Joe Gebbia: Designer-in-Chief

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
But at its biggest mandate, it's in the next three years, how do we touch every digital surface of the United States government? This is brand at civilization scale.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:14)
First of Kind is a new series about design and tech told by its pioneers. Sponsored by Framer, Cursor, Purcell, and Profound. In September 2025, I flew to Washington, DC to sit down with Joe Gebbia, Airbnb co-founder and now America's first ever chief design officer. Joe, welcome.
Good to see you, man.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:35)
You too.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:36)
Yeah. I feel so honored to be having this conversation with you in Washington, DC in the year 2025 And I want to start off just with a simple question of like, why are we having this conversation in this building, in this room? Where are we right now?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:52)
We're in the heart of Washington, DC. You could say it, one of the most prestigious addresses in the planet. We are in the White House grounds at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. This is a building from turn of the century, 1800s, that I think is one of the most architectural masterpiece of Washington, DC. And I thought it would be a great backdrop for our conversation today.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:13)
I love that I learned yesterday, this room used to occupy the founding documents of our nation, that the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, resided here for decades as part of the State Department Library, and is now the epicenter of this new initiative that you're overseeing. Now, most people know you as the co-founder of Airbnb, and I think now Americans are going to recognize you in a new role, in a new capacity, Chief Design Officer of the United States of America. I wanted to start off there with this question of, how did you end up arriving in Washington after a storied career in Silicon Valley?

**SPEAKER_1** (1:56)
It wasn't a straight line, that's for sure. I remember when I first heard of the government doing things with Silicon Valley was during the Obama administration back in the day. And I was deep, deep in Airbnb at the time, building the company with my co-founders, Brian and Nate. And I remember thinking, wow, what a cool application of design at such a grand level. You know, design for society. I remember it planted a seed in a very back part of my mind. Years went by, and you kind of see what was going on, and kind of look for those moments of like, can the government adopt high standards around design and actually push through to the other side? Which would be, you go to a website, you have an experience with the government, and it doesn't feel like the one that you're used to.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:44)
And you recently shared a figure around that. I think it was like an order of magnitude greater than the largest number I could come up with. Like, how many people are we talking about here in terms of the surface area for the American, you know, citizen interacting with the American government?

**SPEAKER_1** (3:00)
It's a lot higher than I ever thought, as I've gone deep into this. It turns out that there's 8,000, around 7,000 to 8,000 dot-gov domains.
There's about 27,000 web portals with all the sub-domains and everything. And within that, there's 9 dot-gov websites that 160 million Americans go to every month. That's practically half the nation, going to 9 websites. And what's occurred to me, especially since being here the last 8 months or so, is that at one point in history, Americans would access the government by walking into buildings to get stuff done. And I have to imagine, at that time, the lobbies would be impeccably designed. Great lighting, nice art on the wall, clean floors every morning when people walk in, a nice reception desk, good wayfinding and signage so people know how to navigate the building. And the reality is the front door to government is websites. And so why wouldn't we treat at least those 9 dot-gov domains, if not the whole surface area of the government, with the same care and attention that those lobbies got all those years ago?

**SPEAKER_2** (4:07)
You're working on this initiative today, but didn't it start off in its current form? And so help me walk through those 8 months of you first coming to Washington, seeing the scale and the scope of the problem set, learning that there was this much traffic to these properties, and that this was the impression that we were given to the American population in terms of what, you know, government stood for. How did that ultimately materialize into the National Design Studio and the role you currently serve in?