Brian Chesky
26 statements across 12 episodes · 11 bullish · 3 bearish · 9 people on the record · first statement Aug 14, 2022 by Shishir Mehrotra · said 156 times in 41 episodes since 2022 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Brian Chesky's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Lenny Rachitsky (92), Chip Conley (15), Jessica Livingston (7), Mike Maples, Jr. (5), Jason Shah (5), Vlad Loktev (4), Shishir Mehrotra (4), Howie Liu (4)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2025 73 mentions in 11 episodes 7 per episode
- Brian Chesky's secret mentor who scaled Airbnb (after dying 9 times & building a hotel empire)
- $46B of hard truths: Why founders fail and why you need to run toward fear | Ben Horowitz (a16z)
- How we restructured Airtable's entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO)
- Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman
- How Revolut trains world-class PMs: The “Local CEO” model, raw intellect & building wow products
- Inside monday.com’s transformation: Radical transparency, impact over output, & the path to $1B ARR
- How to win in the AI era: Ship weekly, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and more
- “I deliberately understaff every project” | Leadership lessons from Rippling’s $16B journey
- 3 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 25 mentions in 7 episodes 4 per episode
- The social radar: Y Combinator’s secret weapon | Jessica Livingston (co-founder of YC, author)
- Pattern Breakers: How to find a breakthrough startup idea | Mike Maples, Jr. (Partner at Floodgate)
- Embracing chaos, inquiry over advocacy, poking the bear, and “impact, impact, impact” | Vlad Loktev
- Breaking the rules of growth: Why Shopify bans KPIs, optimizes for churn, and prioritizes intuition
- Dylan Field live at Figma's Config: Intuition, simplicity, and the future of design
- How a great founder becomes a great CEO | Jonathan Lowenhar (co-founder of Enjoy The Work)
- The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”)
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2023 42 mentions in 18 episodes 2 per episode
- Jason Fried challenges your thinking on fundraising, goals, growth, and more
- Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life
- Building minimum lovable products, stories from WeWork & Airbnb, and thriving as a PM | Jiaona Zhang
- Building beautiful products with Stripe’s Head of Design | Katie Dill (Stripe, Airbnb, Lyft)
- The ultimate guide to A/B testing | Ronny Kohavi (Airbnb, Microsoft, Amazon)
- The 10 traits of great PMs, AI, and Slack’s approach to product | Noah Weiss (Slack, Google)
- The science of product, big bets, and how AI is impacting the future of music | Gustav Söderström
- Billion dollar failures, and billion dollar success | Tom Conrad (Quibi, Pandora, Pets.com, Zero)
- 10 more episodes that year, every mention in 2023 →
Everything said about Brian Chesky, oldest first
Aug 14, 2022 positive
Mehrotra: Brian Chesky prioritizes to-do lists by maximal leverage, not urgency
“Brian also has another one that's in the book. That's about how to rank your to-do list by finding leverage. That's a really fun one as well. And like don't rank your to-do list, but a lot of people do like importance versus urgency or so on. And I guess he so…”
Sep 18, 2022 positive
Feb 9, 2023 neutral
Jun 11, 2023 neutral
Rachitsky: Airbnb renamed its product management function to product marketing
“And I don't know if you know this, but actually at Airbnb,
The product management function has been renamed to product marketing.
So all the product managers are product marketers because Brian is so big on, you're not just building product, your job is also…”
Jul 27, 2023 neutral
Airbnb's search relevance team launched nothing without an A/B test
“One is in my team in search relevance, everything was A-B tested. So while Brian can focus on some of the design aspects, the people who are actually doing, you know, the neural networks and the search, Everything was AB tested to help. So nothing was launchin…”
Oct 5, 2023 positive
Rachitsky: Chesky dedicated a year and homepage takeover to launch Trips
“Brian basically focused on that full time for a while, for like a year. That's the thing he was focused on. We're going to make this thing work. And I'm going to PM this thing and make it work and make it awesome. And when they launched, the easy thing to do w…”
Oct 15, 2023 positive
Nov 12, 2023 positive
Chesky: Company speed is governed by decisiveness, not work hours
“The pace of the team is one of the most important things you can do, and that pace is sometimes governed not by how hard people work, but how decisive they are. If you want to improve the speed of a company, then make faster decisions. And that fast decisions …”
Nov 12, 2023
Chesky: Companies should allocate 80% to big leaps, 20% to optimization
“Think of conversion and growth optimization as like running a football down a field and think of these big, like leaps as passive. You should probably be doing 80% passes, 20% running the ball down the field, and a lot of companies, they do 80% running down th…”
Nov 12, 2023 positive
Chesky: Industrial design training was essential to building Airbnb
“I don't think I could have ever done what I did if I wasn't an industrial designer. I think industrial designer is different than a graphic designer, because an industrial designer, you have to actually understand, you know, you have to work with engineering i…”
Nov 12, 2023
Chesky: Founders fail by letting inboxes set agendas instead of strategy
“A lot of founders spend their time based on reacting. So people will email them, and they'll wake up, and they'll respond to emails, and suddenly their email sets the agenda. People ask for meetings, and suddenly the meetings they take are based on the people …”
Nov 12, 2023
Chesky: Design should report to the founder, not under product management
“I would make sure that you have engineering and design ideally report to the founder product-led person. I would not have design under product unless you have an extremely good reason the product person kind of is a designer.”
Nov 12, 2023
Chesky: Micromanaging operational details upfront creates long-term executive time
“If you decide to be in the details and get very, very hands on, like I did, it might be a lot more work for about one to two years. And so for one to two years, it was way more work than the old way. But once we turned the corner, suddenly everyone started row…”
Nov 12, 2023
Chesky: Founders 1-2 years ahead give more useful early-stage advice
“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…”
Nov 12, 2023 positive
Chesky: Forcing 10x scale unlocks problem solving via first-principles thinking
“One of the best ways to get unstuck from a problem is to imagine a 10 x scale, or 10 x better, or 10 x faster, where you can't do the current process to do it. You have to think differently about the problem. And to think differently about the problem means yo…”
Nov 12, 2023 negative
Chesky: Companies should have no pure people managers lacking domain expertise
“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…”
Jun 27, 2024 negative
Jul 7, 2024
Sep 1, 2024 positive
Sep 1, 2024 positive
10x goals are valuable for testing creative extremes, not hitting targets
“The reality is it's not about hitting the goal. It's about thinking how to hit the goal and going through the journey of that creative journey of like, what does the world need to look like for this to be true? This like crazy goal to be true. Like, how should…”
Sep 1, 2024 positive
Airbnb intentionally slowed product velocity to fix declining quality
“The quality like of what we were releasing kind of suffered because we were just push, push, push, ship, ship, and people were shipping across the board. And I did feel as a leader, like I wasn't proud of some of the things we were shipping. And so I appreciat…”
Aug 3, 2025 positive
Aug 3, 2025 negative
Product reviews with Brian Chesky kept Airbnb employees up all night
“For the product team, my God, I mean, a product meeting with Brian would keep people up the night before not just because they were actually working all night long to get prepared, but also the, they knew they would work all night long because they probably wo…”
Aug 3, 2025 neutral
Aug 3, 2025
Align on goals upfront to anchor meetings with intense founders like Chesky
“You start with that because that actually helps to make sure there's alignment. And frankly, if there's not alignment, You might as well not have the meeting. Let's spend the rest of this meeting talking about alignment. That's what I would do because that's s…”
Aug 3, 2025 neutral