Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Brian Chesky
If we mess with something, somebody could go from making a living to not making a living. So you've got to be very careful. That is not an environment for mass innovation, when you're being really careful. So I'm also exploring little sandboxes, maybe almost like a separate app. What are radically different Airbnbs? What's after Airbnb? Airbnc. What's that? What's the next? So those are the three things I'm thinking about. Number one, how do we take the atomic unit from a home to a person? Number two, how do we basically industrialize what Airbnb offers, to do 50 things, not three things. And then how do we like disrupt ourselves before someone else does with AI, without screwing over our investors and our hosts who depend on us. And so those are the kind of things I'm doing. Maybe the last thing I'm thinking – just as a CEO, I think I've reached a certain level of mastery. I've reached the mastery of product-market fit, hyper growth, profitability. I'm beginning level four. Level four is reinvent yourself, product extension. I think there's something potentially even beyond that in the age of AI, which is like – one of my strengths is all my experience. And that's also my weakness now. I'm 44 – I'm not old, but I'm not young. I'm not AI native in the same way a 22 year old is. Here's a bad example. When I started Airbnb, I was 25, 26, and we were competing against Expedia. They were on Outlook and we used Google Docs. And we were iPhone. It all seems anachronistic now, but back then that was innovative. And we were on the coolest new tools, and we just moved faster. And so also just staying young. Pablo Picasso, another quote, he said the older you get, the stronger the wind gets. And it's always in your face. You've got to stay light on your feet. You got to stay young. You got to keep reinventing yourself. You got to have curiosity. And so I don't want to become like this old school person in their groove. I've got to reinvent myself.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: One of the things that as I've been building stuff myself – really for the first time – I'm not an engineer. I used to build stuff, but I'd tell people and the feedback loop was like painfully slow and lossy. Now it's like five to fifteen minutes and pretty high fidelity. And soon it'll be five seconds and perfect fidelity. I've always loved Bret Victor's idea of wanting the input and the output being as linked as possible. And we're getting to that stage. The anxiety I have having this experience is that it feels like nothing will last. Historically there's been these ways to have enduring moats, people would always call them. You have 200 million people that you know a lot about already. You've got hundreds of millions of reviews, then lots of information on places. You have these embedded things that, I can't just get that from you. But it just seems as I build this stuff, like, oh, it's going to be really hard to have something enduring and lasting. Do you share that anxiety? How does that make you feel, that as the frictions fall, it also feels like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is disappearing into the distance or something?
· Brian Chesky, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S1: Here's an analogy. Take a fashion brand like Hermès, I think the most valuable single fashion brand in the world. The Birkin bag and the Kelly bag, it's like they have a new product every decade or something. They're these really multi-decade old things and they appreciate and they resell. And then you've got Zara, fast fashion. And I feel like we all want to make these things that endure, but we're living the hyper fast fashion of software. If you look at software from 10 years ago, no matter how great it was at the time, it looks really old and dated. You look at hardware from 10 years ago, it looks pretty decent. You look at interior design, it looks pretty good. [00:00:00] S0: Or better.
· Brian Chesky
[00:00:00] S1: You look at buildings, and after a certain period of time, they've got this patina and they're wonderful. You go to Paris and old endures. Environments and physical worlds have got huge endurance, hardware and physical things have medium endurance. Software is extremely ephemeral. Opinions are like that, but some ideas permeate. This is something that I'm, that I'm, I'm wrestling with myself because I want to make things that endure. I don't know how I've reconciled it except to say this. I obsess over our app, Airbnb's app, its design, its interface. And yet no matter how great it is, 10 years from now, I'm going to look at it and think it looks like crap. Because I look at the interface from 10 years ago and think it looks like crap no matter how good it was. Dated software never looks good, even if it was good back then. So then you've got to ask, what endures? I do think there are things that endure. Airbnb the community endures. I started realizing the software won't endure, and the network effect will decently endure, but the ideas of Airbnb – its principles, its mission, the organization, the company, the brand, the identity, the logo, the voice, the community, what it stands for. Those things will endure. Most importantly, the community. I realized, at some point I told the company, we're not building an app. We're not building a service. We're building a community. And that's the only thing that will last. I don't think there will be apps in the future. I think there'll be agents. So if we're attached to apps, I don't think there will be apps. So we'd better let go of that.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: So many of the themes that we've talked about is this steady progress and learning through time applied in service of others. What did bodybuilding when you were young teach you about steady progress over time?
· Brian Chesky
[00:00:00] S1: Weirdly, bodybuilding taught me so much that I could apply to Silicon Valley. It taught me two important principles. My dad was really into ice hockey, wanted me to be an ice hockey player. Unfortunately, I was very skinny. I hit puberty really late, and I went to a sports Academy for hockey. When I was 13, I thought I could be a really good hockey player, but by the time I was 14 – I didn't hit puberty till I was like 15 or 16, and that's a death sentence in hockey. Because suddenly, I went from like first or second line to third or fourth line. I went from thinking I'd be a division one athlete to a division three athlete, and I'm like, okay, it's not really going to work out for me. And so I started weightlifting. I was 135 pounds, and I told my friends, I'm going to be one of the top bodybuilders in the country by the time I'm 19. And they thought I was out of my mind. I ended up, by 19, competing at the national level. I competed at teenage nationals. The first lesson I learned from bodybuilding was, if you can change your body, you can change your life. It was actually the most fundamental thing to change. Everyone wants to change things around them, but what if you changed you first physically? And I even think, if you could start somewhere – a lot of people say change your thoughts. I would change your body first. Change your physical biology. If you can change your body, you can change your life. It was the ultimate expression of empowerment. Okay, now I changed my body, what else can I change? It's a metaphor for eventually you can design the world around you. I can change my body, I can change my environment. Eventually I can change the world. It's like, you just go inside-out. But the other thing it taught me, which might be even more helpful, is that you can't get in shape in one day. And if you go to the gym and work out for 20 hours, you're not going to get in better shape. In fact, you're going to overtrain. And the way you get stronger is through an adaptation from progressive overload. You basically stress the body – the body doesn't get stronger during exercise, it actually breaks the muscles down. And it's an adaptive response, like an immune system, it gets stronger. You just keep doing it. The basic idea is that you can't get in shape in one day, and it's about 1% better every single day.