Ive will be stepping in just as Airbnb’s chief design officer, Alex Schleifer, leaves the company. Schleifer has been running the design side of Airbnb since 2015. Airbnb says it will still be seeking to fill Schleifer's now vacant role separately.Īirbnb has had a predictably difficult time weathering the pandemic - the company laid off almost 2,000 of its 7,500 employees in May, and has faced backlash for being used for host quarantine-flouting parties. But the company - and its investors - still believe in its potential for longevity. Nonetheless, it’s difficult to see Ive’s appointment as anything but an attempt to revitalize Airbnb ahead of its listing as the company faces the fallout of an incredibly tumultuous year.īuddy buddy - The jump from pivotal Apple designer to Airbnb employee is a strange one to be sure.Īirbnb filed plans for an initial public offering on August 19 and has been privately valued at $31 billion. What’s he going to design, a vacation-themed MP3 player?īut Chesky and Ive have been friendly for years, as The Information points out. Ive wrote the entry for Chesky in Time’s 100 most influential people of 2015 list and they also worked together on Airbnb’s logo redesign in 2014. Chesky is a long-time admirer of Apple’s design work, and he’s been dropping hints to employees for months that he might try to appoint Ive to the new role. Internal turmoil - It isn’t just the head of design who’s left Airbnb recently. The pandemic has led to a number of high-level employees walking out - even Greg Greeley, the company’s former head of homes, left in July. Most of the company’s executive team has joined the company in the last two years, while two top executive positions remain unfilled. According to people close to Airbnb, laying off of a quarter of the company’s staff in May sent ripples of discomfort through the company’s remaining ranks. Airbnb has struggled with staff turnover, sources said, and executives have reinstituted bonus plans as a morale-boosting method.Īirbnb doesn’t want a year of stress to affect its long-term prospects - that, at least, we can relate to. The company’s hoping Jony Ive will be an ace in the hole of sorts to lead it into a successful IPO (and beyond). Whether or not the collab pans out in the long run will be something to revisit at a later date.Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky prides himself on thinking very differently than other CEOs, and his answers to the Decoder questions about how he structures and manages his company were almost always the opposite of what I’m used to hearing on the show. That’s very different from most other big companies, which have lots of divisions and overlapping lines of authority.Īnd Airbnb’s relationship to cities is changing as tourism changes.Īirbnb is pretty much a single team, focused on a single product, and it all rolls up to Brian. Airbnb used to be the poster child for a tech company that showed up without permission and fought with regulators, but as the company has grown and the pandemic has changed things, it’s entered what is hopefully a more mature phase - it just came to a deal with New York City after ten years of argument. I asked Brian about that and about what it’s like to run a public company now - the transition from scrappy startup to public company engaged with regulators is a big one. Of course, I also had to ask about cryptocurrency and the metaverse - does Brian think we’re all going to be visiting virtual NFT museums on vacations in the future? You have to listen and find out. Okay, Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb, here we go.
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