Brian Chesky

“Brian now operates in an extremely hands-on way, where he is involved in every single project in the company, and the company only does as much as Brian can personally focus on.”

“And Brian was sharing on the episode that Airbnb lost 80% of its business during the pandemic.”

“So the way that Airbnb organizes its product function is there's basically three roles within product at Airbnb. There are product marketers, and these are senior product managers, and they're responsible for Marketing of the products that Airbnb has, as well …”

“Intuition isn't this arbitrary thing. It's not just gut. These 20 really smart, immersed people have millions of data points that have fed through their brains to inform their intuition. It's leaning on Kind of the human brain computer as a collective to make …”

“So what he ended up doing is he went through with his team and he storyboarded out all 150 screens from the Airbnb app. So Airbnb has 150 screens. They literally laid out all 150 screens. They also laid out all 72 user policies, which my understanding is there…”

“If you're looking to bring people in office, his view is there should be two reasons why you bring people in office. Otherwise you should be fine with remote. The two reasons to bring people in office are for trust building and collaboration, and that's it.”

“During the pandemic, Brian rethought the entire organization's design so things could move faster, so he could be closer to the product, and so the company would operate on one single product roadmap. And so what he did is he moved the company from being divis…”

“And last year he said the business did 3.5 billion dollars in free cash flow across 5300 employees.”

“I think that a lot of people are afraid to reach out to help because they think other people are busy. The biggest honor most people get in their lives or one of the biggest honor is when other people ask them for help. Because we all just want to feel useful.…”

“The problem with finding a negotiation between how you want to run a company, the people you want, Is that's a good way to make everyone miserable? Because what everyone really wants is clarity. What everyone really wants is to be able to row in the same direc…”

“And I think you don't need to reach out to people 10 years ahead of you. They can just be people a year ahead of you. In fact, an entrepreneur getting started, I might be less useful then than somebody two years ahead of them that knows, like, the latest distr…”

“I think that every leader should be an expert in what they're leading. There should be no people managers in the entire company. And when I say people managers, meaning your only responsibility is people, not the work or not the domain, because you can't manag…”

“I think that the CEO, unless they're not a product person, should think of themselves as a chief product officer, and they should be involved in the product.”

“And I think there's a difference between micromanagement, which is like telling people exactly what to do and being in the details. Being the details is what every responsible company's board does to the CEO. It doesn't mean the board is telling them what to d…”

“If you want to see what it looks like to recognize and also remove a poisonous org chart, I highly recommend you listen to the podcast interview between Lenny Rachitsky and Brian Chesky, who is the CEO of Airbnb, and he recently went through this exact exercis…”