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

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on the gospel of Steve Jobs and what founder mode really means

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2024-10-29 06:30:03

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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