Brian Chesky

0:00Artists aren't just, and designers aren't just communicators. We can actually be change agents. We can actually build things. We can create things. We can run things. We can be in charge of things.

0:13From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they're thinking about and working on. On this episode, a conversation with Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky about art, design, entrepreneurship, and change. The world can be our canvas. Our canvas isn't necessarily 18 by 24 inches. It can be the whole world.

0:48Brian Chesky is someone who has reshaped the world through his imagination. As the co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, he helped transform a simple idea, sleeping in a stranger's room on an air mattress, into a global movement grounded in belonging, hospitality, and the hope that people can take care of one another. Trained as an industrial designer at the Rhode Island School of Design, Brian has brought an artist's curiosity to some of the thorniest questions about how we live, how we travel, and how we connect, and in doing so, has changed the possibilities for millions of people around the world.

1:30Brian Teske, welcome to Design Matters. Well, thank you for having me here. Brian, is it true that when you were seven years old, you asked Santa Claus to bring you poorly designed toys so you could redesign them? Yes, absolutely. What gave you the sense that that was possible, that Santa would actually do that for you? Well, I remember just as a kid, I don't know why I would get catalogs of toys or catalogs of sporting goods items or whatever. And I would just, I'd first draw them and trace them and And then I'd redraw them and I'd change them. And I would then want to like disassemble things.

2:08And so when the time came, I think when I was five, I got hockey equipment. When I was six, I think I got like a drawing easel. And then by seven, I was like, all right, like what am I going to design? What am I going to redesign? And I think that was kind of like where I got it. And it was really fun. Like I started – and it was even just things like that were popular. Like I remember like Game Boy and Game Gear came out and video games. kids love like we're obsessed with those so I was like redesigning consoles um Nike Airs or like um were just coming out and so I was really getting into footwear and sneaker design so it was just like things that were around me and I just kept imagining like I don't know and design kind of came kind of organically because I thought of it as art like drawing like copying something and so drawing from observation and I was drawing products and objects that was not the only thing I was doing and then pretty soon I was designing but I didn't know it was called design back then.

3:01Yeah, I didn't either. I actually thought that most design was just done by printers. I didn't know that it was a discipline. Yeah. Growing up, I don't know if I ever thought of myself as a designer until maybe I went to a school called the Rhode Island School Design. And then it kind of occurred to me, I guess what I do is design. But even then, when I applied, I applied as an artist. And I said I went to art school. I didn't say I went to design school, even though it was called the design school and it was half art, half design, actually mostly two-thirds designed probably by student matriculation so yeah it was like something i was like so fascinated growing up i mean i remember when i was like also seven i i went tost louis um because the first time was an airplane our family did a trip tost louis my mom was a social worker and she had a conference inst louis and my sister my dad and i went along and i just had this like peculiar thought to like want to redesign the city i just like was obsessed with the development of cities and how they were designed and organized.

3:56And so only years later did I realize that was not maybe a typical interest. You grew up in an upstate New York suburb wedged between Schenectady and the Mohawk River. And as you mentioned, your mom was a social worker, so was your dad. And much of their time was consumed with finding shelter and care for the community's neediest people. Back then, And how did you understand the kind of work they were doing? They always said that they were there in service to others, to people in need. My mom worked as a social worker in hospitals, first in a kind of general hospital and then in a women's hospital.

4:36Much of my childhood memories were my mom working in a women's hospital. And so, you know, why would a woman need a social worker at a hospital? Well, they were dealing with like loss of pregnancy, domestic violence, drug addictions, some combination of being on drugs and having children. It was mostly like a lot of challenges and despair and trying to help people through difficult periods. My dad worked for New York state government and he worked with people that had developmental disabilities. So he chose to work with, you know, developing programs for them. So my mom worked with women that were essentially victims or something, you know, quite tragic had happened to them.

5:15Hence they needed a social worker and my dad worked with people with disabilities. And I remember my dad always rooted for the underdog. My dad was obsessed with sports. If we went to a sports game, he would always root for the underdog. He hated the Yankees. Why? Why? I mean, I'm a Mets fan myself as a native New Yorker. Maybe because they always won. And we're from New York, but we were Boston Red Sox fans. And part of me thought it's because a lot of our family's from Boston, but we were always Boston fans. We were Patriots fans in the 90s and 80s when it was not like cool to be a Patriots fan and Boston Red Sox fans.

5:49Some of it had to do with I think he always like stuck up for the underdog. I think that was the way my parents were wired to help people in need that were overlooked by other people. And so that was kind of as hardwired in me. And it was pretty natural to do like toy drives. And like I remember my dad like really encouraged me to do a lot of that stuff. You mentioned ice hockey. Yeah. I know that that was one of your first big passions. And I read that after getting a set of gear for Christmas, which included pads, skates, a stick and a helmet. You insisted on sleeping, going to sleep with it all on.

6:24Were you afraid that somebody was going to come in the middle of the night and take it? Inexplicable. I don't know why I did that. I guess I was just so excited and I didn't want to take the equipment off. But if anyone knows anything about hockey equipment, it is extremely hot. It is like wearing like five bedspreads. spreads. And so I became very enthusiastic and obsessive about things, whether it was like, not just drawing, but like try to redesign something, not just wearing equipment, but like sleeping in it. So I probably just had a pretty obsessive kind of mind for these types of things.

6:53Well, you've described it as an intense imagination. Yes, I think that's a good way. It may be better than an intense imagination. And believed you could become anything at that time. And you also had a teacher in high school who saw something in you that you felt others didn't. and at that time recommended that you go to art school. What do you think he saw in you? So my mom, of course, social worker, I remember one time she told me in high school, she said I chose a job for the love and didn't make a lot of money. She chooses a job that pays you a lot of money. And I remember telling my mom, I think I'm going to, in high school, I think I want to be an artist.

7:27And she goes, oh my God, you found the one job that's going to pay you less than a social worker. I transferred high schools. And late in the 11th grade, I got this new art teacher and her name was Miss Williams. I think she saw like a real talent in me. And I just hadn't shown my art a lot to many people. And, you know, growing up where I went up, there was a big emphasis on sports. And, you know, when you're a kid, you want to fit in. And art wasn't a way to fit in. And it wasn't what the cool kids did. The cool kids played sports and the cool kids were great athletes. And so like socially, I wanted to be an athlete.

7:57But like in my soul, in my heart, I was absolutely interested in art. That's what I actually chose to do in my free time. And it definitely like was cool that you could draw. But it was great to get validation because Miss Williams actually, unbeknownst to me, told my mom, she says, I think he's going to become a famous artist. Of course, I didn't become a famous artist. But just saying that alone, I think, addressed her fear that this was going to be an unviable path for me and that actually I was good at this, regardless of how good I was. I was clearly good at it. I was passionate in it. Someone believed in me and that maybe I could actually make money in it.

8:33So I think it alleviated some current concerns from my parents. it kind of instilled in them this idea that I probably have some talent to do this, probably the gift. And she really opened my eyes and really encouraged me. And if you tell somebody they're really great at something, you want to reinforce that and become even better. And then I eventually got another teacher and I entered my artwork in a national competition. There were a series of winners. I was one of the winners. I got my work displayed in the US Capitol in the Rotunda Gallery. And I was like 16 or 17 years old. At this point, I became very clear, Like this could actually be a pursuit of my life.

9:08I remember having this like crazy thought. I could just go to design school and art school and cut out all this stuff that I wasn't really interested in and just focus on the subject that I was really good at, really interested in. And then here's the big thought. I can choose to be happy the rest of my life. That was a profound thought. Especially at that age. At 16, you can say, I can just decide to be happy. It's like almost like a decision. You decide to be happy. And the way you decide to be happy is, well, what makes you happy? Just decide to do that and not worry about can you make money doing that.

9:40Like just have faith you'll figure that out. Despite all of that, I understand your dad had some anxiety about you being an artist and worried that if that was the path you ultimately took, you would eventually move back home and live in their basement. And I read that you felt that that was not a totally unreasonable fear. Were you insecure about your creative abilities at that time or have any concern about being more realistic? Or was it just the sense that I actually can do what I want to do to be happy? I definitely didn't have any insecurity about my creative abilities at that point because I was the artist in every school I went to.

10:22And I was always known as that person. So I presumed that I was really good, but I didn't know if that had any value to society. I remember thinking almost like I was born 100 years too late to do what I wanted to do. I loved Leonardo da Vinci. I loved Van Gogh. I loved Norman Rockwell. It occurred to me that they were from different eras. And if those artists had emerged today, would we value them the same way? And also the other thing I really noticed is part of the thing I gravitated to and ultimately why I chose design is I wanted to make things for people like my parents, art that would speak to them.

10:56and being here at Art Basel Miami, it's an incredible show. I can also tell you, my parents don't go to the show and they probably can't name one artist in the show. They can name, my dad can name like every musician from the 1950s and 60s. And like, they can probably name hundreds of musicians, most artists they can name are dead. And so there's like something interesting about that. Right. And so basically I realized I wanted to be able to create something for the masses. And, you know, I think at the time that was kind of called illustration if you're a painter and if fine art like you know could be reached by the masses but it was more difficult it certainly wasn't reaching people in my hometown where I grew up and so I think it was like a little bit of um an anxiety or this nervousness also possibly a rebellion like part of me was almost like who cares my high school year but quote was I'm sure I'll amount to nothing no yeah it was kind of a joke I mean I'm not sure I really thought I would amount to a lot.

11:54I don't know that time I cared. Like there was so much pressure on kids growing up, you know, upstate New York in the eighties and like, you know, everyone to be something. And it was almost seemed completely ridiculous. Like just live your life and pursue and decide to be happy. And maybe you'll be successful and maybe you won't be successful. And so I think at that period of my life, it was almost like I didn't have expectations, but I was also like, well, who cares? Who cares? I mean, one of the things I told, I went back to high school, to the high school I graduated from and gave my, like, gave the, like, a commencement address.

12:27And my first piece of advice to them was don't take career advice from your parents. I think there's many things you should listen to your parents about. Like, I think you should listen to your parents probably about relationships. Regardless of whether they have a good relationship or not, they probably have learned a lot. You probably should listen to your parents about how to be a good person, presuming they're a good person. They have a lot of wisdom. There's a lot of things. You should probably have a good relationship with your parents. Keep in touch with them. But you probably should not take any career advice from your parents.

12:53And I used to say this before AI. Now I think it's clear that that's a much longer conversation. So this was kind of the environment. I was rebellious, irreverent, not sure I could make money, and partly didn't know if I cared. You decided to go to the Rhode Island School of Design with your dad's blessing. As long as you promised him you'd get a job with health insurance. It seemed like health insurance was really important to him. And my mom, actually. Yeah. And I don't know if it was health insurance or that health insurance is a proxy for it being a real job because they knew a lot of artists that did not have steady income or they're artists slash waiters or artists slash something or something by day, artists by night.

13:35Were they really an artist or was – in other words, if you're an artist by night, it's not really your profession or your career. You're not making money off of it. Maybe you can be an artist. You can express yourself, but they just wanted to make sure that I was stable. I could have a family. I could be comfortable. I would have a better life than them. That was really important. They felt like they had a better life than their parents. They want to meet up a better life than them. There's a lot of anxiety, by the way. Like if you're good at math, no parent worries about if you're going to basically have a better life than them and have anxiety.

14:01If you're really good at like, I mean, I bet you, maybe you said that you study literature and maybe some parents get a little bit nervous at literature, but I bet you art school is a maybe music school, but probably more art school. if you want to pierce anxiety into like working class, middle class parents, tell them that your son is going to go to art school. Maybe now there's more success. One of the turning points though that really helped was I ended up getting a scholarship to go to RISD. And so number one, that reduced some of the financial burden. Number two, I think that was another testament to, okay, well, the best artists probably do make money.

14:34And so I think the combination of those two things really helped me. But I don't know. I was like irreverent. I was idealistic. and I kind of just had this general sense that the world I was growing up in was gonna be a different world than the world I was gonna be in as an adult. I had no idea the extent to which the world was going to change, everyone's job was gonna change, that I would go into tech or do any of this. But I basically realized I did not need to live someone else's life. I did not need to live by a formula. I did not need to accept dogma of how you live your life. And I think anyone listening, of course that's true now because with mass disruption of technology and AI, you can have a lot of anxiety again.

15:15And I think that my philosophy reminds me of an Albert Einstein quote, the best way to keep your balance on a bicycle is to keep moving. That you don't need to worry exactly where you're gonna go, but you just have to keep moving. And the way, which direction do you follow? A lot of people say follow your passion. I think that's pretty good. Maybe a better way to describe it is follow your curiosity. Because I think the curiosity comes before your passion. You have to be curious to discover things to then become passionate about them. And I was just insatiably curious about things. But it was always through a lens.

15:46And that lens was through essentially art, design, and imagination. While you were at RISD, you majored in industrial design. And once again, you had teachers who gave you the sense that you had the ability to design the kind of world you wanted to live in. How did you envision what that world would look like at that time? This is so funny. I want to first describe the environment of RISD because it was really important. I think the environment of RISD might have been more important than the instruction of RISD, the community. So when I grew up, obviously, I was born in 1981. I grew up in upstate New York around Albany in a small town called Niskayuna.

16:26And anyone that came of age in the 80s or 90s, I guess it came of the age of the 90s, but like mid, late 80s, early 90s. It was a prosperous era, kind of like a peak of like mass homogenous kind of youth pop culture, but kind of before the internet disrupted everything. I think it was really about fitting it. I think it is still today, but I think there's probably more celebration of individuality. But in the 80s, it was really about fitting in. And so when it's about fitting in, it's about conforming because you have to conform to something to fit into it. And of course, why is fitting and important?

17:02Because it's this basic human need to belong. And why do we have this basic human need to belong? Because belonging provides survival because we're tribal people. And if we didn't belong to a tribe, then we'd perish alone in the woods. And so it's a primordial feeling that you have to belong. And the belonging required conformity. And conformity meant I need to follow this kind of narrow path. And I need to like – and so you're kind of taught growing up kind of the world is the way it is. And you have to follow the rules. I mean a lot of school and a lot of growing up and I went to like – I'm not religious, but I went to like religious classes a little bit.

17:39And a lot of it was doctrine and like – which is basically like telling you to think like other people. there was you take a test and there's one right answer right like there's one right answer and you got the right answer there's one right answer in infinite wrong answers that's interesting right there couldn't possibly be infinite right answers almost no exam in school except for maybe creative writing and art where there's more than one right answer there's not a lot of creativity in that the school like literally the desk were in this like formation they were literally in rows kids had to learn exactly alike.

18:10I get to RISD and it was completely different because all the outcap, well, not the creative kids, maybe the slight misfits, they all came together. And suddenly all of us, when you take really creative, really ambitious people, kids that like didn't fit in, and now they suddenly fit together with each other. There is something about art school that reminds me of Silicon Valley, which is it makes you more ambitious. It makes you feel like you can be yourself because you're around other like-minded people. And suddenly I'm around people that think they can change things. And RISD instilled this idea, and it was about design.

18:51We went from drawing from observation to saying, well, how do you see it? How do you see it different than someone else? That there wasn't one right way to draw a bicycle. It was your interpretation. And in fact, it was celebrated to see it differently. And so I remember a teacher said to me, you're a designer, you can design the world you want to live in. He was basically saying you can change the world. You can design anything, you can redesign it, you don't need to conform. That was a profoundly different way to think about the world. That was completely antithetical to my upbringing. And I think that a lot of kids and a lot of people, maybe today it's changing, because the internet and like social media and like now emerging technology like AI, like that people have a sense they actually can change things.

19:34I think there is an upside of technology in that way, but that was a profound difference for me. And so that was completely profound to be able to know that like I could essentially change the world. And I think it's this great, like Steve Jobs quote, he said like everything around you is made by people before you that were no smarter than you and that you can change things. And once you realize that, It will never be the same. I read about one of your first assignments at RISD. One of your art professors asked you to draw a self-portrait. And I think he gave you like a week to do it. And then the next week, you all came back into the class with your self-portrait.

20:14And the next assignment was to draw 200. What did that teach you about improvisation and creativity? It was another reinforcement of the way that like, okay, so if you spend like a whole week on a drawing, like you're going to probably approach it in a kind of maybe conventional way or a certain way and probably the way you've always done it in a way. And you're trying to imagine, you know, you're also imagining you want to, like when you're in art school and you're with other artists, you like on the one hand, you want to do something that's individual. You want to have fun doing it. You want to make sure it's true and express yourself.

20:47but because there's a crit there's a sense of evaluation there is a little bit of a competitiveness with other students even you're not that competitive and there's a sense that like you need the teacher's approval because they're going to go through this crit and you're going to get like positive or negative feedback and they were pretty unvarnished in their feedback and there's critiques and so you do a drawing and it's almost to train you to expect to spend many hours so then you get an assignment that seems impossible it almost takes your breath away you're like how am I going to do that? That's an incredible lesson to learn.

21:20And he doesn't tell you how. And so you're like, well, how do I do this? And, you know, there's unending ways to like create 200 self portraits. And I think I ended up, you know, Xeroxing them and like manipulating every Xerox. And like, I don't know if that was a creative solution or not. You know, there was many ways you can like, you know, so it was really this idea that once again, you can think differently about a problem and you can make your mark and you can try to do something different. And actually, a lot of creativity comes through trying to solve a problem, a problem that seems impossible at first.

21:55I think it was actually John Maida who became president of RISD after I left, but he said, art is a question to the problem in the world and design is the answer. And I always gravitated probably more to the answers than the questions. And so even that art assignment felt like in a way a design challenge as much as an art challenge because I was trying to solve the problem of how can I do 200 distinct things. To me, that was as much a design problem as an art problem. You not only were making 200 distinct things and pursuing art and design, despite all of your artistic inclinations, you also wanted to pursue some sports.

22:31And you became the captain of the hockey team, which you said was one of the hardest marketing challenges in the world. How so? So because our kids aren't really involved, like very interested in sports. And it was really funny because the hockey team at RISD was like the biggest student club on campus. And we didn't have a lot of clubs. RISD was a very individualistic school. My sister went to Syracuse University. You know, kids paint their faces orange and blue and they all go to the football games and they go to the basketball games and their sororities and they go to parties together and they do all these things.

23:02It's very collegial. RISD, while it's a community, it's kind of individualistic. dualistic. Oftentimes kids are like on in studio on a Friday night, not partying. So there wasn't really a lot of ways for all the students to come together. The hockey games were one of those things, but the kids didn't come together for sports. And I, we had this vision that like, I mean, this goes back to like, maybe the way I was wired. I took over the team like late freshman year because the kids running the team had gone away to winter session. I took over a team with two other students, a freshman and then RA.

23:35We kind of like managed the team. At that moment, we realized we had the biggest marketing challenge in the world. How do we get art students to come to a hockey game, to a sports game? We realized they weren't interested in sports. They were interested in theatrics and being together. And so we kind of made the whole thing like this insane kind of entertainment carnival kind of atmosphere. And we just had fun. It was very irreverent. And it kind of spoke to what they were looking to do. By the way, that also taught me a lot about entrepreneurship. I would say that running the hockey team, like running any club where there's no curriculum, there's no teacher, there's no crit.

24:10It's completely self-directed. You create your own goals. If you choose not to do it, no one's going to ask anything of you. And it's completely unbounded. And you have to have a budget and you have to mobilize people. You have to have a vision. You have to point people in a certain direction. You got to convince people to do things for you. And at RISD, it was the ultimate lesson in convincing people because I had barely any money. So I had to convince people to do things for me for free, which is really good practice later on, because like, even if you pay people, you got to convince them to do things for you versus someone else.

24:41And so you're kind of as a tech leader. Now I'm in the job of convincing people like all day long. I learned so many lessons from RISD. And so I learned about marketing, I learned about like building a team and leadership. And a lot of the lessons I learned were outside of the classroom. It was also one other thing is the hockey team was one way I learned about entrepreneurship. The other was in 2003, I did a program at MIT. So RISD had this program at MIT. They have a business school called Sloan and they had a product development program inside of Sloan where essentially MIT grads who could get a dual degree in engineering and an MBA was like, at the time, it was called leaders for manufacturing.

25:24and they were doing this product development program and they were like electrical mechanical engineers and a whole bunch of them realized like they can't get very far without industrial designers. I had happened to go into industrial design as a field and that was also like we ended up having this product development studio where they told you to redesign something. We were a bit of it in groups. It was like eight MIT people and a designer from RISD. And so I was basically in a group and I got a, you had to get an everyday object and you had to redesign it. and the everyday object I got was a sugar canister.

25:54And I was like, oh my God. And I felt at the time, like I got the worst object to redesign. Like some people got like a sake machine or like a this or that. And I got a sugar canister. But I love the project because we re-imagined it. Starbucks at the time was blowing up and we imagined this like kind of sugar dispenser was this long, beautiful frosted glass tube that could dispense half a teaspoon of sugar, which I think is the size of a sugar packet. But I had to learn how to like mobilize a team, figure how much it'd manufacture and cost and help drive the team forward. And me and this kid, Matt, who's a mechanical engineer, essentially drove the program forward.

26:28Those two experiences, the hockey team at MIT, were seminal experiences that were pretty much outside the regular RISD curriculum. And I learned so much from them. You also were a student intern at Conair, the health and beauty appliances company. And I believe you designed something called the soap Well, yeah. So basically what happened is at RISD, you know, you have to pick a major freshman year. It's like crazy. And they had 18 majors. So 18 majors of art and design means that you're picking something very narrow. So I go to industrial design and I graduate from RISD and RISD, the department had, the new department had created a design firm inside RISD.

27:12It was basically a design internship program. And we had like a bunch of clients. I actually worked with two, Conair and then APC, which was like a surge protector company. But the Conair team was probably the more notable one. This project, by the way, was when I first started working with my co-founder, RISD, Joe Gebbia. We were paired together. And we basically, they wanted us to redesign basically a woman's hairdryer. I think they were looking for that. They were also looking, they want to do like a face steamer. And they were just looking for like students to give them some forms and shapes.

27:41Instead, we decided to try to redesign the company and the company strategy and the roadmap. I don't think that was appreciated. They were like, that wasn't the assignment. And they also, I think, felt it slightly undermining, insulting. But we had this great invention called the soap shirt where you put it on, you wash it off. I remember we pitched it to them. And there was a guy named Marty. He was a CMO. And at the end of the pitch, he looks at me and said, you drink too much coffee. And that was about all that he said. So I realized the soap shirt probably wasn't going to production. You were selected to be the commencement speaker at your graduation at RISD and in preparation.

28:14While as a student. While you were a student, yeah. In preparation, you studied every commencement speech you could find. And the night before the address. You've done a lot of research. Wow, this is incredible. In the night before the address, in an effort to make the experience less intimidating, I read that you stood at the podium and watched as the staff set up 6 ,000 chairs one by one. Did that help you feel less intimidated? What were you trying to learn in that moment? Wow. This is incredible. I totally forgot I even did that. But now I remember. I think it goes back to like, why did I sleep in hockey equipment?

28:54Why did I redesign toys like when other kids weren't? When I went into something, I went into something all the way. It was almost like becoming a method actor or something. I became the character. And so I didn't just do a commencement address. I studied commencement addresses and I decided I always wanted to have a first principle point of view. My first principle point of view of commencement addresses is, number one, unless you're a world leader or incredibly accomplished, you should probably be funny. Because ultimately, commencements are long. They're frankly kind of boring. And people want to laugh.

29:28And laughter is a great way to get feedback. If you are powerful and poignant, you don't know you're powerful and poignant because that's a quiet reaction. Laughter kind of brings energy. And I thought a student commencement address should be funny. I also thought that a lot of student addresses are trying to speak from a place of wisdom, but you're just a student. And so they're like, kids are talking about changing the world and what we're going to do in our generation. I always thought that was a little bit off-putting. So my commencement address was almost a satire. It was almost like me telling the students about wisdom.

30:02I literally remember saying, not only am I here to accept this Lifetime Achievement Award, and I kind of played that whole thing up. But the final thing I realized was that most commencement addresses were students speaking to other students. I didn't think that was the wrong audience. I thought the invited speaker should speak to students and that the students should speak to the parents. that was the insight that this was going to be a speech on behalf of the students to the parents it was going to be slightly satirical and it's going to be ridiculous and funny and it was going to be experienced no one would ever forget and i was going to go on stage i had a white tuxedo with black pants and i had them hemmed too high with white socks i walked out to billy jean like they were like why are we playing walkout music but they let me do it i ripped off my robe i did the moonwalk and then i like proceeded to do this like ridiculous speech so i was like i had this whole plan and i was like the night before i'm like what am i doing it reminded me actually of a scene from rocky you ever see the movie rocky of course do you remember the night before the fight rocky is like nervous and he like gets up and he goes down to the the arena the night before and he like says the shorts are the wrong color or whatever and he's just like really nervous that was what was doing for me i was like kind of feeling the environment i was a little bit nervous But I was also like preparing.

31:24I was getting ready. I was imagining the energy and I put myself there. And so I think that's what it was. Any place we can see this commencement speech or reading? Yeah, absolutely. If you Google Brian Chesky Fast Company RISD commencement, then it will absolutely be like the first link because like 12, 13 years ago, an author named Austin Carr like discovered it and somehow found it, put online. it's like a 12 minute speech and it's i don't know it's kind of looking back now i cannot believe i did that it was like i guess yeah i think it was 6 000 people in the audience because all the students and the parents or whatever the audience size was it was completely crazy that i did that it was probably the craziest thing i'd done up until that point in my life that was a moment i realized i wasn't just pretty good at art and design that i could actually like kind of speak to people and like perform.

32:18And most artists aren't performers. That was like a performance. And I realized at that point, like I was meant to be on some kind of stage. In keeping with your father's fears, after graduation, you actually did move back home. Was it hard to find a job at that point? It was hard to find a job initially because RISD prepared me for life, but it did not prepare me to get a job. And I resented RISD actually after I graduated and now I have a deep appreciation. But I remember like, for example, in industrial design, we had a pretty good industrial design program. The University of Cincinnati, for example, the kids had amazing portfolios.

32:59They were just like had much more technical backgrounds. They had learned the details of how to do like the isometric drawings in a way that maybe RISD hadn't been honed. They weren't doing hockey teams. They weren't at MIT. They weren't learning this. They weren't learning that. And I felt less prepared after I graduated. And I was like, all right, what do I do now? I don't really have the portfolio to get a job because I was doing all sorts of things that were interesting to me. So I went back home and I basically spent not quite a year, but the equivalent of a school year, probably the equivalent of two semesters jammed in one, like over the course of six months, It's just basically taking everything I learned and just drawing like 12 hours a day, 16 hours a day, just drawing and drawing and drawing industrial design, designing products, designing products, working on my portfolio.

33:48Over the course of that year, I got good enough to get a job. Years later, by the way, I will say that Riz did the right thing because the short-term pain of not having the skill after graduation, having to move back to my parents was worth it because they actually weirdly prepared me to be a CEO. And I don't know if the students at their schools were as prepared. You ended up getting a job with a small firm in Los Angeles called 3DID. Is that the way? Yeah. Your dad was happy as you did indeed get health insurance. Can you share a bit about the project you worked on called the Pure Fluff? Yeah.

34:22Oh, God. Yeah. So I finally graduated from RISD. I have this funny commencement address and I get a job with health insurance. in Marina Del Rey in Los Angeles, California. And it was this like model making shop turned industrial design studio that had like, I think eight or 10 people in it. And basically if IDEO or Frog Design were the big standard firms, they were like the McKinsey of design that got the big clients. Our firm got the little clients. And so instead of Procter & Gamble like contracting us for like a year long project that involved a lot of design research, which at a time seemed way more prestigious, We had small clients, lots of them, small budgets, really tight timelines.

35:05And you had to just churn out product after product after product. It turned out, by the way, that was incredibly great preparation because a lot of great – like that's how a startup is. And big companies spend like years doing research. And I think that actually is – you know, research can be really good for innovation. But like that's also like big company-itis. That's like kind of this problem I think is deeply problematic. So essentially, I'm at this design firm. We're designing products. And one day, my boss comes into work and he says, you're going to be on a reality TV show. I'm like, what?

35:37And he apparently was approached by producers of a show called American Inventor. American Inventor was a spinoff of American Idol. It was basically the same idea as American Idol, but for inventors. It was like a casting call. And people with the best ideas for inventions would get$50 ,000. and they would use that money to hire a design firm to build a prototype of their idea and the best prototype would get manufactured. Kind of a little bit like Shark Tank, but you were like even before you had a prototype. But also unlike Shark Tank, they were actually, it was like true reality TV where they were filming the behind the scenes of the making of it and they were looking for people like drama.

36:16And so I ended up getting paired with a magician who had an idea for a toilet seat. By the way, at the time, I thought this is like amazing. And looking back, I'm like, oh, wow, like I was designing toilet seats. But, you know, I really like gave the project everything. The magician was quite dramatic. Maybe that's why they chose him. There were a lot of tensions between the design firm and the magician. Although I think some of this was like played up for television, like like a SLA part and like slamming it down and almost breaking it like that we printed out the toilet seat. But we did everything.

36:52We did the packaging, the design, the form. He was insistent on calling the name Flush Pure, which sounded like an unseemly infomercial. And we wanted to make it like something a little bit more elegant. And he said the words Flush and Pure had to be in it. And so we compromised on Pure Flush because it sounded slightly better than Flush Pure. And I remember him saying, you flush, but then you apologize at the end with the Pure. And that was the way he pitched the name to me. And I just, I was like, okay, just call it pure flush. It's at least slightly less bad. Shortly thereafter, I think you were about 23 years old.

37:31You had a pivotal moment and you described it this way. I remember one day it was like I woke up. I remember having this vision. I was in a car and I could see the road disappearing in the horizon. I looked in the rear view mirror and it was the same road. That was my life. I had a weird feeling of mortality and realized this is my life. How did that make you feel? It made me feel like I felt growing up and I was trying to escape that feeling. I didn't know any entrepreneurs growing up. I didn't really know a lot of artists and designers growing up. And I went to RISD and I was told that you can design the world you want to live in.

38:15And I give a design firm and I'm not really designing the world I want to live in. I'm designing the pure flesh. And I remember I'm like 25 at this time. The cubicle next to me, the guy's like 35. The cubicle next to him is like 45. You almost like every 10 years, you move down one cubicle. And there's nothing wrong with that kind of life. It just wasn't me. The mortality, the sense of mortality is a weird feeling, the feeling like I'm going to do the same thing over and over again. I can see the rest of my life. And I didn't want to see the rest of my life. I wanted to discover the rest of my life.

38:46I didn't want it to be kind of preordained for me. And like a lot of people, they would call that security, consistency. A lot of people would gravitate to that. Maybe most people. I don't know. I think a lot of people like the idea of the road less traveled. I don't know if everyone wants to actually do that because the road less traveled is also, you know, you don't know if it's going to be raining. You don't know if you're going to find a place to sleep. Like it can be a little scary and you're going on this whim. So I just realized at that point, I need to take a chance. And I need to like, I'm at this design firm.

39:24I've learned what I can learn. But I remember like that magician, I'm designing his toilet seat. I'm designing all these products for other people. And I remember thinking, what's the difference between me and them? The difference was that they took the chance and I hadn't. That they took that car and they got off and the road less traveled. And I was staying on a road that looked like it was disappearing into the horizon. And that's when I had this moment in my life that changes my life. You see, I probably had two moments like that in my life. The first moment was when I was 16. And I said, I'm going to decide to be happy the rest of my life.

40:00I'm going to take the road less traveled. I'm not going to go to university. I'm not going to go Ivy League school. I'm going to go to design school. And I did it. And my life had changed. And nearly 10 years later, I'm 25, 20, 26. I find myself in the same place now. Somehow I'm happy, but I'm still kind of taking the road again more traveled. And I decide once again to get off that road. And so I do the thing that shocks my parents. Again, I decide to go to work and quit my job of health insurance without a plan. My boss is dumbfounded. Thought I was going to be there for a while. I'm living in a house in Los Angeles with three friends that I convinced to move across the country to live with me.

40:42and now I'm telling them I'm going to leave, not only leave my job, I'm leaving LA. They're like, where are you going? I said, I'm going to go to San Francisco. They said, why are you going to go to San Francisco? I said, because the gears in the world are turning there because that's where, you know, so when I said San Francisco, I also meant Silicon Valley, the whole vibe. YouTube, I just launched. I was obsessed with watching videos on YouTube and you know, the videos I watch most on YouTube were Steve Jobs videos. I didn't even know who he was really until you, I knew who Johnny Ive was. He was head of industrial designer at Apple at the time when I was at RISD.

41:18And I looked up to him and he was like my hero or one of my heroes because I was a designer and he was like the preeminent designer in his field. I didn't really know Steve Jobs was. I don't even think I, I heard his name vaguely. I didn't really know who he was. It wasn't clear that that was a path that like actually you could actually become an entrepreneur. So that was like a completely profoundly different idea for me. And I discovered him on like watching videos of his keynotes on YouTube. YouTube had just sold to Google for like a billion and a half dollars. Facebook had launched, had taken the world by storm.

41:52It was very clear that at times in history, there are certain places where something is happening that changes the world. If it was the 1400s, you would have want to been in Florence for the Renaissance. if it was like the 1920s, you might have wanted to be in Paris or Berlin as an artist. If you were a folk singer, you would have wanted to have been in Grand Village in the early 60s. And if you were in rock and roll, you would have been in San Francisco in the late 60s. And it was kind of like that with tech. That was where you wanted to be with tech, and tech was where it was happening. And it seemed that other than Apple and Steve Jobs and Johnny Ive, that Silicon Valley had not yet discovered design, hadn't really infiltrated.

42:34and it certainly hadn't infiltrated apps yet. Even though this beautiful iPhone had just launched, there were no beautiful designed apps for it. I remember when I was at Joe at RISD, there was this whole focus of how do you can get design in the boardroom? Get design in the boardroom. And design was becoming important. Target helped create a design renaissance. The Volkswagen bug reissue was like an iconic design. And most importantly, Apple's resurgence was like huge. And Joe and I had this provocative idea. why should design be in the boardroom when it can run the boardroom? And going back to running our clubs, MIT, I realized we can run our own company.

43:13We can start a tech company. No matter that we don't know a ton about tech. I mean, Joe and I had created websites growing up. So he knew a little bit about startups. And so Joe had moved to San Francisco. And he was for a year trying to convince me, come to San Francisco, come to San Francisco. Well, one day I decide to do that. So I quit my job. I pack everything in the back of old Honda Civic, and I drive up to San Francisco. Now, this is October 2007. I get to San Francisco, and Joe tells me the rent is$1 ,150. Now, I don't have enough money to pay my rent because I wasn't planning necessarily to quit my job.

43:48So I'm kind of living like paycheck to paycheck. And I have$1 ,000 at the bank. And so we have this basic problem. How are we going to pay our rent? And it turns out that that weekend, the Industrial Designer Society of America, IDSA, had a design conference come to San Francisco. And we went on the conference website. And I don't know. We were just perusing the website. And we get to, like, the page about how to get there and where to stay. And they recommended, like, four hotels. And in each of the hotels they recommended, they actually crossed out because they had an update. Sold out. Sold out.

44:19Sold out. Sold out. So it's very clear that, like, the hotels they were recommending were sold out. designers had no place to stay and that we had this really creative idea we said well what if we just turned our house into a bed and breakfast for the conference because they don't have places to stay and we can't pay our rent so actually seems like a really good solution it'd be fun we can meet some designers um get paid pay our rent so we build a website in three days and we're going to call it a designer bed and breakfast but we didn't have any beds luckily joe had three air beds so he pulled the air beds out of the closet we called it airbedandbreakfast.com.

44:53That's where the name Airbnb comes from. I never thought, by the way, I'd tell that story like thousands of times, but I did. I have now. And we built the website and we ended up having three people stay with us. I remember at this point, my mom said, so I guess you don't have that job of health insurance now, do you? I said, no, I'm an entrepreneur. And she said, what do you mean? I think you're unemployed. She goes, no, I'm an entrepreneur. And that's when I realized the difference between unemployed and entrepreneur where you're starting is mostly in your head. It's a mindset. But something remarkable happened that weekend.

45:23We made our rent. But more importantly, making our rent, we actually, like, it was an amazing experience. It was easy. It was fun. We became friends with these people, especially the first guest, Amal. We've kept in touch with, he's now an employee of Airbnb because, like, we ended up working with him. And at that point, we realized we're ordinary guys. I bet there's a lot of other ordinary people like us that want to make some extra money, meet some cool people. And I asked Joe, I said, who's the best engineer you know? He said, well, my old roommate Nate is, and the three of us got together and we said, what if you can build a website, you can book someone's home, the way you can book a hotel anywhere around the world.

45:59And that's what we set out to do. And obviously it worked out, but I didn't do it because I thought it would work. I did it because I said, I'm going to choose to be happy the rest of my life. That was almost like this guiding principle. And I said, happiness is doing what you love. and I'd rather do what I love and fail than succeed in being something that wasn't me. What did your first few bookings teach you about people's willingness to try something new? After the first weekend, we built a website and the first booking, I think we built it for South by Southwest 2008. We built a platform. We wanted to get like hundreds of people to stay and we only got two bookings and I was one of the two bookings.

46:44So it didn't really work right away. And we decided to keep working on it. Now, a lot of people, when something doesn't initially work, they pivot. They lose faith. We could have pivoted too. Years later, people ask like, why did you keep at it? And I said, if people could experience what I experienced that first weekend, this would be an idea that would change the world. We just had to convince people to try it and show them that it wasn't weird. What we noticed, eventually people started booking. Not many. It'd be like one a week, then one a day, then one hour and then one a minute. And that, you know, it's kind of exponential.

47:19But at point it would just be a few bookings a day. We realized that while most people in the world were not willing to try something new, there were a few that were. I remember when we first came up with the idea, I go to one of my mentors in Silicon Valley and I said, I can't figure out how to get, like build a service people want. Even my own sister doesn't want to use it. And he goes, well, don't worry. Your sister might not be an early adopter. And I'm like, interesting. She said, I bet you once the early adopters use it, she'll use it. People want to try something first. And there's early adopters, late adopters, and then there's laggards.

47:58And it turns out my sister wasn't an early adopter. She just wasn't the first. But there is somebody that's the first follower and the second follower and the third follower and the fourth follower. And the first person is the most courageous, typically. And they seek novelty or they may be desperate. or they need, like who knows, but they're going to try something. When you're building a network effect business like ours that requires social proof, that what you really have to do is find those courageous people or those people whom this speaks to. You don't need the entire world to use your product all at once.

48:27In fact, that'd be a disaster. You can't help all of them. You just need to get them one at a time and just know that you're building a business one person at a time. But it also taught me that people do inherently trust each other. They don't trust strangers. but if they know just a little bit about the person and if they believe that there's some basic protections, that they can actually trust one another with one of the most intimate possessions or home. And remember back then, a lot of them were staying in the same home together. And so you had to also trust that like you could live together with somebody that you didn't actually know.

49:00And so we realized the problem wasn't a home rental problem. It was a trust problem. And if we could design a system of trust that we could actually design a way for millions of people and maybe one day hundreds of millions or billions of people to live together. And that was what we did. In other words, we had such a good experience that week and we realized this is a way for millions of people to make extra money, meet cool people, have a local experience when they travel, but it's a design problem that they don't do it. We had to essentially design a system of trust to get strangers to live together, a user interface that make it easy to book a home of the Wake Book Hotel and the world.

49:40And then we had to do a lot of selling, a lot of marketing, a lot of storytelling to convince people this idea wasn't weird, that it was actually cool to put your home up, cool to stay in homes. If you could do those three things, you could build a business. And we did. We just never imagined how big it would get. As you were trying to scale, you said that of the 20 investors you emailed, only eight replied and most told you that it didn't fit their thesis or the market was too small. All said no, so all had an excuse. How did you metabolize that level of skepticism and rejection? I think I wavered between thinking they didn't get it and my confidence was shaken a little bit.

50:16We were like, maybe this isn't the most marketable idea. In hindsight, it all happened pretty quickly. We had the idea. We built two, three versions of the website. We got introductions to investors. They all said no. And the whole thing played out over the course of less than a year. But in Silicon Valley time, when you're 25, 26 years old, that seemed like a lifetime. Because there's a famous story of Mark Zuckerberg has this idea for Facebook. He launches it within two weeks. The entire Harvard campus is on it. And then within a year, he's funded by venture capitalists. And here we were, at around the same timeline, and we didn't really have a business.

50:52And all the investors said, no, what do you do when you need investment? And all the people that are likely to invest say no, and all of them say no. Almost none of them took a meeting. I'll give you an example of why they didn't like the idea. I remember I met with an investor and he said, I like everything about your company, but you and your idea. He said it like kind of brutally, but what he meant, I remember thinking to myself, like I went back to Joe and I said, I have good news. He likes everything else, but that's a problem. He said, basically, designers don't start companies as strangers won't live together.

51:27Those were not unreasonable conclusions. How many designers started big companies that were fundable? Almost none, at least in Silicon Valley. I mean, Steve Jobs was kind of a designer, but he wasn't officially a designer. People didn't see him as a designer. You know, Steve Jobs thought of more like a mythical figure, like God, not designer. So you couldn't be like him. There weren't a lot of models and that strangers were not staying together. It just also told me how uninformed some investors were. They can't be informed in everything. They thought the market for travel wasn't that big, some of them.

51:58It turns out the market for travel is four times the size of the advertising industry. The advertising industry is basically the entirety or the majority of Google and Meta's revenue. These are multi-trillion dollar companies, and they compete for an industry one-fourth the size of travel. So clearly it's a big market. So it taught me to get used to no. And one way you get used to no is you just get a lot of no's. The other way you get used to no is you tell yourself they're going to get it eventually. And so initially some demoralization. moralization. Initially, it's like, maybe this isn't the right idea.

52:30Initially, like, I don't know if this is going to work. But then you build your conference again. You get more people booking. You start reading reviews of people staying. You start realizing if people could experience what I experienced, this would be an idea that's spread on the world. And investors just want to see growth. And if this idea spreads, it will be funded. And so we kept at it. We kept at it. We kept at it. We kept improving the product. It was like we're in a tunnel and it's darkness. but eventually there'll be light at the end of the tunnel. But you don't know where that light is.

52:58You don't know if you're a minute away or an hour away. That was the scary thing is around that time, we were only three months from a breakthrough. But we didn't know if it was three years. We thought it would happen, but we didn't know we were just a few months away. In the meantime, you're living on your credit cards. Yes. You had so many credit cards that were maxed out. You filled binders with them. You described waking up with panic every morning and the cycle of convincing yourself every day that everything made sense. What did living in that level of uncertainty do to you emotionally? there's lightness and darkness to so many things in life i think i don't know if you can have light without darkness i'll start with the light and i'll go to the darkness and the light side it created this sense of resolve steelness this sense that like every day there was a little bit of anxiety but the course of the day was figuring out how to get through the next day and you had to like like a lot of people say like i'd want to start a company but i don't have an idea and And I tell them, actually starting companies having like 100 ,000 ideas.

54:10Because you need like 10 ideas a day and you need to be doing it for like thousands of thousands. And you need maybe 100 ideas a day. Little ideas. Like what do I do? Do I do this? Do that? They're tiny, tiny, tiny ideas. It's not just one idea. And so you just need to get through till tomorrow. And you don't need to know how to get to the top of the mountain. If we're trying to climb a mountain, you need to get to nighttime. You just need to make some progress tonight. And just know with enough nights you'll get there. One of your philosophies has been do everything by hand until it's painful.

54:40Yes. Is it still? I sometimes, I like to say, unfortunately, no, which is a funny way of saying it, right? I think I have the high class problem now if it's no longer painful. Meaning until a year or two ago, it felt like even after we went public, it felt like I had to work like day and night, often seven days a week. and if I stopped working, I always felt like it was like pushing a rock up a hill. And if you stopped pushing, it would just fall all the way down. And then you all the way down, you'd lose everything. And at some point, as you get to the top of the hill and you can almost like let go.

55:16And the thing has its own momentum. And at some point you can't stop if you tried. I couldn't stop Airbnb if I tried. Before, if I didn't hold it up, it would collapse. That's what it felt like. And that changed a few years ago. The company does not need me to run it day to day. It needs me to point it in the right direction and make sure we get to tomorrow. It doesn't need me for today at all. And I actually don't know most of what we do today. I've gotten out of those details and I'm able to do that. So at that point, it's not painful. At the same time, I've learned something about myself that I want it to be painful.

55:54It's not misery, not torture, but the pain of an artist trying to work through a problem or a designer. I like the challenge. I like the struggle. I like the creation. I like the learning. It was never about the outcome. The destination was always about the journey, you know, so to speak. For me, the doing it by hand is the act of designing, is the act of creating. And then once we figure out the product, I work with a team to say, okay, we've created this thing by hand. This is what the perfect experience looks like. Now, how do we industrialize it? I can help think through how to hire the people to industrialize it and some of the processes.

56:30And I find the design process kind of interesting. But I'm not really someone that likes to manage the machine. And so that tells me now's the time to find the new thing. For me, that would probably be around with Airbnb today. Like most people know Airbnb as homes. But we're going to a lot of new businesses, experiences, services, even hotels. We have a really unique spin on boutique and independent hotels, which are Airbnb, bed and breakfast. That's the origination, B &Bs. But then also AI. I'm so excited about the opportunity for AI. It feels like 2008 again when the App Store just came out, maybe like 1993, 94 with the internet, but much bigger actually, more profound.

57:15And so suddenly I feel like a beginner again. How do you see AI fitting into your business model? I think it's going to change our business less than most other tech companies. And the reason why is for now, most of AI is going to change what's on a screen. The way AI is happening in the world right now are two basic places, screens and robotics. That's basically what AI is at the moment. Eventually, it's going to be like significantly more penetrated across like everything we do. but everything in a screen is going to change but most of our needs are not on a screen. The homes you stay in aren't going to change much.

57:56The experiences you have aren't going to change. The services you have aren't going to change. So our business is not going to change as much as Instagram's will or Meta's will or Google's will or even Uber's will because Uber sits in the world of robotics. So I like that our business is so timeless. I remember telling, I think, Warren Buffett about it one time and he said, like, this idea makes sense to me because it could have existed before the internet. In fact, this idea could have existed before I was born. Didn't he wish that he had come up with the idea? He did wish he came up with the idea.

58:24Very good research. In Airbnb, the actual idea is the kind of idea that could have existed 100 years ago and will probably exist 100 years from now. I think that whether it's Airbnb or not or where people are using apps and devices or something different, I think the actual things they're doing are timeless. They're going to go on forever. And they've been doing it forever. The thing that we invented was a global system of trust to connect people. But like hospitality is in nearly every culture, like the ancient Greeks had this term Xenia, which was X-E-N-I-A, this idea of hosting people in your home.

58:59And so I think the first thing I'd say is AI is primarily going to change the digital world. It's going to take a long time to change the physical world. And it's most going to change robotics. And robotics is not going to be a major driver of travel for a long time, number one. Number two, it is going to change a lot though on the screen. I think it's going to change the way you find Airbnbs. It's going to change the way you search and discover destinations. I think it's going to allow us to start many more businesses much more quickly. I think in the future, you're not going to have a search box.

59:32You're going to have a conversation with the application. I don't think chatbots are the interface for the future. I think this will resonate with readers. But the reason why a traditional chatbot like Chatubiti or Gemini will not be the primary applications of the future or that form factor will not be the only or primary form factor is the same reason why Twitter X is not as popular as Instagram or TikTok. Because one is text-based, the other is photo and video-based. And I think that large language models are trained on text. Now, they also train photos and videos. But I think the future of AI is going to be much richer than text.

1:00:09It's going to be visual. It's going to be like multimodal. It's going to be very much interactive. And so what I'm trying to do with Airbnb is design what's the interface after a large language model chatbot. What is a significantly more visual interface that is generated? The interface, not just the content, is actually generated in real time, but it abides by rules. Hence, it's design, not random. And that's something I'm thinking about. And what if Airbnb could understand you and know you and learn about you better than any other brand in the world? Because at the end of the day, I think what Airbnb is really about is not a home rental website.

1:00:46Like that's the way we started. But we're going somewhere else. Where we're going is in the center, the sun of the solar system of Airbnb is not a home, it's the person. And what I really want to build is not a marketplace for short-term rentals. I want to build a community of people that are known and trusted, that they know and trust each other. The Airbnb knows them. We care about them. And that in this community, this trusted community, you can travel and live and get anything you need to travel and live anywhere. And that's really what I want to do. I think AI can help us get there, make it much more efficient.

1:01:17But again, I think the most of the things we're going to offer in the real world, and I don't think AI is going to change them that much. I think we're almost a bet on AI because I think AI is going to help our business because every listing is one of a kind. So AI can like essentially do all the hard work of like customer service when the 10 million homes are all different. It's really, really hard to adjudicate between two people in different countries, have a dispute over a rental or a listing. You get there, it's not exactly right. And AI can really help with a lot of that. At the same time, I think Airbnb is a bet on AI because in a world of AI is a world where people are going to be glued to the screens more and more.

1:01:51And I think they're going to potentially have more time freed up. I mean, the optimistic view of AI is that it's going to automate so many things. It's going to free us up and we're going to have a lot more wealth creation or we're going to have time to do something. What are we going to do? We're going to travel. We're going to have experience with real people in the real world. I think that AI is going to change so many jobs. I don't think it's going to change how we make wine. I think that there are certain things people don't want to change. And those things are these traditional ideas in the real world, the way people meet in the physical world.

1:02:18Some of these things are going to stay the same. Against all odds, given the time that it was in our recent history, December 2020, shortly after COVID, Airbnb went public with an expected valuation of$47 billion. By the market close, your market cap was over$86 billion. Five years later, it settled in at close to$80. Today, being the CEO of Airbnb includes overseeing a community of over 5 million hosts and 2 billion guests. You've become very wealthy in the process, but you have also signed the Giving Pledge and have committed your CEO equity compensation to philanthropy. What moved you toward that level of commitment?

1:03:08There were a couple of things. I remember when we started I said this will be huge one day thousands of people will do this I didn't think billions of people would do it I didn't think we'd make a ton of money I didn't think when I was like in my early 30s I'd become a billionaire I was one of the youngest self-made billionaires in the world it was very weird it was very surreal I didn't know what to do with the money for a long time I didn't even really think it was real I wasn't even sure it was real because it was paper stock that I couldn't sell and I'm like well what if the valuation goes down 99 % like during the dot-com bubble then I'm not really a billionaire it's just on paper so I didn't really act like I was one.

1:03:39I didn't really sink in. And then at some point, it was sort of becoming like, obvious this is going to be real. Even the down case scenario, like this is going to be real. I have a lot of money. And I noticed people were signing this thing called the Giving Pledge that Bill Gates really kind of got going with Warren Buffett. And I wasn't sure if I should sign it or not. It seemed like the right thing to do. It seemed like a really righteous, good movement. I remember calling up Bill Gates. He had his argument, but he actually had me talk to Warren Buffett, who I'd known a bit at this point. He was like this like grandpa figure to me.

1:04:09And I visited him twice in Omaha, Nebraska. And I admired him. And I remember when I visited Warren, he had this tiny little house that I think was worth like$400 ,000. This is a guy that's worth like$100 billion, something like that. And he had a tiny little office. And we got in his car. He drove to like a Marriott to eat at the restaurant where he had like a cheeseburger and like a Diet Coke, I think, or something like that. literally his lifestyle if you took away all of his money and gave him like a hundred thousand dollars like or whatever million dollars and took away like a hundred billion his lifestyle wouldn't have changed i don't know something about that i admired and i i made the analogy that like having too much money consuming too much money are like those musicians that write about music but then they start living this huge lifestyle and they no longer can write music for their fans because the fans can't relate to them so i thought to myself like on the one hand having a grandiose lifestyle.

1:05:01There's some things that are kind of fun about it, but it's got to be a part of you. You can't possibly spend all that money. And so I talked to Warren Buffett and he said, well, the whole purpose of the giving pledge is just this idea that you're going to give your wealth back to society, not to your children. And I thought to myself anyway, like if I'm going to be like multi-billionaire, what actual burden it would be to give all that money to children? I mean, some children are up for it and it's great, but Warren Buffett had this great quote. He said, I'm going to give my kids enough money to do anything, but not so much money to do nothing.

1:05:30And so I think this idea of like leaving everything to your children, it's a huge burden on them. No one consumes that kind of amount of money. No one needs that much money for their lifestyle. So I think that like having billions of dollars, the utility of it is capital allocation that I believe that I can do really good things to the world. And so I realized the way to do that was two things, either invest it in my own companies or give it back to society through philanthropy. And I noticed that philanthropy seemed to have a purpose and it was to do things that neither government nor capitalism was incentivized to do.

1:06:07So, for example, like if there's malnutrition in Africa, as an example, that's not a good business because if people are malnourished or they can't get clean drinking water, they're not going to pay you for that solution. You can't make money. And maybe the U.S. government, that's not their priority. They have other priorities. So philanthropy kind of fills in the cracks. I thought that was really a cool idea that maybe in a perfect society, there would be no need for philanthropy, but you fill in the cracks. And that like some people say, well, why don't you just pay higher taxes? And there's that argument too.

1:06:38But if anyone's worked in the government or like seen the city of San Francisco, for example, that we have one of the biggest operating budgets in the world, then we still don't know how to solve a lot of problems. There's very good ways to allocate capital. So that's where I kind of decided to join the giving pledge. I didn't know quite what to do with it because it's like, okay, now I want to join the giving pledge, but I don't want to give all my money away now because like, what if I like pledge all my money now? And I realized that in 10 years, I want to solve a problem. I already gave my money away.

1:07:05Also Warren Buffett joined the giving pledge, but he started giving his money later in life after he let it compound. So I said, I'm going to like join the giving pledge. I'm going to mostly not give too much money away early. I want the principle to compound, but later in life, I'm going to give away quite a lot of it to cause this I'm passionate about and try to help solve problems. Brian, I have one last question. What do you hope your work will make possible for the next generation of innovators? You go back to that investor who said, I like everything but you and your idea. Designers don't start companies and strangers don't trust each other.

1:07:43the first thing i hope is that a generation of designers and creative people realize that they can rise up and they can change the world they don't just need to work for other people they don't need to just express idea like you can create a painting you can express an idea hoping that idea influences people's minds and gets people to change you also can directly change things you can actually change things not just put out a message that inspires people to change things. That artists and designers aren't just communicators. We can actually be change agents. We can actually build things. We can create things.

1:08:15We can run things. We can be in charge of things. That many artists and designers are entrepreneurs. They don't think of themselves as that, but they're sole proprietors. They actually are. And that the world can be our canvas. Our canvas isn't necessarily 18 by 24 inches. It can be the whole world. I hope that people in Silicon Valley realize you don't necessarily have to be an engineer that the next great company can come from anywhere. It can happen with anyone. That design isn't just how something looks. That's how something fundamentally works. If you believe that, then the world should be run with the help of designers.

1:08:53And design can design anything. And I also hope that people take a more humanistic approach to the world and design. we're not necessarily making things we're designing experiences for people and the things we make are just vessels for those experiences we're not building an app for people to book a house we're connecting people and for them to connect they got to stay in a house and stay in a house we need to have an app for them to book but notice you're working backwards from the outcome you want to create and in our case it's connection to people cultures and communities all over the world I hope that people are more bold, are bolder, more ambitious, and believe that anything is possible because of the journey we've gone down.

1:09:42And so that's why I tell my story. And I love telling my story because I hope it's relatable. At least the beginnings are relatable. The rocket ship is a little less relatable, but anyone can get on a rocket ship. It may not go as far as ours gone because there's a lot of luck involved and craziness. But I think almost anyone can start a company. Not everyone can grow a big company, but you don't need to. If enough people start things, create things, then you can design the world you want to live in. So that's kind of where I'd end it. I'd end this talk where I started, that we think we live in a world that others have left for us and we have to live in that world, or that we have to protest for a different way or speak out for change.

1:10:26You can also just change it. You can change and design the world you want to live in. And I hope that I'm evidence of that. Brian Chesky, thank you so much for creating so much work that matters. Thank you so much for joining me today on Design Matters. Well, thank you very much. You can talk about making a difference, you can make a difference, or we can do both. I'm Debbie Millman. I look forward to talking with you again soon. Design Matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. the interviews are usually recorded at the master's in branding program at the school of visual arts in new york city the first and longest running branding program in the world the editor-in-chief of design matters media is emily wyland