Brian Chesky’s new playbook

Leadership and Clarity Founders should not compromise their vision for the company but instead provide clarity to the team. Being involved in every detail is essential, as it ensures a clear direction and drives product success.

New Approach at Airbnb Brian Chesky shares insights into his new approach of running Airbnb, focusing on building the best possible product rather than traditional growth channels like paid advertising. He emphasizes staying close to design and features while maintaining balance in personal life.

The speaker addresses the misconception about eliminating product management at Airbnb and explains that while they have restructured the function, it's not about getting rid of people but changing how they work together. The new approach combines inbound product development with outbound marketing responsibilities, offloads program management to actual program managers, and focuses on having a smaller group of more senior individuals who manage by influence rather than control.

The Downward Spiral of Bureaucracy Fast-moving companies can become slow-moving bureaucracies due to the accumulation of technical debt, dependencies between teams, and the emergence of separate divisions. This leads to advocacy for resources, politics, subdivision within the company, lack of accountability, complacency among employees and ultimately a big slow moving bureaucracy.

Disconnected Marketing and Engineering In many organizations marketing and engineering operate in silos with little communication or collaboration. The disconnect results in ineffective marketing efforts despite numerous product launches.

Brian discusses the role of performance marketing, likening it to a laser that can effectively target specific areas. He emphasizes that while performance marketing is useful for balancing supply and demand, it does not create long-term advantages because it's not an investment. Instead, he advocates for educating people about the unique benefits of new products.

At Airbnb, they use a rolling two-year product strategy roadmap that gets updated every six months. The entire company works together in the same direction, and product management also handles product marketing. They focus on developing a cohesive story for the products to ensure effective communication with customers.

The journey of a CEO in a growing company involves the cycle of taking control, delegating, and then reclaiming authority. The CEO should be the chief product officer in a tech company to maintain leadership over their core strengths. As Airbnb grew, the CEO faced challenges with delegation and empowerment that led to slower progress despite good intentions.

A/B testing is crucial for making informed decisions and avoiding investing in ineffective strategies. It involves having a hypothesis, control, and treatment to ensure meaningful results. Simply comparing options without a clear hypothesis can lead to being stuck with an inferior choice.

The slow pace of progress at Airbnb in late 2019 led to rising costs, increased bureaucracy, and a lack of productivity. The company was divided into multiple divisions with conflicting directions, leading to difficulty in making decisions and turning things around.

At the start of the pandemic, Brian aimed to transform his company's approach by envisioning a more startup-like culture. He identified that despite having a great mission and brand, they had lost their design roots and were too focused on short-term metrics. The business suffered an 80% loss in just eight weeks due to the pandemic, prompting Brian to take decisive action.

Hands-On Leadership During Crisis During the crisis, the CEO became more involved in decision-making and implemented changes to streamline operations. This included documenting all activities, reducing projects by 20%, removing layers of management, and transitioning to a functional model similar to a startup.

Creating Accountability Through Reviews The CEO established regular reviews for all projects with a scoring system (green/yellow/red) to track progress. These reviews allowed him to identify bottlenecks and dictate the pace without mandating employees' physical location due to effective tracking of work performance.

Airbnb focused on building an in-house creative agency, combining marketing communications and creative functions. They eliminated separate UX writing function to unify the voice across emails, apps, and ads.

Balancing Leadership Styles Founders need to find a balance between their vision for the company and the desires of their team. Trying to negotiate this can lead to dissatisfaction and lack of clarity. It's important for everyone in the company to be aligned with the same direction.

The Importance of Being in Details Being involved in every detail is crucial for leaders, as it allows them to ensure that things are being done effectively. This doesn't mean micromanaging but rather understanding how things work at a detailed level. Involvement in details drives product development and performance assessment.

Eppo: Next Generation AB Testing Platform Eppo is an advanced AB testing platform designed by former Airbnb and Snowflake employees, used by companies like Twitch, Miro, ClickUp, and DraftKings. It enables easy experiment setup, troubleshooting issues analysis while providing statistical methods for faster experimentation outcomes across various use cases such as growth machine learning marketing etc.

Implementing Airbnb's Business Methodology Velocity Airbnb has implemented a unique business methodology by shutting down traditional growth channels and focusing on creating an awesome product. This approach can work for most products, but it doesn't have to be taken to the extreme. The CEO should think of themselves as the chief product officer and be involved in the product development process. Every leader should be an expert in what they're leading, there should be no people managers, and teams should aim to have as few people as possible.

Key Principles for Successful Implementation The key principles include interconnectedness among team members, using data along with research and intuition, expanding responsibility of product management to include distribution understanding customer needs, making sure that marketing and engineering are interconnected with minimal layers between CEO and other employees. Each release is seen as a chapter of a story or episode of a TV series within the ongoing company narrative.

The winter release aims to address the problem of reliability in Airbnb. The goal is to combine the uniqueness of Airbnb with the reliability expected from a hotel, resulting in Guest Favorites - a collection of two million highly-rated homes that offer both uniqueness and reliability.

Airbnb no longer has separate guest and host teams. Instead, they have a unified design, marketing, and engineering team. This change was made because reviews affect both guests and hosts, and almost everything involves connecting the two.

Brian discusses the shift from flat design to a more three-dimensional, colorful aesthetic in interface design. He emphasizes the importance of replicating natural elements on screens and integrating AI for more sophisticated interfaces.

Empowering hosts with great tools is essential for providing a great experience for guests. Building and designing user-friendly tools can inspire hosts to put more care into hosting, resulting in an enhanced guest experience.

The power of setting ambitious goals is to push people to think bigger and approach problems differently. Adding a zero conceptually helps teams understand the problem, while setting the pace of the team is crucial for improvement. Fast decisions come from a bias of action, and leaders should see potential in their team members.

Avoiding Burnout and Creating Balance The speaker shares a surprising learning that being more involved in the details paradoxically gives him more time. By getting hands-on, he initially had to work harder but eventually everyone started rowing in the same direction, leading to fewer conflicts and less turnover. He emphasizes the importance of stepping away from work at times and maintaining healthy relationships for avoiding burnout.

Prioritizing Health, Relationships, and Work The speaker discusses his approach to preventing burnout by balancing work with personal life. He highlights the significance of exercise, healthy eating habits, adequate sleep as well as nurturing meaningful relationships for overall happiness.

The speaker reflects on how being constantly busy led to a lack of meaningful communication with the people he cared about. He emphasizes the importance of proactively prioritizing relationships and meetings based on a strategic plan, rather than reacting to incoming requests.

The Mindset of Continuous Growth Brian discusses his belief that he still has a lot to prove, emphasizing the importance of maintaining a beginner's mindset even as one achieves success. He draws inspiration from Pablo Picasso's approach to learning and emphasizes curiosity, learning from history, and shamelessly seeking help as key factors in personal growth.

Evolving as an Artist In this chapter, Brian shares his perspective on continuous evolution and growth. He compares himself to an artist who is always in the process of becoming something new rather than reaching a fixed destination. He expresses his intention to continue evolving for years to come while acknowledging that some of his current beliefs may change over time.

The concept of paying it forward is about gaining wisdom by being curious and helping others. This idea is exemplified through the story of Sam Altman, who received help from others and then passed on that help to Brian Chesky.

Brian shares his journey as an artist, starting from a young age when he was inspired by Norman Rockwell's paintings. He developed a passion for architectural and landscape design at the age of eight or nine, which eventually led to his interest in environmental design and film animation. Despite initial doubts from family members, Brian pursued art and won a national competition that earned him a scholarship to Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). However, upon realizing the changing landscape of art with photography and AI-generated art replacing traditional skills, he discovered industrial design during his freshman year in college.

Brian, the co-founder of Airbnb, shares his journey from being an industrial designer to starting a company with Joe Gebbia. The idea for Air Bed and Breakfast emerged when they couldn't afford rent in San Francisco during a design conference. This led to the creation story of Airbnb.