Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky explains how the principles of industrial design and the shift to 'founder mode' are essential for navigating the AI era.

The Counterintuitive Job of the CEO

No one is born a good CEO. While some people possess an innate drive to found companies, the role of a chief executive is entirely counterintuitive. Almost all of your natural intuition about how to lead is wrong. Founders are taught to learn by doing, but trial and error is a dangerous strategy for a CEO. In a corporate setting, a mistake in judgment can lead to the creation of an 'empire' by a professional manager that takes four years to unwind once they leave. I learned the hard way that the traditional advice to hire great people and simply trust them is a recipe for losing control of your own company.

By 2019, Airbnb had 7,000 employees and had become a political bureaucracy I barely recognized. I felt like I was in a car without a steering wheel; I would tell the company to turn left, and it would drift right. The pandemic was a rude awakening that forced me to shift from peace-time management to war-time leadership. I realized that before you can empower people, you must know exactly what is going on. Great leadership isn't about detaching yourself; it’s about being in the details and refusing to apologize for how you want to run your company.

Leadership Through the Lens of Industrial Design

My approach to business is rooted in my background at the Rhode Island School of Design. Industrial design is a unique field because a design is only successful if it sells. Unlike architecture, where a building can win awards while remaining unleased, an industrial product must be viable to the customer to be considered a success. This requires a deep integration of marketing, manufacturing, and distribution. In industrial design, there are no 'product managers' in the traditional sense—the designer is the PM. They are responsible for the entire user journey, from the technical engineering to the emotional experience of the customer.

This discipline taught me to manage through empathy. When I designed a child’s ventilator in school, I had to imagine the perspective of a terrified six-year-old looking up at a machine, as well as the parents’ need for reassurance and the nurse’s pride in their technical skill. You have to weigh every stakeholder. This is the essence of 'founder mode': managing the work, not the people. If you aren't managing the work, what are you actually doing? A design leader who doesn't design is an absurdity. You must manage through the content of the work itself, rather than acting as a full-time therapist or mentor.

The Rise of AI Founder Mode

We are entering an era where 'founder mode' will become even more intense. I call this AI Founder Mode. In this new paradigm, the layers of management that have traditionally acted as abstraction layers will collapse. There is a famous saying that the Catholic Church has lasted 2,000 years with only four layers of management, yet modern companies often have eight or nine. AI will disintermediate these steps. I believe 'pure people managers'—those who only manage people and don't touch the product—will not survive. Everyone, from lawyers to engineers, will need to 'code' in their respective fields, maintaining direct contact with reality.

AI Founder Mode moves us away from a meeting-based culture toward asynchronous, high-fidelity creation. In the past, I spent 35 hours a week in meetings just to get information. With AI, information is on demand. This allows a leader to be in significantly more detail without the 'game of telephone' that usually plagues large organizations. When you remove the abstraction layers, you go directly to the source. This isn't micromanagement for its own sake; it is about ensuring the company rows in one direction with total clarity.

The Consumer AI Renaissance

Currently, we are living in the age of Enterprise AI. Most startups are building tools for other companies because the distribution is straightforward and the business models are known. However, the big prize is Consumer AI, which remains largely untapped. Building for consumers is harder; it’s hits-driven and requires superior design, marketing, and culture. But the next 12 to 24 months will see a renaissance in this space. The challenge is that consumers aren't trained to pay for information, so the next generation of winners must build business models around utility and experience rather than just data.

To find product-market fit in this new era, founders must follow the 'Project Hawaii' model we used at Airbnb: make the problem as small as possible. We took a lean team of ten people and told them to focus solely on one niche—improving the guest conversion rate. By treating a large company like a small startup and perfecting a single market before scaling, we generated hundreds of millions in revenue. It is better to have a monopoly of a tiny market than a small share of a big one. You heat up a bathtub before you try to heat up the ocean.

The 11-Star Experience

To truly innovate, you have to go beyond the edge of reality and work backward. We use an exercise called the '11-star experience.' A five-star experience is simply one where nothing went wrong. A six-star experience involves a handwritten note and a bottle of wine. By the time you get to a ten-star experience—where Elon Musk takes you to space—you’ve entered the realm of the absurd. But the value of the exercise is that it makes a six or seven-star experience seem attainable. That gap between five and six stars is where you beat your competitors.

AI will facilitate a renaissance in this kind of creativity. For too long, our tools have been passive, shifting our attention toward consumption. AI turns the paintbrush and canvas over to everyone. Most people think they aren't creative because they lack the craftsmanship to express what is in their heads. AI provides that craftsmanship. It allows us to be 'expeditionaries' rather than just visionaries, putting one foot in front of the other to see what we can manifest.

The Artist’s Motivation

Success can be a curse when it becomes a scorecard for status. For a long time, I was driven by a need for adulation, but I realized that seeking status is like pouring water into a cup with a hole in the bottom. After Airbnb went public, I had to detach myself from the approval of others and return to the intrinsic joy of making things. My heroes—Da Vinci, Van Gogh, Disney, Jobs—were all working on their craft until their final days. They didn't do it for the accolades; they did it because they loved the work.

I view myself as a designer who has been given one of the largest canvases in history. My goal now is to move the atomic unit of Airbnb from the 'home' to the 'person,' creating a platform of authenticated identity and personalized experiences. This requires staying 'light on your feet' and maintaining the curiosity of a 26-year-old. In the age of AI, we are all just getting started. If you focus on what you want to do rather than who you want to be, there is no way to fail.