Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on the founder’s role and bridging Silicon Valley’s AI divide

Brian Chesky (0:00)

And the problem is Silicon Valley's in a bubble, and society feels like AI's happening to them, not for them. But I've talked to AI leaders, and I say, do you talk to any normal people? I talked to one famous person, I won't mention who, and I said, do you talk to a regular person? He goes, yes, such and such. I'm like, well, that's your nanny, you pay them.

And they're like, well, this and that. I'm like, that's your chef, you pay them. And I'm like, we need to talk to regular people that we don't pay. And what they're going to say is they feel like they're not a part of it, that it's happening to them, they don't understand it. And I think that is very, very scary. So we have to basically bridge this divide between society and Silicon Valley.

Penny Pritzker (0:44)

Today on The CEO Signal, we're talking to Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO of Airbnb.

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson (0:52)

Chesky started Airbnb almost 20 years ago with a pretty simple idea, make it easy for travelers to stay in other people's homes.

Penny Pritzker (1:00)

That idea created a new category of travel and turned Airbnb into one of the world's best known consumer companies.

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson (1:09)

But Airbnb is changing, and so is Chesky's role. He's returned to a more hands-on founder approach as the company pushes beyond homes into new categories, including hotels.

Penny Pritzker (1:20)

And he's rebuilding Airbnb to be AI native. What does that mean for the company, its competitors, and the millions of people who use it? From Semafor, this is the CEO Signal.

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson (1:41)

Hello, Penny.

Penny Pritzker (1:42)

Hello, Edge.

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson (1:44)

Very good to be in San Francisco with you. We are actually in Airbnb's headquarters right now.

Penny Pritzker (1:49)

And we're going to have a really interesting interview ahead of us with kind of an unconventional CEO. Brian's the first person that we've interviewed who comes from an industrial design background.

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson (2:01)

Yeah, which is very unusual in the C-suite these days. And I've interviewed him in the past, but you've known him for longer than I have. How did you first meet him?

Penny Pritzker (2:09)

I got to know him when I was in the Obama administration. We made him a president's ambassador for global entrepreneurship. And back then, Airbnb was relatively new, but he was on a mission to create a new category of hospitality and travel.

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson (2:26)

And he's clearly done that in the intervening years. But he's also run into some tension with big cities and other critics that allege that Airbnb's use of short-term rentals has actually inflated the cost of accommodation in some of these big cities. And I want to hear how he's thinking about that right now.

Penny Pritzker (2:43)

I'm really interested in how he sees Airbnb's responsibility regarding housing and affordability. But I'm also really interested since we're here in Silicon Valley and hearing about the biggest corporate responsibility issue of our time, AI.

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson (3:00)

Absolutely. Let's bring him in.

SPEAKER_4 (3:05)

The CEO Signal is presented by PwC.

SPEAKER_5 (3:15)

We help cut through the AI noise with AI solutions from PwC.

So you can solve the business problems that matter most. PwC.

Penny Pritzker (3:27)

Brian, it's great to see you. You know, we first met during the Obama administration. You were president's ambassador for global entrepreneurship, and you were, it was pretty early on in Airbnb, and you were building this new category, if you will, of hospitality. But you came to it from an unusual place. You were a design student, industrial design student, at RISD.

So tell us about how design has informed your leadership and informs your life as a CEO.

Brian Chesky (4:00)

I'll just go back to a second. I went to Rhode Island School of Design, RISD, and I studied a field called industrial design, and for those who, most people might know what it is, but the way RISD described it is industrial design is the design of everything from a toothbrush to a spaceship and everything in between. So in other words, it was a very broad education, but there was a huge topic at RISD when I was at RISD, and the topic was, how do we get designers in the boardroom? How do we get a voice at the table? I was at RISD, I interned, I worked all these companies, and all these designers were working, not for the CEO, but typically for engineering, but sometimes marketing, and so it was definitely a second rate function.

One of my friends at RISD who became my co-founder, we had this radical thought, because everyone at RISD was like, it's all about advocacy, how does design get in the boardroom? We thought, well, what if design just ran the boardroom? What if I stopped asking permission and started a company?