In the world of travel accommodations, tourism is crucial. So, when the pandemic brought global lockdowns, doubts arose about Airbnb’s survival. CEO Brian Chesky brushed off such concerns and took drastic action.
Despite an 80% business decline in just eight weeks, Chesky seized the COVID-19 crisis to analyze and fortify Airbnb’s foundations. Yet, with hosts unable to receive guests and tourists staying home, costs had to be slashed.
In the pandemic’s turbulent early days, around 70,000 tech workers lost jobs, often with little more than a curt farewell.
Speaking to the Diary of a CEO podcast, Chesky remembered the email he sent to Airbnb staffers announcing the layoff of 1,900 colleagues, a difficult message to read even many months later. The founder revealed he went to unusual lengths to get the staffers he had axed a new role.
Chesky’s team drew up a massive database of their laid-off staff for recruiters, with the CEO also calling other high-profile entrepreneurs to see if they could take on any of the staff.
Remembering the early days of the pandemic, Chesky said the slowdown of the business was akin to “an 18-wheeler going 80 miles per hour and slamming on the brakes.”
He had to make some “incredibly difficult decisions” including the call to lay off 25% of staff—knowing it would be “traumatic” for individuals already facing uncertainty.
“We created an alumni directory where if you were laid off you could opt into a public directory, publish your information, and we’d point recruiters to your information,” said Chesky. “We ended up getting hundreds of thousands of recruiters and people…visiting those profiles, and a lot of those people got rehired.
“I was even calling CEOs of other companies to see if they would hire our people.”
The man worth more than $10 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire’s Index, previously said he wanted to do layoffs the right way by cutting “deep enough” to avoid doing rounds.
Chesky, who said he wanted to be remembered for doing the correct thing, shocked axed employees at the time by announcing a bumper severance package, including three months of salary and health insurance for a year.
“I had a deep feeling of love for all of [the staff who were laid off],” Chesky said. “Even the ones I hadn’t met, I knew them through the work and I knew the sacrifice they made.”
Chesky’s CEO network
Whether it was to discuss the hiring of former Airbnb colleagues or the pandemic-hit economy, Chesky said he has built a network of CEOs he can turn to.
The 42-year-old, who launched Airbnb with two cofounders in 2007, said he had struggled with loneliness as the company grew to a behemoth with $35 billion in sales.
As a result, he’s built a network of peers who can relate to his challenges, name-dropping Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, who had appeared on the same podcast just a few weeks before, as one of them.
“Daniel Ek doesn’t know the Brian before Airbnb,” Chesky explained. “So maybe he doesn’t know ‘the real me’…but he does know a different ‘real me’ that my childhood friends can’t know, because high school and college friends can’t possibly know what it’s like for me to go through what I’m going through.
“I can tell it to them, and they can have compassion, but they can’t possibly know what I’m talking about. But Daniel can.”
Chesky, who said he wished others had warned him about the isolation that would come with running a Fortune 500 company, continued: “Daniel can know what it’s like when an executive leaves you or the walls are caving in, you feel like you’re not scaling and you’re drowning.
“There’s all these things I can describe—we have a shared experience.”