Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Brian Chesky
And the moment I find somebody that's really good, I ask them who all the best people they know are. And I basically build these little mafias. Every company's got a little mafia of talent. So Uber's got an Ops mafia. Apple's got a design mafia. And then build these little ecosystems and they tell you who the other good people are, and you're constantly finding more people, more people. And what I do is I am the co-hiring manager for the top 200 people in the company. This is very radical. A lot of CEOs think it's their job to hire their executive team, and their executive team hires their team. I think that is fatal. I mean, theoretically, yes. Theoretically, you should live in a world where you have such good people, they can all hire their own people. Most entrepreneurs, if they have ten executives, would be lucky if two or three are able to do that without any support or help. In other words, you always want to be like marrying up, hiring people of the future. I sometimes used to say, my executives should hire people so good, they would never work for them without my help. In other words, it should be like we're reaching. If you can hire them without my help, we're not reaching far enough. You want to hire the very best person you can. So I'm constantly meeting people, constantly interviewing. The first and last call I make every day is the recruiting team. Still. I probably spend two, three hours a day on it. Every day, every year I spend more time on recruiting than less. By the way, in the 2000s I didn't. I thought it was all about having a good idea, having a recruiting machine, managing people. The great thing is I don't manage this much anymore. The more time you spend recruiting, the less time you spend on management because the really good people just are self-managing. This is amazing. And if you have to manage people, then maybe you should think about upgrading the talent.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Brian Chesky
[00:00:00] S0: You said before that founders are born, you think, and CEOs can be more shaped? [00:00:00] S1: For the most part. And maybe the caveat to that is just like, maybe founders aren't born, but we spend our whole life tinkering and building. But you can't simulate being a CEO. [00:00:00] S0: I was going to ask whether or not you think they're activated in some way – maybe there's the raw material, but then some event happens. Shyam from Palantir would call this the Bruce Banner gamma rays thing or something. What have you learned about activating talent? [00:00:00] S1: I think the activation is giving someone a challenge. Our founding story is we couldn't afford to pay rent. But of course, I have 50 stories before that, of challenges I had. It's just Airbnb, that story activated something on a scale I'd never done before. But it wasn't the first thing I made. I was making things my whole life. I think the way to activate somebody is to give them a problem or opportunity and see if they can do it. I think the people that have a high level of agency are going to do it. I don't know how to teach motivation. I don't know if it can be taught, by the way. I don't know if you can teach it. I think you can motivate people, but I don't think you can make a person who's not motivated, motivated. But I think all entrepreneurs have the trait that they're self-motivated. And so it's really about giving them a challenge and then it's up to them to step in and activate.
· Brian Chesky, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S1: I think the activation is giving someone a challenge. Our founding story is we couldn't afford to pay rent. But of course, I have 50 stories before that, of challenges I had. It's just Airbnb, that story activated something on a scale I'd never done before. But it wasn't the first thing I made. I was making things my whole life. I think the way to activate somebody is to give them a problem or opportunity and see if they can do it. I think the people that have a high level of agency are going to do it. I don't know how to teach motivation. I don't know if it can be taught, by the way. I don't know if you can teach it. I think you can motivate people, but I don't think you can make a person who's not motivated, motivated. But I think all entrepreneurs have the trait that they're self-motivated. And so it's really about giving them a challenge and then it's up to them to step in and activate. [00:00:00] S0: Having plugged the leaky bucket of motivation, of adulation – what's your motivation now as you attack this next chapter?
· Brian Chesky
[00:00:00] S1: Most of my heroes are artists. I'll pick four people. Two I've mentioned repeatedly. Leonardo da Vinci, Vincent Van Gogh, Walt Disney, Steve Jobs. There's many things they had in common, but what is something they all had in common? The last day of their life, or the last week of their life, they were working. Leonardo da Vinci carried the Mona Lisa with him until he died. And he definitely didn't paint the Mona Lisa for adulation because he never showed it to anyone. Vincent Van Gogh sold one painting in his life. He died an obscure artist – in the cornfield, maybe shot, maybe not, unclear what happened. But did it because he loved it. Walt Disney, last day of his life, he was laying in a hospital bed. His brother Roy was like rubbing his cold feet. Dying of lung cancer, looking at the ceiling tiles – which were a grid – imagining Disneyworld. Steve Jobs, Hiroki said the last couple of weeks of his life, he showed him marketing. He was still looking at products. You know, some people can look at that and their interpretation is, oh, that's sad that they weren't spending time with family. By the way, I'm sure those that had families – Vincent Van Gogh and Leonardo da Vinci didn't have families. My understanding is Steve and Walt spent time with their family at the end of their life. But I don't see that as a sad story they're working in the end. Cause I think they did what they loved. You know, the great artists in history did what they love. My motivation is the motivation of an artist. My motivation is to create something great. That is my motivation. I would like to be successful. I want our shareholders to get a return. I would like employees to feel that they're at a great company. I would love to make a huge impact in the world, but mostly I just want to make something. I feel like I'm a designer more than I am a CEO. And I might be afforded one of the biggest canvases of any designer in human history, because usually designers are just not given this many resources. It's almost like a glitch in a system, it was almost accidental. Some airbeds allowed me to crack this glitch and get all these resources I wasn't supposed to get. But I'm not letting go. And so my motivation is that of an artist. I just want to make incredible things.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Brian Chesky
[00:00:00] S0: It's a beautiful, almost closing thought, given the tools now at our disposal that everyone can do that if they want, and we should encourage them to do so. [00:00:00] S1: All children are born artists. The problems is remaining one as you grow up. AI is the opportunity for all of us to become artists and scientists and creators. We don't have to be consumers anymore. We can be creators. True creators. And when we hear the word creator, you think social media performer. That's one way to create, you can perform. The problem is I think, creator has meant performance. Now creator can be create, make. Everyone can make now. It's amazing. [00:00:00] S0: The last question I ask everyone is the same. What is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you?
· Brian Chesky
[00:00:00] S1: The biggest gift anyone's given me is believe in me. And I think the biggest gift you can give somebody, or one of the biggest gifts is believe in you. A couple of examples. When I was 16 years old, I transferred to a public high school. I was really into art, I was a pretty good artist. I didn't know how good I was. And I had a teacher named Miss Williams. She believed in me, and I remember telling her telling my parents, he's going to be a famous artist. I never became a famous artist, but it gave me confidence that I was actually good at something, because I wasn't that good at hockey. I wish I was, and I wish I could make my dad proud of ice hockey. I just didn't get very far. And suddenly that belief set me on a path. In that moment I said, I'm going to go to art school. And that moment I realized, I can decide to be happy the rest of my life. I came to Silicon Valley. I met Michael Seibel and the guys at Justin.tv, and they believed in me. They were early YC people. Paul Graham made an exception to let me in early at Y Combinator. He believed in me. I wasn't an engineer, and he almost never funded non-engineers. He thought the idea was not a good idea, actually. He said, people are actually doing this? I go, yes. He goes, what's wrong with them? But he believed in me. My investors – I can go down the list of investors, they believed in me. Joe and Nate – I had no business being a CEO. Joe somehow believed in me. I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the generosity of people believing in me and in helping me. But I think the greatest gift I can give back is believing in others and help them, and not pull the ladder up behind me, but to really show them. I had the great privilege to eventually join the Giving Pledge. You have to write a letter. I remember my letter was, if you could ask my high school teachers who would join the Giving Pledge, they wouldn't have guessed me. The basic idea in my life philosophy is we all have unknown potential. I think we have these stories in our own head about what we're capable of. To go back to John Wooden, somebody once asked him – what's the secret to success? And he said, I only ask my players to do their very best. The person goes, oh wow, that seems weird. That sounds like what a parent says to the kid who loses all the time. He goes, here's the catch.