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Brian Chesky is still in founder mode.
In an episode of the “Social Radars” podcast published on Saturday, the Airbnb CEO said that he remains involved in personnel decisions for up to 50 employees at the travel company.
“What you need to do is you need to have relationships with as many people as possible in the company,” Chesky said. “You need to be as close to the people doing the work as possible.”
Chesky, who went viral last year for his talk on leadership styles, said that the only way to work with more people is to go down a level from direct reports. He said, for example, a CEO should not only talk to their chief technology officer or the senior vice president of engineering, but also to the people reporting to those execs.
“It’s a concentric circle of like 40 or 50 people, and I treat them all as my directs,” he said. “I skip level, I co-hire them, and I make decisions on whether or not they’re working out and leave the company.”
“Hire, fire, promote, and manage. I co-do it with my executives. It’s a lot of work, but it’s necessary,” he added.
The Airbnb CEO said that founder-mode companies are more likely to “thrive or even survive the age of AI” because the technology is forcing companies to reinvent.
Airbnb did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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Chesky’s management style became etched in Silicon Valley zeitgeist last year when Paul Graham, a writer and founding partner of the startup accelerator Y Combinator, published an essay titled “Founder Mode” about Chesky’s argument that conventional advice on scaling up a startup is broken.
At a YC event mentioned in the essay, the Airbnb exec said, as he has before, that investors and outside managers just don’t have the insights that founders do. He said that splitting a company into organizational tiers — isolating founders from anyone but their direct reports — often kills the business.
Since the essay went viral, several other tech leaders have said they, too, are in founder mode.
In a May podcast interview, Duolingo CEO and cofounder Luis von Ahn said that while he has a “view of everything” at the company, other executives, such as vice president of product management and chief design officer, do as well.
“Yes, I am in that mode, but we have a number of people who could probably play that role as well,” von Ahn said when asked about founder mode.
In an X post last month, Tesla CEO Elon Musk also embodied founder mode when talking about the company’s new chip deal with Samsung.
“This is a critical point, as I will walk the line personally to accelerate the pace of progress,” Musk wrote. “And the fab is conveniently located not far from my house.”
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