Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky says culture is what people do, not what a company says
In 2012, Peter Thiel wrote Airbnb a cheque for $150 million, visited the office, and when Brian Chesky asked him for the single most important piece of advice he had, told him not to wreck the culture. A year later, in October 2013, Chesky sent the entire staff a letter arguing the opposite. Because a process only needs compliance, the passion clause is what separates a culture from a process,. Because people can be trusted to make the right call without being watched, a strong culture, he argued, lets a company run on less corporate process,.
The most repeated line in it runs to eleven words and says nothing about travel, hospitality, valuation or growth. Chesky found that answer deflating. Thiel’s view was that companies past a certain size almost always ruin the thing that made them work. Read it closely and there is no room in the sentence for mission statements, values printed on a wall, or the free food that companies still confuse with culture. Chesky puts the weight on doing. Culture, by this definition, is whatever a company’s people actually do when they write an email, sit in a review, or decide something small without asking permission. His reasoning in that letter was practical rather than sentimental. Weak culture has to be replaced by rules, approvals and layers, all of which slow a company down. Chesky’s claim was that culture is the foundation everything else is built on, and that breaking it breaks the machine that makes the products.
The quote is harder to live by now that software does the doing
Airbnb today employs around 8,200 people, and Chesky has said artificial intelligence now writes about 60 per cent of the company’s new code, with product pilots going from idea to launch in weeks. “Build something 100 people love, not something 1 million people kind of like. He has also backed a separate AI lab of his own, focused on interface and design, while staying on as chief executive. A shared way of doing something assumes people are the ones doing it. Chesky’s answer has been to stay inside the detail himself, what he calls founder mode rather than manager mode, and to keep the company organised around people working together instead of teams left alone to run. The eleven words hold up so far. What they are being asked to hold up is a company where a growing share of the work is no longer done by anyone in the building. Other Brian Chesky quotes “Culture is a thousand things, a thousand times. “The stronger the culture, the less corporate process a company needs. “A company’s culture is the foundation for future innovation. Get the latest technology news and updates. Download the TOI App.