YouSaid · the spoken record

Brian Chesky

lines on the record: 111
first: 2023-10-09
most recent: 2023-10-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“It's so great. So big, huge insight here. Okay. I used to think you talk about the culture and you talk about how important it is. Now let's tower one of the values. Let's print them on the walls. Let's have people repeat them. Let's keep telling people culture is important. And that stuff can help a little bit, but it's not how you build culture. So let me give you a few thoughts. Your culture”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Should be about bringing out the very best in people. Most of all, I want us to feel like we're building one of the most creative places on earth, a company that brings together some of the best people of our generation to dream up new products and services that capture the world's imagination, a place where years from now people would say If I was alive during that time that's where I would have wanted to work. I literally wrote that email last week about culture.”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The culture is the most important thing you will ever design because it's the engine that designs everything else. All good designs start with a vision. And I want working at Airbnb to feel like working at the world's largest startup. I believe we can grow into one of the largest companies in the world without feeling large. A company that's still like run like a startup with the best people in every discipline collaborating at high speeds with intense focus, all while maintaining mental bureaucracy and communication layers. And to make this happen, we're going to reimagine HR function because too many companies have lost sight of which HR was originally designed to do, reducing it to merely an administrative function. Yet at its core, HR is about people and culture and is one of the most strategic functions within a company. That's why we don't call it HR.”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the context emails, I hired a head of people in culture, like a different name for HR. Jonay and I have always believed that you must design the culture you want. Otherwise, it will be designed for you, and you might not like what emerges. The people and the culture they create at the heart of Airbnb. Simply put, culture is what creates the foundation for all future innovation. In the long run.”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's funny you ask this question because last week I sent a email to the entire company, to all six thousand people, and my email was about culture and why it's important and what it is. Can I read you a portion of it?”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Promise they don't live forever. And companies, great companies usually want to live longer than humans do. And so therefore you end up with the inevitable challenge that Disney and Steve Jobs had, which is succession planning. Actually, both of them died prematurely and didn't maybe Steve prepared more than Walt did. And that's the last step of the journey. But I think there's something really special about founders and founder-led companies. And I think that if you want the world to change, we need more entrepreneurs. We need more founders. If you want to empower more women, you should make more women entrepreneurs. If you want to lift up more economies around the world, you should lift up entrepreneurs in those economies. It's one of the greatest ways to create wealth, to change the world, and to just change the trajectory of society.”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is they have the permission? I can't tell another child what to do, but if they were my child, I probably could. I have the permission. And so you have a permission. I could rename, I could rebrand the company and a professional manager would probably come and say, I can't do that. But I know how he named it. I know how we branded it. So you know what you can change. And the third thing that a founder brings is you built it so you know how to rebuild it. You know the freezing temperature of a company. You know what temperature it melts. You know like what this looked like before it was tooled, where it came from the alloys, where they were sourced from. You're not just managing it, you're building it. And the problem is professional managers typically don't have any of those three, at least not in the abundance of founders, but the problem with founders, there's two problems. The first is most of them cannot scale to run a giant company. And even if they do, the last.”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Desire to run a giant company, I don't think everyone needs to do that, but a lot of people have the skill set to do something to start something. This is what you need to get up the mountain. And the problem is, imagine we got up the mountain and then somebody was dropped from a helicopter having never walked up the mountain and you tell them, okay, now you lead this group up the next mountain. Can you imagine how hard it would be for that person to drop from the sky? Or maybe they joined a third of the way up the mountain, but they weren't there at the very beginning. You see, a founder brings three things that a professional manager doesn't have. The first thing a founder has is they're the biological parent. So you can love something, but when you're the biological parent of something, like it came from you, it is you. There is a deep passion in love. The second thing a founder has.”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And can you beat the drum? And when people are tired and they say, I want to sleep, you say, yes, we're going to rest, but we got to go just 500 more steps. I know it's right over the edge. I think we can do a little bit better. And can you push people outside their comfort zone? Not enough to hate you, but enough to feel like a trainer. You're like three more reps and you don't want to do it. And then that very moment, they're not your friend. But at the end of workout, you're like, thank you for pushing me that hard. This is that kind of person. And can you take divergent ideas that no one's ever seen before and just continue to reformulate them? Could you store these ideas in your head, a thousand competing ideas and just reformulate them in your mind? It turns out this stuff is difficult, but you can work your way up there. Most people watching this have the skill set to be an entrepreneur. Not everyone has a skill set or the design.”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a reminder that the world doesn't just change, or at least it doesn't just transform towards our dreams, ideals, and ambitions that require certain types of people. We might call them entrepreneurs, inventors, all sorts of people in different domains that believe the world could be a little different than the one that they live in, that have the audacity to believe that they can do it, and they have the ability to convince other people, to go on that journey with them. But along that journey, everything's going to be different.”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And here's one of many rejection letters. Hi, Brian. Apologies for the delayed response. We've had a chance to discuss internally and unfortunately don't think that it's right for fill in the blank investment firm from an investment perspective. The potential market opportunity did not seem large enough for a required model. Now, I want you to just put in this perspective Airbnb handles nearly as much money as the entire GDP of the country of Croatia today. One in about every fifteen hundred dollars spent in the world, about $1 spent on Airbnb. That's a pretty large market. And our business is pretty much the same idea as the idea that we propose that person who set our market opportunity wasn't large enough. So there's probably a myriad of lessons in that aren't there. And I think that.”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is from August 1st, 2008. By the way, so let me give the context this email. So Joanate and I were trying to raise money for everyone trying to raise money. I want you to know that Airbnb was trying to raise $150,000 at a one point five million dollar, I think, post money valuation.”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Business and not for the sake of the creative people, for the sake of the businesses, for the sake of the world we live in. And don't we want to live in a world that's more interesting, then more exciting? We need to bring the creativity, the artist and scientists come together to bring. And it's that marriage of artists and scientists and operators all coming together that I think can design a significantly better world than the alone we have in now. We have all the technology we need to design a better world. We believe it or not have all the money we need. We can say we need more money, but actually we can be more efficient and more productive of the resources we have. This is going to require creativity, though.”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Serve other people. So all these things start happening and you start appointing more and more analytical people. And then pretty soon you wake up and the only people on your board are only analytical people and the only value what can be measured and the only things you are measuring are measured on a short-term horizon. So the quality of your product, the brand, how happy people are, the vision, whether you're moving in the right direction, are you about to be disrupted in the latest technology? These things are all hard to measure. There's an old sighing by a Nobel Prize winner named Linus Pauling. He says, not everything that counts can be counted, not everything that can be counted counts. So we tend to have a bias towards short-term financial measurements. It doesn't mean they're unimportant, but if you only optimize for them, then you are going to be imperiled, and it's a pretty damn good guarantee that you're going to be irrelevant in the future. So I feel like there needs to be more heart and business, more creativity.”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They continue to have new ideas. And I think the difference between Airbnb and a lot of other large multinational corporations is you think of a company like a body. Most companies, it's like they're cut off at the head. They're disconnected from their heart. And they're kind of cut off and they're focused on the one more analytical side of their brain. I think what most companies need is more creativity and maybe a little more heart and soul. Most people at companies are loving, well meaning people. They just don't act that way. You know, like the HR and legal departments are mostly really good people, but the departments sometimes work where the groups overly defer to these groups. They're very risk averse. They round the edges off it. They cease to take risk. Not realizing the biggest risk is we don't change in a world that we know will change. But no one wants to be the one to make a change, to take a risk. The organization starts focusing on itself rather than why it exists.”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It always does, doesn't it? I think it's in our soul. To be creative, I think most entrepreneurs are creative. It's funny. Almost every business is conceived intuitively. Maybe sometimes people have a business plan and they have some like statistical insights and data, but most people start a company, they have no data. Like they have no customers, and even no customers, you probably have no data. And so everything is started with intuition, with insights and understanding. And then the problem is as you get more successful, you get more data. And as you get more data, you get more reliant on the data. And as you get more reliant on the data, you get more derivative. You get more iterative. And data is good. It's what we might call necessary but not sufficient. But why if something made you successful, would you abandon it? If you fall your intuition, if you follow your heart, if you had ideas, why would you cease to have them, the bigger you get? You don't just have to found a company, you have to continue to refound it to rebuild.”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“OEN has to build systems and you start developing complexities you can't deal with. So all you got to do is get to 100. Once you get to 100, now you get to 1,000. And what you do is when you get 1,000, you just keep going in orders of magnitude. And the job changes. But people get paralyzed because they think you have to make something big. And they're like, well, Apple wasn't like this or Google wasn't like this. Well, actually Apple started by selling these blue boxes in the back of like a trunk of a car. Google was this like research project that we're going to sell for like low millions of dollars and he didn't really know what they had. These things all start as unprestigious toys that seem hacked together and they're only made for you and your friends. That's almost always how it starts.”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I started realizing people who love something become your marketing department. And they'll tell other people. And if they tell other people, that grows by what we call word of mouth. So how do you get somebody to love something? I don't know how you get million people to like something at the same time when you're starting from nothing, but I do know how you could get one or two people to like something. You could meet with them. You can understand what their needs are. And you could design something so perfectly spoke just for them. And you could literally think of them as recruiting one person at a time. If you have a business idea, you don't need to get to a million. Before you get to a million, you need to get to a hundred thousand. Before you get to $100,000, you get to ten thousand. And before $10,000, you get to $1,000. So all you have to do and all roads lead to $100. Don't focus on the mountaintop. Focus on the first step. Don't focus on the million. Focus just on a hundred. And as you do that, you make the problem small and manageable.”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“While Joe Nate and I, or Joe and I at the time, thought of the big idea. We kept talking about the big idea, and Airbed and breakfast was just a way to keep solving our own problem paying rent before we came up the big idea. But when I joined Y Combinator, it's a very well-known startup incubator of sorts, the founder, Paul Graham, used to have a say, and it's the most important vice I ever got, and it's what you were saying. And it's counterintuitive. He said it's better to have a hundred people love you than a million people that just sort of like you. If you have a hundred people that love your service, they, when they love something, they'll tell everyone they know.”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I thought of a way to make a few bucks, turning her place into a designer's bed and breakfast, offering young designers who come into town a place to crash during the four-day weekend. This is september twenty second, two thousand seven. We thought we were just creating a way to create a bed and breakfast for the conference. Unfortunately, we didn't have any beds, but Joe had air beds. We pulled the air beds out of the closet and we called it airbed and breakfast dot com. Now I can assure you we did not think Airbed and Breakfast would be a company where three four million people a night would use to sleep in. We did not think I'd be doing podcasts and I'd be a giant public company. We thought it was going to be a way for three people one weekend to stay in our apartment, sleep on some airbeds, pay us money. We'd have a cool weekend adventure. We'd go about our lives. And the funny thing is we thought it would pay the rent.”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everyone would dismiss it. It turns out that a lot of breakthrough ideas don't seem breakthrough at the time. They seem crazy or they seem unserious or they seem like hobbies. They seem something small. Airbnb, we did not design a way for a millions of people to stay in a homes. Airbnb started one weekend. It was october two thousand seven. A design conference has come to San Francisco. All the hotels are sold out. And we have this idea. We said, what if we just turned our house into a bed and breakfast for a design conference? We can make enough rent.”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right back to. And that's almost every company in the world, by the way. Almost every company in the world. Maybe enterprise companies are not that bad. People have this thing, people forget, take any giant company in the world, nothing large started large. They always started small. It started with a few people, one or a few people, and many times they were making something that looked like a toy. It looked like a hobby. I remember one of my first investors said, Brian, don't worry about people stealing your idea because if it's any good, ever one will dismiss it.”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When we could imagine something better, but we don't have a lot of people in positions of power that can take creative leaps of the imagination and really understand how to design something better that we're in right now. And I think creativity is kind of being systematically squashed from maybe corporate America. You know, Pablo Picasso said it took me four years to learn the paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to learn to paint like a child. I think that childhood curiosity is something that creative people are able to typically, I think, hold on to. And I think that's being a little bit lost. And what I loved about Walt Disney, and I also liked about Steve Jobs, was a sense they were truly creative people that had truly creative companies. They empower them and they had intuition. They didn't just paint the company by numbers. And that's the kind of company I've always tried to do. I've had this dream of creating one of the most creative places.”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So this book became very influential for me. And maybe the final thing I'll just say is like somebody once said numbers are the language of business. And I remember thinking to myself, no language is the language of business. Numbers is just the only way we have to measure them. that you ever notice there's 500 companies in the fortune 500. How many of them are creative people? I don't know how many, but like I might be one of the only ones that went to design school. They have boards of directors. Let's say there's 10 people per board. So that's like 5,000 board members. How many of them are creative people or designers or people from the humanities? Not many. How many CEOs have creative people reporting to them? Not many. We have this world now where we many people are dissatisfied with the way the world is. We are often given two bad options. We tend to be fighting zero sum.”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We designed the experience, the end to end experience, kind of like when I was in industrial design school and we were like designing a ventilator or some product and you're trying to put yourself in the shoes of the user”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then there was another chapter four years into Airbnb called Folly. Folly is the title of the chapter about Snow White, and they called it folly because they named it Disney's Folly. And the reason they named it Disney's Folly is because he bet the entire company on this feature length animated film, and everyone thought there was as terrible the company's going to out of business. And I thought I was reading that chapter and that's when a light bulb went off. He basically invented the storyboard for that movie because the movie was so long, right? No one had done a feature like anime film, they had to storyboard out the scenes. And I remember thinking to myself once I read that chapter, I said, what if we created a storyboard of the perfect vacation on Airbnb from the time you booked to the time you check in? And what if we literally design the end-to-end journey? You might call this service design. And this became a guiding light to how we design our service. We didn't just design the screen, the apps, the emails.”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Walt says, come to California, it's going to be good for you. And Roy, they were literally brothers. And I always thought of Joe, my co-founder, as like brothers, if we were like non-blood related brothers. But, you know, when you're a co-founder, you're almost like brothers. And him going to LA in the 20, I think it was the 20s, was like me going to San Francisco in 2007. The gears of the world felt like they were turning there in some really important way. So this book I read right before I started Airbnb. I'm living in Los Angeles. I read this biography and I thought to myself, I don't have to work for someone like Walt Disney. I can try to become something like that, even if I don't get to that level. I can do something much smaller, but I can do something like this.”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, the biography about the man Walt Disney, and there's two entrepreneurs that I've always looked up to more than any others, and those are Walt Disney and Steve Jobs, partly because they built companies that have lived beyond them. But more importantly, they were creative people that were basically running tech companies. I mean, Apple was clearly a tech company Disney was at the time very much like a technological marvel. The first chapter that really affected me was this chapter. I think it's go-getter. It describes the period of time where he moves from Kansas City to Los Angeles, and in his early twenties, he moves to Los Angeles, he convinces his brother”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yo Gaber, I've read this book twice Yes, I've read this book twice. This book. Okay, so this book had a big effect on me. There's two chapters that really affected me. So, this is the Neo Gabler book. It's the definitive biography, and it's pretty extensive. It's like over 600 pages. You can see it.”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The people we didn't spend time with, the people we loved that we didn't tell, or the people we could have met and didn't.”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I never thought in my lifetime I would be able to experience what I have experienced right now up to this point. The amount of people I get to meet, the amount of work I get to do, I get to work, come to work every day to obsess with some of the most creative people in the world. And, you know, most people, they don't get to be surrounded with the people they choose. When you're a CEO, you get to pick the people you're surrounded with. There's something really special. And I've gotten to select some of the most creative, kind, compassionate, intensely driven people in the world. Making some things that I'm so proud of that have affect millions of people's lives. But I tend to think we regret the things we didn't do. Not the things we did do. And I think we tend to regret.”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think my biggest regret would be The time I didn't spend with people I love. Making sure those people knew how I felt about them. And then I'm 42. I've created many great things. The one thing I haven't created that I've always wanted was probably a family. I just couldn't even explain exactly rationally why, but it's just, you know, like we all, I think humans have been many, many people have an urge to create a family, maybe to feel like they've created something and they can leave something behind. I will have left a company behind, but maybe I could leave more than that behind. So those would be the things that I would regret. Importantly I'd also like to say I feel like in other ways I've lived multiple lifetimes, and I would be filled with so much love and gratitude for what I have been able to experience”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Friendships and the people I loved and who loved me, and what I poured my heart and soul into. And I think that is an important way that I've thought about my life. And I made time for some of it, but I think the pressure of being successful made me so focused on trying to climb a mountain that maybe I didn't focus enough on who I was climbing with and who was along the way with me.”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The amazing life experiences you can have with other people. And I think life is about experiences, but the best experiences are the ones you share with other people. Like on Airbnb, eighty percent of our trips are with other travelers. Like 80% of people travel with other people. And I think as I think about my memories growing up, I rolled the school bus like 180 days a year or more than 10 years, that's thousands of days, and all those memories blend together. I don't really remember those. But I remember basically every vacation I've ever took. I remember the first time I went to this city, the first time I went to that city, and there burned in my mind. And I think that when I look back on my life, I'm going to remember all the experiences I went. the places I saw.”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The first thought is that you probably heard the saying people tend to overestimate what they can do in a year and what they can do in 10 years. That 10 years is a profoundly long period of time in some ways if you're disciplined and focused. And you can have a small idea, a small dream, a small goal, and you can build something vast. And I've only done Airbnb for 15 years. So you think about what 10 years is. You wouldn't have hired me as your intern 15 years ago. The other thing about 10 years, though, is think about.”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, that's a profound thought. You're right, we don't really live our lives. Imagining if we had a limited time left, how would we live? I like to, an exercise I've done is imagining at a young age, we had ten years left, because if I had one year left, I might. Be so dramatically different that I might not do something sustainable. I might like not Warrag and just only spend time and that's not sustainable. But I think we always go about life thinking we have many decades. And I think that creates a sense of procrastination. And if you say to yourself, you have this decade, what would you want to do? It gives you enough urgency, but also long enough to have routine to build towards something. And I think that one of the most important things people can do, two thoughts come to my mind.”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that metaphor of the hourglass with the sand. Slowly dripping every day of your life is a window and every day that window gets a little narrower and a little narrower and a little nearer.”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“doesn't know Brian before Airbnb so maybe he doesn't know the real me that that me but he does know a different real me that my child of friends can't know because my high school and college friends can't possibly know what it's like for me to go through I'm going through and I can tell to them and they can have compassion but they can't possibly know what I'm talking about but Daniel can and Daniel can know what it's like when an executive leaves you where everyone's kind of the walls are caving in and you feel like you're not scaling and you're like drowning in this you know there's all these things I can describe we have a shared experience so i think those two groups are really important your roots and your friends from the past and your friends from your present day shared experiences and there was a period of time where i didn't have either of those really”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Close friends. And really, the only other thing I'd say is I'm now friends with a bunch of other entrepreneurs, including you said you had Daniel Eck on the show. And I would call him a friend and I spend time with him and others. So in other words, I would keep my old friends and I would be friends of people in my situation.”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't love us, and the fact is, we have all these people, but we're not reaching out to them. And they're also not reaching out to us. And everyone's waiting for someone else to take some initiative. And it seems crazy because we're just a text message away from our entire life. And yet, what do we do? We open the phone and instead of texting people or FaceTiming or like seeing them, what do we do open social media? So opening social media is like going to a dinner party, except you don't go inside. You're looking in the window. And, you know, like, it's great if it's a way station to meet people, but if you look, just look in the window and that's your social life, then you're going to feel really sad. So knock on the door and walk in and start talking to people, start hanging out. So this is, that would be the thing I would do. I wouldn't have been totally isolated. I would have stayed connected to my family, my”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I remember I was single, got out of a relationship, and I kind of felt lonely. And I remember telling him I think I need to be in another relationship. And he said, I don't think you yet need to be in a relationship. I think what you need are friends. And I thought to myself, but I have friends. What do you mean? But then he explained that like he had these 15 people in his life, many of them before, you know, mostly before he was president. And he like they were totally connected. And I realized I had all these people in my life, but if I called them first they, oh, what's going on? Like, what's new with you? And I have to get them all up to speed in my life. And if you have someone in your life where if you were to call them or text them, you have to get them up to speed, then you're not connected. People you're connected to are already up to speed. And I actually think that most of us being alone or being lonely is an illusion or maybe the illusion is that people.”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“See how you end up in this drift and drift and drift, I would have stayed connected to my high school friends. I would have high school friends. I now do an annual trip with. Some of them I didn't talk to for almost 20 years. I graduate. I didn't keep in touch with them. It's one of the great regrets I have. I had college friends that I lived with after Risdy, but every year as I went on my Airbnb journey, we talked less and less and less, and I drifted more and more away. And I could go down the list. I actually had this thing. I talked about it once before. But it was 2021. It was like Mayor June. And I. I had developed a at this point long relationship with President Obama. He had left office and he became a bit of a mentor to me and he mentored me on like leadership and business. At one point he took a personal interest in me.”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would start my family, especially my sister. I'm now really close to her, but through a bunch of the Airbnb journey, we would go weeks without talking. No other reason, I was just busy. And like, well, like, and there's this paradox that when you go on this crazy journey like I do, a lot of people don't reach out to you because they're afraid to reach out to you because they think they're bothering you. But you're so busy that you're dealing with inbound from the business that if no one, like you're just reacting all the time. So if your friends don't reach out to you, you're not going to reach out to them because you're just reacting to everything. And they're like, well, they're so busy if they want to talk to me, they reach out to me.”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's going to fill something inside of you, whatever is inside of you that you're missing, you need to probably fill through introspection. Like we might call it solitude, connection to self, or maybe, you know, like many of us grow up, we're kind of lonely. And so we wanted to be loved. So we decided to pursue these things so that people would be connected to us. But then by working, we're just lonely or more and more isolated. In fact, maybe the thing we had to do the entire time was reach out and bring people in. Maybe that was the thing we were missing. And that was probably what happened with me.”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It could feel like you're alone. You don't have as much resiliency. And so I You've got to almost fight. The world as you go on this journey is going to isolate you into a bubble that's going to completely detach you from reality. And if you're not careful, you can lose a sense of yourself. And you have to fight every single day like a person in an ocean, without a life jacket, just staying above water. And that staying above water is fighting the temptations of isolation so that you can remain connected. And if you're connected, you're going to be okay. But it's not going to just happen. Most people don't have to think about breathing. You just breathe. You have to think about staying connected. The other thing is you can't try to be successful to think it's going to solve something inside of you. Being successful other than maybe a sense of purpose. It turns out having a purpose and serving others and being focused on something, that's generally good for you. Beyond that, no amount of status.”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Less your friends, and that gets more and more isolating. And then people start looking at you a little bit differently. And it feels really good, but you can just find yourself working more and more to live up to the responsibility. And you feel like you're never working enough and you're working 60 hours a week, then 80 hours a week and 100 hours a week. And you just almost feel guilty any second you're alive and you're not working. And I, again, huge proport in pouring your life into something, but I think that what I thought was every incremental hour would make me more productive, but what turns out that we need to step away from work. We need to be happy. We need to have some health relationships to probably make good decisions. I don't leaders are probably not the best leaders. And when you're lonely, you're probably less empathetic. Your sense of vigilance is up. You don't necessarily see problems really clearly. You don't have people to bounce ideas off of. When there's a challenge,”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I started this journey is two things. The first thing is how lonely it would be. And it doesn't have to be, but it's almost like by default. You see, when I started Airbnb, I started with my friends, two of my friends. Then we hired people. And those people are employees, but they were also kind of our friends. And this notion that I was the boss and there was a power imbalance, well, we're all like broke working at a three-bedroom apartment. So what does it mean that I'm CEO? Like, that's kind of just a title. And so I felt really connected. We weren't a family, but we were more like a family than a business if it was one or the other. And then as we got successful, then it became more of a corporation. There was a chain of command. There were more boundaries, you know, like you started hiring people that had families and people families don't hang out with you on nights and weekends. And then like, you know, it's just like it becomes more formal. And that's the moment that your employees become your employees.”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me first say that it was mostly worth it. And so I want to be clear about that I wouldn't have done it dramatically different. I am, let me just say, I am. The journey of Airbnb, of being able to build Airbnb has been unbelievable. It's been the great joy of my life time. And if people could experience what I had experienced, I would say to them it would be the most unbelievable ride of a lifetime, and I wouldn't want to change a ton because it's been amazing. But if they're about somebody's listening and they're about to go on this journey, I would forewarn them about some things that no one told me and no one told me that they”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“relationships. And I think that a lot of people take the last one for granted, those relationships. And that's kind of probably been my journey.”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No amount of additional status or money or anything's going to make me feel better because this amount hasn't actually changed how I feel. It turns out that like when you go on a rocket ship, you initially, the success and the status and everything makes you initially probably happier because it's new. There's a novelty and it's distracting. And at some point you adapt to it. And the moment of adaptation is the moment you probably go back to reverting to the way you felt before all of it. You're not worse, but you're particularly not better. Life is so much more than just climbing a ladder and getting the top and realizing you're not much higher than you ever were before. That the world is you had everything inside of yourself mostly to be happy before the journey started and probably what you needed most is purpose. You have that health.”
2023-10-09 · The Diary of a CEO · Airbnb CEO: “IT WAS SO DARK WE NEARLY DIED!”. I Was Lonely, Deeply Sad & Wanted To Be Loved! [INSPIRING!] Brian Chesky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT