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I don't believe in autonomy you don't no why is that because you want to be autonomist start your own company I don't believe in it and I don't think employees want autonomy I think that is a giant misnomer do they want to have some element of autonomy of how they do their jobs yes but I do not think that the vast majority of people are actually happier in a truly autonomous environment Brian chesky is the founder and CEO of the roughly $85 billion home share in business Airbnb we weren't Visionaries we were people that had an experience no one else had the company has been around for nearly 20 years and has had its ups and downs but chesky remains adamant that he will overtake the hotel industry really had to evolve by empowering and enabling which is totally different than doing you had to go from doing it yourself to enabling everyone else to be able to do great work themselves in 2025 the self-made billionaire plans to roll out the biggest updates to the business ever I sat down to understand how he sees the industry how he plans to take Hotel Market share and his management philosophies behind being in founder mode you've been inadvertently linked to this spirited debate over founder mode versus manager mode I know you didn't come up with those terms yourself but I'm curious why or whether you think this so-called founder mode is the best way to run a company is the best way to be a successful leader I think it is I think it is um I think founder mode um I Paul Graham coined the term um basically I'll give you a little bit of background I spoke about my journey being CEO and when I started Airbnb I was a Founder I ran it the way a Founder run the company I was in the details I knew everything going on I was the chief product officer of the company and then I hired a bunch of Executives as we grew and went into hypergrowth and did all these things everyone told you to do like higher grade people Empower them to do their job give them space and the results were devastating it's not that you shouldn't hire grade people or Empower them but you have to be in the details you have to be close with them you have to as a CEO set not only the vision but the Rhythm I review all the work now before it ships I am the chief editor of the company this flies in the face of everything we're taught about modern leadership except when you go through history many of the best companies in history from Steve Jobs to Walt Disney to today with Jensen Elon or many others they're people that are in the details now a lot of people they hear this say wait isn't that like micromanaging there is a difference you can be in the details with people without telling them what to do working through problems with them and by the way if your argument is you hire great people and you Empower them to do their job how do you know they're great if they're not in the details why are you not in the details but the board is auditing you if you're not in the details you have leaders not in the details so this is not about being a Founder it turns out this is more natural this is the natural way for Founders to run it but this is not a this versus that this is not about non-founders this is about a mentality of belief that great leadership is presence not absence and most CEOs of most companies are not present they're fairly absent I believe the chief CEO the the CEO should be the chief product officer of the company why because the purpose of a company is to make a product and so why wouldn't the CEO be the expert of the product you said that early on distancing yourself from the details was deleterious how so so many ways like customer service Joe and I have a phone number uh give customers our cell phone we would answer the calls and then one day we're like we need to hire someone who knows more about customer service than us to do it and then we just let them build out customer service and I can do it for every function and what people do is they hire people and they just let them do their job that is wrong no leader should ever I don't think do that here's what they should do this is a bad analogy one time I'm a terrible golfer but I I went to get like a golf instruction and I had a golf instruction and I they taught me how to swing and I they would have to I have to do repetition after repetition after repetition thank God they were there because if I they weren't there I wouldn't know how to swing I would develop a wrong swing they have to correct me so when you hire people the first thing is you should interview as many employees as possible I interview the first probably 400 employees the directs to my directs I treat as a dotted line to me I'm the cohering manager and when people start we start in the details which one could call good management like Apprentice based model even if they know more than you about their function they don't know more than you about the company or your standards or your pace and they don't know how to integrate so you have to help them and over time like the golf instructor they stop watching your swing and you let go of the details now if you don't do this you end up with leaders that won't be successful they're afraid to come to you you go in the details later and you undermine their confidence they sometimes hire the wrong team if you have to replace a leader you have to replace the team they don't actually collaborate with other groups and you end up having 10 different teams or a 100 teams going in a 100 different directions and maybe they use different technology Stacks they have different me marketing messages going out the whole company seizes to row in the same direction and when this happens there's bureaucracy there's politics there's a sense of a lack of accountability then there's complacency and people feel like they work for a big company and customers start to realize the product hasn't changed and the brand doesn't stand for anything these are all things that come from an absence of leadership where CEO is not being adequately involved in the details of the product or the organization let's use that really great golf swing analogy at what point do you stop holding their hands and helping them swing because employees they do want autonomy so at what point do you say okay you're empowered enough go forth and flourish does that happen I don't believe in autonomy you don't no why is that because you want to be autonomous to your own company I don't believe in it and I don't think playes want autonomy I think that is a giant misnomer do they want to have some element of autonomy of how they do their jobs yes but I do not think that the vast majority of people are actually happier in a truly autonomous environment let me tell you why I don't think autonomy is super helpful there's a SN where you're totally autonomous you're allowed to have your own budget hire your own team do whatever you want except you need collabor you need legal to sign off in everything and you need the finance team to sign off in your budget so you need to actually go through the planning process you need to integrate with the technology they need to in other words this notion of autonomy is such a fallacy in modern Corporate America because companies are organizations organization quite literally means we organize people to work together to do something rowing in a boat now what people don't want is a lack of empowerment and they want to be able to make decisions on their own but I don't think people for the most part want to be disintegrated they want to be integrated so I think that's really really important but to answer your your question because I think you're getting at because I challenge the notion that people want autonomy I think they say they want autonomy I think their actions don't say the same thing if you look at retention retention I find and engagement employees are often highest when they really love the people they're working with and they're collaborating and working well now there are some people like me that probably shouldn't be an organization we just start companies and I also think if you don't want to work an organization start a company we could use more entrepreneurs in the world as well well um but yes you let go over time so let's say um somebody's new I'll meet with them weekly at some point maybe by the 20th week we don't need to meet every week now we can go every other week but it's only after three or four in a row where yeah this seems like an slightly unnecessary frequency so that would be the Judgment call and yes eventually one day you check in less and less frequently yeah when did you flip this switch to founder mode because you said the advice early on was to again be very hands off so what was I guess the Catalyst to flipping this switch and what were the immediate impact well that's pretty recent so the company was doing quite well even though you distanced so started the compy 2008 2009 went on a rocket ship for 10 years and so the rocket ship took off and I was acting like a founder and for the mid 2000s it was great by 20145 2016 five six years in I started feeling like I didn't know what I was doing and I think people are kind of born good Founders so to speak I kind of probably was no one's born a good CEO it is such a non-intuitive job and not only is no one born a good CEO but many of us CEOs believe that almost all the books and information and Business Schools written about it are wrong they're quite literally the opposite advice of what is appropriate you know me Paul Graham would call it books about B manager mode not founder mode so but again you don't have to be a Founder to do it and so I late 2019 it start like growth was slowing cost was Rising I remember an employee that was early employee just said it's just hard to work here I work 80 hours a week but I'm only doing 10 hours of work and it's like 70 hours of effort to take 10 hours of work they described it as like working on a treadmill we had a lot of bureaucracy we had meetings about meetings anyone watching and they're in an organization where there was a meeting about how many meetings there are like it was just that kind of stuff it was kind of there was politics there was like a there just a lot of things creeping in the all the bad words in the big company and then I met two people that changed my life um one was Johnny I who was the head of design at Apple we got we were reacquainted and the other was heroki asai who was the creative director at Apple and they showed me this other way of running a company that Steve Jobs did and I couldn't believe it because Steve said he wanted to build the world's largest startup so he had a functional organization of as few employees as possible all the managers had to be in the details not just Steve they all had be experts Steve reviewed all the work he did these product reviews and they all culminated in these big launches and the entire company rode in a single Direction by the way I asked like Johnny I did you ever feel micromanaged by Steve Jobs he said no I felt the most empowered I've ever felt in my career I nothing against the post Steve world I bet you Johnny felt more empowered in the Steve world than the post Steve world even though Steve visited the office every single day there's this notion that power is zero sum either I have the power or the employees have the power there's a scenario where we're all powerless it's called a lot of Fortune 500 companies there's also a scenario where I have power and I give that power to you it's not Zero Sum so that's what I tried to do um and I met these two people late 2019 and I had this image of like not running it like Steve Jobs but like taking some of these principles but we're about to go public and I can assure you the worst thing you should do before you go public is like blow up the company and like organize it so I don't know what to do all of a sudden it's late January and I'm in a meeting and they're like our China business has dropped 80% because this thing called the Corona virus and I'm like what is the Corona virus well eight weeks later you know everyone was talking about it and we lost 80% of our business globally in8 weeks that's like an 18 we were going 100 miles an hour and slamming on the brakes it was very bad and we went from you know the hottest IPO probably since Uber to journalist like respected journalists asking is this the end of Airbnb and I said well you know Andy Grove from Intel once said bad companies are destroyed by a crisis good companies survive a crisis but great companies are defined by a crisis I said this is going to be our defining moment and I now have a blueprint we're going to go back to not the Navy but the Navy Seals of startups we're going to like be this really lean Elite organization where not only am I in the details we're all in the details and by all being in the detail rils it's like one- shared Consciousness it was the best thing we ever did we made these changes and I think we've kind of in a way never looked back the company went from losing money to one of the most profitable companies in all Silicon Valley we make more free cash flow for every dollar earned in almost any company in Silicon Valley we've made over 500 improvements to the product in three years alone and most importantly the next couple years we're going to be launching new products and services the Airbnb brand is a noun and a verb used all over the world it means to get a house by the night one day the air brand will mean something more I'm going to circle back on your future expansion plans I'm but first I want to bifurcate the next question when you decided to restructure the organization or really how you know or getting back into the details I should say first how long did that take in in totality and how receptive were employees because it's quite a shi from what they'd known especially dudes who had been with you for quite some time I have to forewarn that like when a CEO gets in the details it's it's initially the people are initially pretty concerned and not super receptive um again why because it flies in the face of what everyone knows right employees believe that when things are dysfunctional it's because leadership is too involved not that there's an absence of leadership um they assume that employees want a lot of autonomy not realizing that autonomy can also lead to powerlessness that you're just left in a bureaucracy that you can't navigate and without political Capital you go nowhere like that's a real situation so I would say I've been doing it for the last 4 years if you want to take control of your company back and it's usually you know Visa the organization not the investors it's a one to twoyear process and I was working you know maybe 80 to 100 hours a week so way more than most people want to sign up for I think you can do it in in a fewer hours but here's the amazing thing it's like two years of a lot more work and then you have a lot less work to do so here's the Paradox I'm in many more details and yet I have way more free time on my hands than the old way where I wasn't involved because in the old way you still have meetings but you have meetings for things going wrong because you're not in the details there's always someone resigning leaving a project has to be redone you're brought in on like these and then you have and then you these very long meetings because no one knows who's the decision maker and you have all these committees and there's a swirl you have to sit through these really long presentations and it's just a very efficient inefficient way to run a company so are you meeting averse oh no Absol no the main thing the main way I get work done is meetings I am averse to bad meetings what's a bad meeting a bad meeting is a meeting with too many people and there's only a few participants and a lot of Spectators if everyone's not talking most meetings should have everyone contributing and talking or the meeting should be smaller almost every every company has too many people and they're afraid in the name of being inclusive to uninvite people but that's not what inclusion is that's that's that's that's a slippery slope you need as few people in a meeting not as many people every meeting needs a leader the meeting needs an agenda it needs to be prepared ahead of time and you need to be clear who the decision maker is a lot of times there's no clear decision maker there's a bunch of peers trying to agree peers can agree quickly so then you end up with this committee Vibe where people just talk endlessly without making a decision there has to be a sense of urgency and action so I just think you know I feel like there needs to be a manual like how to run a company and it's not business school case studies it's got to be like here's just a checklist of things to do because like for your job or other job become a doctor you go to medical school and they tell you the things to do and you don't just have to figure it out and I think all of us we have to figure out our Market our product and we should but why is every founder independent having to figure out management Theory why are we doing that any decisions and you kind of touched on this any decisions you're like I don't need a we on in this I'll delegate this one I'll give you an example we do ads um we do these like really cool tv ads and I used to review all the ads and do multiple review the ads because I was trying to develop an aesthetic with the team then pretty soon I only need to review the ads once and give feedback in a meeting now then they started just sending to me and I if I have a problem I'll tell them them and now a lot of the new ads I don't even look at but when we launch this new Airbnb I'm going to go all the way back to reviewing everything again because it's a a giant step forward does that make sense so there is a letting go but it's not a permanent letting go it's a letting go to do something transformational is founder mode just a Brian chesky thing at Airbnb or is it embedded through every management level of the organization you expect all of them to be in every single one every single one and that's where the name founder mode is a little bit confusing because like I'm the founder in founder mode and no one else is but like the principles of like being in the details taking ownership living with the product everyone can do this I mean honestly not just in business like government leaders should do this too and some do but a lot don't you've repeatedly said you tried to you've tried to emulate how Steve Jobs ran apple he had a predilection for hosting about 100 of the most important people at Apple and those selected were hierarchy agnostic right just overall 100 uh top performers or the most important people would you ever replicate this at Airbnb I did and I do it twice a year you do and I don't call it top 100 okay um you know why is that well I think top 100 quite literally means these are the most important 100 people in the company and what I do is I have a thing I call it the road map review so here's something crazy we do that that Steve Jobs did we don't have an annual plan at Airbnb we're one of the only companies SV 500 that doesn't have an annual plan we have a budget each year then we have a rolling two-year strategic plan it's a two-year plan 24 months and it's updated every 6 months we decouple the budget from the Strategic plan see right now everyone watching probably if they work at a big company I guarantee you what's happening is the CFO and the CEO have told 20 teams in their company to tell us like what you're going to do next year your strategic plan and what you need your budget and your headcount and everyone's going to ask for the world and then you're going to say no and you're going to have this negotiation now you have this reconciliation and that's how most companies do planning and it's crazy what we do is we do a budget like a week it's like here's what we're going to spend we have a rolling two-year plan which is a strategic road map I pick the 80 to 100 people in the company I've realized twice a year is the better frequency for us because we want to have a rolling two-year plan every six months it is not just the most senior people but it's generally the most senior people but I pick all the people at most companies there'd be a there'd be protest if the CEO picked people because they would be considered their favorites and it would be considered unfair and not systematic and I think ultimately the CEO should have favorites the favorites have to be on Fair criteria but if you can't have favorites if you can't say this is a high performer and this is what Excellence looks like then you're going to be in big big trouble that is just not good leadership now it can be fair criteria you can have people making sure there's not unconscious bias people keeping you honest looking for desperate impact inside the organization you can do a lot of surveys and you can use that to reinforce your assumptions but the notion that a CEO should not have discretion in decisionmaking of who should be in a room like the president of United States would pick we should pick too it depend doesn't matter what level you're at so we do that as well now I just want to say one thing I take a lot from Steve but I'm not Steve Jobs I'm not trying to be Steve Jobs there's a lot of reasons why no one should try to replicate him it's a different era different skill set we're a different company so I've picked my own we company but it looked it turned out that a lot of what he did which is not that different what Walt Disney did and other CEOs before him are good starting places and then I've adapted it who's your favorite at Airbnb right now favorite what you said you pick favorites who's your who's your number one oh I have so many favorites that's such a political answer that's a politician's answer I mean I don't even know if I have a single favorite like I I think of the company we have 7,000 employees I think of a company as a 100 people and my job is to manage 100 people and it's their job to manage everyone else that's the way I think about it and so many of the people that I invite the roadmap review and there are dozens and dozens of I mean the favorites this is funny my favorites are the people that I'm honestly like I'm texting and you're adorable dog who so another thing I do yeah is I will text a lot of employees and I'll call employees uh if we want to talk you know a meeting is not the best way to do it I don't do one-on-one meetings really unless it's like somebody I don't believe in one-on ones and almost no great CEO in history has ever done them very few um like you know again we can we can go down the list of see who don't do why why don't almost every CEO did 101s and they realized that the one-on-one model is flawed it's a recurring one hour one-on-one meeting where the employee owns the agenda and what happens is like they often don't talk about the things you want to talk about you become like their therapist but more you know they know they're bringing you problems but often times they're bringing you problems that you want other people in the room to hear and there words there's very few times employees should come to you one-onone without other people if they're concerned about something if they're a difficult time in their personal life if they want to confide in something they don't feel safe like telling a group but that should be like infrequent if that's happening frequently that is a very ominous sign for your organization so Jensen hang says I don't do 101s because I want everyone to be part of the solution and get the wisdom when you make lots of one-on-one decisions then people feel like they don't have the decision made they don't feel like they had a voice they didn't have buyin so generally you do group meetings all of us choose to do group meetings now now there's a caveat I do a lot of 101 calls and emails and I'll call some and say hey what's the status of this like I think blah blah blah blah blah blah blah but it's not a recurring meeting with them owning the agenda it's me when I need something I'll call somebody so it's I do meetings they're recurring meetings the group meetings everyone hears there's notes taken it's like very transparent what the topic was what the decision made who was in the room who had input so if the process was unfair in some way I don't want to say unfair um inadequate there's at least a record of the process and people can weigh in and then there's really private Communications calls and texts that I'll do and that's just partly relationship building but that will be like a six- minute call not a half hour or one hour oneon-one where we sit together so most CEOs that I know started with recurring 101s um and we've kind of moved away from them because of the Perils of them and these are some of the reasons what other conventional management wisdom leadership wisdom have you found to be ill advised and perhaps even damaging for leaders yes oh my god well how long do we have yeah so just so you know um when Paul Graham wrote founder mode he never really said what it was right he said like he actually even said in the beginning essay like this isn't meant to um describe the entire talk so I wrote down when I won't do it now obviously for obvious reasons of time but I wrote down like what is founder mode and it was like so far a list of 116 things I'll give you like just a couple like out of 116 here's one that I do that almost no one else does but I think many of the Great CEOs have I have direct reports right I'm a CEO so I have a I have a SE Suite whatever you want to call it a CTO a CFO a chief business officer a head of policy comms a chief legal officer so you know some sometimes people call them Executive Vice Presidents SVP senior vice presidents through your senior leadership team and most people believe it's your job to manage that team and it's their job to manage their team all their directs report to me too so the directs to my directs do will report to me I am the co- hiring manager of all of them I have this radical view that like I'll exaggerate mildly just to make a point if my CFO says I found a candidate they want to work for for the company and they haven't met me then I assume they're not good enough I want you to hire people that don't want to work for you they only want to work for you and I in other words I want you to overhire people say I'm so good I'd only report to coo but I'd report to this organization because you know there's going to be a special Rel to the CEO so it allows people to overhire a little bit also you don't want want your team hiring their team not feeling like your team cuz ultimately they're your people because when you are see whatever retires the people under them have an expectation that they might be promoted into the job but if you didn't hire them and you weren't part of the process then that's a big problem you might not promote them and you might layer them and then they'll leave the company so I skip level a lot a lot of companies it's considered taboo to skip level you're not trusting me why are you going direct to the people I think it's critical for CEOs to skip level I think a CEO should have at least 30 to 50 people they're talking to very regularly below the executive team it could be texts it could be calls it could be bumping in on the hallways but you need to be you know in the details of the company and you got to treat the directs to your directs as your directs I think that's very critical so and again I totally get if people disagree with this most people probably do that's why they don't do it this way but I do think at least is a good conversation to challenge all these conventions and say maybe there's just another way of doing it let's at least give it a try and from a productivity standpoint you found it to be beneficial okay so paradoxical yeah everyone said this is going to be a bottleneck you're reviewing everything you're going to slow down development it's massively sped up decisions don't Swirl at large companies people wait for months and months and months for a decision to get made here it just happens every week yeah sometimes every day sometimes every hour so decision- making has sped up the other thing people said is the really good people don't want to work like this they want autonomy it turns out this is a subjective assessment but engagements up employee turnovers down and the best people are are more retained than they used to be the third thing people said the best people aren't going to want to work in this environment it sounds like your job are too narrow and yet we've been hiring even more senior people in this type of organization because when they hear it it really resonates with them they're like wow I feel like I don't have to spend most of my time at being like a bureaucrat I can actually like do great work all day every day and even though my role sounds narrow it's a very strategic role and I actually can weigh on everything in the company because we're so collaborative so a lot of the par it's like paradoxical in a sense it's like counterintuitive and maybe that's the biggest lesson of all that great CEOs and leaders aren't born and a lot of leadership is counterintuitive talk to me about your next phase of growth um starting with your newly minted co-host Network yeah so Airbnb is a great way to make money by um essentially putting your home on Airbnb and you can make tens of thousands of dollars a year with an asset that you're already paying for and so we were reaching out to prospective host asking hey if you can make all this money why aren't aren't you hosting and a lot of people described they were interested in hosting but they had a perception it was too much work people say I don't have the time or let's say someone here lives in New York they've got a summer home in Florida but they can't actually go to Florida every week and check the guest in and so we thought what if we built a Marketplace a network where we match people with homes that don't have time with hosts that have time but they don't have homes to or they have room to operate more homes and that is exact we did we built a network of co-host we call it the co-host Network it's over 10,000 host in 10 different countries these are some of the best hosts in Airbnb 73% are super host the average rating they manage for properties is I think 4.86 and um and that's compared to a thirdparty property manager at listen airb which is a 4.62 so if you're if anyone's watching and they're like hey would love to make like $20,000 a year on my house by renting a month or two a year then you all you have to do is go on Airbnb you'll see a list of co-hosts in your area will'll match you the very best one for you you can message with them they take a cut of your earnings you negotiate that with them they can do any or all of the hosting for you they can help you set up your listing take photographs manage your bookings with guests they can check guest in they can make sure the entire place is equipped they can give them recommendations they can clean the place they can do turnover they can do everything souped in nuts or just part of it we think there are millions of people that would love to put their home on Airbnb if they could trust the person managing their property and now at the coast Network we think they can yeah how many more uh properties do you think would be listed let's say in a year's time in two years time how what's the expectation or the prediction there we generally don't put out targets because then I get then the is and and I and it's a little bit hard to predict but I do think that the coast network will you know eventually one day like more than two years from now unlock millions of homes do yeah millions of incremental homes I wouldn't want to put a specific timeline on it it's just too unpredictable but millions of new homes part of this co-host Network presumably is also just to augment the guest experience um could AI do any of that creating a chat bot that answers all the questions and dos all the things that a property manager would do yes well okay let me preface sure the AI could do some of Hosting okay I I don't think most people want a robot checking them in quite literally I don't know if they want that humanoid see I would I could avoid all human interaction so if that's the vacation you want then that would be available most people want a would you want to go to a restaurant with only robots serving you I would okay I think you're a niche huge I think you're a huge Niche I think most people don't want that I think most people still want human contact we're living in one of the lonliest times in human history we used to live in a world where you would see people face to face You' have real connection with one another and now we're living in a world where more and more people are being placed by machines and there are times where that's wonderful and that's nice but if you remove you know human interaction is inefficient it's our temptation to automate what is inefficient in one day you could like never leave your house and never meet another person and be kept alive and I'm going think you know that is a step forward for Humanity I still think people want human connection and especially when they're traveling but we do have like keyless entry um we do have things like more and more of our customer servic is being automated we do have ai suggested like kind of replies and messaging that can help post right messages but we do think people still want a sense of a handcrafted experience you might have want you might want to go to a restaurant with a robot I guarantee you that won't be the most popular restaurant in the city and that most those Michelin restaurants or the cool restaurants people go to if they started automating those with robots I think they're going to probably not be in business much longer yeah fair enough uh you've said or hinted at the fact that Airbnb is looking to Pivot away from its core product of short-term rentals and expand far beyond that what does that look like in practice I mean yeah this is a great topic so like the Airbnb brand basically is the noun and the verb I'm going to get Airbnb I'm going to Airbnb my place and it means to get a house for a few nights or a week so what if the Airbnb brand meant so much more and um I think there's a lot of types of experiences and services that we could launch um it's hard to give examples because now I'm giving away the product that's okay give us the scoop come have me back next here's I'll tell you next May okay we're going to be unveiling an entirely new Airbnb it's by far the biggest moment in the company's history since it's founding and you're going to see airb B take the model for short-term rentals or homes short-term stays and we're going to bring it to all these new areas and hopefully you can come to the talk yeah well as I'm sure you saw uh Uber is looking to buy Expedia become this super app is that what you're hoping for Airbnb to be a super app in the travel space or yeah I I think that um the word super app is certainly thrown around a lot it's nebulous um it's unclear if there are any super apps United States a lot of people describe WEA super app um I think that the new Airbnb launching in May will will feel like much more than just an app will be a super app I don't know but it will be it will be an app where you can get a lot more it it will be a onstop shop