The pandemic was a severe blow to the tourism sector and Airbnb. In recent statements, Brian Chesky, CEO of the company, assures that Steve Jobs’ philosophy helped him save the company.
In eight weeks, Airbnb had to face the loss of 80% of its business volume. The pandemic threatened to end everything achieved. It was then that Brian Chesky, CEO of the company, turned to Steve Jobs’ way of working: he had to be involved in every decision, reduce his functions to be in all the others.
Just before the disaster, there was an excursion in October 2019. Chesky told Airbnb co-founders Joe Gebbia and Nathan Blecharczy that “I felt as if I had dreamed that I was leaving the company. I had been gone for 10 years and I came back and I didn’t recognize her. And they said, “Well, what are you going to do about it?” And I said, “Well, I don’t know. The IPO, we are about to go public”.
At that time, the CEO ensures that Airbnb spent a billion dollars on marketing of results, he did endless experiments, AirRooms was on the table, it was impossible for it to be in each of the decisions.
But the premonition was about to come true, so much so that Brian Chesky wrote his termination letter.“we look into the abyss“, remember. “The headlines read Will there be an Airbnb??”, it states. It was then that Jony Ive and Hiroki Asai, Airbnb executives who had worked with Steve Jobs, reminded him of his maxim: “a company should never work on more things than the CEO can focus on”.
Applying the philosophy of Steve Jobs, hard beginnings but excellent results
The reflection of what happened has taken place in the podcast: This Week in Startups and in it, Chesky has valued that following Steve Jobs’ personal involvement methodology has not been easy. At first the steps were slow and “slowed down the processes”.
Also I know generated a certain rejection at the idea that the CEO “meddled” in every decision of each department. However, little by little the personal review formed a “responsibility culture” which, according to Chesky, has been very positive.
According to his balance: “the company is now more efficient, spending most of its time on products, marketing, and recruiting, and very little on corporate affairss”. Just like when Steve Jobs rescued Apple from bankruptcy in 1997.
He airbnb future, According to Chesky, it happens because the brand returns to revolve around people and in the long term by artificial intelligence.“One of the things I like about Apple is that they were never the first, they weren’t the first smartphone, they weren’t the first music player. But when they release something, there’s nothing after, that’s our future“, has declared.