Airbnb CEO on Why AI Will Create a New Era of Consumer Products

This is our full conversation with Brian Chesky, recorded live on TBPN. We discuss how Airbnb reaccelerated growth by rebuilding startup intensity and embracing “founder mode” leadership, why Chesky believes today’s AI chatbots are not the right interface for the future of travel and e-commerce, how Airbnb is using AI across the business with 60% of its code now written by AI, and why he believes the next major wave of AI innovation will come from immersive consumer products, visual interfaces, and agentic experiences rather than another wave of enterprise software. Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  Brian, how are you doing?

• 0:01Brian Chesky?

  Good. How are you guys doing?

• 0:02John Coogan?

  We're doing fantastic. Great to see you. Welcome back to the show. Been too long. Yeah.

• 0:05Brian Chesky?

  Yeah, I know.

• 0:06John Coogan?

  Why don't we kick it off with just, you know, an update on how 2026 is going, how the business is going? What's new in your world?

• 0:14Brian Chesky?

  Yeah, I mean, things are really good. We've accelerated growth for the first time since the pandemic. We grew 10% last year in revenue. And this quarter, we announced that revenue was 18%. So from 10 to 18%, which is a pretty big acceleration.

• 0:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:30Brian Chesky?

  And marketplaces are really, really hard, right? Like, it's kind of like gravity. Once a marketplace at our size, doing around $100 billion in gross bookings a year, it starts to come down. It's really hard to tip that curve. So this has been a pretty big feat for the team to be able to do it.

• 0:43John Coogan?

  So how'd you do it?

• 0:45Brian Chesky?

  You know, it's kind of funny. A number of years ago, we... So I noticed that, you know, as we got bigger, we started losing a little bit of startup intensity, that startup energy. And I asked myself, like, how can we get that energy back? And we basically took a very small team. We named the team Project Kawaii. The name doesn't really matter. But basically, I took a very small team of people. And we said, "We're going to focus on a very, very small service area." And we decided to focus on conversion rate, the guest journey. And I basically tried to work with a team like as if we're at Row Street. Row Street was the apartment that Joni and I started. And I said, "We're going to act like a startup." And the team just grinded really, really hard. We weren't working like a big company. We were a very small team, grinding really hard, focusing on, obsessing over the customer experience,

• 1:30Brian Chesky?

  really looking at the data. And we really got a lot of points on the board. And then we really started taking these pods. And we really started working with the teams, trying to coach them how we worked in the early days. And I just think the pace increased, the intensity increased. We really like tried to bring in like world-class people onto the team. They got very, very focused. We tried to get all the management and bureaucracy out of their way. And it's been a couple of years.

• 1:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52Brian Chesky?

  In fact, we were doing this last year, but one of the things is, as you know, financial results are lagging indicators, especially when you're a big company. So it takes sometimes a while to get the, the, the financial numbers to reflect what's happening inside the company. But I feel like we're a startup again, like more than ever.

• 2:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08Brian Chesky?

  We're like, where we feel much younger and smaller than earlier. And I think with AI, that would be the other thing is 60% of our code is now written by AI, which is twice our, a benchmark of our competitors and peers.

• 2:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22Brian Chesky?

  And it's really, really helping us. AI, I think, is a huge boon to us. I don't know if it's helped the OTAs, but it's helped us with customer service. The cost per customer service ticket's down 10%. 40% people who contact me, the AI solves the problem for them. And we brought it through the entire journey. So everything is really accelerating.

• 2:40John Coogan?

  On the, uh, on the, the, the, the special team that went in to optimize conversion rate, I imagine you have folks internally whose job was basically the customer journey already. Then you bring in your special team and is there some sort of culture clash there? Like, how do you set people up for success to, you know, not get too political in that environment? Actually see it as an opportunity for a win, some fresh eyes, some fresh ideas? Like what, what is required to actually have success? Because I think a lot of big companies that bring in McKinsey and they put together a big deck and everyone freaks out and thinks they're getting fired and maybe some of the good ideas are surfaced, but it never really goes through. So what, like what, what, what, what do you have to communicate to the team that is receiving

• 3:25John Coogan?

  information from this new, uh, this new choir team?

• 3:28Brian Chesky?

  Yeah. So it's a great thing. I mean, really what I'm talking about has played out over like really five years.

• 3:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:34Brian Chesky?

  And the term founder mode, what it really meant that Paul Graham wrote was about me like skipping layals from management and going into the details with teams. And instead of trying, I mean, here's my advice. If you're a CEO or a leader of a company that's big, don't try to change the whole company, try to change a corner of the company. It's kind of like, don't renovate the whole house. Pick like one room and make it perfect and then go room to room. So I really told teams like, Hey, like, I actually, I actually didn't replace the team. I took the team that was already working. I like handpicked some people on the team, but I really just taught them the pace. And I would review work very regularly. So I'd sometimes review the work weekly or even daily to just teach them a level of intensity, a level of perfection.

• 4:17Brian Chesky?

  And it was unfamiliar and uncomfortable. And I will tell you that not everyone liked it. And some people didn't stick around the company because they didn't like that way of working. But those who stuck around, and the vast majority did, they realized, wow, actually, when the CEO is involved, it's actually easier. There's less bureaucracy. I try to make the work better, and I try to clear all obstacles. And so I basically did that group by group. And the great thing is, like, I was in massive number of details, reviewing everything for years. But eventually, it's like muscle memory. It's like, I don't know, an instructor or a coach, you have to teach them. But once they learn that and they have the muscle memory, like a golf swing, you can step back and now it's muscle memory. So now I don't have to be in all these details, all these teams. But I would

• 4:59Brian Chesky?

  just say a couple of things to people listening, like, great leadership is presence, not absence. I think a generation of management's consulting or management school, management teaching, taught us that CEOs should trust their people and get out of the way. And I don't think trust and getting out of the way are the same thing. Again, I think leadership is presence. And if you, if you, you should actually be partnering with your people. You should be on the field with them. If you're a, if you're a cavalry general, you should be on a horse. You should be on the battlefield. You're not like, you're not overseas somewhere else, just writing out blueprints. You gotta be on the field with them. And you gotta be leading from example. I think leadership from the front, not from the back. And so these are just some of the things we do. And I think AI is gonna create like the equivalent

• 5:41Brian Chesky?

  of an AI founder mode, which is now you gotta be even more hands on. And I don't think in the era of AI, there should be any pure people managers. Because you're so close to the details, to the data, that everyone has the opportunity to be hands on. And it's hard to imagine only managing people and not agents. So I think this hands on approach is for everyone inside of a company.

• 6:06Jordi Hays?

  Do you think a lot about what you would do if you were you from 10 or 15 years ago and you were trying to disrupt Airbnb? Like is that is that a helpful exercise?

• 6:16Brian Chesky?

  Yeah, and it's slightly and it's slightly scary because I think that I've told I had a meeting with our team recently. I said that 26 year old me and Joe and Nate could could F us up if we wanted to. And so I told them this is what I would do.

• 6:31Jordi Hays?

  But that's because but that's because you understand this market better than anyone else. You know, you know, the key drivers like I don't think any 26 year old off the street.

• 6:40Brian Chesky?

  Hey, I'm paranoid. I think that if Airbnb sits still, I think a different group of 20 or 30 year olds could also disrupt us. And I think that's true of every one of us. And maybe the by the way, maybe that's not true. And maybe that's not reassuring because we do have a brand that's a noun and a verb. We've got a global network effect. I think it's actually hard to build a network. That may not be possible. But the software and the app, I told our team, like, we can't sit still. Like, our app is beautiful. It's really nice. But we got to be in a world of AI native. And here's a key point I would make. I do not think a chatbot is the right interface for travel or e-commerce. That might be a radical statement. Chat GPT launched third-party apps last year in March. They shut them down. I don't think a chatbot's

• 7:22Brian Chesky?

  the right interface. It's got four or five problems. The first problem is it's text-based. You know, photos are an afterthought. The second is there's no direct manipulation. You have to type every single prompt, which is fine for a conversation, but you can't like add filters, you can't cook around. The third problem is it's hard to compare. A lot of e-commerce and travel is comparison shopping. If you have thousands of options, the AI has to know exactly what you want to be able to show you one or two things. But you usually want to see more choices and you get lost. And most AI is single player. It's not collaborative, let alone the fact that Airbnb, it requires people to have an account. The 85% of people send a message. So what I'm trying to do is imagine.

• 8:05Jordi Hays?

  Sorry to push back there, but I'm I'm uh.

• 8:08Brian Chesky?

  Yeah, go for it.

• 8:08Jordi Hays?

  My wife's planning a vacation and there's like.

• 8:14Jordi Hays?

  Three-ish hotels that we're looking at and we're looking for specific dates and she theoretically, I'm not saying the products are there yet, but theoretically you could ask a chatbot. I'm interested in staying in this location. I'm interested in these hotels. I have XYZ number of people and it could go and the agent could go and pull together like relevant sort of like listings or room types, et cetera, pricing, show me pictures and then actually do an analysis of the trade-offs based on all the information available as well as information in other parts of the internet and pull it together. And then she could share that chat with me and we could both review it together.

• 8:57Brian Chesky?

  Yes, I agree. That's the future and that's not a chatbot we described. That's not a chatbot. It's going to be a completely different interface. It's going to be, well, I guess you'll have to wait and see, but I think the future are not apps. The future agents, but I don't think they're going to be text-forward. I think they're going to be really rich user interface.

• 9:16John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 9:16Brian Chesky?

  And so I think the current chatbot paradigm, what you're describing, it can do it. I just don't think it's the best way to do what you just described. I think there's a much more immersive way to do that.

• 9:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. As you think back, I mean, it feels like at various points, clearly there's been like, oh, is all of this going to move to chatbots? Or is all of, are there going to be a million competitors that are all vibe coding exactly what you have? And so is software a moat? The stock has not been beaten down during the SaaS apocalypse, but have you had to process those with investors? Have you had to walk people through Airbnb's strengths again?

• 9:54Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure you did after the like the 2028 intelligence crisis. Thankfully, they picked DoorDash instead of you guys, but they're very

• 10:02Brian Chesky?

  I really appreciate them picking on someone else for once. But yeah, no, absolutely. I think like there were entire, like actually when ChatGPT launched a third-party apps, their stock probably went down like 7%. And by the way, I thought it was a really good idea for them to do third-party apps. I think it could have been successful, but they would have needed a richer SDK for it to work. And it would have like, like the App Store, Apple's App Store was good for Airbnb and was good for every company because they had a really rich user interface. Maybe this is the point I'm making. That imagine using iMessage on your iPhone to do everything. When in fact, like, every other app has a unique interface. So what I think is e-commerce, you want a very rich user interface.

• 10:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:40Brian Chesky?

  It would be agentic. You can be able to have a conversation with it. You can talk to it. I could talk back to it. But I think the point is it has to be more visual.

• 10:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:48Brian Chesky?

  I think a text-based interface is for some solutions.

• 10:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:50Brian Chesky?

  And a chatbot that's visual.

• 10:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:53Brian Chesky?

  Yeah, that would work. I'm just saying today's chatbots aren't the right solution. But the answer to your question, um, I had a couple of new employees, like one of our, one of our new team members is a name, a guy named Ahmed, who is the CTO of Airbnb. Now he led the Lama models at Meta. And one of the comments he made to me was, he said, wow, uh, yeah, Airbnb is so much more than the app. And in fact, the app that you see is like 20% of Airbnb. Um, we have typically four or five million people staying in Airbnb every night in more than a hundred countries around the world. So there's a lot more to do around payments, around customer service, adjudicating everything. We have to, you know, we have a $3 million guarantee against theft or property damage for a million homes a night. That's $3 trillion. Um, you know, there's just so many types of things around managing five and a million hosts.

• 11:38Brian Chesky?

  We have a host app. So there's a lot of things that are beyond the guest app. I actually think the guest app would be pretty easy to copy. And I think in the age of AI, you can make a better app than ours. And we want to make that app before anyone else does. And we want to be agentic. But I think the key is most of Airbnb is not the app that you use. It's mostly the offline experience. It's the operation.

• 11:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, the, the, the iMessage example is good. It's even maybe even going deeper into like old SMS. Because iMessage has hydrated so many things with the reactions and you paste a link and it hydrates it. And it's becoming more of a visual tool, uh, but it is a long road.

• 12:14Brian Chesky?

  Question for you. Things, yeah, well, before you said, one of the things is the last time I was on, I did make a comment and I'll, I'll make it again. Almost every AI company is an enterprise company. And, um, the last stat I think I said on TBPM was like three months ago and stats haven't changed. I think it was one hundred seventy five companies in a Y C batch and I think sixteen were consumer. That trend hasn't changed. Almost everyone is going into coding. Almost everyone's going to enterprise. I think that's great. My whole point, though, is that the consumer experience hasn't fundamentally changed that much beyond a chatbot. And I think the consumer is a massive opportunity for A I. And I think it's gonna need to be a richer user interface. I think people that wanna do more things, they wanted to be, I mean, the modern A I today is text, photos, and buttons.

• 12:59Brian Chesky?

  Yep. Mostly, and some videos. And I think there's a more breakthrough visual paradigm that can be much more immersive. And with the new image and video generation models, you could do something so much more immersive. Yeah. So the exact example you gave of trying to book a hotel, yeah, you can do it on a chatbot, but there's probably some more breakthrough way to imagine that, to visualize it, to see the neighborhood, to see the map, to be able to talk to it, to understand where it is, to be able to compare photos, different hotels. There's something, I think, richer on the horizon.

• 13:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that was, I was, I was surprised at the push into browsers last year from some, some different A I companies, specifically because I always, I already felt like an L M, like the chat, the chatbots were helping me browse around the internet. It was like just double down on that and helping me find information all over the internet. I like that it's brought together in a standardized way, right? If I, like, the example, you know, of, of comparing like different hotels, right? It's nice to have it just like formatted the same way. So I'm looking at it, I'm not being like, I wanna be influenced by the images and like the, the property, but not necessarily the design of the website, right? Because that, they, they can be disconnected.

• 14:10Jordi Hays?

  I wanted to ask if you think L M's will impact travel in the world in the way that social media did and travel trends specifically because Instagram nowadays, like a place like Marfa in like Texas, right? It's like, it's random town, art, you know, artistic type town in Texas, and then it just becomes a cool place because of Instagram and then, and then, and then the entire kind of town evolves because of that. I can imagine like people researching like places to go with L M's could ultimately drive some of that and then ultimately reinforce each other, but, but what, what do you think?

• 14:49Brian Chesky?

  Yeah, maybe the simple framework is think about a travel journey. Step one is destination discovery. Where should I travel? Step two is flights. How do I get there? Step three is where do I stay? Airbnb or hotel? Step four is like, what do I do when I get there? Restaurants, activities? And step five is typically like logistics, car rental, services. And then step six is you're in the city and then you might want to do things that time spontaneously. I think LM's or that, let's call it the LM technology, applied to, I'm arguing a slightly richer user interface than typical chatbot will be revolutionary for step one, step two, for destination discovery and flights. Also because flights are not very hard to build, there's just three global distribution systems.

• 15:32Brian Chesky?

  Anyone can pipe in an API and have a flight booking app pretty, pretty quickly. And so I think the LM's are really, really good at destination discovery. If you want to say like, hey, I want to go somewhere that's like Paris, but it's a little more affordable. It's good to go in August. I like opera. Like it's going to give you like a very rich like suggestion of places to go. Now, I think the current chatbot doesn't have really rich maps. I think it could do a lot more visually. I think eventually chatbots or this new interface could be very video based. So imagine a chatbot that was actually video based or very, very photo based rather than a little less text based. I think that would probably be what you'd want for travel. I think what I'm describing would disrupt travel more than the current chatbots, which

• 16:15Brian Chesky?

  are more acting like Google sending referral traffic. And they actually, the referral traffic from these chatbots are converting higher than Google. And so actually the chatbots are actually additive to travel companies. To intermediate travel company, you would really want to disintermediate the travel journey and it would have to be much richer.

• 16:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, I feel like, do you remember that company HipMonk? I think it was founded by some YC founders, right?

• 16:39Brian Chesky?

  Yeah, and actually the CEO of Reddit.

• 16:41John Coogan?

  That's right. Steve Huffman, right?

• 16:43Jordi Hays?

  Wait, are you talking about Hipcamp?

• 16:45John Coogan?

  No.

• 16:46Jordi Hays?

  Hipmunk.

• 16:47John Coogan?

  Hipmunk was a-

• 16:48Brian Chesky?

  Hipmunk was a really cool flight booking.

• 16:49John Coogan?

  It was a really cool flight booking dashboard and it would it would rank the flights by pain, like a pain index. So it would say, well, you're not going to face financial pain because it's a really cheap flight, but you do have a stopover. Or you do have to get to the the airport super early. And so it would blend all these things together. And it's something that it feels like could be vibe coded over a weekend now.

• 17:12Brian Chesky?

  Totally.

• 17:12John Coogan?

  And yet, it is weird that when I open up the App Store charts, I see ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and then it's just AI chat apps. And we haven't had that breakout moment. Demis was on stage at YC actually talking about the fact that it feels weird that we have this super intelligence in the enterprise and vibe coding and 60% of Airbnb's code is written by AI now. And yet, we don't have like a new AAA game or a new video game that everyone's playing. And I'm wondering, like, is that a lack of creativity? Is it a lack of of risk taking that there's just too much money? It's too it's too it's too obvious to be able, if you're if you're good in AI, just go into enterprise because you'll just raise a bunch of money, get a bunch of customers. It's really easy to make money. It's more risk on in consumer.

• 17:56John Coogan?

  Like, what do you think needs to happen? Or is it just the intelligence isn't quite there and maybe the next model is the one that unlocks it?

• 18:03Brian Chesky?

  Matt, this is such a good question. I think there's like three or four factors going on. The first factor is I saw a tweet recently that I think there's like 60 new Neo Labs being formed.

• 18:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:14Brian Chesky?

  And I've met a number of these researchers and a lot of them are interested in doing the same things. And I think what I'm noticing is most of these teams are purely AI people.

• 18:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:25Brian Chesky?

  They don't have product people or designers on their team. As they're picking things like science, they're picking things like coding, they're picking things like we want to create a different type of model. This is great, but I don't know if all 60 companies should be doing the same problem. And so what you're seeing is you don't see a big focus on people wanting to do consumer. I think some people think that the AGI can just figure out consumer. I think that's maybe simple overly simplistic thinking. I do think you have to have a a point of view about consumer. So I think that's the first point. I think the second point is, you know, Silicon Valley has become more vibe and trend based than when I came to Silicon Valley 2007, although it was back then. And one of the things I think when people see enterprise companies doing well, they go into it. And I think there's this like natural flywheel.

• 19:09Brian Chesky?

  The other thing is I know in Y Combinator, for example, We teach the Y company or companies use the other companies as their customers. Yeah. Now, back in the day, we would get them to use our product as consumers. Yeah. But I think everyone's figured out, actually, it's way more efficient to get them to to become customers.

• 19:25Jordi Hays?

  It's like five code, five code gen startups all being like, you code with me.

• 19:31Brian Chesky?

  Yes, exactly. Yeah. And so I think enterprise makes a lot of sense until everyone does enterprise. Yeah. And then suddenly, like, everyone's saying consumer is hard, but you know what's also hard? Like, competing with 10 other companies and enterprise doing your idea, too. That's also hard. Yeah. I think additionally, the image in um in video generation models are having a, I think, image two is almost like a Claude code. Breakthrough is so good now in the C dance video models. Yeah. That I think we're about to enter this new era where suddenly going beyond text is possible. Yeah. I think you're going to even be able to see real time AI generated interface in the next year or two. So my prediction is this has been the era of of enterprise.

• 20:12Brian Chesky?

  Even chat GPT's breakout success, I would predict that most revenue is going to go be going to Codex. That's my prediction. I might be wrong, but just given how much money is going to Claude. And I think in the next two years, you're going to see a massive revolution in consumer. And I think you're going to need a couple of companies to lead the way. Yeah. Um, I think we need reference points. I mean, even me saying the chatbots, not the interface, people probably asking, well, what is? Yeah. And someone needs to be the one to do that. I mean, we're going to try to do our part. I'm not sure Airbnb will be the company to blaze the trail, but I think someone has to. I think in another era, it would have been Apple, like the Steve Jobs era, Apple would have done that. Maybe Apple will do that, but um they would have been typically the company that would have done that. Yeah.

• 20:54Jordi Hays?

  Are you worried that everyone is working on the exact same thing?

• 21:01Jordi Hays?

  And when I say exact same thing, I mean, agents that can do things on your computer and or, well, you know, look at the iPhone App Store chart or look at. Uh, look at the early stage startup market, right? Lot of companies, you know, whether the full spectrum of companies from hyperscalers to labs to.

• 21:20Jordi Hays?

  Neo Labs too.

• 21:21Brian Chesky?

  I'm not, I'm not too worried. I might be a little worried for the entrepreneurs if they're like the 10th company doing something. I mean, like Peter Thiel was one of our earliest investors and he used to, he wrote this book Zero to One that a lot of people listening probably read. He has a saying, competitions for losers and you want to kind of try to do something that no one else is doing. Back in the day, that was enterprise because everyone was making an app. And now I just, I had to be careful about being the 10th company doing something unless you're going to be a lot better decisively. It's just really, really hard in a crowded market. So you want to kind of zig when everyone else is zagging. So I'm not too worried, but maybe a little bit. And I would just encourage entrepreneurs to try to take, claim a space for their own. And by the way, Airbnb was that. It was kind

• 22:06Brian Chesky?

  of accidental, but like, like in 2007, everyone wanted to do like a social networking something. And we were like, it was tempting for us to try to be a social networking something, something as well. It was accidental that we inflated through AirBeds one weekend and created AirBed and breakfasts. And people thought it was the worst idea ever. I guess it became like the worst idea that ever worked, but we carved our own space, as did Uber. And we weren't trying to be anything else. And so I kind of, and by the way, OpenAI wasn't trying to be anyone else either. Maybe they were a little bit like DeepMind, but AI was not the thing when OpenAI Anthropic got started. So I do think there is something about not chasing trends. I think once it's a trend, it can be a little crowded and to try to

• 22:51Brian Chesky?

  claim out your own space. And I would say there's so much of the US economy that AI hasn't yet touched.

• 22:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. On that note, how are you talking to, or how, how would you talk to designers or RISD students about applying non-technical skillsets or, or non-AI disciplines, non-computer science backgrounds to consumer? The reason I ask it is I feel like there's a lot of, there's a lot of pushback against AI in design communities, in colleges right now broadly. AI is not particularly popular and there's a lot of fear of job loss. But at the same time, you know, I'm sure.

• 23:38John Coogan?

  Like the tools have changed throughout the history and there's and I feel like you believe that there's incredible opportunity, but I'm worried that some people are not jumping on that opportunity because they have hesitations about various, oh, well, does this displace this tool or what, you know, how was this made or, you know, is this, is this, is this the right tool for the job? Should I even be using this?

• 24:03Brian Chesky?

  Yeah, I'm really worried that an entire generation of designers, artists and creative people are going to decide to kind of sit out AI. And I think it's the biggest opportunity for creative people in my lifetime. By the way, this is not the first time designers were late. We, we creatives and designers were really late to the internet and web. So going back 30, 35 years, most of the prestigious designers did not get into so-called web design. Web design was considered a lower tier, lower status design and they stayed with print. All the established people. And so they did not really chase design. What ended up happening was because you had a lot of these really excellent designers that did not go into web design, I think what happened was a lot of, there were a lot of

• 24:47Brian Chesky?

  good people that became web designers, but I think there became a gap between web design and engineering. You had people that, you know, maybe didn't have the full, full design skill set. And what happened was this function emerged called product management. Product management, I'm not arguing against, we have product managers, it's very important, but in industrial design, there's no product managers for the most part, they're industrial designers. In architecture, the architect is the product manager. And so I think what ended up happening in web design, designers were very, very narrow. There was a void. Product managers filled that void. I'm not arguing against that model, but I think if designers sit out, what you're going to see is engineers and product managers designing for them. And I think the counterpoint is designers can be engineers and product people for intents and purposes. Said differently, if I were starting Airbnb today, I'd be

• 25:32Brian Chesky?

  vibe coding and Claude Code. And I'm trying to do it now. I'm, I'm doing it for fun. I'm not really going to be doing anything productive Airbnb. But if I was 26, I would have thought of myself as a technical person. I think all designers should think of themselves as product people and as, you know, Front-end engineers, if anything. And so I think this is a boon. I don't think that the future of the internet has to be all text-based. I think it can be very visual. I think the photo and video generation models allow you to design incredibly rich interfaces. And this is, I think, the best time in the world for designers and creative people to get involved. I think they're just a little bit afraid. And whatever we can do to enlist them, to just get their hands dirty. Many designers are.

• 26:15Brian Chesky?

  I just think more should get involved and not be getting out of typical wireframes. Just start coding.

• 26:21John Coogan?

  Do you think, so assuming we solve this problem of not enough creative people working in consumer, we build, we as a society, build cool new consumer products and experiences and apps. There's something that deserves to be at the top of the app store. Has distribution and the acquisition of customers and users changed structurally? You were very good at SEO and Google, and there was a referral program. Do those patterns still work? Are they broken? Is there a new playbook that needs to be rolled out for anyone who has something that's great, but they need to get it in the hands of consumers broadly?

• 27:06Brian Chesky?

  I think we need new patterns. This is a funny saying. I think the highest turnover job of any executive at Silicon Valley might be the CMO. I don't know for sure, but you don't see a lot of turnover CFOs. You don't see a lot of turnover CTOs. But Amazon was famously, and I don't know if, part of my theory is that what works in marketing changes every few years. You have to be adaptable, and your old playbook gets outdated. So, marketing is unfortunately one of the hardest functions. I have a huge amount of respect for people in marketing because, one, something works, it almost becomes stale because then everyone does it. And so influencer marketing was really successful until everyone did it. And then people kind of tune it out. It's this thing called banner blindness.

• 27:48Brian Chesky?

  Banner blindness is after you see something over and over, you tend to be blind to it. And so you need a new tactic. So, I think that, a couple of thoughts. Number one. I think that just like we need new interface design, new creative experiential approaches, we also need new types of marketing. I don't know off the top of my head what that is. It's probably something we haven't done before. I mean, Joe and I, we did like bizarre things like we sold collectible cereal boxes and we like, when social media was new, we were all over social media and when, when there were newspapers, we would hunt down reporters and like try to get them to write about us. But like people ask me, how do I get users? I'm like, all the tactics from 2008 aren't relevant anymore. So you gotta be relevant

• 28:30Brian Chesky?

  and you gotta find new tactics. The second thing I'd say though is, you're right, the distribution is mature. When we started Airbnb, the app store was young. In fact, the internet was still young. I mean, we could just, you could launch a website and just ride the growth of the internet. And it's hard. The internet i- is not growing like it did before. In other words, people were coming on the internet in hundreds of millions a year, new users. So I do think distribution for consumers mature. At the same time, the top apps in the app store are new apps. They're, they're mostly chatbots. So what that tells you, if you do something truly breakthrough and revolutionary, consumers will still probably find it. And so that's, I think, I think the two principles are, do something so revolutionary,

• 29:13Brian Chesky?

  consumers will find you. And number two, you're gonna have to find your own new tactics. And you know, anything that is standard is probably stale.

• 29:22Jordi Hays?

  Well said. I have one more. Yeah, looking out into the future, you've ridden the growth of the short-term rental market. You dominate it now. Is, is the biggest opportunity to just continue to make the best product in the category, ride the continued growth of it? Or do you think there's another STR-sized market for Airbnb?

• 29:46Brian Chesky?

  I think the biggest opportunity for Airbnb is to go beyond our core business. I do think, you know, core business does close to $100 billion in gross sales if you net out all the other businesses, gross booking value, the total amount of reservations going through the site. I think that could probably double one day. I don't know how long that one day is, but for every person who stays in Airbnb, eight or nine stay in a hotel, I think we can get one extra person in an Airbnb eventually. And I think that can get you to 200 billion. I think there's a market much larger than Airbnb, which is hotels. Again, hotels is about eight or nine times the size of Airbnb. I don't think we'll ever be a hotel dominant site, but we are going more aggressive into hotels. A fun thing is that about half the hotels in the world are independents and boutiques.

• 30:28Brian Chesky?

  They're not chain hotels and they're not really happy listing on the OTAs because they pay a higher commission to chains. A lot of these independent hotels are being forced, or they feel like their hand is being forced to franchise, to Marriott, to Hilton, other brands, because they have loyalty programs. They can, you know, they can negotiate lower commissions. So we think we can be a distribution channel for these boutiques independents. That is a multi-billion dollar market. I think another one would be services. There's no Amazon for services and, you know, think about like you can hit a button and a car can pick you up. You can hit a button and food can be delivered to you. But what about hitting a button, having 80 other things possible? You know, I don't know if any one market is large, but if you add up the 80 different service verticals, that to me is another pretty big market.

• 31:13Brian Chesky?

  And then maybe the last one is like living, stays longer than 30 days. More and more people have a job via laptop. More people are nomadic, more people are moving around. That's another really big market. So I think for Airbnb, we're looking at really expanding to a lot of different categories. And I think that's where most of the growth is going to be in the future.

• 31:32John Coogan?

  Do billboards in San Francisco work on you? Going back to marketing, it's one of these old things where like, yes, I completely agree with you. Like the CMO who did the first billboard campaign back in the 50s, probably printed legend, you know, books written about them.

• 31:48Jordi Hays?

  Well, the billboard campaign that worked over the last couple of years was just buy so many billboards that people are like, wait, how did this company buy so many billboards?

• 31:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so I'm wondering, is your thesis on marketing that these things go in cycles? And yes, we might be out of the influencer marketing meta right now, but it's going to come back in five, 10 years. Who knows?

• 32:09Brian Chesky?

  That's possible.

• 32:09John Coogan?

  Or is it rise and fall and then never again?

• 32:12Jordi Hays?

  I think these channels though, they don't go away. They just stop being like, if you do this thing, you're going to grow like crazy. You still need to do that thing, but it's no longer an art.

• 32:21John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah. What do you think?

• 32:23Brian Chesky?

  Okay, so one thing I have to acknowledge is I think all of us, advertising works better on us than we admit. I honestly, I, we spent a lot on like, all these ads and I kind of think to myself, do these really influence people? Like, and if they do, and if they didn't, we wouldn't be spending like a billion dollars here on advertising. So, I want to admit that advertising does influence us more than we realize. There's, I think, a lot of studies that show like, oh, that doesn't change my mind. But you see something seven times and it probably, even if you don't want to believe it, you might start believing it.

• 32:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 32:52Brian Chesky?

  So clearly it works.

• 32:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 32:54Brian Chesky?

  I do think though, the ROI of new ideas works a lot better. Just for example, we spent a lot on advertising, but the most popular marketing we've ever done is like when the Barbie movie came out. We took a house in Malibu, we turned the Barbie Malibu Dream House. And it was like new and the whole internet talked about it. And the ROI of that was better than any ad we've ever done, right? We've done things like that. So I do think, doing kind of crazy, slightly unhinged things that people notice. Like, I mean, you guys are successful because you're different, right? I think.

• 33:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:25Brian Chesky?

  I think being different is the key to marketing. And so, if you have a billboard, people are probably influenced, but if you, if it looks different than another billboard, it's going to work. So I think the key to marketing is to be different because you got to stand out.

• 33:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, the Red Bull Baumgartner, the skydive from space is, I think, like a thousand X ROI. I think they spent less than a million dollars on that. And I think it has a billion views or something like that.

• 33:52Brian Chesky?

  Space.

• 33:53John Coogan?

  Great example of that.

• 33:54Brian Chesky?

  Space Airbnb.

• 33:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, then it would get boring.

• 33:57Brian Chesky?

  Work as well.

• 33:57John Coogan?

  And that's probably why they didn't do a sequel and then another one, another one. They went and found something else, let's put a plane through a tunnel or fly a, you know, a hot air balloon upside down or something.

• 34:06Jordi Hays?

  Get a blimp, get a blimp on Airbnb that I can go on a sky crew.

• 34:10John Coogan?

  Sleeping in a blimp, yeah.

• 34:12Brian Chesky?

  So that would be, that would be, that would be a very good idea. Maybe we can talk about.

• 34:15John Coogan?

  I'd love that.

• 34:16Jordi Hays?

  Ship it, we'll podcast.

• 34:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know how long it takes to get to, yeah, LA to San Francisco. If it takes me two days, three days, but I have a beautiful view.

• 34:24Brian Chesky?

  Would you guys do that?

• 34:25John Coogan?

  I would 100% do that.

• 34:28Brian Chesky?

  It'd be good advertising for us and you.

• 34:30John Coogan?

  So, so, so, so, so we say things like this all the time where we're like, oh yeah, like, we'll definitely like do something. And oftentimes it's hard to schedule, but we have been talking about blimps for like over a year.

• 34:40Jordi Hays?

  We know we can broadcast. We've been having.

• 34:42John Coogan?

  To happen with a blimp.

• 34:43Jordi Hays?

  We've been having guests call in from their jets with Starlink and the connection is perfect.

• 34:49John Coogan?

  It is.

• 34:49Jordi Hays?

  So much so that people in our chat sometimes don't know that the person's on a plane.

• 34:54John Coogan?

  That's really incredible.

• 34:56Brian Chesky?

  Okay, Airbnb and TBPN are gonna work together on a blimp partnership. You guys are gonna broadcast across the country on a blimp.

• 35:03John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 35:04Brian Chesky?

  And Airbnb's gonna be a part of that. I wanna make this work. Let's, let's.

• 35:07John Coogan?

  Let's, let's figure it out. We'll talk. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Have a great weekend and we'll talk to you soon.

• 35:13Jordi Hays?

  You're the man.