, where are your users? We said, we don't really have many, but the few we have are in New York. And he said, okay, your users are in New York, and you're here in Mountain View. What are you still doing here? And we go, what do you mean? He goes, go to your users. And so we went to New York City, went door to door, signing people up, photographing their homes. And so...

One by one, we kind of got the network effect going. And it turned out that a company that seemed implausible, the worst idea that there ever was became the worst idea that kind of ever worked. And before we knew it, I was now on a rocket ship. And the thing about starting a company is starting a tech company, it doesn't feel any different than a little pizza shop at first. It's just a few of you.

But then it just grows, and it grows, and it grows. And very few of us ever growing up were taught by our parents what to do when your product meets product market fit, and you have to go on a hyper growth, and how do you build an executive team, and manage a board, and have a huge organization, and be a manager, and do this, and do that. But it took off, and it became kind of in the 2010s one of the defining hyper growth companies. So I guess that's chapter one.

I loved it when I heard you say, think of an idea that doesn't scale. Yes. And then go scale it. Yeah, exactly. There was something very small and intimate about every conversation that you probably had at the beginning as you first got the first users and then there's this level of advocacy that happens. You know, that conversation about how you build a great iconic brand. Yeah. It's not about having a million people that like you.

It's about having a thousand people that love you. Exactly. Because those thousand people love you and they tell their friends and then there's another thousand, another thousand. This is what everyone, everyone makes this mistake and I'm glad you pointed it out. And I think this is very common in software. You want to make something for millions of people. And people don't want to do things unless they can immediately scale the millions of people.

The biggest reason things don't scale is because people don't want them to scale. No one gives a shit about your product. And so it's actually really hard to know how to make something for a million people. But let's say instead of making something for a million people, I had to make something for you, one of you in the audience.

What would I do? I would learn everything about you. And then I would understand your journey, and I'd follow your journey and say, okay, you're going to check out. What kind of service do you want? And you perfect the experience for a single person. And once you perfect the experience for a single person, number one, they're going to have an unbelievable service.

They're going to start telling people about it. So your users become your marketing. But now you have a roadmap of the perfect experience that then you can scale. And people go immediately into scaling or trying to find this thing that people call product market fit, when all you have to do is make something people want. In fact, it's such a basic principle that Y Combinator the first day gives you a t-shirt that says, make something people want.

Why is business any more complicated than build a company people love working for, making something other people want? It's just that simple. Right. It's obviously not that simple. But it's great to hear that it's potentially that simple. And so your journey. Okay, so we've got the founding story, so that's great. People understand there's a kid from upstate New York that went to RISD that somehow is now running what is potentially today the world's biggest community-driven super brand.

I mean, your hosts are your advocates. They are in the community. When you go somewhere, you're actually living there and you're being there. You went through this mad trajectory from the shared economy all the way through to building a wonderful community. And it wasn't just a products thing. It was a connection between people that I think was very special. Even the time when you and I were working together,

You'd have a meeting in Airbnb and Brian would say, who's hosting this meeting? Oh yeah, oh Bill's hosting, oh he cooked some cookies. The community aspects of hosting, to me, I felt this wasn't some notion that you stuck on the top of something. It actually was...

the inception of the idea that hosting ran through how your company works and therefore how much you cared about hosts and therefore how hosts grew, which is your supply, and therefore guests felt that and then you built what I loved honestly about some of the magic you've created is that you've designed for good human interaction.

I don't know whether all of you remember, but last time you went to Airbnb, you go on there, you put your name on, you write a little note. Oh, it's just me and my little family. I love your place. Do you mind if I stay? You bring your nice human and towards the back end, instead of writing the Yelp review or TripAdvisor, it was kind of shitty, I hated it. You don't write those reviews on Airbnb because you do a private review. Maybe you should fix this. So you get those things out of the way and then you do the public review. And so I always thought that you designed reviews

for human interaction very purposefully. Is that something

close to your heart? Absolutely. I mean, I think like when I studied at Brown School of Design, I studied industrial design and you like would study like glass and aluminums and how like wood joins together. There's a lot of fields. There's graphic design, which became like software design or UI, HCI. There's architecture. But I was always interested in something that was never really a field, which is designing human interactions between people. And if you think about it, over the last 30 years, we've designed a lot of tools in the world.

And I don't know if what we need are a plethora of more tools. I think what we need right now is are more connections. And actually, a funny side story, now that you brought it up, we hired the now current Surgeon General of the United States when he wasn't Surgeon General. We hired him because of COVID and we wanted to keep the homes clean. He's the Surgeon General for Biden. He also happened to be the Surgeon General for Barack Obama. And as Surgeon General, he picked a signature issue.

And he said, "I want to tackle the number one killer in America." Well, what's the number one killer in America? Well, according to him, the number one killer in America was loneliness. Because loneliness is this dark thread that runs through, it's not the 100% cause, but it runs through addiction and suicide and depression and anxiety and a lot of mental health disorders. And there were studies that showed that being lonely is equivalent to smoking a pack and a half of cigarettes.

a day. Well, it turns out the majority of Americans today feel sometimes we're always lonely. The loneliest people in America are young people, Gen Z, are younger than baby boomers. In fact, kids in high school are typically lonelier than people in nursing homes. There is a loneliness epidemic. And the more time that we spend on screens, it seems

the more lonely people actually become, even though those screens made a promise of human connection. And so what's happened now? Our offices are digitized, you know? So the office is now Zoom, not physical connection. The mall is now Amazon. The theater is now streaming from your couch. The grocery store is now Instacart delivering. And every one of these things feels like a step forward humanity. But the aggregate impact is that suddenly you have a generation or many generations of people

isolated, lonely, alone, on edge, staring at endless screens. And I'm not saying that we're here to solve that problem, but what I am saying is that a lot of companies and a lot of people have to come together to think about how are we going to build community for the next generation? Because it is not natural for people to only live their lives on digital screens. You see the consequences. And long after this pandemic is over, an epidemic of loneliness, desperation, isolation, and division

And hate and all these things that happen, they come from a lack of human interaction. And the best way I found to change someone else's mind is to make them walk in someone else's shoes. You know, no one changed anyone else's mind in the YouTube comments section. Your Instagram followers will not be at your funeral, and if they were, they wouldn't say anything other than, well, they had a nice body. You know...

It's hard to not change someone's mind up close and you walk in their shoes, you live their life and you realize the other is not so other and we're very similar. So that's what drives me and designing how people connect together is what we're trying to do at the most fundamental level.

Let's fast forward. So we were in 2008, you built this incredible company. Around, let's say 2017, there's kind of this moment where you're like, we should probably IPO. We're doing incredibly well. Isn't that the natural next step?

So can you tell us that story? Because we know then, of course, the pandemic happens, but you still managed to IPO. So take us through that story. How the hell do you get through that? So I'll go from like maybe this moment to like the beginning of the crisis. And I think the beginning of the pandemic was maybe the third chapter. So we have this crazy success. Suddenly, like,

My life completely changes. I'm this unemployed designer. By the way, I used to call myself an entrepreneur. My mom said, you're not an entrepreneur, you're unemployed. And we had a debate about- Moms do that, don't they? And then we had a debate, like, what's the difference? And it turns out when you're starting, it's really in your head. And then the whole point is to make it real. We have this rocket ship, all the success. And then when Airbnb started, it was really different. I think it was really special. But something happened.

I don't know, I don't think I was totally sure of myself. And, you know, I was suddenly like this person running this huge company. And so what do you do when you run a huge company? You bring in executives. And those executives are mostly not homegrown. They come from other companies. And those other companies have with them decades of convention and legacy. And one day,

I guess noticed it was like really hard to get work done at the company. When it's hard to get work done at a company, it's always an issue of like how people are, of leadership or process. It's always one of those two things. And we had leadership issues, process issues, and people were complaining about how it was really hard to get work done.

And we had this pressure of going public on the horizon. And so I did probably the opposite of what I should have done. Instead of leaning into what made us different, I think we started becoming a fairly conventional company.

And what happened? I kind of looked up to different companies like Amazon, all these really successful companies. I noticed, wow, they're divisional. They like take their company and they break it into business units and divisions. So I did that. And we ended up creating like 10 different divisions. And I thought, this is great. I've got like 10 little entrepreneur or CEOs or product people that will drive innovation. And what do they do? They created 10 of their subdivisions. We had divisions creating subdivisions.

And the way these pods of designers and engineers and PMs, and they'd work in these little pods, and then they would create all these requests for the centralized engineering team or this platform team. And then of course, each division had what wants its own marketing, 'cause there's no central message. So then we have like 10 marketing departments. And then the communications,

doesn't know how to handle everything, and then because the company's going in tentative directions, there's no real strategy. So then the strategy becomes metrics. How many companies the strategy is to grow? A strategy is not to grow. That's not a strategy. A growth is an indication your strategy's working. But for us, the metrics became the strategy. And then we did the thing that everyone at software companies does. By the way, I want to just say that I think the way software is developed...

In the world, not small companies needs in some way to be re-evaluated. Because what happens is software development has an absence of constraints. So people on your teams have ubiquitous data and they say we can just be autonomous, make our own decision, we'll A/B test our way towards some local maximization. And the problem with software

is also its strength. Anyone can ship anything and you have ubiquity of data. And what this means is the company can suddenly row in a hundred directions at the same time. And when that happens, product gets separated from marketing. Marketers at company are like waiters at a restaurant. If they go into the kitchen, they get yelled at by the chefs. And that's what happens to most companies, the engineers and the marketers. If you want to know how healthy a company is, just look at how close the marketers and engineers are. Done.

Five minutes, you can diagnose the company, over. And it was broken. It was balkanized. And one day, I have a dream. It's like late 2019. I always thought it was made up when people actually have these dreams. I actually had one. And it was dream was that I remembered, because I don't usually remember my dreams. I remembered this dream. And it was if I had left the company for 10 years and I came back.

And I was really concerned about what I saw. And I go on this walk with my co-founders. We meet up every week. And I said, I had this terrible dream that I left the company. I came back. I was horrified at what I found. And then I realized it was exactly what we're doing right now. And they said, well, what are you going to do about it? And I said, I have no idea because it's late 2019 and we're about to file to go public. And it turns out if the one time you should not rebuild the company from the ground up is right before you submit your S1. And I was stuck.

And the growth was slowing, expenses were rising, and all of a sudden I realized a designer running a company, how did I end up in this position where it just seemed a little bit conventional and like every other company? I guess that's the end of chapter two. I feel like Brian was doing what he felt he should do, that what most companies do, what convention said you should do.

And yet, everything else you've said on this stage so far has been completely unconventional. Yes. You've talked about things in terms of human connection. You've talked about thinking about things as a creative person, as a designer. And yet, there was this moment, you know, a moment of weakness, perhaps, or whatever, and we all have them, where you go... Well, actually, when you're like 35 and you never thought you would ever even manage a person in your life, and now you're running a company that does gross sales nearly the size of Starbucks, and you have

people that are 20 years older than you, and I'm not like abdicating responsibility, but suddenly you can just not listen to yourself, and why would you listen to yourself when someone else has so much more experience? Yeah, what do you know? Right, right, okay. So there you are, you're building this sort of Amazon of travel, and I think if I'm getting the dates right, four months later...

COVID hits. Yeah, so this is the beginning of the next chapter, and I think this is the most interesting chapter, although I think the founding is fun. I think this is maybe even more intense. So it's now January, February range of 2020, right before the pandemic, and we're about to file to go public. Now, to be clear, it's not like I thought we were doomed or anything. I just had this uneasy feeling, but I also don't know what could be different because there's not a lot of companies running it differently. Mm-hmm.

But I had this vision of running a company really differently, truly like if a designer ran a company, not like every other company. And I don't know how to change it. And we're about to go public. We've written our S-1, which is the document you file with the Securities and Exchange Commission, to go public. And all of a sudden, we have a business in China, and I noticed our business in China drops by 80% in a matter of weeks. I'd never seen anything drop more than like 8%.

And I remember innocently saying in a meeting, "Wow, if this thing spread beyond China, it'd be really bad." Well, within eight weeks, our business dropped by 80%. A company our size to drop by 80% in eight weeks is like you're in an 18-wheeler and you slam on the brakes. Nothing good happens. And not only that, it seemed like a desperate situation. Reporters and other people were writing articles, "Is this the end of Airbnb?" If you were to take yourself to the beginning of the pandemic,

We were probably the first company that people attributed having troubles to. You're the canary in the coal mine. Exactly. And I felt like I was a captain of the ship and a torpedo hit the side of the ship. There were articles. Is this the end of Airbnb? Will Airbnb exist? And I have a board meeting. At the end of the board meeting, actually the speaker after, right on the stage, is a person named Ken Chennault. He was the CEO of American Express during 9-11 in 2008. And he calls me and he says...

you know, this is your defining moment as a CEO. And I thought, oh my God. - Is that good or bad? - Yeah. I said, okay. But it was like a bell just rang in the side of my head. And I said, yes, every crisis is an opportunity if you only can tell yourself this is the defining moment. And the hardest thing to manage in a crisis is your own psychology. That's the thing. That's the hardest thing to manage is your own psychology.

Because if you think you're screwed, everyone else will think they're screwed. But if you are hopeful and optimistic and not blind optimism that people can't trust but rooted in some reality, then people are going to have resilience and creativity to keep going. And that became this moment, this rallying cry. And it was as if a thousand of us got in a foxhole. The first thing we had to do was cut expenses. We had to do the thing I would never want to do in my career, which is do a layoff. We tried to do it

with the utmost of compassion. Like for example, we created alumni directories. So anyone that got laid off, we published their name optionally if they wanted in a directory for other recruiters to reach out to. I was even calling other CEOs to say, hey, can you hire these people? And people asked me, what the hell are you doing? You better like save your own company. Why are you worrying about them? And I said, I just feel like if we do the right thing, people will be rooting for us and they'll rally and the company can't go under if the world doesn't want it to go away. Because companies...

exists if society wants them to exist. And so that's kind of my mental model. Then I studied another company, this is where you come in or our connection maybe comes back in, that was close to the abyss. - 90 days from bankruptcy. - 90 days from bankruptcy, Apple.

In 1997, Steve Jobs comes back to Apple. They have a bunch of divisions. Somebody said he had like 70 products. He cleared the product line down to a few products. He got rid of his divisions, became a functional organization. So we did the same thing. We took our 10 divisions. We shuttered almost all of them. We went to a functional organization. We went back to one marketing department. We took a billion dollars of marketing, primarily performance marketing, and we turned it off. And you know what happened? Almost nothing.

And we realized our brand is stronger and more differentiated. And we're gonna lean into our differentiation, we're gonna do fewer things, we're gonna be totally functional, we're gonna be a creatively driven company. We ended up having a whole bunch of people leave the company. Between a layoff and a bunch of attrition, we lost almost 40% of our company.

So we had a much smaller company and then something remarkable happened. We pivoted the business to people traveling for longer term to nearby stays. The business came back without the expense base and we became an entirely creatively led company. And what we ended up doing is we decided we were going to develop software different than anyone else in Silicon Valley. Because instead of having teams distributed, doing whatever the hell they wanted,

which seems like the best way for 10 people in an apartment, I can assure you once you're 1,000 people, autonomy is disempowering. That's the key lesson I learned, that you want to give people autonomy. If you give people autonomy, what you're really saying is go in 1,000 directions and fight for resources, and then you create a bureaucratic system

political organization, empowerment and autonomy. And I mean autonomy as in going your own direction and reading roadmap. They actually became at odds with each other. And so I said, we're not going to do that. We're going to put the entire company on one single roadmap.

And we're going to row in one direction. You have autonomy over how you do your job, but you don't have autonomy of your own roadmap. Because if you do, we go in a thousand directions. And we're not going to run the company off of metrics. We're not going to do that. Almost every other company runs off of metrics. Now, I'm not saying we don't look at metrics. We're not going to run off of metrics. That's not the coordinating function. It's a calendar.

And then we're going to do software releases twice a year. That doesn't mean we don't ship code every minute of every day, but we're going to do two big software releases a year, like Apple, where you do these big products. And then when we do marketing, we're not just going to do performance marketing, and we're not just going to do brand marketing, we're going to actually market the features. You know, Apple doesn't do brand marketing, and they don't really do a ton of performance marketing. They market the products, the new iPhones,

They don't say Apple, like we're an amazing company. They do that like once every 20 years. And so most companies don't actually market their products. And so because they don't market their products, there's no incentive to make anything new because no one knows about it. And so we basically created this product marketing function that ties together product and marketing. We marketed the products. We were totally functional. We did two releases a year. And I can hear what you're saying. Wow, that seems like it would slow everything down. It sounds like people would be super disempowered.

something happened we shipped a hundred and fifty grades in innovations in two years including launching Airbnb categories air cover suddenly if you had an idea and we got behind it the entire weight of the organization was behind your idea we became ideas led we looked at metrics but the calendar was what governed everything and this was a huge transformation we got off the drug

of performance marketing. We do some of it, but it was totally a drug. It's an addictive drug. It never even scales linearly because the more you spend, the lower typically the ROI goes down for cohorts. And we said, we are going to think of marketing as an investment, educating people. Marketing is education of what makes us different. And we're going to obsess over the customer experience. So we got back to basics. We were finding every detail of the company. And suddenly, people were much happier.

They said they were more empowered. They said they had more autonomy. And I'm like, really? But it was that they were swimming in a murky aquarium, which is what people describe when they work at a large company. I'm told I can do anything, but I can't get anything. And that is the paradox. And so I believe that there is a completely different way to run a company.

And I'm not saying it's a better way. I'm just saying there shouldn't just be one way. And I think that design is not just how something looks. Design is how something fundamentally works. And the thing that should fundamentally work is a company and the way it gets work done. And so that is what we end up doing. And just the punchline

If I could end with a punchline, by not focusing and obsessing over money, by not obsessing over endless near-term growth optimizations, we went from a company that's break-even to doing in the last 12 months $3 billion of free cash flow. So in other words, we're not a unicorn by market cap. We're not a unicorn by revenue. We became a unicorn three times over by cash flow.

which was very unusual. We make around the same amount of cash flow as a percent of revenue as a big tech company. And this was not even trying to do that. It was about just trying to be efficient, trying to do the right thing. So I think that running a company in this design-led way actually is good for business. They're not actually at odds with each other.

I'm so glad we had the opportunity to take everybody through that because you go from you know inception to oh my god I should do the right thing like let me go grab the IPO book of how to IPO and become an efficient business and Suddenly that doesn't feel right and you go back to your instinct and actually your instinct proves you right and

And so as I'm thinking about you as a leader of a company, I'm thinking about Walt at Walt Disney. I'm thinking about Steve at Apple. I'm thinking about people that are creatively led.

And I think there's some crazy statistic of how few creative people there are leading Fortune 500 companies on their boards, even on their executive teams. Isn't that amazing? Creative people somehow need to be pushed to one side. And I think maybe you're living proof and Airbnb is living proof that actually creativity and innovation from a designer is actually the perfect antidote to this moment.

You know, it is actually funny. How many Fortune 500 companies are run by like a truly creative person? Okay, not many, and maybe that's understandable. Okay, now take the Fortune 100 and ask, the average Fortune 500 company probably has like 12 people on the board, so it's like 6,000 board members. How many of those are

Are creative people? Not many. Okay, how many creative people on the executive team? Not many. Somebody once said, number is the language of business. I said, no, it's not. Language is the language of business. You just think it's numbers. And I think that the key is that it's not about creativity should drive everything. It should be in the room. It should be in the conversation. And you ever have those bad trade-offs where there's no good solution? That's when creativity is really helpful.

Because when you have like two bad options, creativity sometimes allows you to design a win-win, a third path. And I think that there's a creative renaissance that could happen. Because when you look at the next generation, they are really different. They have this creative spirit. And I think creativity is very correlated with humanistic. And I think that people want to buy things from companies or work for companies that are deeply humanistic. And I think if a humanist

If a human being in a relationship acted like a corporation, you'd call that person a sociopath. You'd say, "You are sociopathic." It's like, you imagine if the way we manage a lot of companies, you manage your relationship with your partner. At the end of the day, we've got to remember, people are human. Yeah.

have this connection with culture where they sense what's going on and bring form and shape to something that people haven't yet fully realized. I think Apple did it time and time again. They're like, oh, my music doesn't really work. Oh, iPod. Oh, iTunes. Oh, my phone's got loads of buttons and the internet's some silly. Oh, look, iPhone. Oh, well, I kind of need to know how to figure out how to do something on this. Oh, the apps

or, oh, I need to kind of watch something, but I don't need all the TV. And it's like one continuous conversation. That's the great thing. You don't have all these random ad hoc annual strategy meetings. It's like one idea leads to the next idea. Oh, and this is the other thing. We never allowed executives to have their own swim lanes.

This is the problem. You have 10 executives. They each have their own roadmaps, their own swim lanes. No. We said everyone in the team works on the same one thing together. You do this, you do this, you do this, but it's the same thing. You don't have your own portfolios. And what that means is you develop a shared consciousness in the organization.

and one product leads to the next. Right. Like iTunes means you have an opportunity for the iPod, and the iPod teaches about hardware, but one thing leads to the next. Right. Steve always said that Apple was run by nine people. It was the largest startup the world's ever seen. And as you talked about, product is marketing, and marketing is product. I always think one of the

great shame of companies that are run by people that aren't as creatively inclined is that they think of brand as something over there. Brand is absolutely everything you're doing all the time. And the role of products is to make brand deposits when it says something about who we are. Steve would ask me when I present ideas, what's the brand deposit of that? It doesn't add up. What else am I getting from it? Not just its utility, but what is it saying about us?

And I think that intentionality, that's how you build brands that last and are generational brands. But what we're seeing now is this wave of really the need for connection in the world. And both from the pandemic, but also from social media, you're a brand whose time has come to

And you being true to yourself, Brian, as a creative person, as a designer, that's how you will be the most successful version of yourself. Not by trying to grab the handbook about how to run a big company. And I think there's a lesson there. And the lesson is that, like, I felt like I got a lot of advice when things were going well. But suddenly when you're in a crisis, all of a sudden everyone's like, what are we going to do?

And you're just like, oh wow, okay. You're on your own. I mean, a lot of people supported me, but there's something about feeling like you're on the precipice. I've never had a near-death experience, but I've been told that it's like you stare in the abyss and suddenly you have clarity. And it really becomes really clear when you feel like you're going to lose everything, what you don't want to lose and what's truly important. And I think the other thing it can sometimes do is give you courage. And I think one of the most important things in business is courage.

I don't think that when businesses go awry, it's because the organization often forgot what it was supposed to do, what it stood for. I like to ask people, if your company didn't like were to die, what would people say at the eulogy? Would they have anything to say?

And if you forget why you're doing what you're doing, and if you lose your courage, then I think that is usually demise of companies. But it doesn't seem like a risk at first. What seems like a risk is missing some near-term optimization. But that is always the long-term risk. And I think what the pandemic did is it allowed us to kind of just reclaim our courage because there was no other choice.

and then suddenly that was it so we're in chapter three which is now you're just getting started the impact that you can have on the world the product innovation the ways in which you can bring people together the things that you can create under the umbrella of airbnb what would you love people to look back and say airbnb put this print on the world you know how was the world different because airbnb existed you know it's funny maybe i'll just say it this way

Isn't it weird how some of the people the strongest opinions about other people are the ones without passports? And so I think that what we really want to do is remind people and this was something that what did people get wrong when they didn't see Airbnb take off? I think they underestimated humanity because what I've learned having traveled to hundreds of cities all over the world what I've learned with Airbnb now being used a billion times is

with the population nearly the size of Los Angeles staying together and sleeping in the same house together every night in nearly every country in the world is that despite what we read on the front page of the news, people are, by and large for the most part, fundamentally good. And despite what we read, people are, in fact, 99.9% the same. And we spend a lot of time in the world talking about the 0.1% that's different.

and we're divided, we're alone. It seems like the more time we spend on screens, the more alone we feel. But I want to be part of just reminding people that one another, we can coexist, we can live together, make the world feel a little bit smaller, remind the world we're fundamentally good, and do that as a designer, designing a better way for people to relate to one another. And if along the way,

people look at our story and they say, you know, there's a different way to run a company. A way that's maybe a little more humanistic. A way where creativity and design could be at the center of decision making. And if some young entrepreneurs come and they suddenly could put out something really wonderful that even eclipses what we could do, well that would be an unbelievable contribution to the world. Fantastic, Brian. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.

So I want to thank Brian for being who he is and setting a bar for leadership of companies. He demonstrated that today just fabulously. So thank you so much, Brian. All right, that's all for this episode. If you're a new listener, be sure to subscribe to Most Innovative Companies wherever you listen. And if you like this episode, please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts.

And we also want to hear from you. So let us know what you'd like to hear more of. Send us an email at podcast at fastcompany.com or tweet us at hashtag most innovative companies. You can also follow me on Twitter at FNDR underscore James.

Most Innovative Companies is a production of Fast Company in partnership with founder FNDR. We couldn't afford the vowels. Our executive producer is Joshua Christensen. Our sound design is Nicholas Torres. Writing is Matias Sanchez. Alex Webster and Nikki Checkley helped with the production. This podcast was done in collaboration with my wonderful partners at Founder, Stephen Butler, Becca Jeffries, and Nick Barnes.