Brian Chesky illuminates everything.

The absolute visionary Airbnb founder - Brian Chesky was on the latest Lenny Rachitsky podcast and it was just the most exciting thing i've watched in a while. The man drops a gem every second. Here are some of my favourite quotes and how I think founders could actually apply these ideas.

'If you don't get into the details how will you know if someone is doing an awesome job?"

Getting involved in what your team is doing can be great as long as you a) get into it looking for greatness and not mistakes/ blame and b) get into it for information and understanding and not to tell people exactly what to do.

"Performance marketing is a laser. If you want to light up a room no point in using a bunch of lasers. You need a chandelier, that's what brand marketing is"

Please don't turn your head of performance marketing into your head of marketing. Hire someone who gets the big picture (brand, product and performance) and then get specialists under them.

"Why is UX writing a separate function? Shouldn't app, emails, ads all be one voice?"

Create a tone of voice document (which means yes, do the work and write a brand strategy first) and make sure every written word across any and every one of your comms follows these guidelines. Before you ask who will monitor this, just make a GPT that is trained on your TOV and get all copy checked by it. This is a job that no human actually wants to do so outsource it to AI.

"Intuition comes not from arbitrariness but from understanding"

Over-reliance on data without having a hypothesis or a way to really make sense of the data renders the data kind of pointless. Also intuition comes from confidence which comes from a tonne of real-world experience. So not everyone in your team has to be a 20-something 'hustler'.

Watch the full episode here