Hi, it's Bob Saffian. You've been hearing me as the host of Rapid Response in this feed for a few years now with short newsy interviews alongside the deeper dives of Masters of Scale. Well, I'm excited to share that Rapid Response is expanding into its own feed. We'll be putting out shows twice a week, focusing on the urgent issues that business leaders are dealing with in real-time. So search for rapid response in your podcast player and subscribe to make sure you get all our episodes. I'll see you on the other side.

The pandemic hit. People were predicting this is the end of Airbnb. Is it going to exist? And so in my darkest moment, you were the first podcast I ever did, and you were the first person I ever told the story to. And I just really appreciate that you and I have been on this journey. The next podcast I did was the recovery, the comeback. Then the next one was the IPO, and I would describe this as the next chapter of Airbnb, Airbnb going beyond Homes and truly entering this new creative place.

That's Brian Chesky, co founder and CEO of Airbnb, who's about to take us into a deep, revealing look into the Airbnb of today and of tomorrow. We'll start with his approach to Airbnb's earnings releases, the most recent of which he announced just a couple of days ago. And then we'll dig into Airbnb's new initiatives around Icon Stays, inspired by the Barbie Malibu Dream house. And surprise, that program offers a hint about how AirBnB will be moving into new creative places. We'll also talk about what he and Apple's longtime designer, Johnny Ive, have been collaborating on, how he's applying AI to Airbnb. Plus, Brian talks about his biceps and his bodybuilding regimen and more. It's so jam-packed. Our session will unfold in two parts. Part two will release on Friday, available only through the new rapid response feed. So please subscribe on Apple, Spotify, wherever you get your podcast. I'm Bob Saffian, former Editor and Chief of Fast Company, founder of the Fluxx Group, and your host, this is Rapid Response. We'll start the show in a moment after a word from our premier brand partner, Capital One Business.

I woke up in the middle of the night because I had this nightmare that we were front-page news that we've done the stupidest mistake of our life by making this pivot.

That's Aparna Saren, Chief Marketing Officer for Capital One business. She's recalling a moment from her previous position at Capital One when she was heading up a team designing a new business card.

We had just made the decision to go all in and sunset the prior version of the product, which was honestly the cash cow for our business. When we made that decision within a senior leadership meeting, as someone who had been on the journey to build this out for five plus years, it was really exciting. But by the time the weekend hit, I started to feel the responsibility the pressure. We are taking this big bet on something that I've built.

Perhaps you've been there. You've made a pivotal decision, and then panic sets in. How would Aparna calm her butterflies and steer her team through this pivot? We'll find out later in the show. It's all part of the Refocus Playbook, a special series where Capital One business highlights stories of business owners and leaders using one of Reed's theories of entrepreneurship. Today's Playbook Insight, have multiple plan Bs.

I'm Bob Saffian, and I'm here with Brian Chesky, the founder and CEO of AirBnB. Brian, it's good to be here with you in person.

It's good to be here with you as well. I'm excited to be back.

So first of all, welcome to New York, or welcome back to New York. I know you grew up in New York.

Upstate New York. Yeah.

You've had a busy month. You were in LA for an event, then you come here to New York to do an earnings release. Where do you stay when you're in New York? Do you have a regular place?

At this point, I stay with my sister. You stay with your sister? Yeah, I stay in my sister's apartment in Tribeca. The whole original premise of Airbnb was the experience of staying with a close friend in the city. Well, when I have close friends, if they're willing to still have me, then I'll still do that, too.

A sister counts.

A sister counts. She's one of my closest friends.

Now, I have to say, you're here in New York for earnings. Earnings cannot That would not be the most fun part of this job.

It's definitely, I will tell you, I do prefer launching new products than delivering the quarterly financial results. But I will tell you something. Before I went public, I was I was overwarned by so many CEOs, never go public. Stay private as long as you can. And so therefore, I had a lot of caution about going public. When everyone tells you, and by the way, they didn't just tell me people don't like being public company CEO. A lot of people said, You, particularly, will not like being a public company CEO. I'm like, Why me, particular? Maybe it had something to do with me being a designer, having gone to RISDI, and why would a person like that enjoy the scrutiny of being a public company. So I'll tell you, having been public now for a little over three years and having done maybe a dozen or so earnings calls, I actually weirdly enjoy earnings calls. I think being a public company CEO, I don't want to diminish its difficulty, but I think it's easier to be a public company CEO than a late-stage private company CEO. Because when you're a late-stage private company, it is like you're a public company.

You have to have audited financials, you have an audit committee, you have a lot of scrutiny in the company. So you have a lot of the downsides of being public, but you don't have the upsides. Meaning when you're a private company and you're really big, there's always this sense that you're hiding something. We're not getting the full story. I think once we went public, It was like this pressure valve just released. And earnings calls, I find, are actually really good disciplines to brush up on the story. And I do find that the analyst and the investors are super fair. I do think the market is like, I We're never going to figure out the markets, but it's not that bad.

As you're talking, I was thinking I had a discussion with Michael Dell when he took Dell private, and he said that one of the upsides for him of going private was that he wouldn't have to share everything, that not all of his competitors would know everything about what he was doing in the same way that he felt like he had to when he was public.

Well, the good thing for you, I tend to be an overshare, and that might not be what my team likes, but I think for you and everyone else, that works.

So last summer, you launched this Barbie Malibu Beach house that went crazy when the movie went crazy. Went completely nuts. And now you've announced 11 icon locations, from Xmen mansion to Ferrari Museum It's a Princess Purple Rain house. It almost seems like this opportunity, this idea, presented itself to you, like the Barbie house opened your eyes to things?

A hundred %. So basically, the quick version of story, just to give some more background on Icons, is 10 years ago, I remember I was with my co founder roommate, and we're living at this apartment that we started a company in, and we need to get some furniture. And of course, back then, IKEA would have been the place he would have We get to an IKEA, we're walking down the hallway and we see a bedroom, those IKEA showroom bedrooms. I remember saying to him, Wouldn't it be funny if we put this on Airbnb? It was as a joke. And we started talking about it internally, like a joke, we're going to list a night at the IKEA. Well, somebody in our Australian team, unbeknownst to me, hears about this idea and reaches out to some marketing executive in IKEA. And they one day tell me, Hey, We got this IKEA in Sydney, Australia on an Airbnb. So it gets listed on an Airbnb, and it becomes a bit of a sensation. Then one day, somebody in our team says, We have an idea to list Blockbuster on an Airbnb. And I'm like, Blockbuster? I remember this.

I didn't think there were any more Blockbusters. I was like, Actually, it turns out there's one left in Bend, Oregon. So we put on an Airbnb. It went all over the internet. It got thousands of press articles, probably got millions of millions of dollars with the press. So then last year, the Barbie movie is coming out. I think it was Mattel and Warner Brothers that reached out to us, and they said, Can we do a promotion with Barbie? Because they were going to do a bunch of these Barbie marketing activations. And so we said, Sure. So we found a house in the Hills of Malibu that looked a little like the Barbie house. And we basically, to the last detail, really every corner of the space, we recreated as if it was a Barbie Malibu dream house.

That is your way to the last detail.

To the last detail. As Charles Eames said, the detail aren't the details. They make the design. And Walt Disney would look at the back of a trash can. And I do think that everything is just an accumulation of details. I think that's a good characteristic of design. But so anyways, this Barbie house we put on Airbnb, It gets more press than the IPO. And we're like, what the hell? The universe is telling me that the world wants this.

So there's not necessarily a strategy behind it. There's just a feeling that there's an opportunity here.

At this point, it was purely a feeling. In hindsight, we backed into a strategy. And sometimes things start with a strategy. Sometimes things start with, we need more engagement and we need blah, blah, blah. But I got to tell you, Bob, sometimes I honestly think the best idea is start with a vision. They start with an idea, they start with a feeling. And then you validate them by reverse engineering a strategy to make sure what you're doing actually makes some modicum of business sense. So it's October, and I rallied the team together. It was only six, seven months ago. I said, We need to create a platform for Barbies. I want to be able to come to Airbnb and see a whole series of Barbies on the homepage. But I don't just want them to be stays because I want them to be experiences. In fact, I want all these to feel like they're experiences, not stays, because this is going to be a bridge to where we're going. We're going to eventually relaunch experiences. And I said, this can be the way to do that. So we huddled together. And probably my favorite concept that the team came up with was The Uphouse.

And The Uphouse, The Uphouse was one of my favorite movies. And I said, If we're going to build this up house, you better make sure it is down to the last detail, because people have been to Disneyland, and their expectation is that it's done to the level of Disneyland craft, and it can't look like a Disney knockoff. You open the mailbox, and there's brochures and they're graphic designed. It's that level of detail. So we do that. We design this house. It takes 100 people to do. We assemble fabricators, prop designers. We had to assemble a team of 100 to be able to build this house. Then I have this thought. I said, Wait a second. I know we're going to build a house, but if it doesn't go in the sky, it's not really the up house. And the problem is, most houses aren't constructed to be lifted in the air.

No, they're It's being imported by the ground. Yeah.

And so if you lift a house, it collapse. There's no structural integrity. So we ended up working with structural engineers to figure out, how can you construct a house that's 40,000 pounds. Okay, 40,000 pounds that can be lifted 50 feet in the air, 50 feet, five stories in the air, and above it will have 8,000 balloons. Now, you can't be helium balloons. Obviously, the physics doesn't actually work out. You'd need the biggest helium balloons in the world, and if they deflate, You fall to your desk, so you can't do that. So we ended up creating a steel structure, and then we found the biggest crane in the world, or one of the biggest cranes in the world. And these cranes were basically used for windmills, those wind farms. And we had to work with safety experts to figure out how the house doesn't rock. We had to work with meteorologists because it turns out about 11 miles an hour, the amount of wind that house can withstand before the rocking becomes dangerous, and the props basically just dismantle. We found land in New Mexico where they filmed Oppenheimer, and that's basically... It looks a little like Venezuela, where the film takes place.

And so that's just one of the icons. We do this for 11 of them. Given the response of Barbie, I knew if we put out icons, number one, we'd remain top of mind. Now everyone knows Airbnb, but our competitor spend four or $5 billion a year on performance marketing to stay top of mind, and everyone knows of them, too. So we're in an industry where even if people know you, people only come to your app once or twice a year, not like Instagram, because you travel. So you have to remain top of mind. The second thing is we're in every country in the world with only a few exceptions, but this was the best way to reach certain audiences. We want to reach the community in India, who's the biggest Bollywood star? Let's to work with one of them. So it really works. And the third thing is the Airbnb brand, on the one hand, is pretty amazing. It's a noun and a verb. It's one of the only brands that is like Xerox or Kleenex. It means something. The problem is, it's a noun and a verb that means a BMB, a place to stay.

It's almost like if Nike meant running shoes, how do you sell basketball shoes?

It becomes narrow.

It becomes narrow. So it turned out that by building this platform for icons, it kept us top of mind. It allowed us to reach all these segments, and it became a gateway to people thinking about AirBnB, not just for stays, but experiences. And that allows us to pave the way for the next few years.

As you're talking about the uphouse, clearly, it cost you a lot of money. It was expensive. And when I think about the other things that you and I have talked about, pandemic and IPO and whatever, 11 listings on a service the size of Airbnb can seem modest. Why spend all that money on just that? But as you're talking about it, this is a strategic decision investment in brand and awareness and the reputation and perception of what Airbnb is and could be.

There's two things. Number one, while we don't spend nearly as much as our competitors in marketing. Just to back up, so travel is an industry where people spend a lot of marketing. Our competitors, some of the biggest OTA spend almost 40% of their revenue on marketing. So I was like, That's a lot. It's a very marketing-driven industry. We spend about half what our other competitors spend on marketing, but we still spend over a billion dollars a year on marketing. So this is a very marketing-driven industry. So it turns out that if you consider this a marketing expense, this is some of the highest ROI marketing you can do. So it's just like versus Google AdWords or TV ads or digital ads on Instagram or TikTok or Snap, How does this perform? Our theory is this will be some of the best ROI that we'll ever do for marketing. That's number one.

Because you get so much earned media, basically. Basically, everyone...

I mean, we've had nearly 10,000 articles written about us, and it's almost twice as much coverage as the IPO. What's an IPO worth? People say it's tens of millions of dollars of free marketing. This was way more than that. This, I think, also was a brand repositioning for us a little bit. But there's another reason that we did it, and it brings me back to Walt Disney. Before Walt Disney built Disneyland, he built a small train set in his backyard. And no one can understand why a guy that had this huge Hollywood studio, he was like, one of those famous people in the world is spending all his time on this little train set. He had Solvider or dolly come to this train set. And what he was doing was practicing. He was building the muscle at a small scale for something that was going to be unleashed to the world. And eventually, what was unleashed was Disneyland. I Icons helped us build some muscle for something that we will unleash that will reach millions of people.

I mean, they're Disney-like experiences, right? You're not going into the theme park business. Or are you thinking about how do you do theme park business in an Airbnb way?

It's a little bit like, I think you could think of it as, we launched experiences a long time ago. It got some traction, never really captured the public's imagination like a our business. And I think one of the lessons was it was different, but not quite different enough. It didn't quite have enough magic. So we said, let's start with something completely unscalable. That's pure magic. And by the way, they'll be guaranteed to be sold out. There's about 4,000 tickets a year. So clearly, these will be sold out, and they're going to be a low price. And we'll start with the craziest of magic and just really then figure out how can we take that magic and then bring it to millions of people. And so we're We're going to start very high in with icons, and then we're moving to mass. It won't be a theme park. I think it's going to reinvent the company, and it's going to be the beginning of the next chapter of Airbnb, and we're going to launch it next year.

Next year? Next year. I can't wait to be back here again.

I can't wait to tell you about it. I told the team one thing. I said, If we can make a 40,000-pound house float in the sky, we can do anything.

I'll confess that when I When I first heard about AirBnB's Icons initiatives, I thought it was a bit of a gimmick. But as Brian explains, it reinforces the brand's relevance and currency by tapping into culture and celebrity. I also love how it emerged organically, planned, that Brian pulled on a thread AirBnB had explored before and leaned into it as an opportunity. And the fact that it unlocks the way to a new expanded purview for the company, well, Brian has a few more hints to share about that. After the break, we'll dig into the head-to-head ad campaign he's launched against hotels, the obsession about his biceps and his bodybuilding regimen, and more. Stay with us.

We'll be back in a moment after a word from our premier brand partner, Capital One Business.

There was panic that set in that night because I didn't want to let people down.

We're back with Aparna Seren of Capital One business. She was recalling the time she woke up in a cold sweat, terrified that the new product she had been working on might fail. So the next morning, she sat down and wrote an email.

It was Sunday morning, and I said, You know what? I'm going to just share this with my peers. It was very emotional. It was a cry for help.

Aparna realized that if the new product didn't take off, she needed a plan B, preferably multiple plan Bs.

I'm inviting them to be the thought partners so that we are mitigating as much risk as possible, and we have contingency plans in place as we'd make this move. You'd write something like this, and your heart is pounding, should I send this? It was a super vulnerable moment for me. But then I was like, I'm going to just send this. What's the worst that will happen? It can't be worse than being on the front page of the newspaper.

She held her breath and hit send. What happened next would surprise even her. We'll hear about that later in the show. It's all part of Capital One Businesses Spotlight on Business Leaders, following Reed's Refocus Playbook.

Before the break, We heard Airbnbs' Brian Chesky talk about why he's invested heavily in creating just 11 low-revenue stays called Icons. Now we talk about how he's recently gone on the offensive to compete against big hotel chains, what His exercise regimen teaches him about business and how he manages the mental health toll of leadership, what he calls the inescapable nightmare. Let's jump back in. You've talked about this long-time message of Airbnb being around experiences and being local, feeling like you're having a local experience. You started running ads against hotels that is, I don't know, directly going against the traveler marketplace. What is that about? Because it's almost like you're making fun of their reliability. It's reliable, but it's reliably maybe something you don't want.

Yeah, let me talk to you about that campaign. So first of all, for the last 10 or 12 years, we've been the receiving end of a lot of contrast of Airbnb versus hotels. It's possible there's been billions of dollars spent that we've been on the receiving end on in the last decade or dozen years. Most team that I have today on the marketing and creative side was actually Apple and shy at day during the golden age of Apple. I hired someone named Hiroki Asai way. He was the creative director of Apple. He brought in these two great creative directors, Scott Tradner and Eric Rumbam. Turns out Scott Tradner and Eric Rumbam created the Mac versus PC campaign. And I've always wanted to do an Airbnb versus hotel campaign, but I didn't want to punch down. Well, actually punch up, they're much bigger than us. I wanted it to be something that was endearing and lovable. I didn't want to do a campaign that said, We're better than hotels in every way. In fact, if you need to stay one night and you're on a business trip, I think hotels are better. And we have hotels in AirBnB, so it's not like that's blasmy for me.

We own hotel tonight, and if you need a hotel, if you need a place tonight, get a hotel. But it turns out that 80% of our trips are two or more people. And if you're traveling with a group, if you're traveling with your family, it's almost always better than a hotel. For every person who stays in an Airbnb, eight or nine people stay in a hotel. And if we can get one of those people to stay in an Airbnb, we will double the size of our company. And so how do we do that? We do that by not convincing them we're better all the time, but convincing them that those family trips and those group trips you do in an Airbnb. So now we have a concept. So then how do we make that concept an ad? I told our team, I said, I want to explore a concept around Pixar-level 3D animation, and let's find an iconic voiceover artist. We end up finding Claire Daines. She does it. And just make it playful and fun, humorous, Making fun of them a little bit, but not totally destroying them, just light. And that became the genesis of this campaign.

And it's been just the punchline, is it's been the highest performing campaign we've ever done. It's I think great marketing is education. You're educating people about some indisputable truth. It is an indisputable truth that it is just cheaper and you don't have to go to bed at the same time, and you can all sit around the kitchen, you can have a pool there. Those are just indisputable truths. You can't argue with them. Whether you want those or not, separate.

So when Icons was announced, there was nearly as much social coverage of your biceps as of the house.

I wasn't expecting that. I've had these biceps the whole time.

Yeah, Some reason people notice them. I know you and I haven't talked about this before, but I understand you did bodybuilding when you were younger.

I was 19. I was a competitive bodybuilder. Yeah.

So what's your routine like? Is it an outlet for you for frustration? Is it like meditation?

It's all the above. But I started bodybuilding when I was 16, 17 years old. So I joke, I wasn't a tech founder of that midlife crisis. I had an adolescent crisis. So the reason I started bodybuilding is I was the same height I am now, and I was 120, 125 pounds. I was just super skinny. I remember there was a program, and I was listed at 135 pounds, and all the other players were like, 180 pounds. So I started weight lifting. And I remember telling my friends, when I was 17, they were playfully teasing me that I was super skinny. I said, Well, I'll be the most muscular teenager in the country in two years. And two years later, I was the seventh most muscular teenager in the country. I competed in what basically the Teenage Mister America was called the MPC Teenage Nationals and Collegiate Nationals. I learned two lessons from bodybuilding that I brought to tech. The first lesson I learned is if you can change your body, you can change your life. It was almost like, you can change your life and you can start inside out. The body is almost the most fundamental place.

I mean, even a lot of therapists, they might say, Start with your body. It's like trying to start with your thoughts. Start with your body. Start with something fundamental. The second thing about bodybuilding that it taught me And this is really good for tech. You can't get in shape in one workout. It's just consistency. And I think there's this narrative in Silicon Valley in tech and business that somebody has this flash of insight. And anyone who's done this knows it's not one idea, it's 100,000 ideas. And you don't build a company in a day just like you don't get in shape in a day. And I think it teaches you that discipline. And it's very methodical, and it's actually very measurable. And yes, I think it's an outlet. The amount of stress can drive you crazy. And it's driven a lot of people crazy. And I think, I I mean, no one talks about when you start a company, you grow it. No one talks about the mental health toll. The amount of people I know that have had panic attacks, they've had to stop, they've lost it, they've gone through really dark periods. No one talks about it.

It's a lot. And you need an outlet. And I think maybe there's two answers. One is health and fitness, and the other is good relationships. You can't be alone. You need to lean on people. And if you have good relationships and you also have a really good health, then you're going to be healthy both mentally and physically. Then you can totally sustain this. But if you don't have good relationships and you're not exercising, you'll probably crack.

You have a lot of energy and a lot of passion. I know from your team that you're always going. Always. Do you take moments to step back and think about the progress you've made and reflect on it? Or is your impulse always the next hill, the next thing?

Kind of always the next hill. But again, We launched Icons last week. Everyone was celebrating. And I went home that night and I started working on next May. But that could either sound inspiring or dark.

You're a lunatic. It sounds like you're a lunatic.

Loontic, yeah. But the way I've explained this is like, if I'm a rock climber, the part I like isn't standing on top of rocks. The part I like is the climbing. And so I don't do all this for as a result. I do it for the process. And so I'm a little bit of a lunatic, but I also love the act. But I will say, and you're right about this, and people close to me have said this, that you do also have to stop and take stock in what you've done and have some appreciation. It's not a bad thing.

It's not a bad thing to have a little gratitude and enjoy those moments.

I do sometimes do that. To be honest, it's not my inclination to do that. My inclination is to always push the boundaries, but it's the inclination of the people I love around me to do that and to get me to stop. My fellow CEO friends aren't like, Can you believe what you've done? They don't say that. None of us do. We're like, Can you believe how far we are behind it? Ai, someone's ahead of us? So all of us in Silicon Valley. That one person in Silicon Valley, none of my peers are like, Yeah, this is amazing. All of us are just egging each other on. Someone's always ahead of you. If they're not ahead of you, you think they're ahead of you. Then you hang out with your high school friends and college friends, and they're like, This is so crazy. Do you remember when you were in high school and all you ever wanted was to prove your mom wrong that you could get a job with health insurance? And I'm like, Oh, my God. I guess I did that. So that perspective is really, really important. I I think the positive Silicon Valley is we're never complacent and we're always reaching for the next thing.

But obviously, that comes at a cost. And we got to be connected to our roots a little bit. I've encountered a number of people in Silicon Valley that are not in touch with anyone their past. If you meet somebody and not one of their friends they've had for more than five years or 10 years, that's a little bit of an issue, potentially. You are maybe, possibly disconnected from your roots and your past. The other thing I'll just say, being a CEO can be such a fun and rewarding job. It can also, if you're not careful, be at times a little bit close to an inescapable nightmare you can ever escape. And the difference is your team. If you have an amazing team and you can really count on them and you can really trust them, then it is the most rewarding thing. I feel like I have more fun today, and this sounds completely crazy, but I feel like my job today is more creative, more entrepreneurial than it was when we were 10 or 20 people. But that sounds completely counter to-Because the canvas is so much bigger? The canvas is so much bigger, but also I have such a great team.

And it doesn't mean that I don't have to deal with some of the nitty-gritty, but there's so many intelligent, competent people that can absorb so much complexity that I feel like today I can almost feel like Mickey Mouse and Fantasia. In other words, it's fulfilling. You're like, We should do this. It happens. When you don't have the right team in place, and so you're in a car and you turn left, and nothing happens. When you have a team and they can't do their job, you end up doing their job. That That gets very intense. And then what happens is you start getting surprises. And one measure of how good a company is, is what % of surprises are good versus bad. So when we were doing through our adolescence or growing pains, nine out of 10 surprise were bad. Every day was a surprise. It was never a good surprise. I remember what I was saying at one point, Why don't I get good surprises?

Another bomb landed today. Yeah.

And the surprises are basically just like you're reacting, you're on defense, Once things are happening to you versus you doing things, and once you have, you're in rhythm and you're on top of things and you're rowing in the same direction, then suddenly, most of the surprises are good. Somebody was like, Hey, guess what? We've been working on this thing. And I'm like, I didn't even know you were working on something. Yeah. And we're onto something. You're like, oh, my God, this is going to change everything. And that happens all the time now. And that's what happens when you cross corporate adolescents. And when you started interviewing me, I was an adolescence. And unfortunately, our corporate adolescence was about as awkward as my real adolescence. It was very awkward, very painful. I think that a lot of companies, they'll go through adolescence. And the adolescence is like, I can describe it. You have an idea and you get to product market fit. That's like you enter childhood. It's really fun. Everything's wonderful. You're a hot company. You get interviewed by Bob and you You think you're the man. That's the wonderful childhood. And then, of course, you enter adolescence.

You're successful, but now you're having trouble managing executive team. Costs are rising, growth is slowing. You're having trouble pivoting to the next thing. Most of us, we all started as good founders. You don't really have to learn to be a good founder. You just become a founder. And if you're super-determined and creative and resilient, you can be a good founder. But no one's born being a good CEO. And I don't think anyone ever started as a good CEO. So at one point, you go from being a real-class founder to a pretty crappy CEO. Almost nobody has ever gone from real-class founder to world-class CEO without having first been a crappy CEO because it's just a totally different job. And in that, that's what I would describe as corporate adolescence. And it's a painful period. And unlike adulthood, most people make it out of adolescence. Most companies probably don't actually make it out of that awkward adolescence. But if you can get to the other side, and I think my series of podcast for you, I think, was the journey from crisis to recovery to growing up. On the other side of that is the most creative you can ever imagine.

I've had a number of people I've looked up to, but in the last 25 years, the one I would have looked up to by far would be Steve Jobs. And what I liked about him was he had that moment of truth from 1997 to maybe 2000, 2001.

He certainly grew up as a leader.

People should recall, he came back to Apple, and I don't think anyone would have described him as a good CEO. Do people think he was a good CEO at Next? I don't know. But I think a lot of people would say that he learned to go through the adolescence at Next. He learned to become a CEO. And then by the time the iPad launched, he had a 10-year run from 2001 till 2011 when he passed. That was a run unlike we've ever seen this industry hit after hit after hit after hit. And it was like this, creative momentum. And it was like the company remained a startup. I've always dreamed of being able to have an era like that. I don't want to say for sure entering that period, but I do feel like the next 10 years, It was a real chance that we could have our own version of at least having... What I think we can do is I think in our future, we will have a whole bunch of new things coming out. I spent 15 years trying to perfect this one thing. It's worked out pretty well. It was a pretty good idea that my friends and I had in my mid-20s, but now we're ready to do the next thing.

I don't know how much.

Do we have more time? I can keep going. If we did this for 12 hours, on hour 12, I'd have more energy than right now.

Brian is indeed just getting started. It's like our conversation is business therapy for him, talking about his dreams, addressing his challenges, honing his strategic plans by talking through them. Yes, there is a part two of my chat with Brian, and it will release on Friday Friday, available only through the new rapid response feed. So please subscribe on Apple, Spotify, wherever you get your podcast. As we continue on, Brian's filter keeps receding. We talk about how he's partnering with legendary Apple designer, Johnny Ive, what ChatGPT gets all wrong that people are missing, and how he personally orchestrates the inner workings of Airbnb. It's part confessional, part braggadocio, and totally absorbing. I hope you'll join us. I'm Bob Saffian. Thanks for listening. Now, a final word from our brand partner, Capital One Business.

Throughout the day, text messages and emails kept pouring in. Whatever you need, just let us know.

We're back one more time with Aparna Seren of Capital One business. She was telling us about a Sunday morning email. She fired off in a moment of panic. Minutes later, her inbox was overflowing, and the support she found wasn't just emotional, it was practical.

We talked about detailed contingency plans, and we created our co market strategy. Before we are in full rollout mode, we had stage gates so that we could test and quickly learn and iterate. Within a matter of six months, as we were rolling things out channel by channel, those stage gates would allow us to pivot pivot if we saw something that we didn't like.

That day, Aparna learned a lesson that stayed with her. Having multiple plan Bs doesn't just expand your options. It gives you new opportunities.

The best way to pivot is actually open doors for thoughtful conversations because humility in knowing that you actually don't know everything, as well as the empathy in knowing that disruption is always drastic and abrupt, helps you go go through that pivot with other people in a very different way.

Capital One business is proud to support entrepreneurs and leaders working to scale their impact from Fortune 500s to first-time business owners. For more resources to help drive your business forward, visit capitalone. Com/businesshub. That's capitalone. Com/businesshub.

Rapid Response is a wait, what, original. I'm Bob Saffian. Our executive producer is Yves Trou. Our producer is Alex Morris. Assistant producer is Masha Makoutonina. Mixing and mastering by Aaron Bastinelli. Theme music by Ryan Holladay. Our head of podcast is Litaal Malad. For more, visit rapidresponse-show. Com.