Big changes possible coming to Airbnb next year. In conversation at WIRED’s Big interview even in San Francisco on Tuesday, the company’s co-founder and CEO, Brian Chesky, told global editorial director Katie Drummond that he hopes that, by 2025, “people say ‘that’s one of the biggest reinventions of a company in recent memory’”.
Although Chesky did not provide details, he did say that the company hopes to reimagine its operations. Experience part that he said consumers really liked but he didn’t think it got as much traction as it could have. The move appears to be an extension of Chesky’s belief in the value of physical experiences and physical communities, which he maintains are superior to most digital experiences, even in the age of WHO.
In an effort to demonstrate that, even after two years of the AI revolution, little has changed fundamentally for most people, Chesky challenged the room to look at the apps on their home screens. phones and think about how many of them have changed significantly. by innovative AI. He admits that there are few, including Airbnb, but he also sees change coming, likening the AI adolescence we’re living in to “the Internet of 1993, before search engines ” when you use what he calls a “phone book.” ” to find websites.
“AI is starting to change our digital world, but it has not yet changed the most important part of our lives, which is the physical world,” Chesky said. At Airbnb, where the product isn’t the company’s apps but connected homes and experiences, that’s still what’s most prized. Chesky says that when AI really starts to change the physical world is “when the apps on your phone are completely different.”
“Ten years ago, everyone thought we were all using self-driving cars now,” Chesky said, noting that although there are many on his streets, they haven’t spread widely. out to the rest of America. “We overestimate how much technology will change in the short term, but we probably underestimate how much it will change in the long term. AI will take a while to penetrate the physical world but once it does, I think it will change everything.”
Drummond also asked Chesky about his leadership style, which has been talked about a lot in Silicon Valley for phrases like “founder mode” (which he notes he doesn’t actually make money from) and the widely publicized view that he no longer attends one-on-one meetings.
He said that since the pandemic, when Airbnb lost 80% of its business within eight weeks and was forced to lay off about a third of the company’s staff, he has become more involved in the line details. date about what your employees are doing. , told Drummond that he thought it was important to guide people through work. Chesky said he oversees 75 to 80 projects at a time, spending half of his 60-plus-hour workweek evaluating projects each week. While he may not do regular, scheduled in-person meetings anymore, he says he does a lot of one-on-one phone calls and focuses on group meetings , where he can meet with multiple levels of staff at once.
