AI First Designer

AI First Designer

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AI First Designer
Why Airbnb is design-led (and how its genius)

Why Airbnb is design-led (and how its genius)

Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb shares 10 lessons of designing a global company.

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Felix Lee
Jun 27, 2023
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Why Airbnb is design-led (and how its genius)
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👋 Hello! Welcome to this week’s ADPList Newsletter, a weekly advice column. Each Tuesday, we tackle design, building products, and accelerating careers. We’re looking for sponsors. If you’re interested to support our newsletter to advertise, let’s chat here.


Hi fellow readers!

First, I want to address the elephant in the room 🐘 — 54%~ of you gave me a good FOMO for missing out on #Config2023; I hope you enjoyed yourselves in person or virtually. Where was I? Well, I was serving in the army in Singapore (an annual exercise training). A different type of fun for a founder/designer if you ask me.

This week, I want to talk about Brian Chesky. He’s the Co-Founder, and CEO of Airbnb; he also is a designer, who graduated from RISD. One thing that still surprises me is that Brian is the only Designer-CEO in the entire Fortune 500 Companies CEO.

“Why does design need to be in board room when it can occassionally run the board room?” — Brian Chesky.

Brian Chesky spoke at Config 2023 on what it means to be a design-led company. In 2008, when Airbnb was founded, it was crazy to see designers being founders. Today, Airbnb is breaking the home-sharing industry by designing trust for 150 Million strangers.

How Airbnb is led by design (and why its genius) — Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb

Lesson 1: The Nerve to be Design-Led.

“Design, in some ways, is fragile. Because companies are organized around the scientific method, and the creative process is something that requires nerve. And over the years, I started losing my nerve.

I brought in a lot of different people from a lot of different companies and they brought their way of working to us. […] We had 10 different divisions, they had 10 different subdivisions, we were very much run by product managers, we had a plethora of A/B experiments, and the thing I started noticing is the more people we added, the more projects we pursued, the less our app changed and the more the costs went up.”

Lesson 2: Learning from how Apple is run.

“I had forgotten about the magic of the design renaissance that Steve Jobs had [at Apple]. And [Jony Ive and Hiroki Asai] described this company to me and the way of running a company with design at the center. It was a totally different way of running a company than everything I was taught.

Everything I was taught about how you run a company was the opposite of what Steve Jobs and Jony Ive and Hiroki Asai did at Apple. And now I have this idea—there’s maybe a better way to run a company. […] I realized that, for 10 years, I was apologizing for how I wanted to run the company.

Because how I really wanted to run the company was as a designer, but I just didn’t have the nerve.”

Lesson 3: Get your core service right.

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