# Brian Chesky: People Who Know What to Build With AI Will Pull Ahead

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

Brian Chesky says AI rewards strong thinking and gives builders more power to turn ideas into companies.

- Show: Silicon Valley Girl
- Hosts: [Marina Mogilko](https://realalpha.app/people/marina-mogilko/)
- Guest: [Brian Chesky](https://realalpha.app/people/brian-chesky/) is cofounder and CEO of Airbnb.
- Published: Oct 1, 2026
- Length: 35 min

## The best minutes

- [10:04](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=604) [Airbnb can give local service businesses a global audience](https://realalpha.app/s/airbnb-can-give-local-service-businesses-a-global-audience/) (7 min)
- [20:04](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=1204) [Generate many ideas, then let the strongest ones stand out](https://realalpha.app/s/generate-many-ideas-then-let-the-strongest-ones-stand-out/) (5 min)

Skip the sponsor reads, the opening reunion, and the extended Airbnb feature and services rollout discussion.

## Full analysis: Brian Chesky says Airbnb ships about 80% more features

- Chesky said Airbnb was shipping like 80% more features than a year earlier.
- That is output, not evidence of better customer outcomes, and the metric lacks quality data.
- Teams should measure adoption, service reliability and cost beside shipping speed.

Its 6 sections, what it means for you and what to watch are on [the page](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/#analysis), free with an account:

- [17:57](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=1077) More features show capacity, not customer value
- [2:21](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=141) Airbnb puts AI inside the shopping interface
- [11:02](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=662) Services could bring local providers traveler demand
- [14:12](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=852) Airbnb tests services locally before expanding
- [22:38](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=1358) AI can sort ideas, but judgment sets direction
- [19:18](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=1158) Curiosity and focus shape who benefits from AI

## Summary

Brian Chesky is cofounder and CEO of Airbnb, which the episode description says he built into an S&P 500 company. He discusses Airbnb’s AI features and its expansion into services for travelers and hosts.

Chesky says Airbnb is becoming AI-native with natural-language search, personalized listing summaries, comparison tools and support for hosts, while keeping interfaces suited to browsing and group decisions. He argues that agents are intelligent applications, not chatbots, and describes Airbnb’s effort to connect travelers with friends and local service providers. He says Airbnb is shipping 80% more features than a year ago, but argues that product quality and speed matter more than AI-use metrics such as token counts. Chesky says AI amplifies people who bring curiosity, judgment and good ideas, and recommends generating ideas in volume while protecting time for focused work. He sees room for many new companies and urges people who find AI intimidating to start using it and ask for help.

### Minute by minute

- [10:04](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=604) **Airbnb can bring customers to local providers.** Chesky says Airbnb could give providers such as a masseuse in Tulum or a photographer in Paris access to travelers they might not reach on their own. He describes testing services in one market before expanding, with delivered ski and surfing equipment among the examples.
- [14:56](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=896) **Chesky welcomes niche service ideas.** Chesky says Airbnb began with common services such as chefs, photography, car rental and airport pickup, but wants to hear about anything useful to even a couple of visitors. He says providers can apply with ideas such as floral arrangements, even if Airbnb is not ready to offer them in every city.
- [20:04](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=1204) **More practice produces more ideas.** Mogilko cites a rule she tentatively attributes to Linus Pauling: the best way to have a good idea is to have many ideas. Chesky agrees, comparing idea generation to exercise and design practice, and says people should generate ideas before they start critiquing them.
- [21:37](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=1297) **Chesky uses AI to sort ideas.** Chesky says he writes roughly 1,000 words a day and highlights five to 10 ideas from around 100 daily notes. He uses AI to read the highlighted notes, find patterns and build a shortlist; he says worthwhile ideas tend to return, while most bad ideas can remain private.
- [29:01](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=1741) **Founders should rethink AI interfaces.** If he were 26 again, Chesky says he would explore education, storytelling and health. He argues that messaging is not the right interface for most work and encourages entrepreneurs to consider other modes, noting that people are visual.

## Transcript

Silicon Valley Girl, hosted by Marina Mogilko, with Brian Chesky.

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there. Where the podcast’s audio and the video part ways, some times are a minute or so off.

[0:00](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=0) It's been seven years since we first met and I wanted to show you this. I don't know if you remember, but that crazy girl at the airport who saw Brian Chesky and then ran to you. Oh, yes. And you were boarding a commercial flight. Of course. What airport was that? It's LAX. Thank you for being so nice and friendly. Of course. And look at how well you're doing. And I'm so honored to be on your program. Thank you. And I invited you to a podcast back then. So seven years later, we're doing it. We're doing it. Well, here we are. So I came to San Francisco building a travel company. And then we were going through really hard times during COVID and seeing you navigate those times really gave me inspiration and strength.

[0:38](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=38) And now we are in this new era of transformation, which is AI. So today I wanted to focus on how you're transforming the company for the AI era. And I wanted to make it as applicable as possible for people who are maybe thinking of starting a business in the AI era or maybe having hard times as a professional because so much is changing. So talk to me about Airbnb becoming AI native. What does it mean for guests? And also I'm a host. I have a place in Hawaii that we're renting out through Airbnb. So what does it mean for both sides of the table? I think it really just means modernizing every touchpoint of the app to be more intelligent, easier to use.

[1:17](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=77) And so I'll give you some examples. Let's say we're a guest. Before AI, you do a normal search. You type in a location and you get a bunch of results. now with AI, starting today, you can hit a toggle and you can do AI search. It's very natural, very much natural language, like typing into a chatbot. And then it is a very intelligent search. So you can say, I want to go to Paris this weekend with this number of people. I want this kind of view and I want this kind of architecture. And it will not only serve up all the results, but it will also pre-filter everything for you because Airbnb is very much about filters and controls. You see, the chatbots aren't really great for shopping. Chatbots aren't really good for travel. And the reason why is they're text-based. They're very hard to compare.

[2:00](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=120) You want things to be very inspiration-based and browse-based. You want it to be fun and entertainment-oriented. It's multiplayer. So the average Airbnb people, it's three people traveling. So they all have to be able to share. You have to be able to message a host. You have to be able to have filters. And you've got to be able to see, like, if I turn this filter off, I get this home. but if I add this filter back, I get that home. So we had to find this interface that wasn't a chatbot, but that felt chat-like, that you can start to have a conversation with, but you didn't take away the functionality people loved.

[2:29](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=149) Then when you go to an Airbnb, we have these AI-generated highlights. So AI basically will summarize the listing for you. And these are really nice personalized snippets. They're personalized to you. So we can make the listing literally written for you, saying this is why you will like this listing. Then when you get to the bottom of the page, if you have a question, you don't even have to ask the host now. You can literally ask the page and the listing could answer things for you. You can still message the host, but now you can message. Then if you have a bunch of listings, you want to compare them, we've got an AI comparison feature tool, which makes it really smart and easy.

[3:03](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=183) And one of the challenges people don't realize and one of the problems of Chatbot is Airbnb is very much a comparison shopping problem. Okay, I like these 10 homes. This one's got a pool. This one's got a barbecue. This one's got really high ratings. This one's new. This one's a little more expensive. This one's in a really good location. How do I make decisions? And how do I compare side by side? And how do I call down? Then we have brand new maps where I can, starting in Paris, I can tap and see information about each neighborhood. Eventually, this is going to roll out to a thousand different cities around the world.

[3:36](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=216) And these are just some of the features we have in the guest side. On the host side, we're going to make the app feel more and more like an agent that can be your coach, understand your goals. It can help you price your listing. So I think the basic idea is that Airbnb is getting smarter. Airbnb's whole app is going to feel more like an agent. But when I say agent, I don't mean a chatbot. People, when they hear agents and chatbots, they think they're the same thing. They're not. Agent is an evolution of an application. It's an application that is more intelligent and understands you and knows you.

[4:08](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=248) And it leverages the power of AI. A chatbot is a user interface. and I think because most agents are chatbots, we conflate the two. But they're not the same thing. And I think that a chatbot is not the right interface for travel. It's not the right interface for shopping, but agents are great. And I think the great thing about agents is they're interoperable. So one agent can talk to another agent. And so I think agents are definitely the future of Silicon Valley and chatbots are not. Yeah, and chatbot feels like more like a reactive thing where agent is more proactive, knowing your interests.

[4:44](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=284) And I really like the comparison feature because you don't know how many hours I spend. It's like two very similar bookings, but this one is quieter, but this one has a bigger bedroom. And you're like having them side by side, I think makes a huge difference. And you're also adding a social graph, something that I absolutely love. You know, it's so funny. I came to Silicon Valley 19 years ago. And when I came to Silicon Valley, there was this thing called a social network and it was Facebook and everyone was on Facebook. And it was mostly just your friends and you could keep in touch with your friends and they would share what they did.

[5:15](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=315) And now none of my friends are on Facebook. And Instagram is not social networking is social media. So it's basically Instagram, X, YouTube, TikTok. They're really not social networks. They're really performance platforms. They're broadcast platforms. And this is not I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but I'm saying now there's no place in Internet for me to know. not only what my friends are doing, but one of the things I used to like was knowing where people were traveling. People in my life, where have they traveled to? Where are they going? And so here's a use case. Let's say I'm going to Chicago. I'm sure I have a bunch of friends have been to Chicago, but I don't know which ones. And now if I connect to people on Airbnb, I can see all of my friends have been to Chicago and I can see where they stayed. I might want to stay where they've stayed, but more importantly, I can ask them like, hey, what's good to do in Chicago? Because what we found is increasingly people want recommendations for their friends and their family rather than from, you know, celebrities or writers. They increasingly want people who feel like they know them. Like, you know me, you'll know what I like, but this is unsolved problem because you

[6:21](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=381) don't know where everyone in your life has traveled. Another thing about Airbnb is one of the best parts of it is meeting somebody new. You know, it's hard to meet people today. I asked my parents, how did you meet people? They would go to a mall, they'd go to a theater, they'd go to physical spaces. Increasingly, people today are not in physical spaces. They're on their phones. And phones are really a way for you to talk to strangers online, but it's a really hard way to meet strangers offline. And so we want to help solve this problem by making it easier to meet people in the real world and stay in touch with them. And so if you travel, you stay in a home with somebody, you might meet them. If you go on experience with somebody, you can stay in touch with them. So I think a lot of what we're trying to do is turn Airbnb from a kind of just a marketplace of homes to a little more of a travel community. And I think the travel graph is really cool. And if you go on Airbnb, you can basically add your friends or family and you can see where they're traveling. And this is a really cool use case. Wouldn't you be curious to know where all your friends are traveling this summer? I think it's pretty cool. Now you can know and you can

[7:16](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=436) decide, well, if they're going, we can go at the same time. Finding the right candidate for my small business used to feel like a guessing game. With LinkedIn Hiring Pro, I get a short list of top-bit candidates, and I can chat with it, just like I would a recruiter. It helps me compare applicants and refine what I'm looking for, so I spend less time sorting and more time talking to the right people. You know, four out of five small businesses agree LinkedIn helps businesses make better hiring decisions. Hire right the first time. Post your job for free on LinkedIn today at linkedin.com slash quality. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser but Gemini and Chrome that's new it can help you with practically anything on the web like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks Gemini and Chrome is here for it ready to make anything online make sense there's no place like Chrome check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus yeah and uh one of the reasons I started this podcast because I wanted to meet people offline and whenever guests suggest do an online thing I'm like no no that's

[8:20](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=500) not the reason I wanted to do that in the first life. So I can totally relate. And I think you're also opening up opportunities for new businesses, right? Because you're now doing groceries, baby gear, restaurant deliveries. Is it 700 plus features that you're launching? I think so. Yeah, we're launching. I think the stat is that we're like shipping 80% more features than a year ago. Most of it's because of AI. Obviously, AI is like this incredible superpower. You know, 10 years ago, even a few years ago, everything had to be coded by hand. Everything was so much harder to do. Now that you can ship things so much more quickly, we can ship features more quickly.

[8:58](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=538) It used to take us a year to ship like a new service. Now we can do it in weeks. And so now, like, for example, with services, one of the things we hear from guests a lot is, I love to stay in homes, but they don't have all the services of a hotel. And we thought, well, what if we could have not only all the services of a hotel, but even more services? So we can have baby gear if you have kids. You know, sometimes hotels have cribs, but maybe they have two cribs or three cribs. And if they're out, you've got, this is what we, I don't have kids, but I hear from my friends who have kids, maybe you want laundry done.

[9:33](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=573) A hotel has laundry. Well, now Airbnb, you can get laundry. So we just wanted to go down the list. Ski rental equipment. I'm going to go skiing. I don't want to, I don't have my own ski equipment. So going to rent ski gear can be very, very, you know, it can be onerous, right? And you just get to a city, you're tired. You want to figure out how to get ski gear. We can have all the sizes waiting for you, all the equipment for you. So we're really trying to make everything as easy and plug and play as possible. So you're not just getting a home. You're kind of getting a full service experience. So eventually, ICS adding dozens, even hundreds of services that can be plugged into the home so that when you book a home, you can get everything you need for your trip.

[10:16](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=616) What do you see the biggest opportunity for small businesses who are trying to build to plug into your system? Let's pretend I'm a masseuse. I'm a masseuse in Tulum, Mexico. I'm just making a random place up. Right now, how do I get business? I only get business from locals who know about me, but how would I, if a trial works, how would I get business? I probably wouldn't be able to get business. Maybe I have to go work at a resort and they have to give me business. Now I can have my own business.

[10:41](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=641) **Brian Chesky:** I can broadcast an Airbnb and all the travelers coming to Tulum, if anyone wants a massage, they can go on Airbnb and they can book the massage with me.

[10:49](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=649) So kind of like the original Airbnb be where I had a home, but no one knew about my home and we gave them a distribution platform and they could basically get an audience. Kind of like the way social media gives everyone an audience. We can give all these small business audiences and we give them a global audience of travelers. And so this is really, really difficult for somebody. I'm a photographer in Paris and I take photos of families in front of the Eiffel Tower. A lot of people want to get their photos. How do you get your photo in front of the Eiffel Tower? Or if you're a parent, one of you is not in the photo.

[11:22](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=682) Or you give the camera to someone else and they're like being bothered. And it's just like an iPhone photo. Now you can have like amazing professional photos in 30 minutes. It's not too expensive. And you'll remember those photos forever. This photographer would never have known how to broadcast to all these guests from around the world. We really feel like there's a whole economy of service providers. whether there's masseuses, chefs, photographers, companies that deal with equipment or baby gear or laundry or cleaning service, car rental, welcome pickups, picking up the airport, anything you imagine.

[11:57](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=717) In other words, now you can be more than just a home. You can be anything. And you were testing all of these, I imagine, before launching. Can you talk to me about all the tests and what's the decision making criteria? For everything we launch, we're probably testing like many, many more things. And we have dozens of services underway. So like ski equipment. I'm not a giant skier, but I ski a little bit. I don't ski enough to have my own skis. I don't ski enough to have my own boots, my own helmet. So everywhere I go, I have to rent equipment. And it's always like, I don't even know where to go.

[13:22](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=802) Do I go to the mountain to rent equipment? Do I have to wait in line? I have to wait for someone to size me. It's so much more convenient if I were to get to the Airbnb. They know my boot size, they know my ski size, and they just have everything for me. So that is something that we're testing. I think the test isn't in Italy, but we're going to hopefully bring this to ski mountains all over the world. And they're these ski rental companies. And they would love to be able to bring the equipment to you rather than you have to wait in line at the store, which is potentially really inconvenient. Surfing equipment.

[13:51](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=831) You know, a professional surfer probably will travel with their own surfboard, but it's pretty hard to bring a surfboard and an airplane. And a lot of people aren't going to travel with a surfboard. And so they're gonna have to rent this equipment. What if in the house waiting for you was this equipment? Or you knew exactly where to go to get the equipment. So these are kind of the ideas. So we're trying to test, you know, we usually do a test in one market, one city. If it works, then we bring it to other markets. And everything we announced today, we've been testing. So we have a lot of other services coming.

[14:23](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=863) There's literally hundreds, by the way. The thing that's exciting is the long tail. It's like, there's so many different services. and no one's service maybe is big enough to be a giant business that you've heard of that has an app. So that's the challenge. Like ride sharing, there's an app, Uber. Food delivery, there's an app, Uber Eats DoorDash. But most other services aren't big enough to have a global brand where you know where to go. And even if they do have an app, they're not integrated with Airbnb. And so it's pretty difficult. Like Instacart, they got an app, but now you can get groceries at your Airbnb and you have an option where you can order of the Instacart groceries through the Airbnb app. It already knows your address. It already knows how many guests and the food can be sent to the house and the host can open the door and have the food put in the fridge. So it's stock for you. It's just much more convenient.

[15:09](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=909) So what is the criteria for launching? I wonder if you have like internal metrics. Is it like, I don't know, 10% of guests are using the service. I'm just trying to translate this for people who are thinking about different business ideas when they don't have access to data like yours. How do they know that idea is viable to launch? It's a great question. I mean, we started with the most popular services, the most common ones, chef, masseuse, photography, car rental, airport pickup, luggage storage. But increasingly, the power of Airbnb is the idea that we want you to be able to provide anything you can imagine. So my hope is anything you offer, if it could be useful just to a couple people visiting your city, then we would love to hear from you.

[15:52](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=952) And I think just contact Airbnb. I think you can, there's a contact button on the bottom of our page and we try to intake as many ideas as possible. So we have like a services platform. If you go to list, you know, you can go to become a host, there's a button. You can basically apply to become a services host. We might tell you that this is coming soon, but we take every single lead. So let's say you do like floral arrangements. This is a use case. People are on vacation. They're maybe on a romantic trip. They want to get flowers in the listing. Maybe they want flowers in the listing. They want to get flowers for the romantic significant other.

[16:27](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=987) That's a service we're launching. And people can apply. We don't have it in every city. But if you have this idea, if you have an idea like that, just apply. And if we aren't ready to launch it now, we will eventually. And so it's just a matter of getting to them. But we want every idea. I wouldn't want to tell people what ideas to apply with because some of the best ideas are ones I don't even think of. But if you have something you think is valuable to somebody else, you just need an audience. And hopefully we can give you that audience. I love that. And I imagine shipping all of these features became possible because of AI.

[16:59](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=1019) Do you have an internal metric where you say, okay, AI is adding that much of productivity and output versus just generating more stuff that we're not using? So at the beginning of the year, there was this whole token maxing thing where CEOs were telling everyone you've got to use AI. and they were measuring it by how many tokens you were using. And there was a little bit of a initial management philosophy to shame people that didn't have a lot of tokens. There were like token leaderboards. That might've been a good thing to do for a couple months just to make sure people were using AI, but that was clearly like a long-term strategy that was not gonna work.

[17:33](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=1053) And now all of a sudden, everyone's like, wait a second, why are we spending so much money on AI? And so I think the most important thing is like, the customer doesn't care if we're using AI to build our tools or not. They just want the product to be better faster. And so we look at product velocity. How fast are you shipping? How many features are you shipping? How quick are you shipping them? Are they high quality and are they successful? And we have metrics for that. So we're shipping 80% more features. That is crazy though. Just think about 80% more for a huge company like yours. Yeah, and it's just two things.

[18:06](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=1086) It's the power of AI that suddenly you don't have to primarily code by hand. But it's also cultural. People have to use the tools and they have to use them correctly. And it's amazing because AI is the ultimate democracy. The tools that Airbnb has is the tools every company in the world has. We all have access to the exact same tools. There's really, there's codex, there's cloud code. It's kind of like back in the day I used Photoshop and I was a designer, illustrator. We all have the same tools. We all have these amazing tools. But they're not equally distributed. The very best people know how to like immerse themselves and get the most out of the tools.

[18:47](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=1127) And so one of the things we tried to do is we tried to make sure people learned how to use the tools correctly. And there's no replacement for like good thinking. You know, you need to have like really good data. You need to like still have good collaboration. AI allows an idea to get out of your head into the world faster. But it doesn't necessarily give you better ideas. You still have to have great ideas. You still have to have great thinking. It's now about great thinking. It's about great understanding. It's about great curiosity. And I think AI rewards deeply curious people because you can do endless iteration.

[19:24](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=1164) AI is like an amplifier. It makes the good people better. And the people that weren't as good, it's less of a multiplier for them. So I find that the dynamic range, the performance gap is greater with AI. That the really high performers even better with AI. I'm a designer by training. I went to RISD. 19 years ago, I started with me. I couldn't code. And today I could code because I could prompt. And so suddenly in that way, it is so democratic. All of us can do so many more jobs. At the same time, great thinking, great taste, great understanding, understanding user problems. These are things that matter even more now because it's no longer can you build it.

[20:08](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=1208) It's what do you build and should you build it? And does it matter? Quick tip to people who want to upgrade. You were describing people who are at the edge of productivity and generating ideas and being curious. I think there was a saying by this Nobel Prize winning maybe chemist, Linus Pauling. He said, the best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas. Like Airbnb seemed like a good idea, right? It was one of many ideas. We had a lot of bad ideas. I think it's about like sheer output. The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas. The best way to create a good drawing is to create a lot of drawings.

[20:32](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=1232) The best way to do anything is to create a lot of it, just throughout sheer output. I mean, you're really good now at what you've done. You probably did it through a lot of repetition, right? There wasn't one moment where you got good. Similar to exercise. You don't get in shape in one workout. It's through repetition. So what I found is that the very best people are the ones that just practice more than anyone else, and they put in the repetitions. Working out is actually a good metaphor. It's repetition. And so idea repetition matters. You know, I know at IDEO, they're a very famous design firm.

[21:07](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=1267) They used to do this exercise where the way you generate ideas, they give everyone post-it notes. And you have to write an idea down, put a post-it note on the wall, another idea on a wall. And they had a rule. You can never critique ideas initially. No devil's advocates. No critiquing ideas. Because when you critique your ideas, you edit your thinking and you're afraid. And bad ideas sometimes are one step away from a good idea. And so I think it's all about volume of ideas. I probably, not exaggerating, have 100,000 ideas a year. And I think 99,000 are really bad. Out of all the ideas, how do you know which ones not to work on?

[22:00](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=1320) It's more the good ideas jump off the page. So for example, I basically have a notebook and every thought is like a sentence or a couple sentences. and I probably write maybe a thousand words a day. So that's probably 300,000 words a year. And maybe each line is a sentence. It was like 10 words. So maybe that's a hundred ideas a day. So that's maybe 30,000 ideas a year. And so then what I do is say I have 30,000 thoughts a year. 99% of them are not useful, right? Just something, you write something down, anything that comes to your mind. I just keep writing it down.

[22:38](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=1358) **Brian Chesky:** at the end of every day, I bold the things that jump out at me. And so if I wrote down like a

[22:43](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=1363) hundred things, a hundred lines, I bolded five to 10. And then at each day I bold them at the end of every month, I look and my AI now can just read the bold ideas. I used to have to manually like pull out the ideas and read them. Now the AI can pull out the bolded ideas. The AI can also read and find ideas I thought were stupid and it can tell me really good ideas. It can see patterns and then those become my short list. And then I iterate them, iterate them, iterate them. You know, I think like Catching the Rise 70,000 words and I probably have like four times that output in words and my writing is a thousand times worse.

[23:19](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=1399) It's really bad writing. It's not high quality. I'm not writing, like if you were to read it, you'd be like, this is borderline nonsensical. It's understandable to me, not to someone else. And I think that's the point is that most of my words are bad. Most of my ideas are bad. And it doesn't matter because no one knows about the bad ideas. They only need to know about the good ideas. And here's the lesson. Good ideas don't die. If you write something down, you write a good idea down, a month later, you're going to write the same idea down again. And you won't realize it comes back. So I find that good ideas, they don't want to die.

[23:53](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=1433) They kind of stay alive. And everything else just kind of falls by the wayside. And these good ideas, they kind of haunt you like ghosts. And you're like, okay, this thing's not going away. I don't know if that's useful. I never said this before, but I think it's about like just total output, just constantly. I remember hearing about Eminem. He would just write all day. He had a notebook and he'd write lyrics and rhymes all day. Bob Dylan was just writing songs all the time, just writing and writing and writing and writing. Now, not everyone's like that. Jay-Z apparently doesn't do that. He just thinks in his own head.

[24:30](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=1470) That's a very unique prodigious skill that he has. Leonardo da Vinci, he left behind so many notebooks. And he was just drawing and writing and drawing and writing. By the way, most of da Vinci did was write, not draw. If you look at his notebooks, it's 80% writing, 20% drawing. And he is the most famous painter of all time. He had like 12 paintings ever. Mona Lisa is one of 12 or 15 paintings he ever painted. So think about the sheer volume of stuff he created. Vincent van Gogh, most of his productivity was in the last three years of his life. And he painted more than one painting a day, every single day.

[25:08](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=1508) And this is in addition to sketches. He just, every day, he wrote, he wrote, he wrote. Hemingway, wake up at 6 a.m. from 6 a.m. to noon. He would just write and he would write until he had nothing left to write at noon. And it was just, it's this discipline of repetition, whether you're a tech founder, you're an artist, you're a writer, it's about pure volume. It doesn't mean you put out a lot of crap. Like you don't publish it all. You have to, then you edit. And you edit and you only publish the very best of your stuff. But I think that what people don't understand is they only see a few things go out and they don't see the sheer volume of what goes in.

[25:47](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=1547) And I think the problem, and maybe I'm going to admit to a problem I have, and I think almost every single person watching has, is we spend too much time on social media paying attention to what other people are doing. My vice is X, and most of us are on X or Twitter way too much, and we're way too focused on what other people are doing. Oh, my God, now it's instinct. Now it's Muse, and now it's this, and now it's that. And there's just, we're all like kids chasing soccer balls and we're all like trying to play fast fashion, trying to copy what everyone else is doing. And just, it's just so distracting.

[26:10](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=1570) And I wonder if we'd all be better off just like not being a little bit ignorant to whatever else is going on in the world. Part of me is like, you know, Van Gogh couldn't doom scroll. And if he could doom scroll, he might not have painted so much. If Da Vinci could doom scroll, he might not have had so much output. And if all of us could just block out a bit more of what everyone else is doing and say, it doesn't really matter what people think. Or even if you do care what people think, let people value you years from now. See, I'm going to put blinders on and I'm just going to just dig in and I'm going to work for years. And I'm not going to worry about getting attention now. I will earn attention later if it matters to me, but I'm going to practice quietly and I don't need the world to watch me practice. I'm going to quietly practice. I'm going to become great at my craft. And when I'm ready, I'm going to put something out there. I think that would be so valuable. We're just put blinders on and just lock in and just go. Here's your report. Oh, thanks, Jane. I wish I could hire someone just like you. Try LinkedIn Hiring Pro. It's more than a job board. It's like the recruiter you always wished you had. Hiring Pro uses real-time insights

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[27:21](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=1641) Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18+. I think this is such valuable advice, such great practice. We need to be doing more of it. And I will admit, I'm giving advice to others, and I have to keep reminding it of myself. Stop worrying about whatever else is going on in Silicon Valley. It's so hard. And you don't want to be naive. Like you want to know generally if you're a company, you want to know what's going on competition. You want to know what's the latest with AI developments.

[27:46](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=1666) But you can do that like 10 minutes a day. You don't need to do that two, three hours. You don't need to open X or YouTube or Instagram or whatever your platform du jour is 17 times or 25 times. This is what I would do and I don't do it as much, but I wish I did it once a day for like 20 30 minutes I'm gonna go on whatever platform I go on. I'm gonna learn Okay, now i'm done And then this time's uninterrupted and i'm gonna like not have my phone on By the way the phone spend more time on a computer less time on a phone The computer is the ultimate tool. We designed phones on computers. We don't design computers on phones The phone Was never designed to be something you stare at all day When Steve Jobs designed it, his vision wasn't you're on it all day.

[28:25](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=1705) Long attention span stuff should be reserved for big screens. So you should not be staring at a phone very long because what it does is it trains your dopamine to multitask and to like change things. And what it does is it like the phone is an enemy to focus and it's not designed to be something you're staring at for hours a day. The computer is great for focus. A large screen. The bigger the screen, the longer your attention span. That's why if you go to like an IMAX theater, you're not going to go to the bathroom. You're in a living room and you watch a television show. You might get up. On your computer, you'll watch a YouTube film.

[29:01](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=1741) But on a phone, you'll only be able to pay attention for 15 seconds before you scroll to the next video. Attention span is commensurate with screen size. I never thought about that. If you want to focus, you need to have a long attention span. If you want to have a long attention span, you need to have a big screen. Do not look at a phone if you want to focus. You mentioned having so many ideas. If you were not building Airbnb today, in the AI era, what would you be building? I used to think I was lucky because I was 26 when I came to Silicon Valley. And when I came to Silicon Valley, the iPhone had just launched.

[29:30](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=1770) Facebook was like blowing up. YouTube was out. The internet was going global. Cloud computing meant like you could have an app and not have to buy your own servers. What it meant was it was kind of easy to start a company. And there was this iPhone that was distribution. So suddenly you could just put it in an app store and everyone could discover it. I felt like I was the luckiest person alive because I happened to be born at the right place at the right time. And it was just as much luck as talent that I got to where I am today because I just happened to be here at this magical time in history.

[30:01](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=1801) And I remember saying for years until the launch of Generative AI Chachupiti, I said, thank God I was born the time I did because now is a tougher time. And then post Chachupiti, part of me said, I wish I was 26 again. because actually as amazing as Airbnb is, if I was 26, I could probably do something just as cool because the tools now are so much more powerful. I don't know what I would do. I'm very interested in education. I think AI can transform education. I think content, like you could build an AI Disney. You could create incredible storytelling with AI. I think health is like an incredible area.

[30:43](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=1843) I think that like instinct and muse are the beginning of consumer AI, agentic AI. But I do not think that the messaging interface is the right interface to do most work. And so I would encourage entrepreneurs to imagine other interface modalities. Like audio or even further? Way further. We're visual creatures. We're not, most people are not text-based. Why is TikTok more popular than Twitter? Because it's video and visual. I think that's the main reason. I don't think it's any other reason. I think that, you know, increasingly people are visual. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs are trying to fit this technology that's the most powerful technology in human history into a messaging platform.

[31:27](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=1887) It's like putting a jet engine on the back of a bicycle. We're just starting out, I guess. We're just starting. This is not to say these apps aren't amazing. Here's another way of saying it. Anthropic opening out of these giant companies, there's going to be 50 more Anthropics, maybe 100. You think so? I know so. This is a cognitive revolution. If people are watching, there are going to be so many companies that are going to be bigger than Airbnb, bigger than Anthropic. There's not this like AI window. We're not in a cycle. We're not in a window. And if we are, it's a thousand-year window. You see, if technology doubles every year for 10 years, that's a thousand X.

[32:06](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=1926) So let's say we're at the beginning of a thousand year cycle. If we're at the beginning of a thousand year cycle, why do you think there's just going to be two big companies? There's going to be so many huge companies emerge. But also, there's going to be tens of millions or millions of small companies emerge. Because suddenly, one, two, or three people can start a whole business. It was inconceivable before. I think AI is, you know, I think there's a lot of fear about AI outside of Silicon Valley. I understand why, because I think people outside of Silicon Valley feel like AI is happening to them and that someone else has it and it's happening to them.

[32:45](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=1965) And it's changing their job. It's displacing them. And some of that may be true, and I'm not defending it, but I am saying that everyone has the power now and that if you have an idea, you can now make something. And it is so much easier to build a company now than it was 20 years ago. I'm really proud of what I built. But the next generation of people watching are going to build things way better than I ever dreamed of because they have tools I never had. This is so inspiring, Brian. Can you tell me in 10 seconds the process that they all have to try in order to realize the power of AI, something that transformed the way you work?

[33:22](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=2002) I think it's like jumping in a pool. I was, for example, and this is more than 10 seconds, but I was like intimidated to try cloud code. And I just like didn't know how to start. I mean, I had an employee who was really good at it. And I said, like, you're going to tutor me. Now, not everyone watching has an employee. They can tutor them. But everyone, either you know more than all your friends about AI or someone knows more about it than you. If somebody knows more about it than you, like, have them help you. I mean, YouTube's an incredible resource. And I just think, like, just start. Just jump in the pool.

[33:56](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=2036) It's jump in the pool. And it is the water is not cold. It just looks cold. For those that are already in the pool, just don't get out. Thank you so much, Brian. Thank you very much. Thank you for being as amazing as you are. Well, thank you for being amazing. If you want to stay updated on all the things these founders say here, we take the use cases and prompts from every conversation and put them into my newsletter called Future Proof. And of course, we also put my own beautiful use cases there. For example, we'll put together the seven skills that came up again and again, the ones people will need in the next few years.

[34:29](https://realalpha.app/v/iJlyNupMOzA/?t=2069) These are the skills that my team and I are also using daily. Subscribe through the link in the description. You'll get that one and you can also read our previous newsletters and see what you missed.