Brian Chesky designed Airbnb's offices as actual Airbnb homes, down to matching inventories in meeting rooms. He argues design shapes companies, not just products, and the offices became a hiring advantage and cultural signal that cost less than traditional corporate spaces.
Chapters
I consider myself a designer by trade, but I think a designer, you know, Steve Jobs used to say, designer design isn't how something looks, it's how something works. And I think when you realize design's how something works, you imagine almost everything needs thought and design. That you don't just design a website or an application, you would design everything. You design a company and you design your organization, you design your buildings, everything. And so we started thinking once you realize everything can be designed, then you don't have to pull everything out of a box and plug it in. Your company doesn't need to look like every other company. Everything can be reinvented. Now, not everything should be reinvented. You shouldn't reinvent management and HR systems. But there are some basic things that might be core to you should reinvent. And for us, we decided the space we work in should be reinvented. First of all, our core competency was showing cool space around the world. We better have a cool space. And I also realized early on that a really cool, interesting space would be a huge differentiator to hire people and that you would spend more time in your office than you will in your home. And so it was deeply important that people were comfortable and happy. And so that was the kind of hypothesis. And I think it's pretty much a no brainer. But I think that it's a moment that people completely take for granted. It's totally a afterthought. And I said that's great that it's an afterthought for everyone else. It's going to be a competitive advantage for us. And one of the things we decided was how can we reinvent the office? And there were like 100 ideas, but I'll just give you one of them. In one of the offices we had you walk in the lobby and there were photos of our homes around the world. And so you go to this lobby and I remember people were like just walking around the lobby looking at all these homes like, oh, these are awesome. And I thought, I couldn't figure it out. But I thought there's got to be a better way than just showing photos of our homes. And I couldn't figure it out. One day I'm walking home, I'm walking from my house to I'm walking down the street and I pass a furniture store and it's late at night and the furniture store is like lit up. They light it up at night and it's like there's a floor to ceiling window and I just look in and it's a showroom. They basically recreated these rooms, and it was hilarious. I thought it'd be really funny just to have a meeting in that, like, in a showroom. And in fact, the next day, I took somebody to a meeting in the showroom, and we were hanging out in a dining room of a furniture store. But you feel like you're in a living room. And it was actually kind of fun. It was kind of absurd. You're like having a meeting in Ikea. But it was actually kind of fun. And sudden we realized, what if all of our meeting rooms were actually modeled piece by piece after apartments on our website? And we ended up doing that. And so I remember one time we emailed somebody, we said, hey, can I. Do you mind if we recreate your home in our office? And they're like, what? And I'm like, yeah, all I need is an inventory of everything in your home. And so some people did it, and we literally recreated the rooms. So you go there. Our meeting rooms are literally homes. You walk into, like, showrooms of our homes. It's a subtle little reinvention. It doesn't cost a lot of money because people's homes, the furniture they put in, is actually cheaper than most office furniture. It's really creative. And we have tens of thousands of people a year who fly or come to our office to tour office. Now, our office has become a huge competitive advantage in hiring, and people like to stay over. But that's just like a tiny example where almost everything is a creative opportunity.
And that was actually one of the ones that I was like, oh, my God, this is a great idea. Because part of what you're trying to do and when you create a culture is you're trying to create a norm of what are we all focused on, what are we doing? And tactile visual. Here it is. Is awesome.
It's so critical that there's no dissonance between what's inside the building and what's outside the building. And I remember I've been to some companies before. Like, one time I went to this travel company, this travel magazine, and I imagined their office being this awesome place. And I don't know what I imagined, but I got there, it was gray, it was drop ceilings, cubicles, and you could have put any logo in the front, and it could have been literally any company. And I thought people need to be in the mindset of your product, and so you have to put your product in the building. People need to be immersed in the world because they're working in that world. And so when they work for you, this kind of like, they're working in the center of the universe. The center of the universe of your business needs to be the most potent. And the problem is, in most companies, it's the least potent. It's, like, just gray with drop ceilings and cubicles. And so I thought that was a huge opportunity to reinvent. And we've now had a lot of, like, CEOs and other people come to our office to get inspiration. Even as, as of last night, I was showing somebody around.
