When I first heard of “the sheet,” I assumed it was bogus. Word was that Airbnb CEO?Brian Chesky?had boiled down his strategic road map–all of Airbnb’s secret plans for 2014–onto a single piece of paper.
Yet on an early evening in late January, I am sitting in a conference room at Airbnb’s San Francisco headquarters across from Chesky and Chip ?Conley, Airbnb’s recently ?appointed head of global hospitality, and Chesky is wondering aloud whether to show me the fabled ?document. Even as he’s talking about it, I am still ?unsure whether I’m being punked.
After a second of deliberation, Chesky pulls the trigger: He sends an employee to retrieve the sheet. He then slides it in front of me, as Conley, only half-joking, declares, “The infamous paper to take over the world!”
The 8.5-by-11-inch typewritten sheet highlights the company’s four ?major goals for 2014, each with specific objectives, product features, target launch dates, and year-end milestones. I can’t reveal them all here–Chesky will debut new initiatives sometime this summer. But the document is a remarkable piece of work, an example of bold corporate strategy boiled down to its essence. Sixty people have been working for five months to distill many ideas to this core. The ever-so-earnest Chesky, who is sick and jet-lagged from a trip to Davos, Switzerland, hunkers forward in his blue rubberized chair and walks me through the details. A former hockey player and bodybuilder with 16-inch biceps, the CEO commands attention. His boomerang grin and slant nose work to sharply focus his attention on you. Rather than turn his head toward me, he physically picks up his chair and pivots it directly so we’re eye to eye. “If you can’t fit it on a page, you’re not simplifying it enough,” he says. And then he creases the ?paper in half for effect. “I told my team they have to put the entire plan on a page this big by next week–same size font.”
That Chesky, who was previously a better crisis manager than strategic planner, can create something this targeted is a very good sign for Airbnb. It means he’s catching up to his company’s outrageous growth. Since he and his Rhode Island School of Design classmate?Joe Gebbia?started the company in 2008, Airbnb has built a fanatical global community–millions of people around the world now use its site and apps to find spare rooms or vacant apartments while traveling. Airbnb takes a small percentage from the billions of dollars worth of sales it has facilitated, a sliver that has added up quickly. In 2013, more than 10?million guests stayed at an Airbnb rental, which translated into more than $250?million in revenue, igniting rumors that it could be one of Silicon Valley’s next big IPOs.
But like many out-of-the-box successes, the company’s growth came at the expense of rational organization. “We launched our 2012 plan in June of that year,” Chesky says. (“There was no 2011 plan,” he laughs.) And in 2013, the company had more than a dozen key strategies. “When you have too many initiatives,” Chesky likes to say, “it’s really hard to keep your focus.”
Focus, of course, is what’s required to take a roaring success like Airbnb and turn it into the kind of transformational company that can justify a $2.7?billion valuation. And focus is what Conley aims to help Chesky develop. Conley built a breakthrough boutique-hotel line,?Joie de Vivre, by ignoring his industry’s conventional wisdom, hewing instead to a quirky aesthetic that produced ?accommodations unlike anything people had seen. For Airbnb to become the outfit Chesky aspires to create, it too will have to transform itself in a way that bears no resemblance to any other company in the world.
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Source: Austin Carr (2014). INSIDE AIRBNB’S GRAND HOTEL PLANS, Fast Company http://www.fastcompany.com/3027107/punk-meet-rock-airbnb-brian-chesky-chip-conley published Mar 17, 2014. Viewed Mar 18, 2014.