Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on the gospel of Steve Jobs and what founder mode really means
The Airbnb cofounder discusses being ‘in the details’ and why traditional management is doing it wrong.
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The Airbnb cofounder discusses being ‘in the details’ and why traditional management is doing it wrong.
Today, I’m talking with Airbnb cofounder and CEO Brian Chesky, who is only the second person to be on Decoder three times — the other is Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. It’s rare company, and what made this one particularly good is that Brian and I were together in our New York studio for the first time; it’s pretty easy to hear how much looser and more fun the conversation was because we were in the same room.
Brian made a lot of waves earlier this year when he started talking about something called “founder mode” — or at least, when well-known investor Paul Graham wrote a blog post about Brian’s approach to running Airbnb that gave it that name. Founder mode has since become a little bit of a meme, and I was excited to have Brian back on to talk about it and what specifically he thinks it means.
One of the reasons I love talking to Brian is because he spends so much time specifically obsessing over company structure and decision-making — if you listened to his previous Decoder episodes, you already had a preview of founder mode because Brian radically restructured the company after the covid-19 pandemic to get away from its previous divisional structure and transition into a more functional organization that works from a single roadmap. That allows him to have input on many more decisions.
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