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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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.”